The 7 days of laundry

My youngest daughter continues to be a source of wonder to me. This is a photo of her bed.

Another view

 Tis fairly grim, is it not? So how can a child that messy be so clean in other ways? I do her laundry, I'm ace at laundry, it is really one of my best skills. And in 1 week, and I repeat for clarity, 1 week,  my child has worn (and I did count and then write it down so I didn't forget)

 11 pairs of pants, 9 pairs of tights, 8 pairs of leggings, 7 pairs of jeans, 7 bras (and you know how sorry I am that it wasn't 6 as I know some of you are singing along to the 12 days of Christmas)7 t shirts, 6 pairs of socks, 4 shirts, 2 dresses....

 and one skirt. 

My argument in days of yore was always that clothes should be hung up or put away like regular humans but as I am afeared of the BBD and even more afeared of the BBD during AS levels, I am just washing whatever is put in the basket, I am fairly certain that most weeks I am re washing clean clothes but as conversations with BBD scare the bejaysus out of me, I am letting dirty laundry get clean. If we have a brief 2 minute exchange of words and there is no eye rolling (her), deep or sharp intakes of breaths (me), slamming of doors (her), tears (either of us) I just count my blessings and go on my merry way. If she passes her a levels and goes to uni, we can tidy up and redecorate

My deep love of Mumsnet

I am always behind the curve, if it's trendy or new or hip, I will find it years after it is trendy/new/hip. I am a late adapter.

So, eleventy million years after it started, I have become addicted to Mumnet. I can spend hours on it, it has boards for everything, all open for the great British public to chip their tuppenyworth in. I have had loads of advice about parenting a troubled teen, dealing with, quite frankly, bat shit crazy ex partners (not mine) and the best Farrow & Ball colours for north facing rooms. I have had squillions of clothes advice, I now know where to buy really cheap shoes and the best jeans. The mumsnet swears by has made me open my purse numerous times. I bloody love it.

Himself now takes me out for a walk every night just to get me away from it, I will clickety finger my way through an evening nae bother at all. So he has now taken to joining in, we do enjoy an "Am I being unreasonable?" of an evening.

Although he's now not allowed near it if he's had a sherbet as when a nice lady asked for good ideas for her husbands 40th birthday present and ON MY ACCOUNT, SO EVERYONE THINKS I'm THE WEIRD ONE. The bold mr auntiegwen replied

"Tie him to a hotel bed and shag him senseless, You're welcome x"

They haven't banned me though, they just chat to me a bit less now.

The beginning of the end

I am finding more and more that I don't want to blog about stuff for fear of upsetting people. The stuff I have going on with my mother is fairly grim and I would like to blog my way through it but I don't want to upset you my dear readers. I have decided to have a separate blog as I work my way through my mother's declining mental state.

I'm not sure if I have enough to keep both blogs going so if I'm not here, you might find me over HERE

Was it worth it?

This week I have the pleasure of my eldest beautiful daughter's company. EBD is off school for the Easter holidays and she's back here with me, tis lovely. She makes me feel I haven't completely failed as a parent.

On Saturday she met up with her 6th form chums, a lot of them she's known since we moved down south in 2000 and it's the kind of friendship where they all meet up and pick up where they've left off. There are about 10 of them, all went to university, all graduated last summer.

Of the 10, she is one of the lucky ones, her degree in primary education is completely relevant to her degree. Her friend Tom also has a job related to his degree, he's performing in LEGOLAND and his degree is in acting. All of her chums have jobs though, some in shops, some in offices, 1 working for the family business. My child is earning more than she would if she was teaching in the UK, she is most definitely earning a good living wage, in this she probably is the luckiest of them all at present.

Her friend has a degree in international politics, he is being employed by a company to go round knocking on doors asking people if they would like a local bus timetable, if they say yes, he fills in a form and returns it to a local council and then a council employee posts the bus timetable to them. As you are middle aged like me, your head will now be exploding at the waste of public money, you like me will have done the "WHY FILL OUT THE FECKIN FORM? ASK AND IF THE ANSWER IS YES, JUST HAND THEM THE FECKIN TIMETABLE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD"

You might have done it without the swearwords and cross shouty shreikery though.

But I doubt it

In which I have left it too late again, the 2014 remix

On a theme of old.

I still need to lose weight. I have been running again and all was going splendidly. Then I hurt my back, walking, sitting still and lying down became problematic and I am usually ace at them. My back got better now so I had a run, a really nice 4 miles, I properly enjoyed it. I got home and found I had a blister covering the back of my right ankle. It had started off as a small rub from my new cheerful "I might be middle aged but my feet look jaunty" shoes

Except my shoes are even jauntier than those as instead of plain old laces, I have red ribbons. You'd be dead jealous apart from the blister it gave me. You will be pleased I haven't added a photo of my blister, it is a lot less jaunty than the shoes.

So, I am still trying to lose weight (as ever) but I love food and my husband loves cooking, we are a match made in heaven, I just need to move around more. He also likes to buy me bottles of gin, I kept buying Bombay Sapphire, which I love but on recommendation from Curry Queen we now love Sipsmith and courtesy of our local fab shop we found a brilliant gin made here in Market Harborough, God but I love this place, it's called Two Birds When you have gin you have to have some nibbles with it, it'd be rude not to. Hence the ferocious amount of weight gained.

It has now come to my knowledge that I am about to go on holiday, which is great, we will be sans weans, which is greater and it will be sunny, greatest of great.

What is less great is that where we are going will be full of honeymoon couples, therefore I will be surrounded by women 2 decades younger and 2 stone lighter as they will have all been on a diet for years before their wedding so they will be all skinny on the day and honeymoon thereafter. Due to another bout of spectacular bad planning and general failure of life stuff, my honeymoon is happening a mere 15 months after our nuptials. Any weight I had lost has had time to be found.

Also whilst I am away, it will be Mother's day and this will be the first time in 22 years that I have not had any one of my children with me.

Before you feel too sorry for me, I shall fess up, it's a lot easier to miss your weans when you've already had a week swanning round Sri Lanka and are now sitting on your own wee deck of your own wee water villa in the Maldives, I bet the sun will dry my tears up a treat.

See you in a fortnight.

Food & work - part 2 work

Sometimes I think being Glaswegian doesn't help me when people ask me to do stuff I find weird. I think my Glaswegian ness shows on my face. Or perhaps I am just fundamentally unsuited to corporate bollocks.

I have been to That London to attend a training course and several meetings. I have had to have extensive training just so I can go to meetings, effectively. My Glaswegian ness was in full force then. I could not have been more Glaswegian if I tried and I have had a lot of practice due to my advanced age

My friend Lou (also Glaswegian) texted me when I was away asking what I was up to. I believe my reply was 5 words long, letting her know my location and included the words team building shite. Succinct.

I loathe with a passion ice breakers and stuff like that, I would like to do my job and not go to another meeting as long as I live. I get the fear when we are asked to go round the table being asked things that aren't job related. I can answer job related questions with no fear at all. I can even use 2 bob words and pronounce them correctly.

At the end of the 2 days, I could have been wearing a see you Jimmy comedy wig and tartan bunnet as I was asked, and I shit you not, " tell me what colour you feel?"

At this point my Glaswegian DNA exploded. All over the desk, a mix of irn bu, MB bars and chips.

In my mother's mind

It's not been easy dealing with my mum having no short term memory, I'm not as patient or as kind as I would be with your mother and it's hard to keep positive as it is progressive and it's not going to get better. But genuinely, today I had my first proper laugh about the whole thing.

I was speaking to her on the phone and I asked what she's been up to. I was hugely surprised when she told me she'd taken the bus and gone to visit my sister. My dad who's been with her 24 hours a day for months and knows she's not been on a bus since about 1975 gently tells her she's mistaken. She then takes the arse with him and starts telling him all about her bus pass and that he's forgotten and maybe he should get his memory checked. She then told him to go jump in the Clyde.

Still, it's nice that she had a wee bus trip, even if it was imaginary. And as my dad says, she'll have forgotten she's cross with him by the time the kettle's boiled.

Food & work - part 1 Food

Following on from my husband telling me I was only interested in food and work. Today after a visit to the loo, I pulled up my pants and they actually disintegrated down the right hip seam.

Either all the food he makes me has actually made me burst out of my knickers or I now have super human strength due to all this improved nutrition as never before have I managed to break my pants. Ever. And I am 47.

I don't care for any of those scenarios

Clearly Marks & Spencer's quality control lady had nipped outside for a smoke on the day my no VPL low rise thong left the factory.

Bedroom chatters

Every morning my husband talks to me, a big lot, till I wake up. Tis his usual habit, he does love a chat, so I get a good 45minutes of chat every morning. That's another little bit of married bliss that was new to me, I had trained the children not to speak until I was fully caffeinated, then I get himself, chatty is his middle name. He talks before and during my first coffee of the day. This has taken quite a deal of acclimatising to.

Andrew will chat about anything, he feels quite entitled to share his opinion on everything in the world and beyond with me, his opinion doesn't necessarily need to be wanted or qualified, I am his wife, therefore I will want to hear it.

Today's topic of choice was the moon. He was amazed that I didn't know someone had driven a car on it and that there was golf clubs and a family photo of some astronaut's wean on it. Frankly at 6.30 am I don't know my own name, I don't care about that either.

I told him so and qualified this with, "I don't have the spare brain capacity to wonder about someone's wean's photie being on the moon"

To which he replied "Yep, unless it's about what's for your dinner or neurological disorders, you're not interested"

Just my bloody luck for the honeymoon to be over before your food and work obsessed auntie has actually got on the plane.

22

Today my eldest beautiful daughter is 22, that was a bit of a shocker for me, in my head I'm about 35 I think!

For the first time in her life I won't see her on her birthday as she is in Dusseldorf and it's a bit far to pop over for a pizza and a glass of wine. Melancholy wee soul that I am I wonder if it will be like this from now on in, she doesn't have any plans to come back to the UK, she has signed up for another year teaching in Germany and then think she might transfer to the Madrid school.

I'm really, really pleased she's doing this, if you have been reading this blog for a while, she was my chick that had to be shoved out of the nest, she wasn't at all keen on this independence malarkey at all but she's now embraced it.

So happy birthday to my practice child, you mean the world to me and I am so privileged to be your Mummy.

My memory

Should be subtitled "Or what's left of it"

Is it cos I'm stressed? (to be sung to the tune of Moose T)

Is it because I'm getting old?

Is it because I've got way too much work on?

Is it a sign of my own personal doom?

Today I was lecturing at a local university, part of my lecture was on memory loss and mild cognitive impairment in neurological disorders.

I drove all the way home and found I'd left my laptop there.

Do you think I could take my mum's appointment at the memory clinic? Save it going to waste.