Walkabout

The doctor informed me yesterday that I'll need to talk to the consultant about another early delivery. This is not really a surprise given that a) it's what happened last time (hence use of the word another) and b) I am 25 weeks pregnant and asking her for serious pain killers. My maternity leave started unexpectedly early a couple of weeks ago and though at the time I was very upset about it (who starts maternity leave halfway through a pregnancy?) I'm now bloody grateful. When DH discovered me asleep upstairs in an armchair because I was unable to get out of it (he was walking the dog and didn't hear me call) he immediately insisted I be dispatched to the MoneyPit. Our 'weekend retreat', though removed from our lives and the life of the PD here in Greater London, is at least all on one level. The PD and I depart in the morning. I shall be dropping the WH at kennels en route, and am looking forward to going to bed at the same time as the PD, not having to worry about stairs, not having to spend all day without earrings because I left them upstairs; that sort of thing. I'm hoping it'll restore my spirits- even the Mothership has noticed my stress levels, and she lives in Ethiopia.

I'm not sure how I'll cope without Sky+ and the internet for several days, so I'm confident that I'll be back soon!

Thought for a Thursday

It's late, I know. I've been having one of those weeks. I did have a 'Thought' planned but I got on a bus today at school time and one of the 'students' was pushing a pushchair. Her pushchair. As I got on she and her uniform-clad friend were having a slanging match with the driver. It transpired he had been reluctant to let them on at the last stop because of all the kids at the bus stop, yet he didn't have a problem letting me and my pushchair on. The whole journey they complained very loudly about their treatment at the hands of the bus driver. One relayed the story to her mother on her mobile whilst the baby's mother was texting (the father presumably.) She interrupted her friend to ask:

Teenage mum: How do you spell 'frow'?
Friend: Frow?
Teenage mum: Yeh, you know, like I'm gonna frow up....

What are they learning at school?????????

The verdict

 

 

I'd say that Pumpkinfest '09 turned out to be quite a hit. The kids all looked lovely in their costumes, and the WH tolerated hers quite well too, and seemed keen on the 'craft' (you may notice that they all appear to be wearing bin bags. They are. I may have overlooked one thing on the shopping list in preparation for the big day. Responsible parent that I am I thought it more important to cover my darling's costume than to worry about the fact that I was calmly shoving a bin bag over he head and encouraging others to so the same. Ooops.) They all ate their tea (the sausage-Pumpkin-head was a big hit. The jellies were too. Which is good because I will NEVER AGAIN scoop out eight oranges for that purpose. I advice you to do the same. It's jolly hard work and my hands felt sore from the juice for days. Annabel Karmel neglected to point that out in her recipe!) were thrilled by the chocolate buttons in the Pass-the-Pumpkin and it was all finished and tidied away before 6pm. Hurrah. I'm now planning a Christmas affair!! By the way that's me with the cheesy grin in the last pic. Must be the hormones- I can't have been that excited, surely?

Thought for a Thursday

This was my original thought, though not very original at the moment (I'll have you know I was ahead of the trend on owning this poster and have it in my downstairs loo.) It's appropriate after a week of awful commuting experiences and poonami incidents from both PD and WH. The WH very thoughtfully rolled in fox poo then rolled all over my *gasp* cream sofa this morning whilst I was bathing PD and putting her in her third outfit of the day. And all before 8am. This evening I fell downstairs whilst trying to contain said WH (who is wonderful sometimes, honestly,) who was acting like a nutter because someone in the South of England was letting off fireworks, and thought this to be more appropriate:

Is it the weekend yet?

photos: Keep Calm Panic

Thought for a Thursday

Once you realise we are all mad, life starts to make sense.

'Nuff said!

Pumpkin Party

Violet Posy is having a Halloween 'do'! I thought it only fair that I do the same....

PD with her trick-or-treat stash last year. And WH in witchy glory!

The Pocket Dictator is having a Halloween Party tomorrow, a whimsical notion caused by the arrival of some lovely new cake cutters (the former cake cutters having been commandeered by said first born child. And destroyed.) I concluded that she, being only 17 months, was still too little for Trick or Treating, so came up with the alternative: "Pumpkin Party". I spent hours cutting out Pumpkin invitations using my new cutter (it's very multipurpose, don't you know?) and trying to decide who to invite, and what to eat, and how long should it last, until I scribbled my way through an entire legal pad making endless lists and writing random thoughts followed by several question marks. I think I might have forgotten along the way that the party will ultimately be attended by a handful of under-twos, who really don't care that everything is themed, since they won't fully get the point of the Party anyway. Although they will totally understand cake.

The 'buying of things I need' stopped this morning when I bought some orange tissue paper. The preparation will begin in earnest tonight when Brother Neal has been drafted in to carve a Pumpkin and make soup with the leftovers (I shall dispatch him to a TheMadHouse for tips) and then he has the unenviable task of 'carving' eight oranges in similar fashion, so that I can fill them with jelly. I will be in Martha Stewart mode decorating the sitting room with inflatable Pumpkins and various other tacky bits I purchased from Poundland for the occasion.  DH is in charge of making the Pass-the-Pumpkin, since he can do that whilst watching Channel 4 news after a long day in the office. Then tomorrow whilst the PD has her nap, I shall instead be preparing:

• Pumpkin-shaped sandwiches
• Pumpkin sausage-head
• The aforementioned Pumpkin jellies
• Pumpkin juice (carrot, orange and apple served in a punch bowl to give the illusion of Pumpkin)
• Various snacks and nibbles that are small and round (I ran out of inspiration at this point)

Not to mention preparing the kitchen for the craft-fest that will be 'Pumpkin Decorating'. I'm not mad enough (yet) to think that pumpkin carving is an appropriate activity for the under-twos, so have spent a considerable amount of time this week cutting out large pumpkin shapes from orange paper that can be decorated with cut-out pieces of foam, glitter and pom-poms. But I am mad enough to get the WH a costume to match PDs (I didn't get one, though it turns out I could). Indeed most of the kids will be dressed in a festive ensemble: this pleases me immensely as it was not a request on the invitation but goes to prove that the other mums are just as mad excited as me! I'll let you know how it turns out if I'm still able to stand. I get the impression a few of the dad's are gutted to be missing it.

The best bit about my Halloween event though? That I won't be home this weekend to deal with trick-or-treaters!!

Wait a minute Mr Postman

    Night Train
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film, July 1935)
   
      by W.H. Auden (1907 - 1973)
             
     

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.


II

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.


III

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Ah the heady days of the Steam Age when the post arrived before you got out of bed and you knew your postie's name, address and family circumstance. When I was at boarding school, I lived for letters. I'd happily take other's cast-offs. Not that my parents didn't write, but you felt so out of touch with the actual world when you were stuck in a dark corner of Yorkshire and there had been an earthquake in Cairo and your housemaster wasn't in so you couldn't ask to use his phone (not thinking of course that an earthquake would mean that the phone lines were down.) Now we have mobile phones so the Mothership (or Father for that matter) can text from darkest Africa, usually much more reliable than the local phone or indeed power suppliers. And we have email and the interweb, so you don't have to wait to hear about babies being born or job applications, you can shop at 11 o'clock at night and you can read the news without having to leave the house to buy a paper. But we still cannot manage without the Royal Mail, though sadly most of our mail is bill-related except for high days and holidays. And eBay purchases of course.

The strikes have really muddled me, not least because there is now a backlog of mail that may take a while to be 'unlogged'. I don't know how I'll cope emotionally if they are unable to reach an agreement, as I still feel quite unnerved when I don't get any mail; have I been forgotten? My teenage insecurities are still evidently right at the surface.