Reality sucks

Aggie had his regular physio appointment today. They decided that his left ankle and hip have got quite a lot worse, and L1-L5 vertebrae are showing more damage too. Instead of going back every six months, he will be having weekly appointments for a while. They have to teach him how to walk symmetrically again, as he is currently putting pressure on his back and the muscles are in spasm - which is why he has been so restless at night - so hopefully I'll be able to get a good nights sleep again soon;-) Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any further damage to his upper back/neck, but thats not a lot of consolation really:( I hate it when he sees the physio - it always makes me have to face reality again. I'm quite good at ignoring reality most of the time:)

Mstr A was in trouble at school again today - the first day back after half term, and he was sent to the head teacher already:( The problem is that once he gets an idea into his mind, it is impossible to persuade him to even consider that it might be wrong - or to accept that he can agree to differ with someone. He will stick to his guns however much trouble it gets him into. I'm not sure what I can do about nthat, or where to turn for advice! After such a good play day during half term, I was working hard at convincing myself that he was managing other people better - but I think it was just that friend L is VERY good with Mstr A, and laid back about being told everything, plus they were doing a rule bound activity where the rules were fixed, so Mstr A couldn't get them wrong!

Reality sucks. I'm going back into my fantasy world:(

Moving along

It's been half term this week just gone. Not a particularly busy holiday, but a school holiday nonetheless!

I worked on Monday, and Aggie took Mstr A off to see the colour therapy optician person. She did loads if tests with various things, and ended up agreeing that Mstr A would benefit from blue tints on his glasses - apparently it made a big difference to his reading accuracy! Of course, this means that we have to get him a new pair of glasses (but fortunately they will mostly be covered by the NHS as "reading" glasses), then pay £70 to get them tinted. lets hope he looks after them well!

Then on Tuesday, I took the day off as Mstr A had his first physiotherapy appointment. It all went well, and didn't even hurt him much:) The physio agreed he is particularly stiff for a child, and said that he had a general weakness in his thighs which might be where the gait is cvoming from, but didn't think there was any real cause for concern. So I will try to get him to do more leg work - he loves cycling in the summer, and I promised to try to find a trampolining club for him too. he likes the trampoline, but finds it difficult to think up what to do on the one in the garden, although I am not sure how well he will cope with the discipline of a club. Perhaps he'll do a term or so, and then just practise some routines if I give them to him:)

We had booked a play date on Wednesday, so i took the day off from the CAB as Aggie was a bit concerned about having 5 kids to watch over all day. Fortunately we had invited a brother & sister from school who match up with Mstr A & LMB ages. They arrived at 9am, and the boys immediately went on the Wii while all three girls trotted outside to play in the garden. Apart from when I called them in for food, none of the children were seen again! The boys swapped from the Wii to the DS to the N64, and the girls swapped from the swings, to the trampoline to the playhouse. When mum came to collect at 4pm, neither of them wanted to go home as they hadn't played enough! So that was great, and very easy - next time Aggie can do it on his own:)

Thursday was a family day - we went over to Nanny A's and briefly met up with cousins girl K & boy K - again successfully managing to play together with no tears or blood.... And all the kids played with Nanny A's puppy - LMD even allowed it to climb up on her and lick her face which is amazing considering a few weeks ago she screamed and clambered vertically up my leg if she saw any animal within 50m of her!

I still don't really get the point of pets tho - I'm glad the kids are not scared of animals so much now, but why have them in your house? Smelly, expensive and dirty whotsits imo:) We even managed to get rid of our fish recently - freecycling them & their tank to a very grateful family. So now we are again animal free at home.

I went to work again yesterday - they were pissy enough about me taking Tuesday off! Aggie took the kids to the cinema to see Madagascar 2, and I'm sure bought them tons of sugary rubbish, yet when I came home in the evening & asked what they had done, they told me "nothing", and that they "never" do anything nice! KIDS!!!

Today Aggie is beingt he dutiful son again and sorting out IT issues for his dad, so I'm taking them bowling & to the playground. It's a terrible life being a child!

But best of all, our new cleaner started this week! My house looks all funny - you can see the carpets, and the floors aren't sticky:) (OK, it wasn't often that bad......), and smells of polish and bleach! She works really hard and has got loads done in her couple of hours! I still feel a bit guilty about having a cleaner, but it is keeping two people in jobs (me & her) so I can feel that I am doing my bit to help the recession:~) And it does mean I no longer have any excuse not to get on with all my stuff - I am going to really crack on with my studies now, which have been totally neglected recently, and also try to catch up on a load of first aid stuff that I am behind with.

The Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee +
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell +
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman +
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy *
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien +
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky*
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne +
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell +
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving*
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins*
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy *
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons*
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth*
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon*
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov*
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt*
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker +
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson +
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallow and Amazons - Arthur Ransome +
78 Germinal - Emile Zola*
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*
80 Possession - AS Byatt*
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell*
83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro*
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert *
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry*
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom*
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks*
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole*
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute*
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo +

Only 6?! I don't consider myself particularly well-read. I just don't have the time right now. But 6!!!!

My magic eyes

remember last time I went to the opticians? He told me I was "special" as my eyes had completely healed from the laser surgery I had years ago:)



Well, I went back to the opticians today - a different one from last time, and he told me that I had "lovely" eyes. Of course, from an opticians point of view that meant that I had good strong veins at the back of my eye, crystal clear lenses and a fluid pressure of 14, which is, apparently, just right! But more interestingly my astigmatism has improved somewhat over the past year or so! So I am one of the few people whose eyes get better as they get older and spend more time on the computer! Weird huh?!

Also talking about eyes, Mstr A is off to try colour therapy on Monday. That's the thing when they give people tinted glasses and it magically cures various things. Of course, only some things, and only some people, but..... When my kids can swim two full lengths of the pool without stopping, I let them have goggles. Mstr A got there a while ago, and said that he can see much better through his blue goggles than without them or even with his glasses. So we looked into it, and there is some evidence it MIGHT help some people with some autistic spectrum disorders. there are not many qualified colour therapy optomitrists in the UK, but fortunately one of them is just a few miles away, and for £28 for the appointment, what can it hurt?

Although we might be going back to her in the not too distant future, as apparently the school are getting LMB checked out for dyslexia, or similar. I'm not convinced myself - whereas I knew Mstr A had issues long before anyone else would admit it (or do anything about it), I don't get that feeling with LMB. She does still write a number of letters and numbers back to front (but she is only 5!), and she is not the most literate of 5 year olds (but she is only 5!), but she can read, and she can spell words out, recognise letters, numbers, shapes, use a computer....... Still, I'm not going to stop them testing her - even if all it does is stop them telling me how she doesn't have much self confidence! What they mean is she doesn't push herself forwards all the time, she doesn't insist on being the one picked first/most, and doesn't vie for attention all the time. But that doesn't mean she lacks self confidence - she happily chats to everyone she meets, she tries new things without batting an eyelid, and goes to new places and makes new friends easily. She agrees with me that she is big, clever, beautiful and brilliant at everything she tries:) she happily shows her friends (and others) how to do things, and regularly performs her "shows" and concert for lucky members of the family! I'm at a bit of a loss as to what else I can do to encourage her self confidence! Or how to explain tot he school that she does have it!

I don't think we'll have the same problem with LMD - she can't bear to let anyone else speak/do anything/get attention if she is there:) She soooooo wants to be at school - she insists on wearing school uniform every now and then to go to nursery. It does look extraordinarily cute:) But I'm sure she's planning just to sneak next door into the reception class when no-one is looking! Although in fact, she's more concerned about trying new things than LMB is - she worries that she won't be able to do it properly! But I don't think the teachers will be telling me she lacks self confidence!

It's half term next week, so it's going to be a busy week. Hopefully the weather will stay dry - it's a shame the snow didn't turn up a couple of weeks later really.

Lost for words

>

From the BBC:

Talk of arson in the town has provoked fury, our correspondent says, with many locals finding incomprehensible the prospect that some of the devastation may have been manmade.

Sorry is the easiest word to say

It seems that the bankers have apologised, and that's apparently what the public wanted, so that's all right then. problem solved, everyone happy, and 4 "unemployed" men get to keep their million pound bonus and golden handshakes and sidle off into retirement with clean consciouses.



I am not a great believer in this modern concept that one person must be responsible for all bad things that happen, and that the best solution to any incident is to sack the person at the top, but neither do I believe that saying sorry solves anything.



I don't accept that from my children, and they are all still in primary school! They have to apologise if they hurt others, but they also have to do something to make it up. As a member of the public, I do not feel at all pacified by hearing 4 rich men apologise. Especially as they don't seem to have any idea what they are apologising for>:(

It's snow unusual

to have snow in England that it deserves wall to wall coverage, the closure of schools, workplaces, the cancellation of EVERY SINGLE bus in the capital city, and shock and horror accross middle England!

Except it's NOT that unusual!!! Most parts of England get snow most years. Some get it every year, and some get several inches every year. OK 6 inches in 48 hours is a lot in the south - it only happens every 20 years or so, but it does happen!

It's all gone from here now. less than 48 hours and less than 6 inches is hardly the end of the world, or civilisation! I made it to work. I wish I hadn't bothered - apparently no-one expected me there:) (although I doubt they would have paid me if I wasn't there!). I didn't even get time to make a snowman:(

Perhaps I can build one with my grandchildren in 20 years time........