A Mother's Ramblings

Today is the 19th anniversary of the day Flyfour and I made our best decision ever, to make our relationship official on paper as well as in our hearts. So, I just want to say to the love of my life... I'm sorry, not sorry.

Flyfour and I love going for a walk. Every night we try to go for a little walk around our neighbourhood and each weekend we try to go for one a little longer, so when Flyfour heard that Cold War Steve , a British collage artist and satirist, had an exhibition in Riverside Country Park, we decided we needed to go and see this exhibition and combine it with a walk as an early celebration of our wedding anniversary. In usual AMR Fashion, we decided to combine the walk with two other events so that we'd have a little holiday in a day for the two of us, and well we didn't invite the children to come with us, not because we didn't want them to come, but Top Ender is still isolating and Dan Jon's favourite thing to do is not go for a walk!

I wrote this blog post nice and early, so I wouldn't have the last-minute rush of last week in getting the meal plan up and ready for the family to have a look and see what we are eating each evening.. actually saying that since I've started putting what we are having on the whiteboard each morning the children haven't been checking the blog half as much, which is probably a good thing as now I can talk about them! So, here's what we're eating this week!

Thursday last week, Flyfour received a three-word WhatsApp message from me. I smashed it!  And because of the time, he assumed I was bragging a little and that my interview had gone well. What I was trying to tell him though was that I had just been offered and accepted a new role at the school I worked at. I've spoken before about how worried I was about applying for the position, and I was. I like my current role, I like being the first face most of the people who visit the school see, I like being friendly and open and welcoming and bubbly and being told off for not being what a school receptionist normally is. Yet, this new role? This role so appealed to me. It appealed to me because it's an area I am interested in. It's an area that I honestly think I understand. It's an area that I think I could make a positive change to society and my local community in. Yet I'm getting ahead of myself.

We knew it would happen to us eventually. Flyfour and I had spoken about it at length. What would happen when I was the one who brought Covid into our home. I had assumed, that it would be me, as working in a school on the Reception desk, I come in contact with so many different people and students and teachers that it just seemed like a matter of time before the track and trace system alerted me to have been in contact with someone with Covid 19. Only it wasn't me that was alerted, it was Top Ender.

When I got my job as a Receptionist, I was ecstatic. I really mean it, I was so chuffed to be offered the position because I didn't think I was going to be able to find a job that would play to my strengths, I didn't know that I was going to be any good and I felt that I had tricked the people interviewing me into giving me the job because there was no way that I was actually qualified for doing the position... despite my oodles of experience as stated on my application form. I'm sure the two, what I assume at least as I've never seen them, kickass letters of recommendation from the head at the Primary school I was a governor and volunteer at and my Bishop (because all the other companies I'd worked for in the past no longer existed or the people who knew me had moved on) wrote for me also helped. Over the next few weeks and months, as I slowly learnt the job and my way of doing it I found out that I really enjoyed the job. I wasn't too bad at it and I could see

Something that I like to do each Sabbath day is read over the notes I make during Sacrament meetings. Sometimes I find a specific speaker or a talk that I've been thinking about, or a subject that I've been drawn to over the last week or two, other times I just flick through and see what drawing or word art jumps out at me. I found a talk from around a year ago, where a former Bishop of my ward had shared some thoughts he'd been having about small changes, based upon some observations he had made about machinery and it put me in mind of what is happening at the moment in my own life.

 A quick one, just before midnight because I'll forget what's for our evening meals this week if I don't! Saturday - Meatloaf (yes I forgot to get the mince out yesterday!) Sunday - Pork Chops Monday - Fish Finger Sandwiches Tuesday - Pasta! Wednesday - Toasties Thursday - Salmon Friday - Sausages and Mash

Last Friday I finally felt like myself. I know what a starter eh? The truth is during the lockdown and the summer holidays I got a little lazy and well a little lonely. At work, I got a little used to only working half a job and I got used to an easy pace. It wasn't that I wasn't working hard, heaven knows I kept busy with things that I could do, and things that needed to be done even without the children in school, but everything was just easier without visitors each day and without telephone calls every few minutes. I got used to not going to Brownies and Rainbows and used to not seeing the girls each week. I even started to think that maybe I should give up volunteering as there wasn' really anything that I was getting out of it, there wasn't anything the girls were getting out of it. I got used to not going to Church, I got used to not going to Youth nights and hanging out with the Young Women other than via WhatsApp messages and the occasional zoom meeting and post

For our last Summer "Hurrah", the family and I went to the Harvester to have a meal out. We had a great time, we enjoyed our food and the company but decided to go to a local supermarket to get dessert because the meal out had already cost enough and there wasn't much for those who were dairy intolerant or coeliac. Top Ender and I headed to the doughnuts, which is what we'd been thinking about and Dan Jon and Flyfour headed off to the ice-cream which is what they'd been thinking of. Everyone got something that they were happy with and we headed to the checkout and then home. Once we were home, Dan Jon asked if I would help him serve up his ice-cream and that's where the trouble started.

At some point, Flyfour heard Gary Barlow singing "One more year in Yorkshire" on the radio and played it to the children and I. The time I most clearly remember it being played was whilst we were in a traffic jam in Ireland and the whole family were singing along. The song is amazing, it is and I'm pretty sure always will be, one of my favourites from all musicals and personally I think it is one of the cleverest openings to a musical, in this case, it's the opening to " Calendar Girls The Musical ". Not too long after our trip to Ireland, Flyfour found that the musical was coming to Northampton, which is just up the road from us here in Milton Keynes and we decided that we would totally be going and so purchased four tickets. We joked on Facebook before we went into the theatre that we were sure we were going to be the youngest people there, but we didn't realise that we really were going to be the youngest people there!

Last year, one of my cousins invited me to a party she was having. I was excited to go because I love my cousin, (True fact: I love all my cousins) and I wanted to celebrate with her, so even though my cousin lives in what I would call, the middle of nowhere and I wouldn't have Flyfour with me to drive or navigate (he was going away for work) it was on the calendar. It was a great evening, full of fun and on the way home roughly thirty minutes into our journey, my car decided to tell me that it was really needing some petrol, and as it was a fairly new to me car, I wasn't sure if I was going to get to a Petrol station before the car ran out of fuel and I'd end up in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around to rescue us and we might freak out a little. Luckily I was using google maps and was directed to a petrol station, about 15 minutes away, but when I got there it was CLOSED! I redirected to the next nearest Petrol Station, another 15 minutes or so on from the detour w

It's been one of those weeks where it seemed like it was all going wrong, and then it didn't. Instead, it became awsome, it became the kind of week that we all dream about having, where surprises came and rewards were given and opportunities presented themselves and were there for the taking. Look, it was a really good week and this week coming is going to be just as great.

When the children were participating in the Stake online FSY/Rise and Reach week, Top Ender let me know that the Stake President was going to be giving the Friday Devotional, because she knows that he is one of my favourite people/speakers and that normally he has something to share which makes me think or puts me in a headspace that allows the Spirit to witness to me. So I gatecrashed his Devotional, not wanting to turn my camera on when he asked the participants because I was already in my PJ's having had a water fight with myself in the garden whilst watering the plants! There was one thing that really stood out to me as something I should ponder on for a bit longer.

It's been a weird summer holiday for us here, not just because it seemed to start in March when Lockdown was declared, but because it was also the first summer that I have worked in the children's' school lives, (outside of the home that is!). As I did work throughout the summer holidays, not every day but enough to make it seem like I was there every week, the start of the new school year has a new meaning to me. It's still the time that I feel that I should be making new year resolutions, it's still a time of new beginnings and new starts and renewal of friendships but it's also a consolidation for me this year. I've seen what I've achieved in the last year and now I have a point to which I can look back to and measure my own improvement and successes against. I can see a path forward, I can see the route that my life is supposed to take, I can see how I'm growing and how I will continue to grow. I'm ready for this year.

I can fast see this blog becoming a once a week update of my meal plans. I have been concentrating so much on my podcast About Ten Minutes With PippaD  that I just haven't been able to keep up with blogging and my job and keeping the house clean and tidy... Maybe I'll give up on that last one! Anyway, here is what we are eating this week and I promise to do better at sharing my thoughts and ideas here as well as my on weekly podcast!