Where did the rest of December go???!!

Christmas seems to have whistled by as fast as it approached, we took all the decorations down yesterday and everywhere looks huge again. It also sparked off a complete house tidy and throw-away session – Jack’s bedroom is now a haven of peace and tidy tranquility and is two black sacks of RUBBISH lighter, I’ve never known anyone hoard as much junk and crud as Jack.

Ellie’s room is half-way there and so far we have removed one black sack of detritous from her skanky pit of doom! Edward’s room is a little den of playful heaven and all of his toys and puzzles are in the same place with all of their pieces present and correct.

Our bedroom/my office still has a few things hanging around that need to be sent away – a 4X4 wheel cover that I designed and had printed for Daniel’s new business and Lori’s crimbo pressie, but apart from that it’s a nice place to be.

All of this has taken a lot longer to achieve than normal because I have come down with full-blown flu and have felt wretched these last few days, worse still is that I have given it to Simon and the way he is at the moment it’s not looking likely that he will be fit and well enough to be admitted for his operation next week – he’s ‘disappointed’ as you can imagine.

Other hot news of the New Year – just a few weeks after deciding that nappies were not for him, Edward is now dry at night time too! For the last week or so, I suppose, Edward has been waking up in the morning with dry nappies and for the last two nights we have left nappies off altogether and he’s woken up in the morning with dry pyjamas – I’m very impressed and proud of our little Bear.

Jack and Ellie go back to school tomorrow and normal life will resume once more…as normal as things ever get in this house anyway!

Sarah x

…the scrolling images are done now. Almost there! But bedtime now and an early night – HURRAH!

Sarah x

PS – the painting was a GREAT success, not even a sniff of chaos – the artist was SO tired afterwards that he had to have a lay down on Ellie’s beanbag (the new resting place of choice) in the kitchen with his ‘Mear-Mear’ pillow and blanket and the noo-nee-blanket. It’s hard work being creative!

Now that I know how to write the code to create themes in WordPress (that is the software that powers this blog) I thought it would be nice to have something a little more personal than a generic picture of something, nice as some of those generic pictures are! You might notice it’s not quite finished yet but it got to 2am this morning and I figured I should probably go to bed (so much for that early night I was telling you about Niki!!) – the scrolling images are test images from the business blog on the new site that isn’t live yet, I’m aiming to have it done by New Year and certainly by the time Simon goes in to have his operation.

Me and the Bear are going to be doing some painting today – it’s going to be quite involved and to work will need to be quite precise (I can’t say any more than that at the moment) so it’s either going to all go to plan OR it’s going to be complete and utter CHAOS! I’m putting my money on the latter!

Potty training moved up to the next level this morning. We have progressed to standing at the toilet on a step and, “Peeing like Daddy, that’s right!” Yes, that’s right Edward, peeing like Daddy…splashes and all!!!!

Sarah xx

Lucy went back to my mum’s this weekend – she lashed out at Edward and so having her stay here was no longer an option. Jack and Ellie were in the lounge, Ellie was playing Indiana Jones Lego (one of the BEST games in the whole world!) and Jack was mooching around. Edward went in to the lounge, made a bee-line for Lou-Lou and GRABBED her legs – she didn’t like it and lashed out. He’s fine – a couple of scratches on his forehead and a ‘tooth-graze’ and a deeper almost puncture wound higher up on his head under his hair, I say almost puncture wound because it was a perfect tooth-shaped triangular hole about 2 to 3mm deep but the skin wasn’t actually broken and bleeding if you see what I mean. He was a very lucky boy as it could have been at lot worse. He’s none the worse emotionally for all of it and isn’t showing any fear with the dogs, which is good on the one hand and not so good on the other as he is still trying to pull Cypher’s nose and cheeks if he can. I hope this phase passes soon.

It also means that Neo has come home – as Lou-Lou has a certain fatal history with cats…although having said that she’s been exceptionally well behaved with mum’s cats over the last 24 hours! Cypher on the other hand has done nothing than bark and cry at the gate at the bottom of the stairs because he knows there is something up there. Poor Neo, his quiet ‘retirement’ at my mum’s has come to an abrupt end! He seems quite happy at the moment though camping out in Ellie’s room – under the bed during the day but comes out to say hello and roll around on the carpet like an overgrown kitten and he slept on Ellie’s bed all night last night. Morpheus isn’t interested in him being upstairs, it’s just Cypher who’s a bit over excited at the moment.

And so that is all the weekend news. Christmas seems to be hurtling towards us at a staggering speed and we are probably the most disorganised we’ve ever been, it’s going to be over in a flash and all of a sudden we’ll find ourselves in 2009 which will probably race by faster than this year has.

Sarah xx

LOOK! LOOK! A second post within the week!!! Just like I promised!!!!

So after the successful trip to Thrapston in BBP (big-boy-pants remember) the next test was to go further afield. On Tuesday Simon and Edward went shopping to Asda – this can take anything up to three hours if they faff and meander around so everything was ready to GO and again all they were waiting for was for Edward to have a pee and then they would be OFF.
They were gone for ages and I was really expecting Edward to come back in different clothes but NO! It was a great success and has set the tone for going out for longer in BBP – so maybe we’ll only need to stop once, if at all on the Crimbo Eve there and back journeys.

Nothing much else has happened this week other than I decided (again Tuesday I think) to take the dog gate down the separates the kitchen and the lounge. Morpheus was getting increasingly unhappy at being shut on the the other side of it and come that evening he was acting very strangely, he almost had a really wild panicked look in his eyes and wouldn’t settle down. All in all the gate was causing more stress and agro than it was worth – Edward was shouting at the dogs because they were always being told to shut up and settle down, Cypher would rarely move out of the way if someone wanted to get past – making it very difficult for Simon to manoeuvre his way through and so would make him cross. Edward would stand and rattle the bars like a little prisoner if he was shut out of the kitchen and CRY, “Bear’s come too! Bear’s in kitchen! Help cooking!!!!” and so it would go on!!!!
Without it all of that has gone: no squeaking dogs, no crying Edward, no fluff and skank piling up either side of the bottom of the gate because the Dyson can’t quite get there, no kids getting told off for forgetting to tie the gate shut with ever-increasingly complex knots that Edward can’t untie it and break into the kitchen etc and I LIKE IT!
Simon, on the other hand HATES IT! It does mean that you have to follow Edward around the house and be close by him all the time so he can be whisked out of the way of the dogs if they decide to get silly (rolling around on the floor and kicking their legs around, rushing to the window to bark at someone who dared to walk past etc) and as a result it means that you can’t just sit with the laptop on your lap and let Edward get on with something. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing to be honest, I think the TV babysitter has had a long enough run. So me and Edward have been doing ‘stuff’ this week: building fires – he helps to clear out the fireplace and build a new fire, we decided to teach him and involve him with the fire so that he learns about how to be safe, feels useful and included and as a result he has no interest in it when it’s lit because it’s boring – you can’t do anything with a hot fire but you can do LOADS when it’s cold like play diggers in the ash and get absolutely FILFY! We’ve been to the park – he rode his tractor down there (he sits on it and someone pulls it along) and he cooked me stew in the little wendy house, we swung on the swings, he rode the springy horse, slide head-first down the slide (that is the ONLY way to go down a slide) and we went on the roundabout – I felt sick for the rest of the day! Give me an extreme rollercoaster and I’m fine, love it but stick me on a roundabout or one of those carousels where you bob up and down on the horses and I’ll get off feeling really sick! I’ve got some little videos of our trip to the park on my phone so I’ll need to see if I can compress them and put them on here!

And so there you go, that’s about it – Jack’s gone beating today, Ellie’s playing with Edward, I’m in the kitchen (I can sneak in a bit of work if I keep my laptop out here when Edward is playing on his computer in the kitchen) and Simon is still snoozy in bed. I’ve got some pictures to stick on here but they are still on my camera – I’m hoping I’ll get a few minutes to do them sometime today.

Have a good day
Sarah xx