A Mother's Ramblings

I've spoken before about how I see September as the start of the year and a time for making School related resolutions , and I've even followed up and made sure that I follow through with the promises I make to both the children, the school and myself. I'm pretty sure that making resolutions in the Autumn is engrained from years of British Schooling and I'm sure that even when the children have long left School that I'll still think about making promises (after all that is what resolutions are) in September when I buy myself a new notepad or seven. The latest resolution that I've made with the children is to do with our weekly routine.  Monday night we have Top Ender at Brownies, so Big Boy and I play computer games together. Tuesday night we occasionally have Faith in God or we catch up on chores. Wednesday night we have Family Home Evening (it's basically a study, prayer and then a few other activities that we do together session). Thursday ...

Recently I've changed our bedtime routine. Just a few small changes, but enough to make our evenings run a little smoother and hopefully encourage both Top Ender and Big Boy to a more peaceful and rejuvenating nights sleep. Part of the new routine is after they have finished watching a cartoon in bed, or reading a chapter or two of their book, or writing in their journals, or what ever it is that they want to do before I tell them to turn off their bedroom light is that now after saying their prayers with them I tell them each a story. Big Boy likes this because he knows it is putting off the inevitable actual going to sleep part of the routine but his request for stories that he'd never heard before and that I've made up each night is getting a little hard to keep up with. So I've started to get a little more creative with my story telling. I've started telling stories that aren't technically mine. Basically, I've started telling him plot lines of v...

WARNING. Reading this post may spoil the illusion that my family and I are perfect. I had big plans for the start of last week. Flyfour/Daddy was home as he'd been working over the weekend and as it was unusual to have him home I decided that we needed to do something to mark it. Maybe we could go out for a meal as a family, making use of an early bird special to make the most of our limited funds. Or maybe we could go to one of our favourite lakes for a walk and a picnic and ensure that we were back home early enough to send Top Ender off out on her usual After School activities. In the end we did nothing on Monday night. I could handle that we did nothing on the Monday as along with Top Ender going to Brownies, I had a Governors meeting and by the time it was all over and done with and I was back ensconced in my home I couldn't be bothered to go out again. Tuesday was going to be different though. I had spent all day Monday suggesting various ideas of things we co...

Daddy had a couple of days off last week and this meant that instead of me hanging around the house on my own I've been busy trying to cram a million memories into a couple of days. What I didn't realise however was that Daddy was trying to get in on my act. I know, I know. I've already admitted that Daddy makes a better me than me , but this was different. Daddy asked me where my fabric stash was. For a start, how does he know I have a fabric stash?! Then after selecting a suitable piece of fabric, he started work on a craft project, and one that seemed familiar to me... He only went and made a much better milkman's wallet than the one I'd made! Okay, so he did use my blog post in order to work out how to do it, but he also moaned that my instructions made no sense and it was a wonder that anyone ever read my blog with the number of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (they're all there on purpose I swear). I think it was because standing in th...

The children and I were back to our normal routine this week, with Thursday coming round and a return to Beavers for Big Boy. As I may have mentioned once or twice (hehehe), because of Big Boy being a Type 1 Diabetic I hang around outside of Beavers in case of an emergency. The lovely ladies that run Beavers are aware of what BB's hypo signs are etc, and it's just an extra "layer" of security for them and me. Luckily there is a lovely park outside the centre where Beavers is held, a cricket ground just opposite and a lovely lane to walk down which leads to a Canal, so Top Ender and I have plenty to do if we get bored of reading in the car, whilst we wait for BB to finish at Beavers. This particular week, Top Ender and I decided to walk down the lane to the canal. She wore her new jacket from Muddy Puddles , which was rather handy as it was blinking cold! Luckily unlike Top Ender I have a layer of natural protection against the cold aka Fat. As we were walking...

This week, it was pointed out to me by a very lovely young lady (that I'm not related to), that I was her favourite adult. She likes that I can laugh at myself, that I'm caring and funny, that I say prayers and that if she needs me she knows I'll be there. She ended the conversation, by letting me know that when she grows up she wants to be just like me. So apparently I'm now a role model. Who would have thunk it? I never thought it would be something I'd have to worry about, I mean my kids know not to have me as a role model because they live with me and so see that I occasionally do stupid things like trip up the stairs, talk to myself, pour drinks down my T-shirt instead of into my mouth, burn my mouth by eating food that is too hot, fall over despite their being nothing to trip on and maybe once I've locked myself out of the house... I'm not the sort of person that other people would have as a role model. Who wants to be an overweight, sometime...

Big Boy wants to be normal. I know this, because he told me. He even explained to me what normal is. According to him, normal is going to your friends house without your Mum also going. Just like when his friends come to his house, or his sisters friends come to our house or just like when his sister goes to her friends houses. And I cried. Right now it just isn't possible, I mean sure when he was popping in and out of our neighbours house and playing with the boys that lived there it was fine, because in an emergency I was ten seconds away, but his friends from School and Beavers live a few miles away and in an emergency I'm a car ride away. That's just too far for me to know he's safe. BB is unable to take care of his own blood testing and administering of insulin at the moment. He's tried, goodness knows how much he has tried. He just hasn't the strength to prick his own finger and get the right amount of blood on to the little testing strip. Hec...

When Daddy and I first talked about him staying in Birmingham during the week and coming home on a Friday night there were a lot of things that I didn't think about, that I now realise my wonderful husband took care of so that I didn't have to. Now, several months later it's got to the point where I'm thinking of doing the small things during the week so that when Daddy is home, he doesn't have to worry about them and can just get on with spending time with the family. It was because of this and because I'm a naturally lazy person that I decided that what I really needed to do was share my five things to do before bed for a better morning, as that way I have no excuse for not doing them in the future as you can all hold me accountable. 1) Pick up the Living room/Kitchen/Den/Room you use most. When I used to head to bed, Daddy would head up about ten minutes after me. In those ten minutes he'd put the throw cushions back on the sofa and put the TV r...

As you may have guessed from our daily Summer Holiday posts we didn't actually go away anywhere this Summer, but we managed to squeeze a lot of fun in doing the things that we love to do as a family and yes that does include a day where we didn't do anything other than lay in bed! The thing was we'd been challenged, along with some other lovely bloggers, to have a summer of adventures by GoPro. Yes, that's right those of the fantastic little go anywhere camera fame. To help us, they sent a parcel of the GoPro Hero3+ video camera along with a lot of mounts and a couple of cases and a memory card and then they gave us ten themes or suggestions for our challenges and let us get on with it! Only there was one thing, an incentive of sorts, the "best" video gets a trip to the GoPro Mountain Games in Colorado next Summer... I know right?! Now, since we got the GoPro's the bloggers working on this project have been chatting what seems like daily, swapping t...

This School year is an exciting one for both Top Ender and Big Boy. Both children will be taking their SATS this year and Top Ender gets to visit various Schools that she likes in the local area so she can decide which Schools she would like to apply to. Of course it also means that with the start of a new School year, there is even more opportunities for me to creatively make a pack lunch for the children and hopefully get some more brownie points from the Dietician we see every six months or so, as part of BB's Diabetes team. With all the new things, it makes sense that the children get a new lunch set and Store have kindly sent BB a Lego Lunch Set . Big Boy was thrilled as he loves The Lego Movie. The pot is quite large ( 6.5cm high x 16cm x 14cm) and easily fits in all of his lunch, an example of which is below (that's two quarters of a sandwich stacked on top of each other, so you can see how deep it is) the only thing missing was the pot of fruit, which BB was fill...

On Sunday, I was lucky enough to be able to teach my old Church Primary Class and I didn't realise how much I had missed it! Somehow Sharing Time just doesn't have the same feel for me, even though I always try to make that fun too. Anyway back to this past Sunday. As the lesson was on Tithing (we LDS members pay 10% of our increase as a tithe) I thought that something I could do with the children that they would enjoy was making a Milkman's wallet, so called because Milkman use them. At least that is what my Dad told me. So what is a Milkman's wallet? Well, take a look at this video, ignore that I say this is how to make one, I swear I meant work one and hopefully you'll understand. Magic right?! The children at Church (and of course my children) thought so too. So how can you make one? Well, follow the steps below! For this craft you will need. Two strips of card measuring 18cm by 9cm (you'll get three out of a piece of A4). Four strips...

When I woke up this morning my husband and I were holding hands. It's not that unusual for us, I often wake up to find us holding hands in our sleep, but this morning it seemed more fortuitous than normal. Today marked the day when because of work, we (the children and I) wouldn't see him for another seven days. We've been aware of this period coming up and we've both thought back over our nearly 13 years of marriage (end of this month marks our anniversary) and agreed that being apart for 7 days was actually the longest that we've ever been apart whilst being married. Although his trip to Chile a few years back was his furthest, his planned excursion from Birmingham to Amsterdam makes this trip seem almost local. The thought of him being away makes me sad. I mean the reason my husband and I got married was because we were (and still are) best friends (seriously, I know that makes some people gag but we really are). There is almost nothing that he doesn...

As the Summer Holidays are drawing to a close, it makes me think about all the fun that the children and I have had together. We made a deal at the start of the holidays that we would eat in the garden as much as possible and that we would do at least one thing a day. It might have been a small thing, like the time we had a car picnic, or it might have been a bigger thing like going and watching the sunset, but as long as we did one "special" thing a day, then we knew that the whole holidays had been spent wisely, well you know we'd made the most of everyday. And yet as I said this is nearly over and when the children go back to School and we get back into our normal routine we'll stop eating in the garden (mainly because of the expected cold weather and rain that the UK is famous for in Autumn and Winter). We will stop doing a special thing a day because homework and housework and after school clubs will move back into focus. I don't want to lose this sense ...

Do you remember the review I did the other week about Little Crackers Fruit juice drinks for children? Well, it wasn't until a few days later, when I received some more drinks to review that I realised why the brand Cracker seemed to familiar to me. A few weeks before this had all happened, whilst I'd been perusing the drinks aisle in my local Supermarket I had come across a Still and Cloudy Lemonade drink that I thought would be a nice change and so I picked up a bottle... you guessed it it was The Cracker Drinks Company . Then I realised I'd even mentioned the drink in a blog post about another picnic ! The lemonade drink that BB had tried was the very same Cracker Lemonade pictured above. Well, not the same bottle as we'd drunk all that weeks ago, but you know what I mean! The other flavours are just as lovely as the lemonade and lovely over ice (hehehe, my new fridge is so fantastic) and I think that all three are my favourite drinks to have at any tim...