Time is fleeting

Wow, almost a week since I last posted - so much to do, so little time to do it:)

I had my 1st review at CAB last week - they keep regular tabs on us newbies, and I still have various bits of paperwork & training to complete along the next few months while I move from new to experienced advisor. It all went well. No problems from my PoV or theirs. I only seem to get through 4-5 clients a day, and others seem to manage more, but then again, I do get through 4-5, and write them up, so it's not terrible.

I also, finally, managed to write my first essay for my course this year. I have already decided to postpone it a bit & take the exams in October rather than June, but still, I need to get on with it. Now I do not need to spend all Thursday morning cleaning the house I am hoping to use that time to get on with studying.

We went up to the re-enactment market in Warwickshire yesterday to mooch around, but didn't really need too much stuff - Aggie picked up a couple of small badges to copy while doing his new trade of metal casting, and I bought a straw hat in the optimistic hope that I will need to shade my head from the sun at some point this summer....... But we have finally reached the point where we have most of what we need! Yay. I'm also not too far behind with the sewing this year - with two children & one adult fully kitted out, and only a couple more dresses to make to get everyone totally sorted (Aggie calls his a cote, but it's still a dress LOL). I even managed to sell on a few bit of old stuff. Hurrah. Mstr A is going to try being an apprentice this year, rather than a page, so will be around the living history traders rather than fighting with the soldiers - probably better all round we think!

no more superwoman

We just got agreement for direct payments to help Aggie out round the house & with the kids for a few hours a week. WHOPEE! When it's all organised that will mean we can have someone in to vacuum the main rooms, take LMD to pre-school at lunch-time, peel potatoes and generally keep the house a little bit up together. I reckon we may even get an occasional evening babysitting otu of it. And all on those nice tax payers money!

I really did feel a weight lift off my shoulders when we got the letter:) It has been the subject of many long discussions recently. I'm not the most houseproud person in the world and will happily find more interesting things to do instead, but even I have a minimum standard, and we were not reaching it. I know Aggie finds it hard to physically do some of it, but it was really getting me down.

So some good did come from all that trauma at the end of last term when Mstr A was suspended:) There is always a silver lining......

But it does mean I can't claim to be superwoman any more, just having to care for Aggie, and Mstr a, look after the other kids, work for my employer, keep my hand in with my self employed work, study, volunteer at the CAB and re-enact, with only some housework required:)

white goods bads

I'm not very happy with modern life at the moment.

With three kids and a disabled husband constantly making a mess, I do at least one load of laundry each day, often two if beds have been changed/towels used/potty training failed etc. I need to. If I'm lazy, and miss a day, the baskets overflow, there are not enough clean clothes for the kids to wear to school and it takes days to catch up again. However, because I am lazy, i have worked out a system - i put a load on each night before i go to bed, then when I get up in the morning that load goes into the dryer, and another load goes into the machine.

Last week was no exception, other than when i woke up on Thursday morning my washing machine was not bleeping at me! I looked, and saw that it was still full of water, and wet clothes. the door was still locked, and the machine had just stopped half way through it's cycle. I tried the normal solution of turning it off and on again:-) No luck. there was power, but none of the other buttons worked. My next solution was to complain to Aggie in the hope that he could fix it, but he poked it a few times and suggested that the motherboard had probably gone.

Fortunately, knowing that we are fairly laundry intensive, we had bought a good machine a few years ago, and paid for their "lifetime" cover which the salesman assured us covered parts, labour and appliance replacement for ever - basically meaning that other than deliberate damage, we should never have to buy another machine. So i phoned them up, and gave the details over the phone.

An enineer turned up on Friday, spent approx 30 seconds looking at it, barely touched anything, agreed it was the motherboard and stomped off, saying he would order one.

So we went into the weekend already behind on laundry. It was LMD's birthday party, so my mother, sister and cousin G were staying over. So by Sunday I knew we were not going to make it through until the new part arrived. I went to the laundrette. Fortunately there is one just at the end of my road. At nearly £3 a load, and smaller machines than mine, I did two loads straight off. At a load a day, it will ake me just under two months before I have spent enough to buy a new machine altogether! I didn't pay for their dryers though - I brought it all home wet and did it there.

I phoned on tuesday to find out when the part would arrive. we were told Thursday, so it was another trip to the laundrette yesterday. Wet clothes in the dryer at home.

I woke this morning and went to get LMB some clean school clothes out of the dryer - and guess what! That had broken too - lots of noise but no tumbling going on - and still full of damp clothes! Aggie reckons it is the drive belt which he can fix, when he gets the part!

A different engineer called us today to see of it was OK to come round between 3pm and 5pm to fit the new motherboard. Not really as it was parents evening tonight, but we agreed. Aggie went to parents evening and I stayed at home and waited.

And waited.

Aggie came home. i cooked supper. we sat down. the doorbell rang. At 5.30 the engineer turned up. A nice guy, he came in, looked at it, pulled it out, fitted the new motherboard, and came to tell us that was not really the problem. The otherboard was burned out, but only because the door lock was knackered. We would need a new door lock before it could be used. he will order one and come back when it's available. Oh joy. He expects it will be another 5 days.

I'll be back to the laundrette tomorrow (not sure when as I have an interview smack across the middle of the day, but....). And Aggie is off to try to buy a new drive belt for the dryer. But we might all be dressing in paper suits pretty soon. Kudos to Tomorow's World circa 1975:-)

Happy families

I'm not quite sure what has happened, but my kids all seem to be nice!

The girls have been playing really well together recently - happily going up to a bedroom to play when asked too! Mstr A hasn't had much of a tantrum for days - and I have even been able to talk him out of his tears reasonably easily. They were all wonderful at the re-enactment at the weekend - playing with bigger and smaller children, being (mostly) polite to the adults and going to bed with reasonably minimal fuss (they still woke at 6am, but you can't have everything in a tent). They each made friends and played well.

Mstr A has been doing really well at school too. We saw his teacher just before half term and she said that he mostly does his work at the allocated time, and has not had to be sent out of the classroom all term. He's had a head teachers award, and been voted lead speaker at the harvest assembly. He says the other children don't play with him at playtime still, but we're working on his understanding of rules - and personal space - still.

LMB doesn't seem to have learned anything whatsoever of academic use at school. But she seems to be having a great time there. She's been invited to two birthday parties, and had a couple of friends come and play. Her best friend is the little sister of one of Mstr A's best friends, which is great:-)

LMD is just the cutest little madam in the world. It's true - it's not just me who thinks so - everyone who meets her says how cute she is, and then she talks at them and they all ask to take her home:-) Although none of them do - even when I offer!

Aggie is settling into life at home - he's done well with the kids for the last week, taking them off to places and doing stuff with them. He's not been so great at understanding that housework still needs to be done, but perhaps he'll learn after I've moaned enough!

The family is just feeling a lot more settled all round really. And the many cuddles we get are fantastic. Having three kids is starting to make more sense at last:-)

Getting sorted

Clever Aggie spent this morning putting together LMD's mid-sleeper bed for her. It was a bit of work as we got it off freecycle, with some fixings, no instructions and from a guy who had never seen it put together in the first place! As we had collected not only the bed but some miscellaneous bits of wood and half a wardrobe as well, Aggie had to work out what went where, why and how before even starting the hard`work of assembling it. Along the way he discovered that some bits had already been "bodged a bit":-) and that it was 1cm longer than the previous bed we had in there, which meant it didn't actually fit between the walls!

But he managed to sort everything out and she now has her own bed with a ladder and a desk so she can be the same as LMB. It also means I can now really get knuckled down to sorting out all their stuff. I've almost finished sorting LMB's room. What she has got in there is all that she is having in there! I've just got the last couple of toy drawers to fill up and Aggie has to put up a shelf and she's done. If she wants anything else she will have to decide what will be removed to make space for it.

LMD's room will be the same hopefully in another week or so. Once I've worked out what she can have in there, everything else will be taken away and hopefully the concept of tidying up each day will be drummed into them:-)

I wonder if there are any indoor car boot sales around here? :-)

Next job is for us (Well, Aggie) to finish the last bits of DIY in the girls rooms and to get on with finishing our bedroom walls (long time readers will remember that this was on his To Do list over a year ago!) so that we can sort out our bedroom and then we are`well on our way to getting things sorted:-)

Don't worry, be happy

Hurrah! Aggie's happy pills are starting to work again after the Doc upped his dose a while back. This week he has finally started to get involved with family life again and do stuff around the house, as well as go to the gym! My life has got drastically easier, as he takes Mstr A to school in the moring, so i just have to take the girls and don't have the same sort of rush to get to work on time. he also has started cooking again, which he loves, is pretty good at, and again, releases me from a really tim consuming chore. yay!

Of course, it also means that I'm not getting much exercise any more, as I walk the girls to school at 2 year old pace, then it's only 1/2 mile cycle to work. But that's ok:-)

In theory, this should be giving me a bit more free time - maybe to do some revision? But it doesn't seem to work like that! Although part of that may be because work has been absolutely manic this week, so i've been pretty exhausted. I have managed to read through most of the syllabus, and it all seems so obvious and memorable when the book is in front of me, but in the exam it's just me and what I remember! Of course, i'm a bit annoyed at my lecturer, because I have now done three mock exams as home work, and he has lost two of them and not marked the third yet, so I have no feedback whatsoever on what I'm doing *scowl*. And because the exams were handwritten (bloody stone age lawyers), I don't even have the exams to re-submit, or read through! I'm getting a bit panic-y now. 18 days to go *gulp*

Don't you wish your MiL was cool like mine?

Nanny A came over yesterday.

She turned up while we were all out at work, cleaned the house, left some new clothes for the children in the front room & disappeared off home again before we even had a chance to see her & say thank you.

How lovely is that?