Anitcipating

Christmas morning 2011

First things first, I cannot believe it’s been over two months since my last post. Life just took over recently and I’ve been too busy to really think about blogging and struggled to summon up any motivation. The main reason is that we’re in the middle of selling our house and buying another and if you’ve ever done either, you’ll know how energy sapping and soul destroying the process can be. Anyway, enough already, I’m back and what better time to re-enter the blogosphere than the lovely month of December?

I used to be a bit sneery about folk who put their trees up on the first of December, thinking it a bit vulgar almost, but I have to say that I’ve recently come to the conclusion that you might as well enjoy this time while it lasts. Let’s face it, it’s all about the build up isn’t it? Once the big day’s been and gone, then that’s it for another year, so why not start enjoying it early and make the most of it?

With this new found enthusiasm, we’re heading out to buy our tree later, directly after we’ve dropped in at our first Christmas fair of the season. M is helping to staff her Brownie stall (Brownie’s as in guides, not chocolate cakes) so we’ve promised to go and buy some of the mini Christmas cakes they’ve made. Bless them.

Everything seems to kick off in earnest this weekend and it’s all to look forward to. The work night out, the school nativity, the last minute shopping trips and the amazing panto at York Theatre Royal which is now a firm favourite with us – just some of the highlights of the next few weeks.

When does Christmas begin in your home?

How to Save a Life

I’ve spent the last two Saturdays giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to dummies and rolling complete strangers into the recovery position. Well, to be fair they were no longer strangers by the end of it.

As you may have guessed, I’ve been doing a First Aid course (if you had anything else in mind then you may find the rest of this post disappointing). Now, I’ve never done one before and to be honest I wasn’t keen on giving up two Saturdays to take part, but it’s important for my job at the pre school so I gritted my teeth and got on with it. The upshot is that I’ve come away feeling pretty confident that I could deal with a casualty if it came to it and it got me thinking about just what an important skill this is, so today’s post is a very quick and basic lesson in how to save a life.

Take this scenario. You’re walking along a busy street. Suddenly, someone steps out into the road without looking and they’re hit by a car. When you get to them, they are lying on the road, out cold. Besides calling an ambulance, what could you do to help?

For starters, you’d need to work out if they’re just unconscious (and if so you need to get them in the recovery position) or if they’ve stopped breathing aswell.  To check if a person is breathing you will need to first open the airway by tilting the chin (and therefore the head) backwards. The casualty will need to be lying flat on their back on a firm surface if possible. Place your ear to their mouth and listen for ten seconds. You can also watch to see if their chest is rising and falling. If there is no breathing (or very irregular breaths) after ten seconds, you should begin CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). This is slightly hard to explain but essentially you will need to place one hand over the other and lock your fingers together then press down firmly on the casualty’s breastbone (sort of in the middle, between the ribs). You should push down to a depth of 5-6 cm. Next do thirty compressions (pushes) at a speed of about two per second which is pretty fast. When you’ve done this you then need to perform two inflation breaths. With the airway open, pinch the patient’s nostrils together and then place your mouth over theirs to form a seal. Now give two quick breaths checking to see that the chest rises after each one. You should then go back to thirty compressions followed by, you’ve guessed it, two inflation breaths. Now, ideally at some point the poor beggar will start to breathe normally and show signs of consciousness, but if they don’t, then you must continue the CPR process until the ambulance arrives. I’ll warn you it’s pretty intensive and exhausting.

If you’re dealing with a child by the way, then the same procedure applies except you should begin with five inflation breaths before going onto thirty compressions then two further breaths. For a child over one you should use one hand only and press to a depth of at least one third of the child’s body. For a baby, you should use two fingers.

The point of CPR is to maintain an oxygen supply to the body. Without it, that person has more or less no chance. With it, they could make a full recovery. The message is to just have a try. The casualty doesn’t have much to lose. Just remember, thirty compressions, two inflation breaths – easy!

I was lucky. My course was very thorough and covered lots of stuff besides CPR, but I think if you could learn one aspect of First Aid, then it should be this.

Twinkle Twinkle

I was browsing in my local Oxfam book shop over the weekend. I don’t often go in there but I was passing on my way to the hairdressers, sans children, and had a bit of time to spare, so in I went. Right by the door they had a tall shelving unit jam packed with vintage children’s books. Right on the top was a line of annuals and that’s when I spotted this.

It was nestled amongst five or six other Twinkle annuals of varying age. I picked up a couple of others first but it wasn’t until I got to this one, the 1980 edition, that I instantly recognised the front cover. It was a strange feeling, like being teleported back thirty odd years. When I opened it up I had the same sensation, as if it were only yesterday that I was reading Nurse Nancy and Winkle the Witch.

Nancy the Little Nurse

Winkle the Witch

I used to get Twinkle delivered every week from the local newsagent and I loved it. Looking at it now, it’s so wonderfully winsome and simple in a way that doesn’t really exist anymore. I would have been six and a bit in 1980 when this annual was published, just slightly younger than M is now. When I gave it to her to look at, she had a cursory flick through and then decared it “a bit boring” <sigh>. She then went back to reading her Agatha Parrot book which is fanastic, but soooo different to the wholesome delights of Twinkle.

When I sat down with it, there was a particular story which I really remembered, one about a Tiny Tooth Fairy. The images were so nostalgic and the whole experience made me a little teary-eyed. Not sure why. It was just hard to believe that thirty two years had passed since I’d last seen those pages.

The Tiny Tooth Fairy

Retro puzzle page

I checked on Ebay and it seems that Twinkle annuals are pretty easy to come by and don’t cost the earth. I paid £2.99 for this one ( the original price tag was still in the book and stated £1.05). Anyway, I think I might need to pay another visit to the Oxfam bookshop soon to see if they’ve still got those other editions on the top shelf. I can feel a collection coming on…

I’m linking up with Magpie Monday over at Me and My Shadow

Getting into the Olympic Spirit

Now, unless you’re a right miserable git (or live in London and are about to have your daily life turned upside down), you can’t fail to be at least a bit excited about the impending Olympics. We are here anyway. We applied for tickets months ago when they were first released but we weren’t successful, so we quickly resigned ourselves to watching it at home and getting into the spirit of things from a distance.

Our first real brush with the hoopla happened a few weeks ago when the torch relay came to town. We were lucky aas the weather was gorgeous and York was one of the places where the torch ‘rested’ overnight, so there was a huge free concert at the racecourse which culminated in the torch been carried in by Harvey Smith on horseback.We do things in style here in Yorkshire, you know.

M took this from her vantage point on G’s shoulders!

The following week I took K to her weekly gym club class. This is a fantastic community gymnastics centre in the heart of York. It’s a charity which was set up several years ago by a local man named Stan Wild. Now in his seventies I believe, Stan was selected to be one of the torch bearers here and was kind enough to bring the torch into the centre for children to have their photos taken with it. Result. K and I got in on the act.

You can rely on me to be pulling a silly face in a photo

Earlier this week, I was at work in the pre school when one of my neighbours turned up to do a mini Olympics session with the kids. She’s working as a steward at the games and came in decked out in her full official kit – quite impressive it was. She set up a little obstacle course (sadly this had to be indoors due to the inclement weather) and then dished out medals at the end. It was lovely.

On a more sedentary level, G and I have been enjoying the hilarious Twenty Twelve on the BBC. Way to Go!

Now, with the start of the school holidays just a few days away, my thoughts are turning to ways in which we can get involved and keep the kids busy at the same time. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

Medals wall chart  to keep a tally of who’s winning what.

Make an Olympic torch and have your own torch relay or opening ceremony! This is the sort of thing M will luuurve.

Make cardboard medals then all you have to do is organise a backyard olympics and you’re away. You could also make medal biscuits.

Make olympic flags to wave when supporting your team or bunting to hang around the house and garden.

I suppose the main thing really is is to just be part of it and use it as an opportunity to make memories with your kids. What are your plans for the next few weeks?

The Importance of Down Time

I had one of those days yesterday where I was rushing about from beginning to end. Thursdays are a often like that here as it’s one of my work days. It’s also a day when M has an after school club and needs to take kit for it and my mum looks after K so I have to prepare things for her and then get everyone in the right place at the right time with the right bag of stuff. And all by 8.30am. Now, that’s normally do-able if not exactly fun, but G was out after work last night too, which meant that where I normally start to wind down around 6pm when he gets home, instead I had an extra couple of hours of ‘parenting’ before I could put my feet up with a nice bowl of chilli bean risotto.

So, all of this busy busy busy got me to thinking about how utterly lovely it is when you do finally have a minute to yourself and actually how important that time is in an otherwise hectic life.

I sometimes wonder how I used to fill all that free time I had before children. I’m sure I didn’t appreciate it because it wasn’t limited back then. All I had to do when I wasn’t at work, was keep our little flat reasonably clean and tidy, stick a wash on once or twice a week, cook a bit and then that was more or less it. The rest of the time was gloriously free of chores.

These days, I consider myself lucky if I get to sit and have a cup of tea without having to get up several times to deal with someone or something. G’s much better at doing this than me. He seems to have the ability to switch himself off from his surroundings and spend half an hour playing his guitar or reading the paper. For some reason, the girls don’t seem to pester him in the same way that they do me and I have to say, sometimes that in itself drives me crazy.

I remember seeing an ad campaign for Twinings tea recently (other teas are available) which featured a woman having a few moments to herself in the midst of a busy life. I think the slogan was “getting you back to you” or something like that. It was a deliberately simple ad, but one I remembered because its message made sense.

Now, I expect we all have different ideas about how to fill these little windows of oportunity, but here are some things that I like to do given half the chance:

Have a quiet, uninterrupted cup of tea (I promise I’m not being sponsored by the tea industry)

Read a magazine (I subscribe to one of the glossies, but generally read it on about four separate attempts)

Go for a run (one advantage of being a fairly crap runner is that I can only manage about 20 minutes tops)

Have a bath

Catch up with my favourite blogs

Do a bit of online shopping

Do nothing, just sit and think

What about you? How do you chill?

*In the time it took to write this blog post, I have also done the following: taken K to the loo, put Angelina Ballerina DVD on, made K a snack, wiped K’s nose, wiped K’s hands*

Melamine and Enamel

No, these aren’t the latest celebrity baby names.

I love melamine and enamel. Let’s begin with melamine. Now, I get pretty excited by the old school dinner crockery or the cups and saucers sometimes used at fairs and fetes, but what really floats my boat is the contemporary colourful stuff. Even better, it seems to be more and more widely available as a material of choice these days. Paperchase or Cath Kidston are great places to find pretty bits and pieces and, in the summer months, a lot of other high street shops sell it in the form of picnicware. I think you’ve got to love its unbreakable, practical beauty and the fact that it’s so versatile. I’m totally in love with these babies right now and need to find an excuse to buy them.

Moving on to enamel which I like just as much, but find less easy to come by. The really nice enamelware tends to be the vintagey stuff like the cute blue teapot that I bought from an antique fair years ago. Having said that, I did pick up some lovely bowls from the aforementioned Cath Kidston recently. I also love those utilitarian type enamel mugs and pie dishes (my mum has several of these which date back to my childhood and are still going strong!). Currently on my ‘to buy’ list are these gorgeous Orla Kiely planters - the combo of enamel and Orla Kiely is a sureifre winner in my book. I think I like enamel for the same reasons as I like melamine – it’s sort of got a tough but pretty quality about it.

Are you a sucker for a certain material? What is it?

Wholesome Tales

M loves to read and, if you’ll excuse the boasting, she’s pretty good at it too. She’s six and a half but has been reading well beyond her age for quite a while now. It seems to come naturally to her. Anyway, the upshot of this is that it can be a bit of a challenge keeping her supplied with reading material. She reads whenever she can: in bed, on the loo (gets that from her dad), in the car, whilst brushing her teeth, anywhere.

I regularly pick up book bargains from charity shops and of course, there’s the library, but one of our best sources of wholesome literature is her grandparents. G’s dad, in particular, is something of a hoarder and as a result they have a huge collection of stuff from when G was a lad, including some fantastic old books.

 

I love the fact that M’s a bookworm and has an insatiable appetite for words on a page. Reading has to be one of the most satisfying hobbies and it warms my heart to see her enjoying the likes of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton just as much as I did when I was her age <wipes away a little tear>.

Do your kids like books? What are their favourites?

Busting the Myth

M lost her first tooth a couple of weeks back and was VERY excited. She was one of the remaining few children in her class not to have lost one yet, so when it started to wobble, she fiddled with it more or less constantly until it came out. In fact she came running through into our room at just after 5am the other morning to tell us. So, anyway, it was a big deal. Obviously we made a whole hoopla out of it and discussed the procedure for the tooth fairy and M went to bed that night in a state of extreme anticipation.

Well, the tooth fairy came and deposited what M later described as “a fancy pound” under her pillow (the coin had the leek design on it, this is fancy apparently). The following morning M awoke to find all was in order and that the visit had taken place as expected. We didn’t think too much more about it after that, at least not until last Saturday when M was hanging out in our bedroom and just happened to open my bedside drawer. You’ll never guess what she found in there, secreted in a little jewellery box. What, you guessed? Really?

My heart missed a beat while she held out the box saying “What’s this Mum? It looks like my tooth!”. All I could think to do was burble something about how the tooth fairy must return teeth to their owner and that we wouldn’t have known that as it’s our first visit etc… etc… I think she bought it, but I felt BAD. When I told G what had happened he said “Yeah, she often rummages in that drawer”. This was news to me.

So, having managed to chip away at my daughter’s innocence, the main thing is that the myth appears to remain in tact, unless M’s just humouring me.

Running: A Very Thrifty Activity

I’ve been running for almost a year. No-one will be more suprised by that than me. Usually I’m the sort of person who starts something then lets it gradually slip, but I’ve kept going with it right through the winter and I’m glad I have. Now, just to be clear, I’m still pretty slow and can’t go for more than about twenty minutes at a time, but I head out a couple of times a week and it’s enough to keep me reasonably fit.

I think one of the reasons I’ve stuck with running is that you don’t need any fancy equipment (although you could, of course, buy all manner of accoutrements if you wanted to). All I have is a decent pair of running shoes, shorts, top and sports bra. All of these items are fairly old. I listen to my IPod too but that’s not strictly essential. The rest is free. No gym fees, no pricey paraphernalia. What’s not to love?

Putting the Spring into Cleaning

Let me start by telling you that I’m a bit of a neat freak. I love a tidy, organised house and often hover over my kids when they’re eating a crumbly biscuit or shove their toys back in the box the moment they’ve finished playing. Actually, that looks really bad written down, but I can’t help it. It’s like an involuntary twitch triggered by the sight of mess. That said though, I’m not so bothered by a bit of dirt or dust, particularly if it’s hidden under something or at the back of somewhere.  Strange or what?

Anyhoo, lately I’ve become aware that there are a few cleaning jobs which really need dealing with (we have the filthiest oven you can imagine and it’s not even two years old) and I thought whilst I’m at it, I might as well go the whole hog and do a proper spring clean. So, here are my top tips for getting the job done.

First off, you probably need to set aside a whole day or maybe even two, depending on your house. Ideally you should also aim for a time when nobody’s home as there’s nothing worse than la famille walking in and instantly wrecking the joint. Makes me want to shout when they do that.

That sorted, you’re free to crack on. For me, a spring clean is about tackling the otherwise neglected tasks, rather than a more elaborate version of your weekly housework. It’d be an idea to make a list of what needs doing. Mine looks like this:

*Clean oven (Lord knows what I’m going to use to do this – suspect it will need hardcore chemicals sadly)

*Empty kitchen cupboards, chuck away out-of-date food (usually something random like dessicated coconut or suet), then clean and air inside before refilling

*Defrost and clean fridge/freezer (such a boring job, but the whole thing works so much better when it’s done, right?)

*Vacuum under sofa and beds (this means shifting heavy furniture, so you may need a hand)

*Wash cushion covers on sofa (I mean scatter cushions, not the main ones you sit on – our sofa has in fact only been properly cleaned once in six years and I can hardly remember what the actual shade of it is)

*Wipe paintwork and be free of those mucky fingerprints

*Clean windows (the window cleaner does outside, but when that’s done it just shows up  how grubby they are inside)

*Wash/dry clean curtains (to be fair, this is unlikely to get done, just too much hassle)

Now, no-one said that this was going to be fun, but imagine how nice it’ll feel when it’s finished and you can forget about it for another year. Heck, looking at that list makes me realise just how much of a slattern I really am <blushes>.