A RUBBISH IDEA

East Renfrewshire council has changed all its refuse policies recently to save money on landfill bills. Their new idea of collecting rubbish fortnightly instead of weekly of course means those who didn't recycle before are now forced to. Given there are seven of us, our refuse has never fitted in the bin without recycling absolutely everything down to the smallest yogurt pot and we've needed to use a garden composter for years so it isn't really affecting us very much. The problem we are having is their new food waste policy. We've always put the vegetable waste in the garden dalek so the brown bin has only ever been used for weeds. The council has decided to incinerate all food waste now - chicken carcasses, spaghetti, beans and the likes. We're meant to put it in the brown bin so that's what we've been doing. The weather of course has been sub-zero since the end of November. So every day we chuck out food waste and it freezes solid to the bottom of our brown bin. Every Friday the bin lorry turns up, two men jump out and hook on our brown bin, turn it upside down, the frozen food stays firmly stuck to the inside of the bin, they return our bin and drive off. Isn't that an impressive use of council funds? A troop of men driving round all day tipping up brown bins completely aimlessly. I wonder why no one at the end depot is asking why the truck is returning empty after every seven hour shift? It'll be interesting as the season goes on. I reckon our brown bin waste will reach the brim round about spring by which time the rotting food will really start to stink as it thaws! I can hardly wait :-/

SIMPLY SPRAY - UPHOLSTERY FABRIC PAINT

We all know this recession is hard. The world is full of financial uncertainties. Obviously after six months on maternity leave, self-employed with five kids and a mortgage, this isn't the best year to splash out on a new three piece suite but I saw Simply Spray upholstery fabric paint on the Internet and figured I'd found a stopgap until better times.
I splashed out on three cans of coffee coloured paint figuring I'd start with the living room futon as it is covered in coffee stains, felt tip stains, footprints, you name it!
On pressing the spray nozzle, a haze of pale brown paint came out beautifully then suddenly lumps of thick, dark paint shot out wrecking the surface of the evenly coloured futon and finally the can jammed. We tried over and over but each spray session ended with blobs of permanent ink dripping onto the fabric. It then completely seized up and refused to spray despite the can being at least half full.
The paint can't be washed off, can't be spread out and can't be completed. I would thoroughly recommend, however hard up you are, that you avoid Simply Spray like the plague. It is an utter waste of time and money. Instead of spending £20 to save me buying a new £150 IKEA futon cover I have now spent £20 to completely destroy a borderline usable futon cover, forcing me to buy a new futon cover. Oh joy!

CUPRINOL FENCE SPRAYER

We live in a corner house. When we moved in there was no fence on one side, just a conifer hedge but we thought a perimeter fence to fill in the gaps was advisable given how many small children inhabit our world. So there are now approximately 80-100 metres of wooden fence at various points round our garden. Of course 100 metres of fence is actually 200 because a fence has two sides. We painted the outside at the back of the house manually. It took about five hours so we decided that we had to find a better solution. We went to B&Q and found a sprayer because painting a 1m80 fence would take forever. First time we tried it (a couple of weeks ago) we realized we couldn't use the sprayer near the plants or fruit trees because everything was being completely coated with paint. We spent half an hour painting with it and Thomas spent an hour cleaning it afterwards :-( On Tuesday I went out and painted behind the trees manually. It took about five hours. My shoulder throbbed and I was covered in paint. I was knackered. Second time we tried it, it stopped working after the first ten minutes. It was clogged with paint. Thomas spent an hour cleaning it and then sieved the paint into it only to have it clog again after ten minutes. A second and third time Thomas cleaned it out, finding it only worked if you blew the paint out of it. It took two hours to clean the sprayer and half an hour to clean his beard. In the meantime I spent six miserable hours painting again manually. Third time it clogged we threw the useless piece of crap in the bin and both took out a paintbrush. We have about five hours left on the side of the house and maybe three on the other side. I am now sitting here recovering with a chunk of cake and a large gin. My shoulder aches, my arms ache, I feel like I could use a double hip replacement. The next time the fence needs painting, I am going to put the house on the market.

WHO TO VOTE FOR ON MAY 6

I am a seasoned traveller. I have backpacked round Europe and even NYC alone and with kids and babies for the best part of 25 years so I don't normally find getting from A to B difficult. This time however crossing the 1400km from Copenhagen to Calais via Aarhus with over a million other stranded air passengers was proving tricky and costly. I didn't for one minute believe my MP (East Renfrewshire's Jim Murphy - Secretary of State for Scotland) could offer me anything I hadn't come up with myself but I wanted him to be aware there were people stranded in Europe for whom a bus in Madrid was not the optimum solution. More for fun, and for want of something better to do given the vacuum of information we were facing in Northern Europe, I decided to tease him with the following email first thing on Monday morning:

Hello Jim
I am one of your constituents living in Newton Mearns. This morning I had to ring all three of my children's schools to explain I, my husband and my 5 children are currently stranded in Europe unable to return home because of the Volcano. I was told many children and teachers are in the same situation.I find it interesting that no one is coming up with any solutions to get us home. Flying is a cheap form of transport these days - being able to fly to Europe doesn't mean you have enough money to finance endless nights in unbooked hotels, meals in restaurants or buses, trains and ferries across Europe. I simply cannot afford to come home by means other than budget airlines.

Today I was utterly dismayed to hear Gordon Brown on BBC world coming up with a plan to repatriate people in the US via Spain not even mentioning people stranded in Europe itself. I was due to fly from Copenhagen last Friday morning. I have tried overland and managed to get as far as Hamburg where the trains are now so full I cannot proceed given I have 2 babies with me. I am being offered 5 hour waits between train connections in the middle of the night in the middle of Germany and they are estimating 2 days overland to Calais where I might get a boat and then try to find my way from Dover to Glasgow. Three days overland at huge expense, with 5 kids between 12 weeks and 12 years is unaffordable.

Apart from Mr Brown no politician seems even to have noticed the crisis. I will be deciding who to vote for on May 6, depending on who has some real and practical solutions for me and the many families stranded at the end of the Easter school holiday.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions.


Of course I heard nothing back for 48 hours, which had I not had my mother-in-law's flat keys would have cost me another £300 at Danish prices if I had needed to pay two days food and two nights in a hotel at the current exchange rate. So 2/10 for a speedy reply for starters.
Then suddenly this afternoon I received this reply from one of his minions - I will copy it for you verbatim:

Thanks for emailing Jim, he has asked me to respond on his behalf.

Several constituents have contacted Jim about the terrible disruption that the volcanic ash has triggered across the world.

As I am sureyou can understand there is little that individual candidates can do, but please rest assured that the prime minister government is taking the matter extremely seriously and doing all it can to get people home as quicly as possible.

The Foreign Office's current plan for the dealing with UK nationals stranded in Europe can be found here - http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/021-Flight-disruption-help/022-travel-in-europe/

I hope that this is of some use to you and reassures you somewhat.

If there is anything further you would like Jim to do please get in touch.

Best regards

Funnily enough I had actually found the foreign office's page of advice several days ago. What I do find interesting is that when I wrote pointing out crossing Europe to Calais or Madrid was too expensive and impractical with small children and the crowds currently on the trains and asked if Jim had any more helpful advice or suggestions, his second in command simply sent me an email full of spelling and grammatical errors linking me to the foreign office page that tells me to make my way either to Calais or Madrid after checking with my airline. Let's have a big round of applause for that one!

So I will sit here till Friday and if my flight is cancelled again, I will make my own expensive way to Calais (£500) and as a thanks for the 'prime minister government' sending all the buses he could find to Madrid rather than various centres around Europe, I will make a point of making sure I do not vote for Mr Murphy and his crew on May 6.

A VOLCANIC RANT

Several points on the stranded passenger issue:

I have heard several flippant remarks on the TV about people getting a prolonged holiday. The thing is when you book out of your hotel on the last day of your holiday, you don't tend to have budgeted for an extra £100 or so a night to stay on somewhere else. Nor have you budgeted for another week's meals in restaurants. You have no more clean clothes, so you go looking for a laundrette and end up doing your very own impersonation of the old jeans ad sitting in your underwear. You may not have necessary medication with you - who takes a month's supply of say the pill or asthma medicine when they go away for 4 or 5 days? You don't know when any of it will end so you are stressed financially.

I read today on the BBC a quote that summed it up. Someone who had flown to Copenhagen like us with a budget airline (we paid £250 roughly to come with Norwegian) was now facing an overland trip back to Scotland choosing between car hire at over £1000, land travel at £700 or as he put it 'haemorrhaging money indefinitely on Copenhagen hotels and restaurants'.

I heard a suggestion that as many people as possible should try carpooling to get home. On the face of it, this sounds like a reasonable idea but stop a minute. Why would people be on holiday at this time of the year? Because the schools are off. If you choose now you are likely to be a couple with at least one child with you, more likely two. Sharing a taxi home or car hire when you have to pay 4/5 of the cost makes carpooling insignificant as an option for most.

We fly everywhere because flying is the only means of travel we can afford. Flying is much cheaper than trains these days. Journalists are acting as if people who could afford to be in Europe can simply pay whatever it costs to come home overland as if paying out an extra £1K or £2K is nothing to your average passenger. We paid, as I said, about £250 for our holiday. We cannot simply fork out an extra £100+ a day to stay on or travel overland. Most people will be in this situation.

People are also acting as if the problem stops when we reach Dover. The UK is unlike the rest of Europe. We fly everywhere because internal trains are three times the price and because of that when we arrive in Dover, getting to Glasgow is another financially significant trip if alternative means of transport are even being laid on. Everyone who is stranded did not come from Kent. Scots are even more likely to have flown because they are further from Europe on land.

We are in the middle of a recession. How many employers will be happy when the workers don't come back for weeks after Easter? How stressful is it for those who can't afford to lose their job to be stuck here haemorrhaging cash they can't pay back indefinitely?

And to cheer us up this morning Gordon Brown has finally noticed the problem (probably when many fewer kids and teachers than expected turned up for their first day of school after the Easter break) - great at last we might get an extra few buses or boats... but no, it seems no one is stranded in Europe, it is simply a problem for people stranded in the US and further afield so he's going to have them flown to Spain and brought home by bus - he hasn't noticed us at all...

I guess the solution in that case is to try to get a boat from here to the US so Gordon will repatriate us eventually via Spain. Grrrrr.

THE NAME ISSUE AGAIN

I have been watching the election campaign on the TV and, as a woman, I am finding the media's interest in Sarah, Samantha and Miriam more than a little nauseating.
Firstly, I am not in the slightest interested in who made their clothes or what shade of nail varnish they are wearing. If these women in any way pertinent to the campaign, it would be from a policy point of view, and given they have certainly all been gagged so as not to cause their partner to lose any points in the polls, they are irrelevant. I find it more than a little patronizing too that they are all assumed to be supporters of their husbands' parties. For these three, it does seem to be the case but I can imagine a marriage or partnership where two people love each other but actually don't agree politically, and for that reason, again, their presence in the campaign is unwelcome. Imagine a situation where two of the three support their partner's partner, and the third doesn't? How would the media deal with that?
I would have loved to have seen Hillary become president last year simply out of curiosity to see if the media would have dared to ask Bill for his best apple pie recipe, or to hear how his suit compared to the designer gear of Mrs McCain, but I'm off on a feminist tangent.
The one thing that is niggling me most is the mainstream media's almost blanket insistence on calling Miriam González Durántez Miriam Clegg. When I first married back in 1991, the registrar said 'Sign the certificate here using your maiden name for the last time'. It was taken for granted that I would change my name to my husband's. That was then, but this is now. I, like a growing number of UK women have chosen not to change my name. Whether Miriam has chosen not to become Clegg for UK or Spanish reasons is irrelevant. The fact is that she goes by the name Miriam González Durántez, so how dare the media rechristen her to suit their antiquated ideas? It should be her choice, and hers alone, to change her name.

RYANAIR I HATE YOU

I remember fondly when Ryanair started out, back in the days when they actually used their grey matter. They thought through the plastic meals and worked out that many customers would rather fly cheaper and not receive the plastic food. That was about the last time they got a policy right. Now I hate them with a passion. Apparently to 'incentivise all of its passengers to travel light' during the summer months, they are going to charge passengers £20 per case per flight. Now bearing in mind that they don't allow you to pool luggage and per flight means per leg of your trip, then for my family to go to Italy via Stansted (not because we love Stansted but because they don't go directly) we have to pay 7 people times 4 flights times £20 to take our bags with us, because let's face it, whether they want us to fly light or not, not many families with kids can fit enough luggage in the their back pocket for a three week stay in another climate. This gives us a £560 surcharge over and above flight costs. Of course they also still slap on the wonderful charge per person for paying with a debit (no, not just credit) card. This is a charge per person, not a charge per card of course because processing that one payment using one card for one amount is apparently seven times more costly to them :-\ So we have our flights, our surcharges for bags, for paying them, for wanting our kids to travel sitting near us etc etc The original £11.99 flights are now costing us over £1000 and they then put a coin slot on the loos to 'incentivise all of their passengers to go to the toilet before boarding'. Two hundred passengers sharing a single toilet that will get jammed the third time someone puts a quid in the slot and nowhere else to make your kid pee, just great. No matter how well travelled my bladder is, I can hardly tell Anna at just 2 that she has to hold it in for a two or three hour flight. If I was planning to reboard a Ryanair plane, I think I'd take a potty and ask the flight attendant where I was meant to empty it after use! But I fully intend to boycott them till they come to their money-grabbing senses, so it won't be a problem.

JIGSAW PUZZLE HELL

Léon is a bright little boy but one sticking point we've had over the past year or two is jigsaw puzzles. He can do them, but no matter how many times I explain to him that there are edge pieces and middle pieces, he still insists on trying edges in the middle and vise versa. This usually results in my usual calm mothering demeanour going into meltdown. I start calmly trying to remind him 'Remember honey the ones with the smooth sides go round the edge'. As he tries this for the 25th time, I start to twitch and by piece fifty I am usually jumping up and down sweating manically shouting 'Pudge put the smooth pieces round the edge'. I start to look like Basil Fawlty when Sybil tormented him from her hosptial bed while awaiting her toenail operation. Thomas says he can always tell when I am doing jigsaws with Léon from the tone in the room below his office! Oh dear.
Anyway, by last autumn I had finally got it through Pudge's jigsaw-challenged little mind that the smooth pieces went round the edge. Phew - my sanity was saved (only just) and the little white van with the men in white coats was no longer on standby...
Then mum bought Anna a lovely jigsaw in Marks and Spencer for Xmas. What Granny wouldn't buy a 2 year old something nice like that? But what on earth are M&S on???? What kind of bastardized jigsaw is this? Is someone out to get me? It has smooth pieces in the middle too! Pudge tried to help her out and is now back at square one. If I could get my hands round the neck of whoever commissioned this piece of nonsense for M&S I'd choke him/her to death! Anna likes it too much for me to lose it, Léon is more than puzzled by my year of jigsaw rantings and I am ready to order the straitjacket.
Thank you very much Marks and Spencer :-(

NOT A GOOD DAY

It's 6am and Anna shouts from upstairs 'Daddy, I want a pee'. Daddy replies 'Zzzzzz' from my side. Grrrr. I jump out of bed onto the frozen floor and leg it upstairs. I've still not got round to changing the clock on the boiler - bugger. I take Anna to the loo and she pees for what seems like five minutes solid as I shiver, then begs to get back under her warm duvet.
I go down and fall asleep. Around 7am I move my right leg. Something on Thomas's side is cold and wet. Surely 38 is too old (or too young) to be peeing the bed? The wet is too cold anyway. I lie awake and hear 'drip'. 'Thomas! Something is dripping on the bed!!!!' We turn on the light. Our bedroom is in the bottom corner of the house in the extension. Our heads are beneath the office but our feet are in the bungalow half of the extension. The lintel separating the two halves has two little drips hanging from the edge of it. It is snowing outside. Waking up with slush in your bed on the second day of British Summertime isn't the ideal way to start the new season.
It has to be a hole where the one storey extension meets the two storey one, or something to do with the central heating pipes directly under the office window. Option one is bad, option two is even worse (it would necessitate the removal of all the office furniture and the ripping up of the new hardwood floor on a week when Thomas is up to his eyes in three different projects).
We turn off the heating for an hour to test theory two. It continues dripping. He's relieved. I'm still stressed. He takes up a kettle of water to test theory one. He opens the window and pours the kettle onto the outside window ledge. Niagara comes instantly to the bedroom ceiling. Option one is confirmed. We decamp with our wet duvet into the cold living room and leave a basin on the bed. At least we can now try to reheat the house given we have 10cm of snow outside.
We know if we can just find the hole now we can plug it with concrete or tar first time there's a dry day...
First time there's a dry day? Oh shit it is Scotland! Thomas has plugged it temporarily with playdough! The drip has subsided but I'm still considering a night on the most uncomfortable futon in the world in my living room as a better option than another rude awakening to a foot in the slush in the bedroom :-(

DID I MOVE HOUSE?

When I moved in with Thomas he had a large library of books. To frighten anyone who knows me, he had about six times as many books as I'd acquired after nearly fifteen years working in publishing with a subsidised bookshop. When his one man flat became a five person flat overnight about 80% of his books were moved into storage. When we moved to the house, I moved in my books. All my books plus 20% of his are the books you've all seen in our house over the last four years. They take up two whole walls of the TV room, one wall of the living room, one in the hall, one wall in the office and two shelves in the kitchen. Added to that each child has a shelf or two of kids' books in his or her room. Our storage room ran out at the weekend :-( so we went to retrieve the seventeen large boxes of books (see this photo for the size of one), all my old paper photos from 20 years with a professional slr (you can imagine - if I start scanning now, I may fit them in before I die), and all his papers (approximately ten large shoe boxes). With six boxes still off-site, we have lost access to the living room and dining room already. Thomas now needs to go through these and pile them into the categories: keep downstairs, keep in the loft, give to charity, sell, bin or burn, wrap up as Xmas presents to be given until 2050! I can't help because they aren't mine, so this needs to be fitted in after work, meaning it will potentially take weeks. Of course I already live in dread of where the 'sell' pile will be stored while the countless obscure tomes fester on Amazon for the rest of eternity. The loft pile is also an issue given Thomas hasn't floored the loft yet :-\ We can, of course, no longer have guests other than the odd individual who can be given a coffee in our TV room. We certainly can't have anyone stay over as the living room futon is no longer visible at all. Walking through my house makes me want to run and hide and cry. The health visitor is likely to start treating me for post-natal depression, I am becoming so unstable - not realizing it is post-book-retrieval depression instead! I have found one way of helping out. I went through our current shelf yesterday and threw out 80% of my own reference books to make space for his stuff. I figure anything non-fiction can be googled these days. If I never see another reference book, it won't upset me. But one question does puzzle me... before Thomas met me, how long was he planning to live to actually get through all this crap? 180 years maybe?

GLAD TO ESCAPE INSULAR BRITAIN

I decided to watch the news tonight on TF1 while feeding Amaia. I had seen the UK news so knew what was going on in Europe... or did I? The French news told me in great detail of the freezing temperatures in every country in Europe except the UK, hitting as low as -32°C in some countries, killing people left, right and centre. I had noticed some Danish friends on facebook moaning about the new wave of cold but this is amazing. Straight away I went onto BBC Europe but there's no mention there. It is like we are cut off from all information pertinent to the whole continent. I am so glad I can speak other languages and therefore escape insular Britain into the news everyone else is hearing.

ITALIAN DESIGNER-LABEL COATS

With five kids and no lotto cash in the bank, designer clothes isn't something I can allow myself to indulge in. Coats are usually something I buy on sale at the end of winter and keep ten years. I've never had an exciting coat, only a standard, functional, dark-coloured one. Last Xmas my in-laws were over from Denmark. The pound hadn't long fallen by 35% against the Danish currency. Out shopping, my mother-in-law was skipping along telling me that shopping in Scotland felt more like you'd expect in India or somewhere similar. When she saw the price of coats in an Italian designer shop had been reduced by 50% and factored in the new exchange rate, she insisted on buying me one. I didn't put up much of a fight! People who usually don't notice my clothes started declaring coat-envy! I felt a million dollars in my beautiful purple coat. I considered putting in my will that I should be buried in my coat, given I was never likely to have another expensive coat. This winter I was pregnant so didn't get to wear my beloved coat until this week. I happily put it back on yesterday. What happened to your coat? Thomas asked while we were out walking... what did he mean? I took it off. Half of my coat has faded to a pale pink where it has been in the light in our hall, the other half is still purple. My coat is ruined! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I guess I need to go back to being the girl with the coat no one envies :-(

CHASING WILD GEESE

When Amaia was born last week, the paediatrician discharging her wanted me to have her hips checked as he suspected a minor problem. He wrote in her notes that she was to be checked at Yorkhill by ultrasound when she reaches six weeks. When she was three days old a letter turned up inviting her for a hip scan today. How efficient... With Marcel and Lots at school we loaded the three wee ones into the car and set out for the hospital. This was made all the more stressful by Anna being on her second day of potty training, and so being nappiless at the very time of the afternoon she often falls asleep if taken on a car trip! They scanned Amaia on arrival and agreed the hips seemed both shallow and immature. I was then asked her age (given she's big enough to be six weeks). When I replied that she was born last week, they sent us home again telling us she was too young to be checked and asking us to return when she turns six weeks! I just love all these NHS goose chases I seem to end up on thanks to my kids! I wonder where I can apply to have my petrol refunded in the meantime?

OUTDOORS IN THE SNOW

I know I have ranted this till I'm blue in the face but I am still annoyed! I remember from my childhood that snow days in the playground were the highlight of the year... snowballs, slides, snowmen, freezing toes, teachers shouting at you to be sensible as you tried tobogganing down the school's front playground sitting on your schoolbag or a large textbook. I can still hear the squeals of joy, and the odd cry of a kid who'd hurt an arm or leg. Charlotte has just gone to bed moaning about how this weather is getting her down on school days. We've been back at school a week now and we haven't been allowed out once! she grumped. Council policy is to keep all primary kids indoors sitting on their seats during all breaks and lunchtimes when the playground isn't ice and snow-free in case they get sued when little Jack and Sophie fall over and sprain a wrist. Stop ruining our kids' lives with this Health and Safety shite and let them run about like we used to. Kids aren't meant to be glued to seats doing crosswords while the blue sky and snow beckon outside.

MOVING HOUSE

Léon had an appointment at Yorkhill on Friday morning. Of course, I had printed out photos of his latest spot and eczema problems and typed up notes for my parents to take with them, while Thomas and I were in the Queen Mum's having Baked... Funnily enough, Baked had other ideas (this is becoming a leitmotif) so Thomas and I managed to take Léon ourselves :-(
Leaving Yorkhill, we passed the Queen Mum's of course and had difficulty negotiating all the removal lorries parked outside, being filled with beds and chairs! This is becoming a nightmare. The hospital is now shutting in two days and is seemingly stripped of all furniture and Baked is still cosy inside. My last baby, when she decided to show up, only gave me a couple of hours to get to hospital, which was hard enough without icy snow, going to the hospital I know well. This time in labour (if we ever get there) we'll be scraping the car for half an hour and then trundling around the South Side to find a maternity unit we've never even visited, finding its car park and admissions department (assuming I can find their phone number). I guess we need to go on an expedition this afternoon to familiarize ourselves with the area despite the weather and advice not to go out driving unless necessary.
Obviously if I had had any inkling Baked would be late, I would have registered at the other hospital originally. It seemed sensible to book in to the hospital that holds all my gynecological notes, rather than hoping they'd be transferred during my pregnancy. Another friend who is having a baby at the new place has just waited nearly 5 months for her notes from a different Glasgow hospital to arrive on site! Ironically, I now find myself in a situation where my notes are stamped with all sorts of special indications including their worries about Baked's size, recommended caesareans, Anna's quick delivery, my age and rhesus status etc and the Queen Mum's will box them up for sending at some point on Tuesday when they close, and send them with everything else from the hospital. I don't reckon the chances of them having them are high from Wednesday :-( And believe me, at 10cm dilated with a 4.5 or 5kg baby you are in no fit state to sit down and fill them in on your gyno and previous delivery history for an hour during labour.
This is turning into a real trial for the nerves and I'm usually a calm person!

THE MATHS OF THE BIG BUMP

And another thing while I'm ranting... I don't get the Maths...
The hospital told me on 2 December that the baby was 3.1kg. The hospital told me on 30 December the baby was 3.7kg. So she grew 600g in 28 days, or an average of 21.4g a day. I have ten days of my pregnancy remaining, supposedly, so I would estimate Baked's birthweight on 9 January to be 3.9kg, not 4.5kg. Can it really be that they expect her to grow at 80g a day from now on, ie four times more than she has grown in the last month????
What a load of nonsense!

IKEA IS BEING A WEE BIT CHEEKY

You know me, I'm not one to moan about Ikea as it is my favourite shop but today they annoyed me by being just a little too cheeky...
Due to the imminent arrival of Miss Baked, we needed to move all the bedrooms around and create space.
Currently Marcel has the biggest bedroom containing a triple bed - one of those double beds with a single bunk on top - and Léon and Anna are sharing the smallest bedroom with a small bed each. Given the choice of swapping rooms with them, or choosing a mini person to share with, Marcel opted for a straight swap but his colossal bed will not fit into the smaller room. Marcel isn't particularly fond of his huge bed anyway so off we went to Ikea to buy a normal single bed frame. This one was advertised at just £30, which suited our budget... but when we found it in-store it seemed to be £45... odd.
I checked the online page on my phone:

HEIMDAL

Bed frame

£30

Assembled size

Length: 206 cm
Width: 96 cm
Footboard height: 47 cm
Headboard height: 120 cm
Mattress length: 200 cm
Mattress width: 90 cm

This product requires assembly

Good to know

Slatted bed base, mattress and bedlinen are sold separately.

Now I don't dispute that a mattress and bedlinen may be something you actually have at home but I find it odd that a bed frame comes without a slatted bed base, as these need to fit the bed exactly. Mattresses can hardly be expected to levitate after all... so the slats turned out to be the extra £15. I am not happy :-(

BAKED

I'm beginning to think we must have been in an ironic mood when we adopted the nickname Baked... given how small baked beans are.
After October's discovery that Baked was possibly larger than we'd been expecting, I was dragged back in today for another growth scan to check how things had progressed over the last six weeks. I saw a sonographer, a midwife and a consultant, each for ten minutes so of course my appointment took 3 hours. Thank goodness Anna had gone to Granny's or she'd have been hysterical with boredom.
First we went for a scan. I am officially 34 weeks and four days pregnant at the moment (though by my reckoning, I am actually 34 weeks and three days). Baked was asleep, as she often is in the morning and lying in completely the wrong position for scanning. The sonographer checked her limbs and heartbeat and moaned a bit about her position and seemed to be about to give up when Baked turned to the screen yawned very clearly and moved over just enough for the diameter of her head to be measured. Figures popped up at the bottom of the screen saying the estimated gestation was 37 weeks and two days - ho hum... Then she moved again and the sonographer said she'd take a quick stomach diameter too. I waited with bated breath. The screen calculated 39 weeks and 2 days, and the foetal weight popped up at 3.15kg. Oh great! Lots was only 3.28kg at birth and even Marcel (the biggest) had only been 3.75kg.
I was sent round to the consultant with a new graph plotting Baked's expected birth weight to be 4.5kg (that's just shy of 10lbs for any imperial weirdos out there).
The consultant decided to check in the old fashioned manner... feeling my belly with his hands and confirmed he agreed with the technological findings of an hour earlier. His plan is therefore to have me back in on 30 December to check her size then (if he can fit her whole head on the screen to measure its size) and come up with a strategy. He also suggested an internal examination that day to determine whether or not to induce me. I just love internals. What a fun way to finish the year! If my cervix has started preparing for birth I will be induced then so she isn't allowed to grow beyond week 38. I thought I was doing well being on number five never having needed to be induced. I can tell New Year's day is going to be fun.
Of course, he then went on to explain that he doesn't know if my pelvis will cope with a baby more than 20% bigger than my norm, so will be left perhaps with a decision to opt for an emergency section if she gets stuck at the end of labour. Oh this pregnancy is just getting better and better... I thought I was doing well to get to number five never having needed a section. I haven't even had drugs since Marcel - I am planning a painful but bearable natural birth and am being thrown into inductions, sections and god knows what. I am not amused. Finally, he explained I will be granted an elective section if I want one. Aren't you listening to me???? I don't want any kind of section, I don't even want a bloody paracetamol. I want a normal, drug-free delivery. Time to sue the Dane and his big genes???
Oh and to top it all. Bloody Baked is currently (and has been for several weeks) OP into the bargain. I have already had two nightmarishly long, drug-free OPs and I could really do without that added hiccough. Grrrrr.
Anyway, I'm away to ADSA tomorrow to buy ingredients for a curry, raspberry tea and all the rest to start my own induction programme this weekend.

CAVITY WALL INSTALLATION - EAGA-STYLE

Back in June or July a bloke from Eaga Scotland came to the door offering free surveys for cavity wall insulation. He left a leaflet. Remembering how warm my parents house had become since their installation, I rang on the off-chance they had some special recession deals and found out that was indeed the case. I arranged for a free house survey.
In August a guy came round, surveyed the house, filled in all the paper work and had us sign up. As he got into his car to leave, I asked when the job would be carried out. He replied that it usually took about three weeks but because our house had two separate extensions on it, one on the gable end and one on the back and both were timber kit extensions which couldn't be filled, he would need to get a supervisor's approval before the job was signed off. He took two photos, disappeared and the saga began.
After the three weeks had passed, I rang up. I went through the press 3 for the installation department nonsense, hung on for 15 minutes and was promptly hung up on. This didn't augur well. I rang back later and was asked if I wanted to book a survey. No, I had one of those three weeks ago, I want you to tell me the supervisor's decision since I can't sign up with someone else until you say no as I have already applied for all your grants and signed up. They promised to ring a supervisor and get back to me. Of course they didn't. This was a Friday. I rang back at 5pm and they were already on their weekend. I hassled them again Monday morning and was told the surveyor from three weeks earlier hadn't submitted my paperwork. I asked for his mobile number and when I rang him, was told he had taken the day off because his child had been hospitalised (aye sure...) And no excuse was given for the three previous weeks. The saga dragged on another week.
The following Monday a little boy on the switchboard said my surveyor had arranged a meeting with a supervisor for Friday afternoon and he'd let me know the outcome. Of course when I rang at 4-45pm (I was learning) on Friday I was told the surveyor hadn't turned up and the meeting now set for Monday. We were already into October. I explained I was going to rip up my contract and get their main competitor out the following week if I hadn't heard a yes or no. (In truth I couldn't really be bothered restarting the 'whether my house with extensions was suitable' nonsense with another company this close to winter but I sounded convincing.)
In one last attempt I tried the surveyor's mobile again. He asked if I wanted to arrange a survey - Arg - Nooooo - you did that in August, it is now bloody November. Immediately I got some cock and bull story about him having taken the photos in a non-downloadable digital format and him never being in the office at the same time as a supervisor. It was the second Thursday in November. I gave him a 24 hr deadline to track one down. Of course when I rang on the Friday, he was unavailable and my many friends in the Eaga office could find no notes pertaining to the outcome of the meeting with the supervisor. They offered me a survey once more!!!!
So last week on Monday I phoned to cancel and got someone I didn't know. She told me my notes had been updated to say that because of my extensions I could only be cavity filled by the Inverness van which was in Inverness until today at 8am! Believing this was yet another excuse, I said 'whatever' and she agreed to pencil me in for today. Given my nearly 4 months of jumping through hoops, I rated the chances of my walls being filled today at about 5%. At 7-50am however the doorbell rang and there was a nice Eaga van sitting at the end of my path! Shock and surprise!
A team of men jumped on my roof, drilled my walls with such ferocity the wee ones were running round the house by 8-15am shouting ' Watch out, there are dragons outside!' and by 10-30am they were packing up to leave. Thomas popped outside and asked if it had been a really hard job given the extension issue and the head filler looked at him as if he was quite mad and left muttering 'What issue? This was as standard a job as any we take on!'
Give me strength! (And if you are planning cavity wall insulation yourself, I thoroughly recommend Miller Pattison - they did mum and dad's!)

HOME ECONOMICS THEN AND NOW

Here's a photo of my little brother at the age of 12. Derek started high school as I entered my 5th year. He got double home economics twice a week. Eighty minutes of sewing that made me laugh, and eighty minutes of cooking that tested my ingenuity... He used to stand on the main stair case and wait to pounce. He was quite small at 12 so could hide behind other pupils. Just when I thought it was safe, a little voice used to squeak: Do you want to taste my onion soup? ... my coffee buns? ... my soufflé? etcetc You don't want to knock their confidence and you don't want to be nasty when your sibling is actually being nice to you for once, but those five words Do you want to taste... used to strike terror into me. As you can see, his coffee buns weren't the most appetizing. His onion soup was like hot dish water with a raw onion floating on top. I soon attempted to find a way to the top floor, avoiding the stair case! I tried being early or late to classes just so he couldn't find me. Although his initial culinary adventures were pitiful, he soon learned the talent of gourmet cooking and these days I actually look forward to a dinner invite! Although school didn't teach him to cook, it at least tried to make him rustle up some real food.
I was discussing cooking lessons with a friend the other day. Marcel hasn't started cooking at school yet but given he cooks an evening meal for six of us every 5th day or so (as does his nine year old sister), the calibre of the lessons didn't really worry me. My friend's son is also 12 and has already started cooking at school.
The first problem these days seems to be the lesson length. They have fifty minute periods and don't double them for cooking. Secondly, of course as always these days, is that the first fifteen minutes are then taken up with all the usual health and safety bullshit. With less than half an hour left once you consider the tidying at the end, they have no time to teach them anything that will be remotely useful for life.
My friend's son's first cooking lesson was called 'How to make an empire biscuit'. This is a bit basic (more what I'd expect Pudge to be doing at nursery) but if they had actually taught them how to do that, it wouldn't have been a complete waste. It turns out that they didn't have time to bake the biscuits and let them cool enough to jam and ice them. They had these 12 year olds simply take two digestives from a supermarket packet, jam them together and spread ready-made icing on top. If it wasn't so tragic, I'd laugh.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt my friend assumed they were trying to gently break in those who had never cooked before. The second week's lesson was entitled 'Homemade pizza'. She figured that at least might come in handy one day if her son goes away to university. But no, poor Gordon trudged home this time with a slice of cold toast with ketchup and grated cheese on top, wondering if he was going to have to live with his mum forever or die of starvation at 18. His mother is now teaching him to cook herself.
You do have to wonder in this age of ill health and obesity, if this really is the best our schools can manage. Personally, I'd rather Marcel did no cookery than this useless nonsense!