I made myself a mei tai baby carrier the other day, and then a second one when my MIL gave me some Thai silk she’d been given. The girls were so entranced by the sewing machine and all the sewing paraphernalia that I let them have a go at sewing some patterns on a spare piece of fabric. They loved it and I suggested they make something, which they very eagerly agreed to. We decided on bandanas, which I initially thought was a bit daft as hemming is so boring, and that’s all that’s required. However, to those new to sewing, even boring straight lines of hemming is exciting so, in the end, they loved it. They helped me pin and then we sewed together, with them controlling the needle and me controlling the fabric. Flopsy took to an even pedal pressure very quickly but Mopsy took a bit of experimenting before she got the hang of not doing desperately fast or nothing at all! But by the end she was sewing like a pro! It was really fun and we all enjoyed it. I’m thinking of suggesting they make simple bags next, if they express any more interest.
I can’t sleep because my gums hurt too much. They’ve been getting worse and worse gradually for a couple of weeks now. I also have a crumbling wisdom tooth which is due to be removed on Tuesday. That’s not hurting right now though…well not in comparison to my sore gums :-( Off to the pharmacist first thing in the morning to try to get something to help me get through the next few days before my dentist appointment. Quite convenient that this flares up while I’m still getting my post-baby free dental care, but very unpleasant when I’m trying to fight insomnia as it is! I know everything feels worse in the middle of the night. Trying to distract myself by surfing the net but it’s not really working 
This is in response to Emma’s recent post. I hope she doesn’t mind me responding here! Over the last couple of years, having read more and more about Taking Children Seriously (or whatever you want to call the ethos of respecting your children ;-)), I’ve thought about stopping writing about the children. However, there are several reasons I still do it.
1. This blog started as a record of my life as a mother and the early part of the lives of my children. I would absolutely *love* to read a similar record about my childhood. I’m always asking Mum what I was like/doing/enjoying when I was Flopsy’s/Mopsy’s/Cotton-tail’s age and, although she can remember a little, it would be so wonderful to read about what I and my brother were really like then. This blog is a record for me, and for my children.
2. I find motherhood exhilarating and exhausting. It’s hard work, upsetting work, frustrating work but also rewarding, exciting and hugely enjoyable. The other thing I’m always asking my Mum is ‘did you react like this ever?’; ‘am I normal?’; ‘what was motherhood like for you with young children?’. If she’d kept diaries and I could read them, I think it would be so interesting and informative. I also find reading about other mothers’ struggles and reassuring myself that I’m not abnormal very helpful. Writing this blog honestly is therapeutic for me and, I hope, on occassion helpful to other mothers who read it.
3. I find my children’s achievements and interests fascinating and interesting and I enjoy telling others about them - just as I would share news about my Dh, I like to share news of the other people in my family I love.
The most important thing to make clear, though, is that I very rarely blog about my children without their consent. Often they ask me to put photos of things they’ve done on here. They know their grandparents read the blog and that my friends (and some of their friends!) do too. Of course, there is the odd occasion when I don’t ask their permission because I’m writing about myself; my reactions to something they’ve done. This is disrespectful and I’m not proud of it, but I feel that it is partly justified by the above two reasons. If they ever told me explicitly not to, of course I would stop, but I hope that they look back at this when they are mothers and are pleased that I was honest about what life was like for me and for them when they were children.
On Friday last week, we watched the rain start, and not stop, as we packed up our bags and suitcases ready for leaving for our holiday in Wales on Saturday. We drove down the M5 and M4 on Saturday morning, stopped at Techniquest in Cardiff over lunch, and got to the house near Cardigan at 4ish. Turned on the news…apparently the M5 was completely blocked thanks to traffic jams caused by the floods…we’d got through just in time. Our other piece of luck was that most people were stuck in Cheltenham on Friday evening…Dh works in Cheltenham and we live in Gloucester - if he’d worked on Friday as initially planned, he wouldn’t have got home! We had a lovely holiday but watched the news in horror. Our home town flooded, and so did the water treatment plant so the mains water got turned off. They were handing out packs of bottled water at supermarkets and bowsers were being stationed all over the city. Thankfully we were still away during the initial panic period - people pushing and shoving to get the bottled water; taking more than their fair share; filling up from bowsers then selling it(!!!); and so on. We decided to go back to my parents house in a neighbouring county on Friday night instead of returning in the middle of the night to goodness knew what. We were fairly certain that our house hadn’t flooded being far from streams and rivers and relatively high up, but I wasn’t too keen on being thrown into life with no water and three littlies on my own as Dh had to work on Saturday. So yesterday we went and bought water carriers and filled them up from my parents’ taps then my parents drove us home; and then my Dad took me to the supermarket for supplies and bottled water. The panic has now subsided as Gloucester has got used to having no water and still surviving so there was no queue for bottles and they were just handing them out to whoever wanted them - I thought I’d need proof of having three children, but as people weren’t being silly any more they didn’t worry about it. We picked up four six-packs of 2 litre bottles of Evian. There was a huge army tanker of water there and the soldiers and police officers were filling up water carriers for people. You can do a ‘drive thru’ there, so that’s what I’ll be doing over the next week I guess! I was worried about taking all three on my own to collect water but it seems that it’ll be easy enough. Last night we bathed the girls and washed us both in a plastic stacking box - I think we managed to do it with about 7 or 8 litres of water…not bad! The water from washing is now in the ‘loo flushing water carrier’. We’ve put loads of buckets and things in the garden to collect rain water for flushing the loo and the girls have really entered into the spirit of things with the new rules of ‘no flushing the loo’ and ‘no turning the taps on’. We’ve also asked Flopsy and Mopsy to use the potty for wees so we can put them on the compost bin so we don’t have to have them sitting in the loo for ages - Flopsy thinks it’s hilarious! I think I’ll manage without a bowser/bottled water trip today but may have to go tomorrow. I don’t think it rained as much as they expected last night so hopefully it won’t have delayed the water going back on at the end of the week. Mum and Dad are laying bets on how long we stick it out before giving up and going to stay with them. It seems a lot of people have fled Gloucester as the city is eerily quiet. It’s all very strange!
Although I might make up a list of my own that ends up having more titles in bold 
Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicise the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
When I first started getting cross easily, I put it down to exhaustion from not sleeping. Then I wondered why I wasn’t sleeping and thought that maybe the rage and the insomnia were both being caused by the same thing. Gill suggested that it might still be exhaustion. Now Mum had suggested a thought as to why I’m not sleeping and I now think that the anger is caused by tiredness. Not sure how I’m going to get sleeping though if this is the reason:
A few weeks ago Dh spent the night have horrific dreams - really upsetting. Each time he woke, he said, he saw a figure in the doorway…not a sinister figure. Eventually Dh woke me up to tell me about his dreams, in an attempt to take his mind off them. I did as I automatically do every single time I wake and put my hand onto Cotton-tail’s tummy to see if she is breathing. She wasn’t. I screamed and grabbed Cotton-tail and gave her a shake. She opened her eyes and grinned at me. Dh and I spent the next hour crying, then playing with Cotton-tail, then helping her get back to sleep. Dh had no more nightmares and the ‘figure’ had gone. Was the figure Cotton-tail’s guardian angel? I believe so. I believe he was keeping Dh tossing and turning in his sleep to disturb Cotton-tail and keep her breathing.
However, it does appear to be since that night that I haven’t been able to sleep, having only had a handful of nights when I can. The nights I can sleep are getting slowly more frequent. If that’s the reason, I guess I just have to be patient and wait until peaceful sleep returns to me as my subconcious gets more confident that Cotton-tail is safe.
Last night was one of our bad ones. In a fury I wrote a very honest and angry post and then deleted it a couple of hours later. I’m a bit annoyed I deleted it because I personally feel it would be much easier to parent if everyone were honest about the times parenting is crap. When I post these sorts of things, I invariably get lots of supportive comments and emails from people telling me I’m not alone…so why don’t I read about other parents having a tough time? Maybe we should have a tagging thing about the hard things about parenting…or would it end up being too depressing? Anyway, for anyone who didn’t read the post last night, it was about the inevitability of our children deciding that last night was the night they would stay up very late being as last night was the first night in ages that DH and I had a secret plan to stay up watching Chicago. I got very cross and angry and had to run away into the kitchen to type out my frustrations. People have said ‘lack of bedtimes and time for me to be with my partner is one of the reasons we don’t do TCS’ but TCS is firmly against anyone self-sacrificing, including parents. So…we’re not getting right. We are struggling and struggling to find a common preference…a solution that suits everyone. We let the children stay up and play and they get to a point where they want to go to bed. That’s fine - we enjoy spending time together as a family; time Dh wouldn’t get otherwise as he works relatively long hours. However, we are then too tired to stay up together any later usually as Dh has to get up very early for work and I wake several times in the night to deal with babies (and I’m suffering from insomnia anyway at the moment). Today Dh has the day off, so we thought we could be adventurous and stay up beyond 10pm last night to watch a dvd and spend some time just the two of us. Stupid plan because the children used their special telepathic powers to know we had a plan and, after starting off normally going to sleep, suddenly decided to get up. Which was when I lost my temper. In the end Dh got them to sleep by 10pm and we decided to stay up anyway, getting to bed by 12.30am - way later that usual.
Having written all that, last night I managed to get to sleep no trouble, and had no long awake periods in the night and we all woke naturally around 9am-ish so maybe staying up late the night before Dh’s days off is a solution. Ideally, I’d like to be able to watch more grown-up tv, but that’s just not going to happen at the moment and I’m quite enjoying our more leisurely evenings when we don’t have a bedtime battle. Let’s see how things go.
My darling Mopsy has decided it’s time to sort out the pecking order in our household :-( It’s not much fun. She’s not being awful to Cotton-tail, but she completely ignores me when I ask her to keep being gentle and occasionally hurts her. She’s always sticking her feet in Cotton-tail’s face, or dragging her around the room, or prodding her. It makes me crosser than anything else the children do…which is probably why she does it! Parenting a 2.5year old is SOOOOOOO demanding! Constantly trying to ease frustrations for them, helping them cope with meltdowns, supporting them while they try to do everything themselves and trying not to get cross when they get angry at you if you dare to try to help. I love her to bits, and her total and utter cuteness more than makes up for the tough bits. She has a great sense of humour, is a very kind and generous person and, most of the time, really looks out for Cotton-tail and Flopsy. She removes things that Cotton-tail shouldn’t have (stray pieces of paper, small toys etc.) and kisses her if she gets upset. She sings to her and if she happens to do something that makes Cotton-tail laugh, she’ll keep on doing it to please her. She copies everything Flopsy does, to the extent of trying to say what Flopsy’s saying to us at the same time as her, resulting in a kind of mumble, while looking sideways at Flopsy and then repeating the last word of the sentence - a little echo :-) However, she also will often snatch whatever Flopsy’s playing with, unless there is one each, just because Flopsy’s got it. Flopsy’s so patient with her but often eventually snaps and hits her. When I come to sort it out, she says to me “I tried to sort it out with words, Mummy, but Mopsy just hit me” - I have to stop myself laughing out loud, of course. And when Mopsy’s in her frustrated-two-year-old mood, I just get crosser and crosser. I try to be patient and understanding for as long as I can, but when her behaviour is upsetting one of the others I just find it so difficult to deal with. I know all the theory. I know what I ought to be saying and doing, but keeping my temper in check so that I actually do it and at the same time placating Flopsy or Cotton-tail (whichever one has been the brunt of Mopsy’s 2.5-year-old-ness), is so, so difficult. This is not to say that Flopsy is perfect…far from it…but Mopsy’s the hardest work at the moment. The other trouble is that she’s so bright for her age, and her speech is fantastic, that it’s very easy to forget how old she actually is and expect too much from her…being advanced can be a real hindrance in some ways. Poor Mopsy…her frustrations are totally understandable, it’s not her fault, and she is a very lovely girl. She offers other people her food, cleans up mess, cuddles people when they’re upset, sings beautiful songs, and helps build ikea furniture:
and is very, very good friends with her big sister:
Mopsy the rabbit (oh! Just realised that Mopsy is a bunny in the actual story! Ha ha!)
Flopsy the sky
Flopsy the clown
Mopsy the lion
Flopsy the zebra
