It's a sunny day. Highs of 20 degrees tomorrow, apparently, woo woo! I hope you get to enjoy it. Weekends I am unable to fight the desperate need to stay up late and stay in bed as long as possible during the morning ahemafternoon so I miss too much weekend. Partly because the thought of the ordeal of going places makes me want to hide. But next week I have some significant money coming in, so I'm going to take the fam to Avoca Handweavers today, and soon I will have an Indian takeaway. YES I WILL, YOU CAN'T STOP ME. Ahhhh... we never had much, but we did have the occasional takeaway, and it was good. I miss those days of meagre disposable income. 

How are you all? I never have the energy to do more than compose little posts in my head, and then I forget them. The Olivia saga continues and I don't have the energy to tell you about it. worryworry

I should be doing some actual proper writing, I should be planning my classes better (And I have to, I have Advanced for the next two weeks, ulp). I should be exercising and cleaning up. These are my shoulds, nothing much changes, what are yours? 

Today@ blue sky, dry washing on the line, a visit to my poor neglected grandmother, and a real lunch. I plan to buy a lemon tart. 

xx 

mundania

The day started off so nicely - Olivia stayed the night with her friend last night, and did not need rescuing. I woke up late-ish and continued my Criminal Minds fest, in the sitting room, while Bodhi watched the Iron Giant in bed, munching popcorn, and then played with the girl next door.

Then I cleaned Olivia's room and hoovered a lot, and started sorting the clothes piles in my room, and hoovered a bit. So I was proud of myself.

The sun has been shining for days. All across the bank holiday. Astounding. If ONLY it was like this for most of the summer - and it rained at night. Wouldn't that be excellent?

Now I'm all caught up with Criminal Minds and Olivia should be able to sleep in her room again. Hahahaha, we will see.

However, I went to various supermarkets, bought the Last Cakebox I'd been lusting after in Aldi, put it in the car, shut the boot on it and ... it cracked. Dammit!

Then I started making Shepherd's pie and veggie chili as planned, but realised the mince was out of date and I'd no canned tomatoes. So I went in search of mince but it was all sold out and Aldi had closed so I gave up and got chips for dinner. Cringe*

And no, Olivia doesn't want to sleep in her room, it makes her stomach hurt to be in there, it feels wrong. I could really do with some everything's-ok-spray at the moment. 

cakes and cards

So it was my birthday last week. I had a really nice day. This year I made sure I had absolutely no expectations, so of course it went really well.

They brought me a cake and lovely card in school, and I brought in lemon cupcakes to share with the students and teachers just in case (you don't want to take these things for granted). Thanks to the chocolate cake, there were enough cupcakes left over to bring home and share with the friends and their kids who came to visit. Man, I got all the flowers - beautiful tulips that Bodhi picked out (and my friend Anne taught me that if you push a pin through the stop of the stem they don't droop!), a wildly coloured assortment from Ramona and the beautiful white roses and lilies I've long lusted after from Anne. She even arranged them nicely for me - I is not good at that. I was a bit gutted I was going away from them for the weekend, but they were still holding strong when I got back. A kitchen full of flowers.

I went to visit my friend, writer Janine Ashbless. When I arrived in her lovely home, there was this waiting for me:

Lemon sponge with ginger  curd and cream! It was so springful and delicious. Two cakes! Two cakes!! So nice to have a birthday cake made for me, it's something I appreciate so massively.

Possibly the sweetest thing about it was Janine's greyhounds reaction on getting a rare taste - they looked at her like she was their goddess fully incarnate and couldn't wait for More. It was so funny. Greyhounds are clearly bun hounds, that's what those noses are for.

I had such a lovely weekend, and didn't get snowed in, though it did hail and snow on me just a tiny bit. Not enough to be worrisome though.

I have a few nice pictures that I'm still too tired to try and get off my phone. I've had a great week in the sun here, feeling bizarrely... happy. Happy like a normal person feels, perhaps, though I'm super over tired today and a family birthday party at a Drogheda playzone that felt like a 'Nam flashback and one child being miserable and scared and the other being hyper sensitive (not that I blame her, it was a screamy circle of hell) and bitchy has kind of dropped me into an exhausted pit of defeated misery again, but no doubt it won't last. I can't wait to stay in bed tomorrow morning. Am looking forward to it so much.

Anyway - look at that cake. Look at it! 

no time to blog!

But I had a great weekend away.

More soon, oh three readers left :) 

the curse of One Pig Left

I'm lying on the bed playing Angry Birds and Bodhi sings his horror theme music in a high pitched, creepy voice -

  Doo dooo doooo dooo... You will always have One Pig Left

Best, most evil curse ever. And it broke me up laughing. Though it does make life more frustrating, being so effective :)

so, what news?

Not a lot.

I've had intermittent internet acces for weeks. Once it settles down it's here for the night, but it's very temperamental before that. They keep saying they've fixed the line, but they haven't.

Today I had plans - bring Bodhi for the short haircut he's desperate for, and as it's FREE CONE DAY, head to Dundrum Town Centre for free ice cream, and return all the clothes I bought for Olivia a few weeks ago that she won't even try on.

Got there, tried to return clothes in first shop and realised I'd left my wallet at home. We went for free icecream anyway and then I had  to wheedle my way out of the car park. It was cheery one way or the other, though, Ben and Jerry's make peanut butter cup icecream now, and the kids learned that even though you may assume you're in dire straights, humans can still be kind and helpful and let you out of the car park without paying your €2. No need to panic. Olivia even came too, despite her newly developed intolerance of seatbelts.

HMV is weirdly closed off and empty now. Makes me sad, ashamed of their shitty behaviour as I am.

I think dealing with Olivia may make Axl have an actual heart attack soon, and I don't really know what to do about it. We've started sending her to a really good OT, but she won't co-operate. To put it mildly. We are bruised. Literally bruised. I'd sedate her if I could. They're doing a parenting course I'd love to do, but it would cost us €600 on top of the €125 a week her sessions are. Not possible. Poor but happy doesn't work so well when you need support and resources, eh?

Having said that, Bodhi has a newfound love of Brie, on crackers. One child to try and provide special needs care for, one to keep in fine cheeses. A parent's lot, eh?

bookworms and hideyholes

I escaped to my room today. I even fell asleep. The kids kept pestering me with unreasonable demands like 'get up and feed us' but I just couldn't.

I keep running to my room, and my hot water bottle retains some heat and it's just so... safe and simple there. Not least because there's this artic wind blowing at the moment, it's horrendously cold. Also because I'm indulging in some James Herriot, which I first read about, I don't know, nearly three decades ago. I was reading it last night, and found a passage that still makes me laugh uncontrollably - I remember laughing my way through it as a kid, and it warms me that a book can still do this all these years and inumerable readings later. I love that, it too is a secure feeling, snuggled up in bed with a favourite book.

Funny, I saw this picture today and normally I wouldn't have posted it, but I took Bodhi to a party this weekend and there was a little girl there who looked just like this one- big glasses, roundy red cheeks, earnest demeanour, looking somewhat scruffy and chubby in a big sparkly purple ruffled skirt and runners. She was really cute. Then today a student walked into a classroom as I was passing looking exactly like the adult version of the little girl, red-blotched cheeks, dousled dark hair, the same glasses. She was small and ... I don't know. Like a little girl who'd grown up without changing at all. And then I saw this, and decided I'm feeling affection for little dark girls in big glasses this week.

My James Herriot book actually had a book worm in it. It's got little rounded passages and funny shapes chewed out of it. Which is weird. Only time I've seen that. Happily, the little worm is long since passed away. 

Bodhi-isms

Bodhi and Olivia and myself were playing wrestling the other day - Olivia won't wash, and was smelling truly horrible. Bodhi disagreed, and said he thought her armpits smelled nice, like that food I like. You know, those spicy things. What are they called...Spicy wompits?

I had no idea what he was aiming for but Olivia asked, do you mean falafel?

Yes! Falafel!

I'm kind of loving Spicy Wompits, I have to say.

I don't really know what to do. Olivia won't let me brush her long hair - since the last time I got all the tangles out, a backbreaking and painful experience for us both. Now she's started doing her melodramatic hysteria act when I try. Any suggestion of having to cut it and she shrieks about preferring to be dead - I'm gone before she gets up for school, her dad brushes her hair, but he just lightly darts over the top layer, hence the tangled mess underneath.

I think we're going to have to wait til it's one mass of tangle and she gets lice, then HE can shave her head and deal with the fallout.

I could wrestle her to the ground and sit on her for half an hour while trying to stop her  grabbing at it but I don't have what it takes to do that. I can feel the sick weight of it on my heart again, and I can't face that either. I wash my hands of it. Fuck it.

I should have ignored Axl and got all this diagnosed years ago. We would have had more money for treatment and we could have stopped it before it got this bad, and it all got so solidified. I'm reading a book on sensory processing and I'm really too scared to, the knowledge is alarming at this stage.

If I'd had a neurotypical child I really think I wouldn't have done so badly. I got a lot right initially. I know you don't get a choice as to whether or not you can cope with the things parenting throws at people, illness, death, disability... But the bare truth is that some of us don't have what it takes to manage. Maybe that's just an excuse, when so many manage with so much worse, but I always said that I couldn't be one of those people... and here I am, floundering about with things getting worse by the minute. 

well put, Oprah

“Forgiveness does not mean you have to accept the person back into your life. It does not mean you are condoning their behavior or that you are in any way saying that it was “ok.” Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different so you don’t hold on to wishing that you had a different kind of family. You let that go, and you move forward with the Grace that God has given you from this day on. I don’t want the spirit of me to die because of what you did.”

—	Oprah, 2-8-11 I don't so much love the way the date on this makes it looks like a bible quote, but I think she says this v well.

“Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting suffering go, then you’ll come to realize how unnecessary it was to drag those burdens along with you. You’ll see that no one other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival.”

—	Buddhist Teaching  (via elige)

A festival! I do like that idea. I think I'm still a loooong way from understanding how to use this knowledge though. I wish there was an app...