Seven

At 10am on 9th March 2005, Monkey was born with the yank of some forceps. He made a grand entrance, covering me, the doctor, half the room and himself in poo as he came out; a fact he finds very funny, being a boy of the age that truly appreciates toilet humour.

He needed a clean before being handed to me. Not that I cared, I was exhausted and didn't feel that elation that many new mums experience. Instead, I was relieved it was all finally over as his birth had been a stop-start labour running over several days, involving trips back and forth to maternity units and antenatal clinics, most of them fruitless.

It's oh so quiet...

Something is not right in the house. The house, once tidied,. has stayed tidy. Toys have been returned to the playroom and stayed there, instead of reappearing when I turn my back to litter the floor. The carpet, once vaccumed, has stayed clear of crumbs (I wouldn't go so far as to call it clean...). The kitchen is clear of detritus and everything has been put away soon after it's been used. The noise levels have reduced to a minimum - for a change, I can hear myself think.

Not only that, I have raced through to-do lists like there's no tomorrow. Items that often take me days to tick off have disappeared. Used to finishing only a few tasks each day, I write a to do list for each day but yesterday, I ran out of tasks to do - and managed to find two more to finish instead. My to-do list for today, whilst short, was completed early.

This is unheard of. This is unprecedented. So what has given rise to this new, organised, domesticated calm that has descended upon this house? Have I been reading self-help books on how to organise my life? Have I been offered money for every task I get done? No.

The answer is quite simple: I am the only person here. The rest of the family have gone camping. They left on Wednesday for a holiday park somewhere near Southport. Not far away if things go horribly wrong, but far enough away to be not here. They're coming home sometime today - although they were already contemplating a late departure, so it's unlikely I will see them much before teatime. And let me tell you, it's bliss.The space in my brain normally reserved for working out what's next is free to do what it wants. Mostly, it's been focused on getting my jobs done. Oh, and maybe watching a bit of tennis. Maybe.

Instead of sitting down, and a voice piping up "Can I have a drink?" the second my backside hits the chair, I've sat in peace. Jobs have been done quickly because there have been no interruptions. No constant questions. No answers to questions that take five minutes instead of a few seconds.

A long time ago, I used to live in this house alone. It almost seems weird that I ever did - just me in a big four-bedroomed house; but I did. I think that it's actually way too big for one person but maybe, just maybe, I was just a house-sitter for a few years until we grew into it and made it a proper family home. And yes, it does feel odd being here for so long completely alone now. But, for a couple of years at least, this was my life.

So, as you might have guessed, I'll be more than happy to see them again when they come home. It's been lovely to get things straight once and know that they'll stay that way. It's lovely to have space and only work to one timetable - mine. But it's also lovely to have a house full of mess (sort of) and laughter. Full of random utterings, giggles, cuddles with a large dose of frustration thrown in. My God, I've changed. I'd have never thought I could enjoy the chaos that is family life. But I do. It's been blissful to have space and peace for a couple of days but I'll be ready for them when they return. The children will get a huge hug when they come back. I might even make them a cake. It's just the washing I won't look forward to.

And you know what? For all the peace and quiet, I still can't drink a whole cup of tea hot. Perhaps that's not the children's fault after all...

Mother Love

Can you see the pride shining from her eyes? Her little family, one boy and one girl. Maybe not perfect, but they make her proud. They can take some looking after and they work her hard. Occasionally, she falls short of the challenge, but don't we all? Sometimes, they make her cry, but they also bring her endless joy. Their love for her is as unconditional and fierce as the love she feels in her heart for them. She protects them as if she were a tigress protecting her cubs. Like any mother, she is not perfect and, try as she might, she has a favourite who gets a little more attention and time than the other. She hates to leave them, but it has to be done. She feels guilty leaving them in the care of another. After all, you never know, do you? How can anyone else care for them in the same way that she does? How can anyone else love them as much to look after them as well? The looks on their faces when she gets home after a long day say it all. Well, to her anyway.

She is the embodiment of Mother Love, aged 4. Even if they are adopted, they are her children and she is their mother.

Missy Woo and her little family

A note for Mum

Do you know those days? Where the kids run rings around you in the morning and won't co-operate, nothing else seems to go right, and you feel like the whole word is against you? Where you don't know what's right or what's wrong anymore and you wonder why you bother? Yeah? Yeah.

I had one of those the other day. It was going pretty badly, as days go. Then, I collected the children from school and on the way home, Missy Woo told me that she had done some writing at school and that the teachers had taken a copy so she could bring it home. It sounded a bit strange, but I thought nothing of it. After all, Thursday is a bit like my Monday as Monkey has football and we end up dashing back and forth so I don't have to think, just do.

We got home and Missy Woo got her things out of her book bag. She gave me this:

And you know what? My bad day evaporated in an instant. It didn't matter anymore. The spellings didn't matter. She had chosen the words and wrote them herself. It made me smile - if not grin inanely - and I suddenly didn't feel like a bad mother after all. I may have shed a small tear, of happiness of course.

As someone pointed out to me on Twitter, to know that she feels secure and wants to share that feeling is beautiful. They also suggested that I get it framed. And do you know what? I think I will.

She may be only 4 years old, but she never ceases to amaze.

(Thanks to @TheBoyandMe for inspiring this post)

When you were young...

I got tagged again by Garry from Blog Up North - in its new home, if you haven't already noticed - to talk about what I wanted to be when I was young and why.

The story starts with a bit of background. My older sister taught me to read when I was 2. Yes, you read that right. Two. Two?! I can hardly believe that myself but that's what happened. I might have been nearer 3 but I was definitely still 2. By the time I started school at 4, words were not a mystery to me.

Now, I am old and when I started school, the ITA was all the rage in teaching children to read. You had to learn the special symbols and read all the books before you went on to the proper books, which were for some reason were called TO. (No, I've no idea why either). I guess it was supposed to take a while to get through them; maybe a term or two. I read them all in about two weeks and was off away on the "big" ones. By the time I was 6, I had a reading age of 10.

I loved school, so you can probably guess where this is going. I wanted to be a teacher. I loved showing people how to do things, and I seemed to have a knack for working in a logical progression that was easily understood. As I got older, I remember one of the teachers at school telling me I'd make a good teacher. I coached my younger sister through her CSE Maths when she was struggling with it - a fairly frustrating experience because I lost count of the times we had the conversation about why a minus times a minus was a plus and the conversation ending with me saying "It just is!".

However, by the time I reached that stage, the enthusiasm for teaching had already waned. I don't know what it was - I think it was in part my desire to move away from school and do something completely different in a different environment. I did sciences, languages and maths at school and wanted to be a scientist (a biochemist) although the language teachers thought I'd make a good linguist as well. To appease them all, I did French as well as Biology, Chemistry and Maths at A level and applied to do a science degree. OK, actually, it was an Agricultural Science degree but it was a flexible course where you made certain choices at particular stages so you could change if you wanted to.

In the time I was there, I learned enough about Biochemistry to sate my curiosity for it and my interest in it waned. I didn't want to do research stuck inside a lab all day long although my final year dissertation was actually a comparative feeding trial of ducks and chicks, which largely had me collecting chicken and duck poo, grinding it up and analysing it for various nutrients. Very few options were open to me specific to my degree as the traditional route of working for what was then MAFF was not available as I graduated so I went and got a job in Accountancy - sounds mad I know, but I was good at Maths, remember?

That lasted six months. I liked doing the accounting bit - it was the audit that I found mind-numbingly boring. I moved to a different part of the country and got myself a job in IT, working on a helpdesk. IT was still a pretty new industry then and the company I went to work for wanted people who understood accounts to help their users of their systems. I was apparently perfect and they trained me in the IT side of things.

Working in IT support allowed me an outlet to teach and explain things again. I have also trained people how to use various applications over the years and that is very similar to teaching So, in a way, I ended up teaching but in a different place.

Since I left my IT job in 2009, I have completed a course which qualifies me to teach to adults and I have looked at getting work in that field. However, with things as they are, teaching hours are very hard to come by and so far, I haven't managed to get casual teaching work. I loved the course, although it was a little hard going at times, and I really enjoyed preparing and doing the teaching assessments that I had to complete to pass the course. I've used my teaching skills in my volunteering as I often have to teach new treasurers how to do their role and use accounting software - which takes me back to my first IT job! I keep going full circle, it seems.

Garry also posed another question on his blog: When you look into the mirror, do you see the person you hoped you’d become? Or something better? Or worse? My answer to that is I am now a mother and I thought I would probably never become one. That, to me at the moment, is the most important thing I've achieved. So, yes, it has turned out for the good - even if it is an unpaid job. It is a job I relish in and I teach my children something new every day. I've enjoyed all the jobs I've had, with one notable exception which didn't last long and I got out of for the good of my health. So I guess I've been lucky and that it demonstrates I took the right path.

I'd now like to tag some more people to continue Garry's meme....

They are:

Julia at What Will Julia Do Next? (and do check out her new blog The Head's Office)
Joanna at At Home with Mrs M
Sally at Who's the Mummy?
and Dawnie at Dawnie Brown

but do feel free to join in by commenting below, or even writing a post of your own and linking to it in the comments. Whether we achieved our childhood dreams or not, we are where we are, probably with good reason. And if you're still not where you want to be, we all need to remember there is still time to get there and it's never too late to dream. Cod psychology over, that is my thought for the day.

How to be made to feel like a bad mother in one easy move.

So the other day, I took the children to the Trafford Centre. I was trying to get them out of the way because we are having to deal with night shifts at the moment and it's better if the house is quietish during the day.

I decided to take them somewhere for lunch. It's a place we have eaten at before, and had coffee at a few more times. Mostly, they were pretty good although they have a fascinations for toilets and kept going to the toilet.

However, after the meal, they reached their boredom threshold very quickly and started to get up. I was trying to finish off my large coffee as quickly as I could and I'd asked for the bill, but they kept getting up and wandering around and I kept telling them to sit down.

Eventually, Monkey - for whatever reason - hid under a table but did so with his feet sticking out. I got up and called him quite sharply to get out and get up. And then the manager appeared. He got Monkey out of there and brought him over to the table and got Missy Woo to sit down. He smiled and half-winked at me and then proceeded to explain that they can't go running around because the waiting staff are carrying hot drinks etc. They said sorry and the guy went away. I paid the bill and couldn't get them out of there fast enough.

Now, I appreciate that the guy was a) explaining to them what is basic health and safety and b) trying to help me, but I walked away from that place feeling like an unfit mother and a bloody awful one at that. True, they weren't on their best day that day as they were a bit full of it and possibly we should have gone to the Food Court but it is a lively place anyway, I had been trying to control them, and it was only for a few minutes.

I almost feel too ashamed to go back now. Should I feel this way about it? I am normally pretty firm with my kids; they know where they stand with me but sometimes, they just have the devil in them and ignore what I say. This was one of those times. I'd be interested in your thoughts because I don't want to be the mother that can't control her kids.

The Gallery - Motherhood, then and now.

Yes, yes, I know - I've not been posting again. A lot has been going on and I had a job interview today which I'm waiting to hear about. So I thought I'd get back on the horse as it were and do another entry into the Gallery at Sticky Fingers. This week's prompt is Motherhood. I haven't had time to come up with a fantastic new photo  - and to be honest, I am not a great photographer - so I've got two photos which kind of depict the then and now of my journey into motherhood - well, actually, the start of life as a mother of two children.

Here's the "then" photo: (it's a bit blurry, but not my photography!)

This is me with my two, literally minutes after I'd got home from hospital. I actually spent a few days in our marvellous midwife led unit that is just down the road here, after transferring from the big bad maternity unit in Preston. It was bliss and I could have stayed there for weeks, but come home I had to do. Missy Woo was 5 days old in that pic, Monkey 16 months old. I look happy, but I think I was terrified at the prospect of two of them, particularly as Monkey had not been a good sleeper as a tiny baby. Thankfully, Missy Woo was brilliant - so much so I used to have to wake her up to feed her before she got too hungry! Monkey was overjoyed with his new friend, so much so that his first word was "sister". And looking at that photo, I think that is about the most Missy Woo wore in the first 3 weeks of her life as it was so hot then. 

Before I post the "now" photo, I must make an apology. A lot of you who follow me on Twitter have already seen this pic before because it was, for a while, my profile pic (and it was on here too, which I've now changed.) It is, however, one of my favourite pictures of me with my two. It's getting on for a year old actually, but it depicts how they have changed since the first photo. 

Here goes:

This picture was taken in Pizza Express as you can see. I met up with some mummies that I have known online for some time. They were meeting up in Manchester and I took the chance to tag along with mine to put a few faces to names (hence the sticky label attached to my boob). 

Now, personally, I love this photo. It is similar in pose to the "then" picture in that I have got my arms around both of them so we are all cuddled together as a unit. I'm happy and relaxed, largely because my children are behaving, albeit for a few minutes. Both of them are extremely photogenic as you can see. They are the same, but different. You can see that Missy Woo has dark eyes in this picture whereas Monkey has, like me, pale green eyes. Their hair colour looks the same but Missy Woo's is darker, more golden, blonde whereas Monkey has a whiter blonde. (Sadly, like me, they are both likely to end up brunettes.) What they both share is that mischievous glint in their eyes - nothing particularly evil (most of the time!) but you know anything is possible.

This is my brood. They make me laugh, they make me cry, they frustrate me, anger me but they also love me, as I love them, to bits. It was a long road from that first morning at home but here we are. Two beautiful, funny, smart children. Oh, and one frazzled mummy. ;)