The Doctor's not listening....

I mean, they have so many questions to ask - if you smoke, - I don't, and haven't any intention of starting but that doesn't stop them wasting my precious appointment time by asking the same question each time, plus anything else that they feel they need to keep the government statistician happy ticking boxes.

Then they are so desperate not to give you antibiotics that they dismiss everything as a virus. I've had a bad chest since before Christmas. I've been to the doctor, who didn't even look in my mouth and decided it was viral.

I've also needed an x-ray on my arm as I fell awkwardly when it snowed. My physio asked for a particular x-ray to decided whether the radial something was broken. She even wrote it down. The doctor wrote me a form which managed to omit this request, the radiologist said they didn't do that x-ray, but without it you can't know whether it's broken or not.

Frustrated? I am!

Marmalade

My annual domestic goddess has arrived. Seville oranges are in season and the kitchen smells deliciously of citrus and sitting proudly on the windowsill are several pots of authentic Oxford marmalade. I managed to get the setting point right this year so we don't have the deep toffee texture of last year's effort.

Funnily enough I inherited my dislike of citrus peel from my Dad, who is a great marmalade lover, and passed it on to Nathan. We pick the peel out of our marmalade when we put it on toast!

The other people's children rant

My kids probably think I'm a miserable old bag most of the time, as I'm quite happy to tell them no and we can't afford it and you're too young for that etc etc. I would say we are reasonable, they probably wouldn't agree, but we try to let them do as much as we can afford without going into debt and be as flexible as we can in helping them accept as many social life offers as we can. However sometimes we just have to end up saying 'No sorry, you can't' - either because (occasionally) we have some social life of our own, or we can't afford it, or because one of them is already doing something that takes up our time.

I have a friend who seems incapable of saying no to anything her children want - material or activity wise - on the basis that she feels her childhood was deprived so they should be able to do everything they want. Maybe I'm the miserable one here but I do feel that we have to learn to give and take and to live in a family where everyone has equal rights, and the kids don't end up downright spoilt because no-one ever says no to them. I hope my kids will grow up as balanced and generous people who are polite, considerate and enthusiastic about life even if they lack the many experiences and material wealth of their friends.

A Happy Valentine's Day

We had a great one. I went to my crop and ate heart decorated cupcakes - thanks Claire :), strawberries and other delicacies, then came home early to help Ken cook his speciality Lamb Rogon curry with all the trimmings which we shared candlelit with the children, then carried on with the jigsaw wordsearch which is giving us so much trouble!! Such a nice technology free evening and we talked - a few grumps but on the whole really fun, and accompanied by the Gold 'Best of Spandau Ballet' CD which I haven't heard for ages and really is very good - thanks guys - it's 25 years since I saw them in Paris but the music still makes me sing along.

The curse of technology

I had a new mp3 player for Christmas - great, just what I wanted, and I had the perfect playlists all planned in my head.

A few weeks and some of my music carefully uploaded later, it has a 'file system error'. Predictably this doesn't appear on any of the online help provided by Philips, and neither does the manual help. I can't install the device software on the computer so it works and therefore I am stuffed - at least until someone can help me sort it out.

Frustrated? You bet, it all seemed so simple when I took it out of the box. Now I just want to throw it at someone. and to make things worse YOU CAN'T EVEN LOAD LEGAL DOWNLOADS ONTO IT! what? I thought that was the point of having an mp3 player - grrrr.

Bragging Parents

I can't stand listening to parents who bang on about their children's latest achievements ad nauseam so I'm going to blog my smugness today about Nat doing 200m in his swimming lesson - a huge achievement for him, and much more than he expected to do. I'm chuffed to bits with him but to save me from boring for England, this is the last I shall say on the matter, except to family and godparents!....

Bump!

I fell over this morning and now my elbow hurts - a lot! We decided to walk to school as the roads are still not clear and I'm a chicken at driving in the snow. The pavements were treacherous, and on one icy bit I turned round to see if the boys (mine plus a friend) were ok - bad move, I slid, went bang on my bum and put my hand down - but it's the elbow that hurts.

I can't face going to A&E as it will be full of idiots like me who have fallen down, plus all those with colds who can't be bothered to go to the GP, so I'm taking painkillers and hoping it will go away.

The sun is shining and I have to go and see if I can drive as I have the dancing run later, but I'm feeling very unmotivated to do anything - post snow laziness syndrome.

Fantastic Freezing February

Well, February came in with a bang - loads of snow, more than we've had for years, more than the children have ever seen in London. As usual, the entire transport network shut down as did the schools so yesterday we were all at home and in the park by 9 o'clock as we were so excited to see a foot of snow over everything. It looked awesome and we had so much fun building a snowman and throwing snowballs.

We'd only bought salopettes for Adam's ski trip on Saturday so they've been put to good use already as have the ski gloves, hat, fleeces and thermals - shared out with the others. I really need some other trousers as wet jeans are not pleasant, but otherwise I was amazingly warm, thanks in part to some fabulous hats which arrived from Sally and Yogya in Nepal, warmly lined with ear flaps and very trendy to boot, the kids are desperate to wear them!! Not often they want to borrow our clothes!

Today was beautifully sunny. Ken had to go into work (the buses were running and so were the tubes, but still no trains - pathetic!!) The kids and I went to the park with the Nikon and took lots of pictures, then raided Morrisons for squirty cream and marshmallows to make hot chocolate. The schools are open tomorrow so real life will kick in again, but this has been a fabulous unexpected break, so much fun - I'm quite glad the British are useless in the snow - we get to take time out.

I'm not looking forward to digging out the car and driving tomorrow, but hey! that's another day.