Really? Has a year just flown by like that?

When I started to write the date on the whiteboard before school started this morning, I was gobsmacked to realise that it was International Star Wars Day. And immediately, my blogpost from this time last year popped into my head. I can't believe it's been a year since then, it feels like about a second ago. If you didn't read it then, go and read it now.

Today, E and I laughed, and wrote the date a thousand times, and giggled and nudged each other every time anyone mentioned the date. We talked about our favourite scenes and characters, we watched Lego Star Wars stop-motion animation youtube videos for our reinforcers after school.

I even relaxed my no-Star-Wars-related-play at breaktime rule (although I was happy to record that he chose to play football instead).

I wish that I could have shared my dear husband's barmy take on tomorrow's AV vote - read it here, it's hilarious - but thought it might be a little over E's head. It took me long enough to convince him that Star Wars was fiction, rather than a documentary.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

More soon on the saga of the new bedroom - but I just wanted to remind everyone to get out and vote tomorrow. Say yes to AV.

Quiet weekend

The end of this half-term break has come about all too soon, as always. And, as always, I steadily came down with some sort of exhausting virus which left me in bed all day Thursday and Friday, with Jamie following me over the weekend and J-cub spiking a temperature all day today. Fingers crossed it'll pass for them as quickly as it did for me (although actually, in retrospect I've been ill pretty much all week, and only today am I feeling better). Meanwhile, we've done lots of nothing this weekend, apart from watching Finding Nemo sixty-three million times (I swear, J-cub wakes up chanting 'Meemo, meema, meemo, meema' every day) and spending an awful lot of time cuddling.

J-cub's cries of 'Tuddle Tilly!' every time she curls up to sleep are now grumpily tolerated, although not so much when he tries to sit on her.

We've had the return of Buckethead very much in evidence this last week...

And inexplicable signings of 'crocodile' in the bath, even though there are no crocodiles to be seen and he doesn't seem particularly perturbed by whatever dangers he's imagining...

I spent today's naptime dusting off my shiny new sewing machine and whipping up a fleece lined Dinosaur hat, which I was super-proud of (especially after I'd unstitched the first attempt, which had the stegosaur spikes going up the back and then down one side) but which J-cub flat out refused to wear. 'Dorodee dat!' he shouted angrily, banging it down on her head. And, to be fair, Dorothy is a dinosaur after all...

So long half-term, back to work tomorrow ... :(

Day 9 - Toy Story 3

Today was my last day of work before school resumes in September.

And what better way to fully make use of my skills as a talented behavioural therapist, than by taking the boys on a field-trip to see Toy Story 3?

I'm not going to go into detail about it, as I hate spoilers with a passion and wouldn't dream of inflicting that on anyone. I will say though, that it is GREAT. I'd forgotten how truly amazing the animation was (I'm not sure that I've actually seen a Pixar film in the cinema before, which might account for that) (and no, I didn't see it in 3D, it gives me a headache), the characters were perfect, it was equally fun and desperately sad. Although I think the sadness would not have been so poignant had I not had a son. That's all I'll say.

Go see it, it's great. And if you can get paid for seeing it, then even better ;)

Day 8 - Sleep deprivation

I'm not going to bang on about sleep deprivation too much, because I have plenty of other outlets for it elsewhere (happily, all mums seem able to empathise and therefore provide ample group-therapy opportunities).

Suffice to say, I nearly fell asleep driving to work. With J-cub in the car. Not good.

I had a very strong coffee when I got there, and managed to cope through the first couple of hours of breakfasting and playing (and by cope, I mean I put CBeebies on and tried my hardest not to fall asleep while J-cub played on and around me). The boys had again stayed up all night playing DS, and none of them had surfaced. At around 10.15, J-cub got to the end of his awakeness tether, so I gave him his bottle and popped him in the buggy. I'd got as far as pushing it from the utility room into the lounge (where there are plenty of heavy curtains to make it nice and dark), when I realised that he'd already fallen asleep. Thank God (although why he can't fall asleep that quickly at home or at night is quite beyond me).

I lay down on the sofa, just to rest for a second, and I was out like a light. I woke nearly 2 hours later, to hear J-cub stirring. I woke the other boys for lunch (at 12.30! Honestly, if there weren't extenuating circumstances, I'd be shocked at them) and managed to get in an hour's play with all four of my boys before my shift ended.

And yes, I feel terribly guilty about sleeping on the job.

Day 7 - Other people's toys

I took J-cub with me to work for the first time today. The boys I look after live in a gorgeous, huge house, which is full of 14 years' worth of accumulated toys. We arrived at 8am, and the boys were still asleep after a hard night's work playing DS. After their Dad had left, we explored the kitchen, utility room, playroom and lounge, and J-cub was beside himself with joy at all these new toys.

They have a lovely play table with a Brio train set, which J-cub didn't really understand but liked picking up the trains and carefully placing them on the floor.

We found an old keyboard under the piano, upon which I gave the boys keyboard lessons when they were little (like most of their musical instruments, their interest waned as they grew older). J-cub sang and banged the keys and made a complete racket, it was lovely to watch. Our piano is currently covered in boxes of stuff, and I haven't played at all since before he was born. I'll have to rectify that soon.

After his nap we made some more racket, which woke the boys and they played with him while I cooked lunch. They found an old box full of play food and spent ages tipping it out, putting it all back in the box, then tipping it out again. After half an hour, one of the boys commented "Babies are tiring, aren't they?" :D

Part of my role involves 'shadowing' my main charge, E, in school. I am technically a teaching assistant, but in a behavioural therapy capacity, whereby I prompt him through his work and his school day in the least intrusive way possible, until he learns through repetition and reinforcement how to do things for himself. I use a lot of gestures which have been adapted from Makaton and British Sign Language, all of which allow me to communicate with him without the other children being aware that I'm telling him to stop pinching his skin or to look at his teacher. I explained to him about the CBeebies programme Something Special, and taught him some of the signs that J-cub uses. Within minutes he was generalising the ABA techniques I use with him, to teach J-cub the signs being demonstrated in the programme. It was amazing to watch.

Towards the end of my shift the boys started to run out of baby-wrangling patience, so I set up a ping-pong tournament to give them a break. It lasted for about 5 minutes, before J-cub decided he wanted in on the action, and stole the ball. We swapped to playing table football, but J-cub swiped that ball too.

Game over!

Summer Holiday Project

So, evidently, I've failed at the whole NaBloPoMo Saved thing. I'm claiming extenuating circumstances, and I'm chucking in the towel. I need to get back to blogging regularly, and I need something to give me a bit of purpose, like my Hundred Days list did.

I am therefore going to do something blog-worthy every day during the school Summer Holidays. We broke up today (woo hoo!), and I'm not sure exactly when we go back, but it's in about 7 weeks time, so I should have 50 or so posts under my belt by then. I'm defining something blog-worthy as being anything from 'Ooooh look, I took a lovely photo today' to 'I redecorated the hallway! Honestly, I did!' (a prize to anyone who guesses which of those is more likely to happen*). I've got two weddings, a week's holiday, a 31st and a 40th birthday before school restarts, and I'll try my best to keep going through all of that. The first day of my holiday is going to involve going to a funeral, so I also reserve the right not to blog tomorrow if it's all too much.

I'm also going to be working on and off for the first couple of weeks, but it's work of the 'Let's go to the beach' variety, rather than 'Let's ruin the holidays with a lot of work' work. In case I haven't mentioned it often enough before, I love my job.

*If anyone actually tries to claim that one, I reserve the right to provide a virtual prize. It'll be a good-un though.

Jacob's driving in his car...

The two lovely boys I work with are now aged 10, and have decided that it's about time to let go of some of their toddler toys. They invited me to rummage through their garden shed, where I found two lovely Little Tikes cars, which they thought they could just about bear to be parted from. I chose one, and while I tutored E, his brother J scrubbed and washed and cleaned all the spiders off the car. I folded down the backseats of the car and squeezed it in, and arrived home to give J-cub his belated birthday present from his honorary brothers.

We helped him into it, and he's barely spent a second out of it since. We were a bit worried that it would take him a while to work out how to climb in and out of it, but about 5 minutes after he'd first sat in it, Jamie took J-cub out of it to give him his tea, left him for a second to get his cup, and came back in to find J-cub sitting back in the car with the door shut.

His legs aren't long or strong enough yet to propel himself forwards, but he's enjoyed using it as a highchair, sitting it and spinning the wheel, reading books while leaning out the front window, climbing in the wrong way round, standing on the seat and leaning out the front window, sitting on the parcel shelf, climbing out of the door, cruising round to the other side, and climbing back in through the window.

I was very cruel and put it in the garden, after I got sick of having no room for anything else and after J-cub got stuck in the footwell for the hundredth time. I'm just waiting for him to start pointing out the back and signing 'car'. In the meantime, I've been taking him out every time it's not raining for some driving practice.

Today's Look Up photo was an easy one - he leant out the front window to check out the ceiling (just in case there was anything going on up there). AMAZING face :D

You can't look directly at a bluebell...

A very quick post today as I'm shattered after all the children at school today were besieged by their volume controls being stuck on high, resulting in my ears still ringing and my brain being numb. I managed to make a small girl cry uncontrollably by asking her to stop screaming "I found a woodlouse!" and just to tell her friends quietly instead.

I took today's Look Up photo standing outside my employer's back door, which opens onto a narrow walkway edged by an 8-foot high brick wall at the top of which is a small strip of wild garden (the house is cut into a hillside). The bluebells were glorious - highlighted by the sun and waving in today's welcome breeze.

From time to time, I like to baffle city-born Jamie with straight-faced explanations of nature, most of which are true, but some of which are not. These include there only being 5 clouds which encircle the world, occasionally breaking up into smaller pieces of cloud but still being part of a greater whole, and my most recent explanation of the blue haze you see at roadsides when banks and verges are covered in bluebells. I insisted, for days, that you can't look directly at a bluebell. It's an optical illusion, like a perception filter, which means your eyes slide right off it and you only take in the group of flowers (like a herd of zebra) but you can never see a single flower, except in the very periphery of your vision.

He didn't believe me. I don't know why I do this, but I get massive kicks from it. I don't think many people get my sense of humour.

Boogie Wonderland

We spent a delightful afternoon at school today, building dens for fairies as part of our Eco School initiative. My group of four boys built the best den by far, even beating the normally endless creativity and imagination of the girls (although the girls' den did have a swing). I can't even take any credit for it, as I was inside catching up on paperwork during the initial design stages (I brought the paperwork home to do last night, but J-cub scuppered that plan by screaming solidly for 4 hours. Ho hum.). When I rejoined the boys, they gave me a guided tour.

My look up photo is taken from the ground floor (which you can't see), which included sleeping, eating and lounging areas. It was covered with a thick layer of cut grass, which made it almost completely waterproof and very warm and snuggly. The first level you can see is a dance floor "for the fairies to have lots of discos". Can you see the mirror ball? How cool is that?

And the top layer, which you can see the bottom of, with the mirror ball hanging from it ... it contained nothing but a thick layer of soft grass and leaves. "What's that bit for?" I asked. They answered "It's a secret place for snogging!"

Excellent.

One small step...

During my drive home from work this evening, where I first stopped to pick up J-cub from nursery, then to drop off the boys at their karate lesson, we had a long, rambly conversation. We covered topics such as how much it cost to fix my car door, why I couldn't afford to buy an Ipod, or an Iphone, or an Ipad, or the DVD of Avatar (all things the boys thought I should own, rather than things I necessarily want), which of their old toys I thought J-cub might like, and how many spiders I thought might be living in their garage, how much I fancy David Tennant and how much I'd cried during his last episode of Doctor Who, why alternative energy sources are important, and how wind turbines are being set up in America above highways, to harness the energy of passing cars. That sounds interesting, said I, I'll have to look that up when I get home.

Today's post is therefore a bit different - I've looked up this unimagined concept which the boys had seen or read about, and found that not only is it true, but there's a whole variety of ways of harnessing wind energy, which don't have the negative impacts which are so often associated with standard wind turbines. There's an excellent post on Biofriendly which explains it all if you're interested. The pictures are amazing, I especially love the aesthetically-pleasing streetlights towards the end of the post.

We try to do our best to help the environment here, we are fanatical recyclers, are now cloth-nappy users, grow our own veg, only have one car ... I know there's a lot more that we could (and should) be doing, particularly to cut down our electricity usage. I was reminded of this post on The King and Eye, about making your blog carbon neutral, which I read a while ago and forgot to follow up. It's high-time I did so, even though my blog falls waaaaaay short of the apparent 'average' traffic of 15,000 hits per month (where are you, readers?). The initiative in question was started by a company called kaufDA in Germany, and, in their own words: "“My blog is carbon neutral” is an initiative, originally started in Germany by the “Make it Green” programme, that has the goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. We plant a tree for your blog and thereby neutralise your blog’s carbon footprint for the next 50 years! Everyone can make a small contribution to the environment. Every tree counts!". All you need to do to sign up is to write a post about the initiative, insert one of their buttons, email them, and they'll plant a tree for your blog. How awesome is that? Your tree, in its lifetime, will offset the carbon produced by your blog, as well as doing all the other wonderful tree-ey things that trees do.

Who's with me?

Willow Maze

Not an ideal photo today, as I took it with my phone seconds before the battery died, so I didn't have time to improve on it.

Still, this gives an idea of where I spend around an hour each working day - building dens in the living willow maze in the school field. The maze was planted 3 or 4 years ago, and is now mature and full of twisty passages and secret areas for the children to play in. In the summer it's so green and leafy and cool, and the children get embroiled in scraps from the start of break until the bell rings, over who has laid claim to each den.

It was my first day back at work today, and I managed to cope with only a few coughing fits and no fainting spells whatsoever.

I was much more relaxed at work today, as I dropped J-cub off at nursery with no tears whatsoever, and he even held out his arms to go to his keyworker, then waved bye-bye to me. When I went to pick him up, he was happy playing in a pile of Duplo and turned away as if to say "Just let me finish this game Mummy". He also told me all about his day, in his own inimitable style, by pointing out the painting he'd done, some glittery pictures he liked, the books he read, and the cot he'd slept in.

We came home for a couple of hours of cuddles, squeezes, smooshy kisses, no nap for me (J-cub delightfully crawled over to me and prised my eyelids open) ... then the next 4 or 5 years of our life were ruined as Brown stood down, Cameron became PM and a mostly-Tory government came one step closer. If you're as unhappy about this as I am, you might want to consider offering your support here: http://www.takebackparliament.com/

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This photo was taken looking up from the very centre of the willow maze, where all the paths converge into a circular clearing and all the branches criss-cross to create a ceiling overhead.

Happy Star Wars Day

I've elected to stay home from work today and tomorrow, so as not to pass on my lurgy to any other staff/children, and because when I start coughing, I just can't stop, and I'd rather that didn't happen when I'm tearing round a playground trying to keep within eyesight of a hyperactive 10 year old.

I was gutted when I woke up this morning and realised that my decision meant that a) I wouldn't be there on our first day in a new classroom, and b) I'd miss sharing May the Fourth style Star Wars jokes with the boy I work with (E), who has been obsessed with Star Wars for 5 years now. When I started working with him, he and I did not mesh well. We couldn't find any common ground, he resented me replacing his previous favourite therapist, I was too authoritative and found it hard to let go and be silly with him. Every day that I worked, I'd be met with cries of "No! Not you! You're fired!", and I'd have to carry him to our work area in the throws of a full-blown autistic tantrum, kicking, screaming, biting, and pinching me for the first hour or so until he'd given up trying to get rid of me. Our sessions were always peppered with attacks from toy swords and screwdrivers, threats to cut off my head or drill through my hand. He threw a table at me once.

About six months later, he saw The Phantom Menace for the first time. My husband Jamie is your typical born-in-1977, geeky Star Wars fanatic. I've seen all the films a thousand times since we've been together, and gradually grown to love them as much as he does, although I don't think I'll ever be quite as obsessive about the lore as he is. This education, though, meant that at a time when I drove home from work every day in tears, losing all hope of being able to work with and help a child who hated the very sight of me: all of a sudden, we clicked. He started talking about Star Wars. His verbal skills were very limited at the time, but when he found that I could describe scenes for him, and knew character names, and could differentiate ships for him, and had an arsenal of Star Wars toys, books, and merchandise at home which I could bring him to play with, I became, in behavioural therapy terms, a motivator for him. His eyes would latch onto mine whenever we had a conversation, rather than skittering away to stare at the branches of the tree outside the window over my shoulder. He would run to our work table when I called, rather than me having to pick him up and place him in the chair. His verbal skills started improving at an exponential rate, as he found something that he really, really wanted to talk about. He started greeting me with pleasure, and reading on the sofa after work was finished, I had a warm and cuddly boy cwtched up against me, rather than a child who couldn't bear me to touch him.

5 years later, he still loves Star Wars, although Doctor Who, the Beano, all Wii games, anything to do with space and astronauts all feature heavily too. 5 years of spending 30 to 40 hours a week with the same child mean that I miss him like crazy when I'm not working, in a way which you're absolutely supposed to distance yourself from in this kind of work, but which my stupid empathic nature has entirely prevented me from doing. I was on maternity leave last year, and so it's been 2 years since I've been able to be silly, and giggle, and make the same joke a hundred times in a day. And I'm really sorry that I missed today.

May the Fourth be with you, E.

Working from home

It's coming to the end of my Easter holidays now, and while the 2 weeks off have been blissful, I've spent most of this week a) coming down with J-cub's lurgy, b) revelling in J-cub getting better but dreading him going back to all the germs at nursery and c) thinking about how much I miss my maternity leave and being a stay-at-home-mum and how much I don't want to go back to work on Monday.

I'm consoling myself with the thought that it won't be overly long until the Summer holidays, and hopefully I can wangle myself out of working during the holidays as much as possible.

Which I'm apparently quite adept at doing - yesterday was the only day during the holidays I'd agreed to work, and talking to my boss on Tuesday evening I persuaded him to drop my charges off here rather than trekking out to work at their house.

They are totally enamoured with J-cub and all his toys (despite being just 10, they spent the whole day making sweeping statements such as "We didn't have cool toys like these when we were babies, we just had a jack-in-the-box"), and weren't too old to enjoy lying in his ballpit and stacking cups for him to knock over. The two boys shared their lunch with J-cub and proclaimed BLW to be much better than 'shoving spoons in his mouth', and while he napped we played Star Wars Monopoly with the Clone Wars DVD playing in the background.

Later in the afternoon we went for a walk through the woods, stood on the railway bridge and waved while a coal train beeped and whooshed below us, leaving the boys with hair standing on end and bright red cheeks, ate ice-creams and had a rather awkward conversation about breastfeeding.

I really shouldn't complain about my job, it's not really like much work goes on ;)

Return to work

February 13th 2009 was my last day in work. After 6 years of trying, I cleverly managed to fall pregnant at such a time that my maternity leave could cleverly be extended by a week, by tacking a half-term holiday onto the beginning of it. Of course, if I'd have been really clever, I would have aimed for the summer holidays. But then I would have been heavily pregnant and labouring in the heat of summer, and that's no fun for anyone.

February 22nd 2010 was therefore set as my return to work date. On Friday the 19th, I was informed Monday was an inset day (which I don't have to work). Unfortunately, I'd already booked J-cub into nursery, and would have to pay whether he went or not. Part of my job involves working at the home of the child I support, so I elected to do that on the Monday, to gently ease me back in. And ease me back in it did. I had a lovely day, sorting out all the paperwork from the last year, familiarising myself with where we're at, and planning our way forwards. The day flew by, and before I knew it, it was time to pick J-cub up from nursery.

He hadn't had a good day. He'd refused all his milk, and food, and slept for just under an hour (rather than the 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon to which he is accustomed). He cried when I walked in, a "Whyyyyyy?" wailing type of cry. It broke my heart.

On Monday night, he started coughing like crazy, waking himself up repeatedly and making himself retch so that he threw up his night-time milk everywhere. Poor Jamie hadn't got to bed until 2am, and was up with him again at 5am. His back was killing him, so I took over at 5.30am, and sent him back to bed. When he got up, he said he had little chance at coping at work on 3 hours of sleep, so he might as well stay home and look after J-cub, as my work wouldn't be very impressed if I called in for dependency leave on my first full day back.

So off I trotted to school, to try and cope on around 5 hours of sleep. And oh, I had forgotten the noise. All those children screaming with delight at seeing me (which was quite nice), and bombarding me with questions, and telling me all about every second of the last year that I had missed ("And then, Miss, ANOTHER tooth fell out! And I got a TV for Christmas!"). A mum accosted me at the end of the day, to say that she'd been concerned all half-term when her daughter kept asking "Mum, how many days until we go back to school?". She eventually asked her why she wanted to know, and was told "Because Beth is coming back!". Bless. (The child in question went on to tell me that I looked "much older than you did last time I saw you, your hair's more grey around there, but you're not fatter!". Well that's a relief).

Tuesday is my short day, so I was home by 4pm. I was exhausted.

On Wednesdays, J-cub stays home with his Daddy, who went part-time after J-cub was born, to stop me going entirely mental. So I didn't have him to worry about all day, and just concentrated on trying to keep going on my longest day, working from 8.45am-6.30pm. And I did, just.

Jamie took the boy to the GPs in the afternoon, as his cough was worse. She said it's just a virus, and to keep on with the fluids and the Calpol. After several months of a good-during-the-night baby, it's very hard to go back into getting up every hour or so to rock him back to sleep.

When I got home, I had about 20 minutes of play and cuddle time with him, before he needed to go to bed. Again, after a year of spending no more than a few hours apart during his nap times, it is excruciating being away from him for 9 hours one day, 7 the next, and a whopping 10 and a half the next day. On Thursday, I barely put him down all day; I just wanted to cuddle him, and kiss him, and hold him and feel him breathing all day long.

65. Contact HR about return to work

Not an awful lot I can say about this really - I've confirmed my return to work date as February 22nd, which is starting to seem awfully close.

All the free time I wrote about earlier was quickly eaten up, I spent the afternoon nap time (one hour 30 minutes) trying to do items 14 and 36, however I didn't have the right sized screw to fix the broken kitchen cabinet door (and rather think that I might have to buy a whole new hinge) and couldn't fix the lounge door handle as the cross head of one of the screws has been mangled and there's nothing for the screwdriver to grip. I have no idea how to get it out now.

In the evening I couldn't muster the energy to do anything more than emailing HR. At least it's something done though, rather than leaving another day to fly by with nothing crossed off the list, which is what I felt like doing.

7. Hire someone to jobshare with me

Interviewed this morning - decision made - phew!

Update: not an awful lot I can say here, without discussing the ins and outs of what is essentially a confidential process and job. It was a hard decision; we only interviewed 2 applicants in the end but both were good for different reasons, and in the end we went with experience (JetlagGirl) over novelty (FirstEverBoy).

It was hard using my brain after such a long time off, and after having lost a large proportion of my brain during labour and the first few difficult months. But once I got back into it, it was fun, and interesting, and made me more excited about going back in (argh) just 2 months time. JetlagGirl will be starting straight after Christmas, working full time as my maternity cover until I return at the end of February, when she'll jobshare with me. She seems to be committed for the longterm which will be nice, as I don't want to have to go through all this again in a couple of months.

Day 19: Mission complete.

Double fail

I had two potentially largeish list items lined up to do today, and managed to fail at both by lunchtime.

#7 - Hire someone to jobshare with me. I've been hitting up the Internet hard, advertising the job, sorting through CVs, emailing lists of questions to applicants and whittling down a shortlist. The three shortlisted applicants were supposed to be interviewed this afternoon, however one cried off due to jetlag having just returned from a year in New Zealand (fair enough), and one emailed at 9.30pm last night to say she's accepted a position elsewhere. It's not really a good use of time to interview one person at once, as there is a lot of explanation of theory and therapy to do, so it's easier to do as many people together as possible. So I've postponed the one remaining applicant (and our first male interviewee - it being a caring type of job means our applicants are mostly female) until next week, so we can do JetlagGirl and FirstEverBoy together.

#17 - Sell car. This car is the bane of my life. Last summer, during a heatwave, the aircon conked out. I was (only slightly) pregnant at the time, and we had to drive to Derbyshire to DJ at the fantastic Indietracks festival. The festival was blissful, with fantastic bands, a lovely atmosphere (at a steam railway! What more could you want), and we met some fantastic people who have become good friends. Driving up and back, on the motorway, pregnant, with no aircon, was horrendous. We had to stop at every service station to sit in the shade and cool down.

Then (well, after a few months had passed), the winter hit, and the heating broke. Approximate cost to fix = £450. I was heavily pregnant by then, and learnt that after driving for 40 minutes, the heating would come on, although by then I had usually turned into an icicle.

After J-cub was born, my Dad wanted to change his car, and was offered a low part-exchange price for his current car. He knew we wanted a new car, so offered it to me for the low PE price, as he'd rather I benefited from it, rather than the dealership. So we had a lovely shiny new car, and I planned to sell the old one on adtrader or ebay or something. But baby things rather got in the way, and I found it was hard to do something like go and clean all the junk out of an old car when you've got a baby stuck to your breast for 20 hours a day. It just sat there, and rusted, and did nothing, and I was eaten up with guilt and anxiety every time I looked at it (which obviously didn't make me do anything about it).

So this morning, with lovely father-in-law here to help, I thought I'd try and get it ready for selling. I knew the battery was flat, as I tried to start it a week or so ago. It's facing the wrong way on the drive, with the bonnet away from the street so I can't attach jump leads to the new car without turning it around. We tried this morning to push it down the drive, and it won't move. We pumped up all the tyres, had 3 of us rocking and pushing and shouting at it, and it's stuck fast. I'm guessing something's happened to the brakes, or the wheels have rusted tight or something (I'm not really good at cars).

Anyway, it's not budging, the battery is as flat as anything, and I don't know what to do. What I really want, is for someone to turn up and give me some cash for it and take it away.

I've paid insurance and tax on it all this time, because I'm an idiot. It's reasons like this, that this list is a good idea for me, I just wish I could have started by selling it 8 months ago. Or at least started the engine every once in a while, and driven it around the block.

Silly Beth.

39. Find J-cub a nursery place

(<--- that's a temporary picture, as I obviously didn't take it (obviously cos I don't go to pubs very often, and if I do, I don't spend time in there writing numbers in pints of Guiness. I used to be a dab hand at the cloverleaf back in the day though) and I'll update it when my camera has fully charged batteries, which it doesn't at the moment, and I have no patience to wait.)

So today we went to see the nursery we want J-cub to go to, as it's just a couple of minutes away from my workplace, so he can be there for the minimum amount of time (I have a 30 minute commute, so if he went to somewhere near home, he'd be there for an extra hour). It was very nice, all the staff were welcoming and enthusiastic and qualified, and the children were happy. However, I came away feeling strange on two accounts.

Firstly, I don't want to go back to work. I don't want to have someone else raising my child, albeit for just one full day and one two-thirds of a day. I don't want to miss his milestones, or even to miss the day-to-day mundaneness which makes parenthood so constantly amazing. It makes me sad to think that in just over 2 months time, this year off will come to an end and I'll have to return to real life. We don't have a choice, we couldn't afford for one of us not to work at all, and even if we could, I couldn't give up my job (which I love) and make Jamie work full time at his job (which he hates). That would be desperately unfair. So instead, we've compromised by both going part time. I'll work Monday-Wednesday, with J-cub in nursery Monday and Tuesday, and at home with Jamie on Wednesdays and at home with me Thursday and Friday. We'll see how it goes anyway, both of our jobs are pretty flexible which is nice. Anyway, it's all self-pity and blah, I know I have to go, so I have to get on with it.

Secondly, I didn't realise our parenting style was so odd. We didn't have any particularly strong views about parenting before or even during my pregnancy. Since J-cub arrived though, we've been completely baby-led, taking his cues for feeding, sleeping, eating, routines, everything. This is known as Attachment Parenting, although we haven't been able to follow it in all areas, due to my inability to breastfeed (due to complications from the start, I mixed fed for 6 months, and haven't stopped beating myself up about it yet) and Jamie's inability to function on anything less than strong painkillers and antidepressants (which are big no-no's for co-sleeping).

Today though, you would have thought we were from another planet. The nursery had no knowledge of baby-led weaning, which isn't really surprising since even a lot of health professionals seem to be clueless. They were at least receptive to it, and happy for J-cub to have toddler meals, and not to spoon feed him or force him to eat. They seemed surprised he wore sleeping bags to sleep in, which I thought were much more common. My mention of baby-signing was met with blank stares - no comprehension of what I was talking about at all ("Did she say baby signing?"). Luckily, one of the staff in the baby room overheard and piped up that he'd learnt signing as part of an SEN course he'd done, and he seemed very keen to put it in action. Maybe we'll be lucky and he'll be J-cub's keyworker. We don't have a routine during the day and he just sleeps when he needs it - I guess we'll fight those battles when we come to them as they asked if he goes into the cot awake and I said no, and they looked worried.

Maybe I'm being unfair on them, maybe they didn't care. I just came away with the impression that they thought we were weird hippies. I think it's just that I don't see what we're doing as that unusual. Then again, I read blogs and forums by parents who are following the ideals of Attachment Parenting; I don't read blogs and forums by parents who are following Gina Ford routines. I suppose we'll just have to see how it goes. We left J-cub in the baby room while we went into the office, and he was absolutely fine.

At least it's done, and that's another weight off my mind. Nothing to stop me going back to work now though :(

And you can't have a photo of the nursery, because then you might track down J-cub and steal him (he is very cute, I wouldn't blame you). Instead, have a few pictures of our trip to the beach afterwards:

Me wearing J-cub in the Mei Tai

A crab in a lobster pot

J-cub walking over to check out the contents of a lobster pot

Day 10 - Mission complete.