Happy Hippy Madhouse.....

So, it's been and gone. No more worrying about it for another 300 or so days. What a relief. i'm sat here, it's 11.35pm, alone in the house - well, apart from two fur people that is. Why? You may well ask? The honest answer is that my kids have more of a social life than me! J and N have gone to a party, R is with daddy, B is in spain, K, C and L are all having a drink at her house and i'm sat here alone, Billy no mates! I could've gone to Ks house but my next door neighbours're having a party which would cause my dogs to make a terrible noise if i went out. To be honest it's quite nice. Everyone seemed happy with their lot, dinner turned out well, even the rotting bird carcass that is intergral to the celebrations apparently. The joys of having adult kids, they know what they want to eat. Usually we get along fine eating my vegan choices but at this time of year i relent and prepare them the meat, it's their holiday too after all. My darling daughter...

I've just had a very sobering experience that made me sit up and realise how very little i have to complain about in my life. I was driving home from dropping R off with daddy for her xmas sleepover. I was feeling quite down, B is away in spain and R not being here overnight was making me feel sorry for myself. As i drove down the road i saw something that made me realise just how stupid my self pity actually was. Flashing blue lights, police cars, ambulances and two cars, one half the length it should be whilst the other was upside down on the wrong side of the road, personal effects scattered across the road. I don't know who these people are, i know nothing about them. All i can think about is how do you tell someone something like that? They could've been out doing their last gift delivery, almost home for the holidays? Collecting their little ones - or dropping them off - planning a bubbly bath and snuggle before tucking them up excited in bed. I can't inagine the ...

Hello, i'm back. It's been a rough couple of weeks. i've has a major chest infection and been really under the weather with it. The down side of this being i've been so behind with all the shopping, it comes to something when there's not a tin of beans in the house. To be honest it scared me a bit, i haven't been this ill for years and when you're a single mam - or even if you're not - it's a worry how to keep the house running and everything ticking over when you can't even lift your head off the pillow. If it hadn't been for my beautiful daughter Kayleigh i would've been in serious trouble. Thank the Goddess for her, she's been out, done all my gift buying AND food shopping, as well as her own housework, shopping etc. She really is a blessing to me. I'm finally feeling better today, it's the first day when i haven't had to go back to bed. It's taken me all day to just clean the sitting room, i ask you! It's so...

For any of you who wondered what decision i came to, i said no. They weren't allowed to sleep together. On friday J,N,A ( his girlfriend) and two of his mates all crashed in the living room watching movies until stupid o'clock. Stepping over festering teenagers the next mrning was less than pleasant -not to mention funky-Pheww! Sat the boys were in J's room n A slept in R's bed. There was much pulling of the face at first but when i took her to the station to go home they both admitted that they'd had fun anyway and the not sleeping together hadn't been the hardship that they thought it might've been. I was so relieved. when i'd picked her up from the station i'd told her the house rules, hugging and kissing (within reason) not a problem but they weren't to have sex in my home or there'd not be another visit, J wasn't happy i'd said that to her but as i pointed out to him - and her - if they're big enough to think about having s...

I'm not sure where all the time's going recently. I seem to be up for hours doing a great impression of a headless chicken (running around in circles with no real sense of direction), tiring myself out but at the end of the day not having an awful lot to show for it! Smalls have been mithering the life out of me for days now to put the decorations up, i suppose i'd better put up my hands now and admit straight out, I HATE XMAS!!! Always have and likely always will. Even as a kid i can remember getting a knot in my stomach whenever i thought about it. From a young age i can remember my mam stressing about xmas. We were a big family on one not big wage and i knew from being little that it was a hard time. For one reason or another we didn't have any contact with our extended family, it was us kids, mam and dad. My dad was first a miner -until they closed the pits down that was. He then worked for british steel - until the bottom fell out of the steel industry too, Margare...

It seems to me that the times when i have the most to say are the times when i can't get near to the blinking 'pute to do it! We've got J's new girlfriend coming to stay this w/end so we're up the wall with making up beds etc. He's sulking 'cos i've said that she can't sleep in his room but there's no way that i'm going to let that happen, he's 16 but she's only 15. Her mam is letting her travel across the country alone on the train, i was a nervous wreck when J did it but i don't think i could let my young daughter do it, why is that? Why do we feel that our girls need more protecting than our boys? By 'we' here i'm refering to we as a society as oppossed to we just the people here. Am i wrong here? Should i let her stay in his room? He's allowed to stay in her room there so maybe i'm being old fashioned - a term thrown at me regularly by my teens? Just because i'm a liberal parent and allow my kids to exp...

I'm going down to my mams this weekend. Usually it's for family occasions etc but this time it's not. It would've been - should've infact - but as i've said many times, untill people are sick of hearing it more than likely! - life is what happens to you whilst you're busy making other plans (John Lennon, Beautiful boy). In fact this song is very apt as it's the song i played ay my sons funeral. He would be 18 0n sunday 23rd, hence the trip down to my parents, he's memorial stone is there. I don't go there all the time, i do know that he's not lay under some cold stone in a little corner of a church but this year i feel like i should make more of a recognition than i usually do. Stupid maybe? I don't know. This time of year always makes me feel down anyway, before John died even, i've had s.a.d.s for years but as these two dates creep round i can feel myself hiding away. It's almost like a retreat, i start to go down in the weeks l...

So, it's sunday again, did i get my act together? Did i 'eck! I was so tired that i did something i haven't done since well, who knows when.I had a lie in. Till nearly midday! L got up with R and sat through cars and bratz with her and left me abed! How kind is my son? wonderful! My youngest little man was still abed with me- asleep! That's my boy! We went to bed early, full of good intentions (on my part anyway), R was flat out on the chair so L said he'd carry her up for me, off to bed we went. Ahh, lovely and tucked up, some film on - that fab i can't even remember what it was -when up came L with the girl. He crawled over the bed to put her next to me, laid her down, B put his arm over her at which point she punched him in the eye. Whoops! That wasn't going to help my early night plans one little bit. As you can imagine the B siren went off, followed by R's 'cos he pushed her. She didn't want him to touch her, he wanted to cuddle up and so on...

It's saturday - again -! and i'm no further on with this whole de cluttering lark. It's shocking how much time i'm spending on here really, i love flitting from page to page, it feels like i'm with friends even though i'm alone somehow. I keep telling myself that i'll feel much better when i've got rid of most of the c**p but to be honest it's so overwhelming that i don't know where to start.No matter how organised i promise myselk i'm going to be it ends up me thinking 'aww, i remember when he/she wore/played with/ was bought for/by and then i've lost, it only takes the one thing. I really need someone who's ruthless to bully me into getting rid of things or, even better maybe, chucking the whole lot out while i'm elsewhere. Ho hum, i'm going to really try this week and get some of it done at least. **sigh** Our quandry with regards to the whole h.s. thing is no closer to resolution. R has taken it upon herself to keep as...

Do you ever think that someones stood somewhere just off camera who's got a different script to the one you're following and who's laughing at your confusion? I kind of had that feeling today. I plucked up the courage to speak to R's dad abut homeschooling her. I presented a pretty convincing case and to my surprise he said it was a good idea, i was more than intelligent enough to do it - you could've knocked me down with a feather at this point!! my memory has been knocked to hell by the medication i have to take to allow me to function and get through the day- and that he would support me 100%! Brilliant !! When i'd come round and could speak coherently again (2 strong sweet cups of tea and the smelling salts helped tremendously!) we chatted for a little while briefly going over what our priorities would be with regards to her education, which methods we would use and how long we'd give it to make sure that it really was the best way forward for our daught...

I've finally taken my courage in both hands and used withcraft How Blessed am i? Originally uploaded by hippymummy17467 To upload a pic of 5 of my kids, Lee, Jay, Nell, Brandon and Rowanne. Anyone who knows me irl would tell you what an amazing achievement this is! For too long i've avoided the whole computer thing like the plague, but no more! Hee Hee! The whole learning thing seems much more do-able now we've got the computer to help. I'm performing a bit of an experiment this week, R has a cough and B is quite congested, they're not desperatly ill but i though that this would give me the opportunity to see if we could actually manage home ed? I'm not sure how it'll go, part of me thinks that at 9 and 7 they might be too old to change to a completely different learning technique but my biggest fear is that i wont be able to teach them all they'll need to know in order for them to get decent jobs and lifestyle when they're older. How will i feel if ...

For the longest time my kids pestered the life out of me to get a computer. I said on more occasions than i'd like to count that we didn't need one and i couldn't afford one anyway. Around Yule aol did an offer that if we signed up for 18 months then we got a free laptop, so relented and off we went, onto that amazing journey that is the .www. I have to say i was absolutely WRONG!!! I LOVE it!!! I'm a single parent and have been disabled for the last 4 years, also i live quite a distance from my family. This means that i don't get out as much as i used too, sometimes having periods when i can't even get out of bed. Prior to my disability we were hardly ever at home, we live in the countryside in a tiny little village and to make it even better we're only a couple of miles from the coast. We used to have great fun, the world was our oyster. After i became ill all of this stopped, it's only this year that i've had the courage to try things again, i thi...

You know what, i'm such a hoarder! I swear i have stuff in my house that i haven't used in 10 years or more! Why do i do this? I go through the kids wardrobes and see things that'll never go anywhere near them ever again, i think to myself 'charity shop' then get distracted and end up putting them away again. It gets to the point where i think the kids have loads of clothes when in reality they have 3 pairs of trousers that fit them and the rest is rubbish! I've thought about this a lot and i think that it stems from my childhood, my parents were not well off, only my dad worked and he had 6 kids to feed. We didn't have holidays when i was small, we did have lots of days out which were great, we all piled into the car and off we'd set bursting with excitement! The beach! Water! Fun! Sand butties(sandwiches)! What more could a kid ask for? We got so excited! We'd be asking if we were "nearly there yet?" before we'd even get out of town! ...

Another weekend, gone before i blinked! We had a lovely time on friday, i took Nell n Rowanne to a friends halloween party with Jean and Heather. R went as a 'dead ballerina' and Nlooked lovely too. She was wearing a purple pixie dress,black leggings, orange and black stripy socks and heavy walking boots, plus my beautiful long black velvet dress coat. The fact that she wore that made me sit up and notice that she has grown so much in the past few months, on the other hand it also made me realise just how fat i am now. Before i damaged my spine i was quite slim - through a lot of hard work and exercise! I'd slimmed down from 238lbs to under 126lbs - but gradually the weight has ceept back on, not all of it but enough to make me uncomfortable. Obviously exercise presents something of a challenge now, my mobility is impaired severely and there's no way that i'm up for any distance walking which does frustrate me as i used to walk for miles with the kids and dogs. We ...

Generally i love it when the kids're off school, we can spend more time together and most of the flashpoints aren't in use then, you know, like getting up, washed, ready for school, kitbags, homework etc. We still get up pretty early BUT the good thing is that we don't need to be anywhere ar organised for anything (organised is NOT my middle name!) so theoretically life should run more smoothly, but no. We still find things to stress over, just different ones. R and i have gone to bed early a couple of nights (Yippee!) as i've been having a really bad week and have been practically immobile for two days. So, there we were all nicely tucked up in bed watching Pocahontas when along came..... Nell! This might not seem like much of a problem, she is a wonderful daughter who i love dearly, BUT, add Nell to a tired R and what do you get? Bedlam!! Within minutes of her arrival they were trying on fairy costumes, tutus, and heaven knows what else, all thoughts of quiet snuggles...

The kids're off school this week so of course i'm feeling off kilter anyway (you may remember that B goes to his dads during school break), not helped by the fact that everyone else seems off kilter too. R is really feeling it, we've had a couple of crying sessions today, one quite major as we descended from slight disagreement to the screaming banshee from hell! She wasn't happy either! No, really, most of the time i can keep calm and as she gets older the 2 second warning has extended so much that most of the time quick thinking on my part can avert disaster - not today! To be fair i wasn't as calm as usual, i'd had a bad night and was in a lot of pain and wasn't very mobile at all. I was supposed to go shopping today but that went out of the window much to R's displeasure. She had it in her head that she wanted a tuna sandwich so of course we didn't have any tuna. This was thankfully resolved by going to Kayleighs house for a tin of tuna - problem...

Just how bad has the weather been? Absolutely dreadful! No need to worry about global warming then eh? Much! There has been lots going on but it's been one of those weeks when yu're flapping around all week in a tizz but when you look back you're not quite sure what you spent all that time on? One thing i have done a lot of this week is spent time exploring Blogger. Not a bad thing to be doing, i've discovered that i much prefer blogger to t.v.- well, thats not strictly surprising as i prefer watching clocks tick to watching t.v" - but like most things with me i always go at it gung ho for a while and then the novelty wears off. It's a bit like reading a book thats so great that you just can't put it down until it reveals its thrilling end. 'Nothing wrong with that' you might be thinking, 'uses the old grey cells and keeps them active', however i have found one quite significant flaw in this philosophy - There IS no ending! The 'book...

Another day, another drama! Why me this week/month/year??? Of course it all started so well. We got loaded into the car and managed to get to Jeans only a little late and this time it wasn't even my fault!! Lee decided to order some food for us all to be delivered - fabulous!- but surprisingly-not!- it took nearly an hour for it to be collected even though they said it'd be ready in 20 mins! Then of course it took ages for it to be eaten due to our new arrival (x-box anyone?) which kept on distracting them whilst they were supposed to be eating. Not their fault at all! So they kept on saying anyway! We finally got to Jeans, piled in abandoning hats coats and shoes in the process. (It's so cold wet and windy here right now that i was toying with the idea of socks for everyone, including me!) The kids quickly settled into doing some crafts that they'd requested for this visit, at least R and Heather (Jeans lass) did. B has been very unsettled recently which is so sad to s...

I think that friday is, in some ways, my favourite day of the week. The sense of relief i feel when i realise that we don't have to get up and organised by 8am is almost (but not quite!) spiritual. As we all know kids have their own little body clocks going which seems to work along the lines of :- fuzzyheaded, sleep deprived exhaustion and on a go slow all week through monday to friday where you're practically weeping before they'll get up BUT come saturday, when you don't have to be anywhere - or dressed for that matter, they're up with the lark and full of the joys of spring by 8.30am! WHY?? Do they do it to punish us or is it just my kids whose body clocks work that way? So, up we got this morning, B and i (R and N were at sleepovers) not in a rush to be anywhere. Lee was up before 10am and we were just lazing around for an hour or so. L's boss arrived with his wages, thankfully!, in which he found a lovely surprise. This led to a hasty get...

Here i am, waffling on about various bits and pieces of ur life when i forgot to tell the best news i've had all year! Lee moved home at the end of july!!! Yipee! T be fair whilest i'm selfishly doing a jig in celebration of his return it was in fact a very hard time for him. He had split up with his girlfriend and had no where to live so he came home to his Mam, it was sad 'cos he'd had to give up his job which he loved and had been in for 5 years and enjoyed. The job situation being what it is he struggled to get another but has finally found something that he seems to enjoy. I f course wish that he hadn't had to go through the heartache at the time but would be a liar if i didn't admit to being over the moon that he's back with me. It hasn't been the easiest of times, he's not lived in the madhouse for 5 years and has had to get used to the general uproar that is us, he has needed some quiet time alone to think which isn't the...

Today is an odd day, Rowanne has gone to stay at her daddys house tonight. He's off work with a damaged elbow so is doing midweek sleepovers as well as friday nights. I'm not sure that it's a good thing. I know her dad loves her and does his best but she's been under the weather recently, a water infection, and has been upset over a few things that he said about me. I know he's very self centered and generally doesn't think before he speaks but i feel that he really should be careful when he's talking to her. We haven't lived together since before her 2nd birthday so it's not like she misses that, however earlier this year he made murmerings about moving here with us. I must admit that my first thoughts were what was he after and why now. I know that him living with us would be an incredibly difficult thing for us to adapt to but i did give it a little thought;i think the concept of two parents together appealed to me until i did a reality check ...

After all the excitement of yesterday, staying up late to halp J and do this i overslept a bit this morning. It's at times like this that i often wish that my kids were homeschooled. I hate hurrying them to get ready when they're clearly tired, they must be 'cos i know i am! I've often thought about it but my biggest fear is that i wouldn't be able t teach them all they need to know in this age of technology and computers. At the ripe old age of 41 i've finally plucked up the courage to try the world inside the screen. If my kids only had me to teach them then we wouldn't even have the flipping thing! (even though i have to admit to enjoying parts of this- blogger for one!) We're always being told that we need this or that and our kids're deprived if we don't provide it for them. Try telling your (then) 3 year old that she can't have the Bratz super duper delux pop princess fairy compound for the one off budget price of your soul plus the yea...

So, today being sunday i'd planned to not do too much, well, actually that's not quite true. Initially we were due to go to "Apple Day", a one day festival that celebrates everything and anything remotely to do with apples - the clues were there in the title people! Anyhoo, to cut a long story short (Yeah, like i EVER do that!) it was cancelled earlier this week due to the fact that the field was most likely under 6" of water. Shock horror! So, we had a few let down kids - and mums for that matter - with not much on. I then foolishly envisioned a relaxing sunday morning with a lazy breakfast and maybe even building up the enthusiasm (or courage might be more apt) to do "the bedrooms". You may wonder why i wrote it like that? In fact 'bedroom' is quite a relative word in this house. 'Why?' you may wonder. Well, it's like this, when most people think of the word bedroom they imagine a room with a bed in it, maybe a wardrobe and/or...