MY HUSBAND

Preparing the wedding cakes
Originally uploaded by PhylB

One of the reasons I love my man so much is that nothing is a challenge to him. Whatever adversity life throws at him, he knows if he reads the right book, he'll find a passable solution. That kind of positive attitude just makes life much easier to bear.
Currently of course he's looking for a book entitled something like How to feed 6 after you're made redundant, but last week I found him reading this. We couldn't afford a wedding cake so he just whipped out a cake decorating book for beginners and got on with it. The resulting cake top was of course so comical, it was adorable and it made my day. Never mind it looked a bit like Gordon the Gopher marrying Les Dawson in drag!
I know whatever life throws at us, Thomas will simply pick something off the shelf and get on with it.

MY BIRTHDAY

It was my birthday once again yesterday. I wonder why, when you are a kid and you love birthdays, there seem to be years, decades almost, between them and yet when you are an adult and would rather do without one, they turn up at, what feels like, monthly intervals. Isn't life funny?
Thomas ordered me a present which we went out in a snow storm on Tuesday night to pick up, only to find the pick-up service at Tesco closed. It was freezing and we'd gone after I finished work at 11pm, so that wasn't the best start.
Wednesday morning started with me having to work 7am onwards (ie before the kids woke up). Fun! (But as a first present Anna slept all night - what more could I really want?) The big ones rushed off the school squabbling as usual without so much as acknowledging it was my birthday. What's new there?
Things improved when the postman turned up with two cards for me at 10am. Thanks Shona and Sheina.
Mum and Dad invited me to the Golf club for lunch which was nice. The course looked very crispy!
Then I spent my usual hour picking up the 3 big ones.
We got home just before 4 and Charlotte wished me a Happy Birthday. Charlotte proudly handed me an envelope which she'd coloured in. I opened it to find a home-made card which had been too big for the envelope so she'd folded to fit in. It was a bit of a mess - but very sweet! I tried to open it but she'd sellotaped it shut! I opened the tape and 5 tiny chocolates fell out. My teacher gave me these for Christmas so I kept some for your birthday she said proudly. (I guess that's a sign of will power in a small child!) I then opened the card to find she had taped two 10p and one 5p coin inside. I saved this for you to buy yourself something, she said! How sweet! She then tidied the living room as an 'extra gift'. She is an endearing child. I went to the kitchen to make coffee. Pudge turned up with a freshly homemade card. He had taped one 1p coin in it!!! This is from my money pig, he stated very seriously! 26p - I guess I need to go shopping today ;-)
Suddenly at 4-10 I remembered I was meant to be at the doctor for Léon's MMR booster! Oops - senile already? I flew out the house and arrived just 5 minutes late. The health visitor checked his records and couldn't find any note of him having had the original MMR at 13 months old. I am sure he did but have no proof. She checked the computer - it said he'd had it on 13 December 08... emmmm that was a Saturday and 18 months too late - I don't think so! After half an hour of checking various records we abandoned the booster until the doc could track down where we are at on the immunisation plan. The rush out in the snow seemed to be in vain, until she offered Anna a Men-C booster instead! Poor Anna.
Home again, I made a nice curry. I was just finishing it at 6-15 when Marcel wandered in Oh you made dinner - I was just coming down to make you dinner for your birthday he said. I guess it is the thought that counts.
After dinner, back to Tesco in another snowstorm to pick up what turned out to be a shiny new black laptop. That will be wonderful because my old one is so slow running Vista it takes me 20 minutes to log in in the mornings to work!
Then we all shared a ridiculously fattening chocolate cake and went to bed.
The day definitely improved as it went on.
Now I guess I'll blink and my next birthday'll sneak up on me at an even more alarming rate.

ENGAGED!

 Engaged! Originally uploaded by viralbus

What a weekend! Pudge has been vomiting and burning up since late Thursday so we've been up for hours during the night. Last night while dealing with 3am vomit, Anna started barking like a seal and is also roasting now. It's been pouring with rain and blowing a hurricane. You need wellies to get to the garage. Thomas suggested a trip to town to find something for his sister's birthday. I wondered if amazon might not be a better bet given the circumstances, especially given she'd mentioned a pile of books she fancied but he insisted. Grrrrr. We went to the Argyll Arcade to look at necklaces and then went through the whole place looking at rings instead! After years of jumping through Scottish divorce hoops, I am finally free, so Thomas had decided to buy me a beautiful ring from the most wonderful shop Mr Harold & Son and some flowers and I jumped at the chance to say yes and formalize what has been the situation in all but name for several years now. My mum's already been on asking how long she has to diet(!) and no doubt con my dad out of a new frock - no idea, we haven't thought about any of the other logistics. I should look into it over the next few days... The main thing is I am thrilled, Thomas seems to be too (crazy man seems to want to be landed with wrinkly old me and all my children) and the big kids also seem positive. Marcel was less than pleased at my answer to his query of when the wedding was to be... Not till you've had your hair cut! Charlotte of course simply came out with a dismissive I hope you're making Anna the flower girl. This of course is code for I don't intend to wear a dress to your wedding mother! I don't think Léon knew we weren't married but is looking forward to a nice party anyway. Anyway, watch this space!

ALL THE EIGHTS

I see this is 08-08-08 - supposedly the luckiest day of the century according to some. The luckiest last century was meant to be 8-8-88 - that's why André and I got engaged that day...hmmmm. Well I did get 3 wonderful kids...

EYES

I often wondered as a child or as a teenager, what any kids I may one day have would look like. Would they be smallish like me or taller? Would they have dark hair like my parents or lighter like me? Would they have straight or curly hair as we have that in the family too? In fact the only thing I took for granted was the eye colour. Any kids I had would have dark eyes like me, my brother, my mother, my grandfather etcetc. Of that fact, I was one hundred percent sure. And as you can see I was completely correct?!?!!!
First I had Marcel.

Then Charlotte.

Then Léon.

And finally Anna!

Two green, two blue. How strange - I really haven't mastered the art of making brown-eyed babies very well, have I?!

ALWAYS EXPLAIN THE OBVIOUS TO YOUR KIDS!

Chameleon
Originally uploaded by ucumari

I was just discussing lizards with Thomas. Anna was reading a book about lizards, you see!

It reminded me of a traumatic experience from my childhood I thought I had already told him.

When I was 5 my school took me on a school trip to Calderpark zoo, Glasgow's zoo that closed down about 5 years ago. When I was 5 there were only 3 TV channels, no Discovery Channel. And our TV had been black and white most of my life. So I wasn't as clued up as today's kids - I knew cats, dogs, cows, horses, elephants and tigers but I wasn't au fait with chameleons, iguanas and the likes.
It was a rainy Glasgow day and most animals were hiding in their shelters. They took us into a building marked Reptile House. I didn't know what reptiles were and no one explained it to us. I was a sweet wee girlie girl. I skipped in excitedly hoping to see cute little fuzzy animals like tiger cubs or polar bear cubs only to come face to face with a large iguana. I jumped back in horror. What had happened to this poor animal's fur? I wondered. Just as had happened with the clowns, I was too shy to ask an adult why all these animals looked liked that, so I puzzled it through in my naive 5 year old head and concluded there had been a fire in the reptile house and all the animals had been burned. For weeks I woke up in a sweat every night as cute furry little animals burned in my dreams and turned into ugly chameleons. What an imagination!

I suggest maybe we should always explain things to little kids even if they see completely obvious to us adults! It could avert months of worry!

A SCENE FROM AN UPCOMING HORROR MOVIE?

A scene from an upcoming horror movie?
Originally uploaded by PhylB

Flickr never ceases to amaze me. You upload pretty photos of yourself (well as pretty as you get at my age), your kids and your family and in the first 24 hours you get 2, maybe 3 hits. You upload something as horrendous as this - but which contains a small scrap of human flesh covering everything you would cover at the public beach anyway, and even though it isn't tagged as being in any way naked, you get over 200 hits in the first 24 hours. Odd. Firstly how do people find it? And secondly, why on earth do they want to see it? I must say it has me puzzled, though also amused. Maybe I should try walking down the beach at the moment wearing nothing but a bikini and a face mask to see if it provokes the same reaction?!

A NEW START

I decided a while back to revert to my maiden name (Buchanan), but given we were in the process of a mortgage application and house buy, I didn't think it overly wise to revert to a name with no credit rating on the country's national databases until all that was done and dusted. Given we got our keys last week though, I figured a new month was as good a day as any to break with the old and embrace the older. I feel years younger already!

THE STALKING FINALLY PAID OFF...

Happy bunny
Originally uploaded by phyl1

Last summer I turned on my computer one day. Out of the blue the google ad that popped up told me my Barbra was about to tour the US. I nearly fell off my seat, given firstly that I thought she'd retired and secondly that I had only spent the last 20 years looking for an excuse to fly to New York. So I turned on my computer the day the tickets went on sale, assuming all attempts to get through would be in vain and fell off my seat a second time when I actually got a ticket before they sold out within the first half hour.
I flew over to Manhattan, just baby Pudge and I and the rest you can read on my blog archive for October 2006.
When google next informed me she was coming to Europe, I thought for about half an hour that it would be a piece of self-indulgent nonsense to go see her a second time, and then I rationalized quite how often I have spent money on myself in the past 15 years and realized that I was only talking about the financial equivalent of a trip to Tesco or two. So I bought tickets for Rome and the saga began, Rome of course got moved to Zürich , after I had Ryanair tickets to Rome, then we had a wedding to go to so were in Scandinavia when she first came to the UK and then Ireland - by the time Rome was refunded the only venue that hadn't sold out completely was the O2 arena in London last night. After working out how to run from the office to the airport and get to Gatwick with about 2 hours to spare, we finally got to the long stalked event.
The O2 itself was much bigger than I had imagined - I had only ever seen it from the air when flying over London so was amazed at the size when we arrived at North Greenwich. Knackered but happy I sat down to enjoy nearly 3 hours of the singer I have loved since I was just 7 years old, accompanied by a man I can only assume must love me a lot, given he flew straight from work and arrived back and had to go back into the office, exhausted after indulging me in my fantasy. Thanks!

PHONE RAGE

I was up half the night with a runny nose, a thumping head, and a sore throat. I ran the kids to Newton Mearns at 6-30am then collapsed on the bed. I wasn't going to make work. I took some paracetamol and cough sweets and slipped back under the duvet. It was about 8-30. I had probably been asleep less than half an hour when the phone rang. I was disoriented when an Indian-sounding voice asked if I was Mrs Widmann. 'No, sorry', I said. He introduced himself as Imran and asked who I was. I told him in the croakiest, sleepiest voice that I was 'the person who lived with Mr Widmann'! He then inquired whether there was anyone elderly in my house having trouble with the stairs? Emm, well at 39, I am the most elderly, and it's a ground floor flaming flat. 'So no one is likely to want a stair lift fitted?', he continued politely. 'It's a GROUND FLOOT FLAT', I repeated exasperated and now fully awake. He wished me a happy day and hung up.
An hour later as I was about to drift off again, the phone went. A voice, English this time, asked if I was Mrs Widmann - god here we go again, 'No I'm the person who...' They informed me that if I could quote the correct bonus product code (whatever that is) I would win a makeover for my bathroom...give me strength! I gave up trying to get better by sleeping and got up for a coffee.
(Oh, and Thomas, go ex-directory, please for the sake of my health!)

HAIRDRESSERS UPDATED

I finally took the bull by the horns, bit the bullet and all those other nasty things yesterday, so that's that ordeal over with for another few months :-)

HAIRDRESSERS

I tend to have reasonably long hair most of the time. most people perhaps assume that is because I like long hair! I don't mind it but it is actually because I loathe going to the hairdresser with a passion. I equate it with a trip to the dentist to have a tooth extracted (not that I have ever had a tooth extracted but given the choice I may even opt for the tooth option.) Hairdressers are almost on a par with wasps in my book. I am not sure if this stems from a childhood where I generally had either long hair, or hair trimmed by my mum but I have almost no recollection of childhood trips to the hairdresser. As a female adult, the banter usually goes something like: 'Are you doing anything nice on Friday evening?' To which I would like to reply 'No, I have 3 little kids, please bugger off and leave me in peace - you don't give a damn about what I am doing on Friday and I don't know you and therefore don't want to speak to you!' But that is impolite so I waffle painfully. Why do they feel it necessary to chat to you for the whole half hour as if you were their best mate? I guess that is why I rarely colour my hair - that means an extra hour of waffling to the enemy! The solution would probably be to befriend a hairdresser but I have never managed that. Each time I see someone different so each time I go through the ordeal of small talk. Maybe they should have hairdressers for people who hate hairdressers! Where the women who cut your hair promise to ignore you or leave you to read a book in peace while they chop away at you. I should look into that! I can't be the only person who hates visiting the hairdresser?

Oh and the reason for this rant by the way, of course, is that my hair really needs cutting at the moment :-(

ANOTHER DREAM

This time not one I dreamt while asleep but more what I hope I will have enough money to buy one day! For the past year since I had my third kid I have been thinking how much more practical a 7 seater car is than a 5. Even going to the shops and taking my parents with me always meant borrowing André's VW Sharan instead of driving my own Citroën Picasso. So I have been looking at the Vauxhall/Opel Zafira or the Renault Grand Scénic while cursing Citroën for making the only small MPV with just 5 seats. Until yesterday when I stumbled upon this ad! Yes the new model of my car has just come out and it has 7 seats! And they even make it in a nice shade of metallic red - cool - now I just need a decent enough income to buy it :-\

SHE SELLS SEASHELLS

I suddenly remembered today that when I was 7, during a gym lesson at primary school, my teacher called me to one side and asked me to repeat 'she sells seashells on the seashore' three times. I think because no one explained why I was being asked that at the time I had a vague notion the teacher had been abducted by aliens and replaced by someone who was perhaps mildly insane. The reason of course was that my two front teeth had been knocked out in an accident when I was two, you can almost see it on this photo of me at four, so I had a bit of a lisp in those days. Anyway I guess I must have failed the seashell test miserably as I was taken out of gym, told to dress and sent to a speech therapist for the next two years! But it worked - no lisp now.

BACK TO WORK

Well this is the first time I have had time to sit down in nearly a week - maternity leave has come to an end - alas - and needs must :-( so I am back to being a headless chicken. Started back last Tuesday at 8-15am. The place was pretty empty at first so I waited on it filling up, only to remember that actually half the place has been made redundant so it wasn't going to fill up :-( How depressing! The office is huge, empty and echoey. And worse still my mate Pat who sits opposite me has just resigned so I will soon be reduced to talking to the photos on my wall! I hate to say it after just 4 days but I feel like I need a holiday already! Anyway at least Léon is enjoying nursery. He's been hiding behind his hands and playing peek-a-boo since he started and on Friday they held a wee birthday party for him for his first birthday.

SHOES AND HANDBAGS (WITH THE ODD MOBILE PHONE THROWN IN)

I think there are two categories of women in the world each at opposite ends of the spectrum. The two types will never understand each other, not in a million years. There are what I'd call shoe people and non-shoe people. Shoe people love shoes, they buy shoes that look nice, they have cupboards full of shoes that have only been worn 2 or 3 times. They have shoes to match every conceivable outfit. They look in shoe shops to see if anything jumps out at them, even when there isn't a hole in the sole of the pair they are wearing! And there are non-shoe people. That is to say people who have maybe 2 pairs of shoes - a black and a brown so you have something that will go with more or less anything, these shoes are characterless and very comfortable. The adventurous non-shoe person might even run to a couple of pairs of boots or sandals too. I consider myself a very adventurous non-shoe person as I not only own all the above but even have one pair of (very comfortable) pink(!) trainers. I also wonder if it is a hereditary condition. My sister-in-law likes shoes and her son spends all day chewing everyone's shoes, while Léon crawls past everyone's shoes in complete indifference. Carol too always says a girl can never have enough shoes - what for I ask myself?! Am I strange?

Anyway where was I going with this shoe theory? Oh yes - handbags. I think handbags are an extension of shoes. Kind of like shoes in the extreme. I think shoe people also need a variety of handbags. My mum has different coloured handbags to match different clothes, practical ones she'd use out shopping, little ones she'd take to a dinner dance etcetc. She buys handbags! I find that incredible. I have never bought a handbag in my life. Handbags don't interest me. They are purely functional and can be inherited as mum tosses old ones out! In fact handbags and mobile phones are two of a kind. In a family like mine there is always someone who has a nice handbag or mobile phone that is in perfect working order that needs to be discarded in favour of something prettier or more high-tech. And there is always some runt of the family ready to accept the cast-offs! :-) (Thanks for my new phone mum!)

I'm just looking through flickr and there are actually handbag and shoe fan clubs on there, have a look at this photo - how strange!

CLOWNS AGAIN

What am I saying? - hid under my duvet! It was the 70s, I hid under a nylon, fuchsia pink candlewick ;-)

A MORBID FEAR OF... CLOWNS

When I was little, I was scared of clowns. I loathed clowns. Clowns didn't make me laugh - clowns gave me the creeps. They were terrifyingly sinister. I dreaded our annual outing to the Kelvinhall to the circus with the Cuthbert family because I knew not only would there be clowns but there would also be a revolting smell of animal sweat and pooh. Mum and dad didn't know I hated clowns, why should they - I never mentioned it! So because I was a good little girl they bought me a present. A painting about A3 in size of a sad-looking turquoise blue clown with a tear running down his face! Did I tell them it scared the living daylights out of me? Or did I lie awake under my duvet every night thinking: Can't sleep the clown will eat me! Crazy, screwed-up kid!
Donations kindly received towards all future psychiatrist bills, thanks. (Oh and for the record - I still don't like clowns - they are kind of on a par with monkeys (see posting: BLOG PROFILE) in my book).

SHOULD WE REALLY HAVE BURNED OUR BRAS?

Ok those who know me may not recommend I do this for real, it'd be too unsightly after all those babies and they weren't unobtrusive to start with ;-) but metaphorically speaking, did we really think things through and plan them out properly in the 60s when I was a mere 2 year old bra-burner? Ok some coutries may have got it right, if they have I'd like to hear about it, or at least better than us but we in the UK still haven't got the work/life/kids balance right.

Today I had to take Léon to nursery for the first time for him to get to know the women and other kids he's going to have to spend 5 hours with daily from the end of this month onwards. Five hours a day away from his mum and he isn't a year old yet :-( And yet that in itself is an improvement.

When Marcel and Charlotte were little we were told to hand them over at 29 weeks or lose our jobs. Why 29 weeks? - a strange figure derived arbitrarily, I guess. At 29 weeks Marcel was barely on food, he couldn't sit or crawl or walk or talk - he wanted to hug his mum and drink from her breasts, he didn't want to do finger-painting with a bunch of strangers. When Marcel was 29 weeks old part time work wasn't something you could ask for or if it was it was so hidden in the small print that no one had yet found it. So I left my 29 week old baby and I went and wrote a German-English dictionary 35 hours a week and I drove 5 hours a week to and from work so I spent 40 hours a week away from my precious boy.

Marcel didn't sleep well - he first slept through the night at 15 months. So from 29 weeks I worked those hours and I drove those hours without having slept at night. I sat in the office to keep my job with my breasts aching to feed him, my body longing to sleep and my heart quietly breaking.

But I didn't learn my lesson, because I did it all again 2 years later! And this time I went back and wrote French dictionary while the same pattern set in. But this was crazier still - I was paying out £900 a month to have someone play with my babies while I wandered about like a zombie who hadn't slept in 3 years with aching boobs. And there's that unwritten law that you have to look ok, even when you haven't slept, even when you are worried sick because your kid is home sick and you've been up all night, even when you don't know where to take your sick kid while you go in to the office, or when you use up all your holidays at short notice because your child gets chicken pox and then you can't go away for a much needed rest in the summer.

And then someone suggested part time. That seemed like a reasonable compromise. I started working a 23 hour week instead of 35 but I had moved further away so I was driving 10, so I was still away 33 hours a week and earning even less.

I know it was my choice to have kids but neither the full time or part time scenario really works. It doesn't work because they are ill sometimes, they do cry all night when they are teething etc

So now the magic number is 52 - you have to go back to work after 52 weeks off. Fortunately, as you all remember, I had Léon in the office before I went on maternity leave ;-) so I get to stay off till he is 52 weeks old but that doesn't make it easier than with the others - I still want to stay home and hug and feed and nurture my tiny man. The last month off isn't nice, you get up every morning with a brick weighing down your heart like a prisoner on death row.

Now I am not advocating staying home till my kids go to uni - both they and I would go mad but I think 2 or 3 when they enjoy interacting with little friends and playing would be a better age to go to nursery than giving up babies - I mean we should hand over toddlers not babies. As for fulltime work with a baby - I have done than and what you miss out on is so phenomenal that I can't begin to explain. Getting home at 6 every day and spending just 2 hours a day with these precious people simply means you miss out on the most special times you can never regain.

I for one wish we'd simply gently singed our bras rather than fully burning them back in the 60s.

DRIVING

I was lying awake thinking about my comments on the car repair last night. I drive around 10000 miles a year. I learned to drive in 1985 and bought my first car in 1990. It is 2006. I guess for the first 5 years with no car but access to parents' and friends' and hire cars, I probably only drove about 10000, for the next 16 years I drove 160000 plus say 1000 on holiday every year in the hire car. That makes 186000 miles. That makes 23.47 times around the circumference of the Earth! I'm 38 years old and I have driven round the Earth nearly 24 times. The distance between the Earth and the moon is 238857 miles. Five years from now I will have driven the distance between the Earth and the moon! Crazy or cool?! :-)