Mystery photo time!

What is this?!

No nothing surgical!  Homemade beet root crisps, low carb and surprisingly tasty.

I think it might be time to look for a new teaching job, I also washed the dusters last week!

Katie x

My month in numbers December

What a lovely month :) 

60 each of croissants, pain au chocolats and chocolat chauds served at the year 6 café to mark the end of our first term working together.  It was so nice to have such enthusiastic students and they all entered into the spirit of it with real gusto, when I arrived they had decorated the hall and put on the music from Allo Allo!  Everyone ordered in French and served their parents and guests in French as well, at the end of the afternoon they gave me a lovely thank you card they had made themselves and a chocolate Santa that the children and I ate while playing the gingerbread man game on New Year's Day!

46664 - Nelson Mandela's prison number, the press coverage reminded me how inspirational he was.  His imprisonment is one of the first things I can remember being interested in as an adult topic and it is amazing to think his struggle covered the whole of my life!  

8 postcards bought at the national portrait gallery on my grown up day out in London.  It was such a treat to have a chance to do something adult, I walked along the south bank at a reasonable pace, had a delicious lunch with my husband and saw lots of cool Elizabethan pictures.  It is so interestingly to see the faces to go with all the names from the books I have read.

3 beautiful carol concerts attended, a very Wildmoor Christmas was lovely and really special as it was the first time I have been able to go to a Christmas show since M started school.  Year 2 sang Stille Nacht in German perfectly and were the highlight of the show!  W had a great concert where they sang lots of songs with actions and then after 15 mins Hayley said 'that's the end!' And off we went clutching a chocolate coin, my favourite was Christmas pudding!  Then in the last week of term we went back to M's school for a French café, we had croissants and hot chocolate and then they sang vive le vent as part of French Christmas week, très impressionnant et je me suis bien amusée! 

12 bottles of rosé!  For our family Christmas party everyone had to do a 'turn' based on one of our holiday journals from the 80s.  We wrote 'on the first day in west France our family we did see' and performed it before lunch with extra loud singing by W who continues to sing it in the car every few days!  Reading the journal showed how different your memories can be!  One of our favourite stories about that holiday was when we went out in the dinghy not realising what the Atlantic waves were like and nearly took out an elderly French lady being swept back in to the beach at 100kms an hour!  We have been talking about it for years, doesn't get a mention! But the journals did remind me how much we did on those holidays and how lucky we were even if we didn't know it at the time, and all that French! 

One Christmas dinner cooked for 6 guests and all went according to plan thanks to Nigella!  We ended up having a really nice and chilled Christmas, we saw everyone who needed to be seen and had some fab family days at home and out and about.  

The communal count: 

How many Christmas movies is too many?  You can NEVER have too many Christmas movies, we discovered Arthur Christmas this year and Home Alone 4(!).  The highlight of our Christmas viewing was Wreck-it Ralph our new favourite film, we must have seen it a dozen times and W now goes around the house fixing things with his fix-it Felix hammer.

How many Christmas events did you attend?  2 Christmas carol concerts, two end of term French cafés, one lovely 'company do' lunch with my boss/husband! Two family parties with 'shows' and my favourite bit every year children's Christmas mass.

My month in numbers is the brilliant story telling idea of Julie Kirk at http:/notesonpaper.blogspot.uk. 

 

My month in numbers November!

At last!  I have finally got my November pages done and my numbers recorded.  I must make notes as December goes on to avoid all that remembering!!

Lots of bike riding, crafting and catching up with home stuff and friends this month.  3 Hometown Hifi gigs too :) 

The school run :)

One of those strange times of day when everyone is rushing to get somewhere except William!  You can guarantee he needs a wee or pulls his bag off at 2.55pm.  The children like to ride their bikes to school but there and back is a bit much for the little guy sometimes.  But here he is not crying!!

It is so lovely to see him enjoying his bike and being so active.

On the way home the other day I overheard a fab snippet of conversation between two blokes getting into a van : 

"He is a legend I tell you, when I write my book he will be chapter 10, we were just ..." 

Who?!  What did he do?!  It is too intriguing, what do you think the legend did?  And who makes up chapters 1 to 9?!

A plus! Xxx

Advent awesomeness!

Check out the advent calendar I made for the children!  I am very pleased with it :) each envelope has a treat, a joke and an activity to do that day, tomorrow's is clear out your bedroom and give toys to the charity shop.  Paul is operating a one in one out policy on anything that crosses the doorstep so we had better be ruthless!

Loving the reflection of our hobbies in the mirror, my basket of mini books and two of Paul's pianos!

Can't wait until the morning to see them open the first one, just hope they are not too disappointed not to have a crap hello kitty calendar with cheap chocolate!!

Randomness!

I love it when I find these random photos on my phone or iPad!  The brilliant thing about digital cameras is that the children can take lots of pictures and I end up with some gems and some strange ones like this: 

Any ideas what it is?!

My month in numbers October

My month in numbers is the brainchild of Julie Kirk from notes on paper and a fun way to record our adventures. 

October was dominated by our visit to Southampton General, 10 days on the children's surgical ward as the next stage on our Hirschsprungs journey with William.  Some of our hospital numbers: 

Slept in beds 9, 3 and 14, moving towards the desk for critical care then back towards the door when we were ready to come home.  Just like the neonatal unit where we moved from room 4 to room 3 then room 1 as he got better.  2 operations, 1 planned with 8 hours in theatre,  3% morphine and the first epidural, whilst it is hard to take William to theatre it was much easier with the team of outstanding doctors we know so well, and they know us so I feel like I am leaving him in very good hands.  We had amazing care and when he was getting more pain instead of recovering he was quickly back into theatre for a second emergency procedure; 4 more hours in theatre, 5 hours in picu, 1 new stoma and 10cm less bowel small and large.  

Some nice bits too!  We met Rhoda again, once of the nurses who looked after William as a baby and it was so nice to see her and for her to see him all grown up!  She taught us so much when he was a baby.  We were visited by Dr Ding Dong, Dr wee wee and Dr bananas who told us lots of jokes "knock knock, who's there? Idunup. Idunup who?"  Honestly it is very funny!  William earned lots of stickers and got a toy from the prize cupboard, we made a pumpkin at the craft session, we made monsters and played the magic hat game a lot!  We watched alot of cbeebies and finding Nemo 5 times in the last 24 hours we were there!  But one of my favourite moments was Gerard being attacked by Darth Vader!  We heard him coming down the corridor and when I pushed Uncle G out to take a picture he ended up like this!

Back at home we started and finished the Sopranos season 6 which was in two parts.  Very good but a strange ending although I quite liked it.

5 nights at Sandy Balls, the balls in question turned out to be geographical feature!  We saw an amazing fire eater, did lots of playing, saw our friends and carved pumpkins.  The sweetest part of Halloween was the children dressing up in their costumes, they wanted to go to the halloween disco but when we got there it was too busy and noisy so they played twister in the dark and then we walked back to our lodge where they took it in turns to knock on the door and say trick or treat to get a sweet! 7.9 miles cycled on our family bike ride including a cake stop and a pub lunch!  And LOADS of ponies and donkeys seen en route :) 

40 Monarchs since William the conqueror, and we know them all thanks to the ruthless rulers song from Horrible Histories, the children can sing along perfectly "William William Henry Stephen Henry Richard John etc.

And now for the communal count : 

I received 20ish pieces of mail this month addressed to me, some junk mail, 4 Christmas mail order catalogues which I am browsing for inspiration for Christmas shopping just not quite yet!  The nicest was 3 parcels with get well presents for William.  A survive in hospital kit for me from my best friend including these fab cosy socks that I wore the day William was in theatre :) 

There was also a lovely guardian angel from William's godmother to watch over us.

A weather related fact!  One night in hospital the wind was really loud and whistled past the windows so much that it was more annoying than the occlusion alarms!  The Children's wards are on the top floor of the hospital and is the first tall building the weather hits coming in from the Solent.  It is always loud but this was something else and the next day we found out a tornado had hit the south coast and had hit us first :)