When I was a little girl I absolutely hated having to go with my mum to the garden centre.
Being dragged around a place full of boring old plants was certainly not my idea of fun, but dragging us around the garden centre (for what sometimes felt like hours!) was indeed what my mum would do.
I have to admit to being completely and utterly unprepared in the blog writing world this week. It was Labour weekend this weekend so a long overdue 3 day holiday and I made the decision on Friday night to make it a technology free one. So this morning is the first time that I have been on a computer since Friday! I went on my phone for exactly 10 minutes on Sunday morning just to check that the All Blacks had indeed won their semi-final match and not come down with some unexplained case of food poisoning (ha!) and again on Monday to look up lemon trees because for a minute there when I nearly stabbed my eye out with the biggest sharpest thorn you have ever seen I began to wonder what the hell I had bought myself! Who knew lemon trees had thorns?! I certainly didn’t.
Those two words that all parents dread: Toilet training.
What the hell do you do when your kid just WON’T POO ON THE TOILET! I mean, trying to train a little person to pee and poop on the toilet and not in a nappy/undies/on the grass/in the bath (ugh!) is not a fun activity for parents in any shape or form (ha!) and boys can be harder than girls to get on board with the idea.
I started my oldest just after age 3. That could be considered quite late but everything I read said that boys can take longer to be ready and forcing them to start early if they’re not ready can be a battle of wills that ends up with the unpleasant side effect of taking longer, more accidents and regression. Cohen also had a few communication issues with his speech delay which spurred me to hold off (and he turned 3 in the middle of damn winter, not an ideal TT time of year!).
My oldest son is what one might call a hypochondriac.
I don’t know when it started exactly but it’s been going on for as long as I can remember and as he gets older it’s just getting progressively worse.
The tiniest mark on his body and he is crying that he has a hurt and it ‘needs a plaster mummy, you need to fix it!’. It is not unheard of to hear a proclamation of ‘But I’m dying!’ in our household.
I’ve certainly never been without my moments of ditz (refer to I have a Confession … My Blondest Moments Exposed) but since having children those moments have risen substantially to the point that I have a story for almost every occasion.
Not only do I have increasing numbers of embarrassing moments to recount, I also have trouble with the simplest tasks. Like remembering whether I washed my hair the day before. Or was it the day before that? Something so simple that I struggle with on a daily basis. I try to remember but I just draw a total blank. Do I remember lathering shampoo in my hair? Combing through the conditioner? I should be able to recall something like this in an instant but … complete blank. I just cannot. Washing my hair ever second day should not be this complicated! My memory is like a sieve. Names, faces …
Last week I wrote The 5 Types Of Kids At A Pre-School Disco which got me thinking about the typical types of drunk people you will come across at any event involving alcohol.
In recent years I haven’t been as much of a drinker, certainly not since the idea of a hangover with young children is about as appealing as a root canal! However I have been out clubbing the odd time and to be honest I felt:
#1. Too sober
#2. Overdressed (literally!)
#3. Old!
That is putting work do’s aside which always start off quietly and end with climbing fences to go on glow worm hunts in the Botanical Gardens or crashing someones 21st birthday … Not that that has happened recently of course! Ha!
However, once upon a time …
So my 4 year old had his very first kindergarten disco on Friday night and the invitation of course extended to the whole family (somehow I don’t think they’re quite at the age for the drop off and run quite yet!).
This week I have been too preoccupied to read or do anything but search high and low for diaries I am no longer sure exist but have vague memories of reading which I first talked about in my post To The Father Who Doesn’t Know I Exist … (If you haven’t read it, perhaps do so first before continuing to read this update).
Has this ever happened to anyone else? You have some whisper of a memory at the edge of your subconscious and you begin to think you imagined it or dreamt it because you can’t seem to reach the whole memory to put it back together. In my instance I have a memory of reading a diary that contained the name Jimmy and details of my mums life in London after finding out she was pregnant, except I can’t pull that memory and make the pieces fit. I can’t picture the diary and nor can I find it despite searching high and low. This weekend I fear I may turn my house upside down in an effort to locate it. Because my house is so small, I’m worried I inadvertently threw it away or the memory is a complete fabrication in my mind. How does that happen? Perhaps the memory of what I read was a whisper in my ear while sleeping from a woman long since dead. I must admit the strangeness of this situation is starting to mess with my brain!
After I posted the post last Tuesday it was shared by over 300 people and viewed by more than 34,000.
Ironically it was shared by a blogger friend who I only met the week before. It was then viewed and shared by an old flatmate of hers from her London days. From there it ended up in a ex employees group of a tour company where it was seen by someone who knew him and passed that on to a family member who by Friday then contacted me. 3 days is all it took. Social media is amazing in this day and age! The world shrinks a little more with every passing year.
We are currently trying to piece things together. 34 years ago is a very long time, memories are scratched away with time and I have no corroboration to put together a timeline but we are trying to put the story together through photographs and dredging up long forgotten memories from the past.
Perhaps I will get answers or perhaps I never will but I already feel a surreal sort of peace that I know now that he exists, even if the reality is far more complicated than I anticipated. I still have had no direct contact with him and may not, however I do feel a sense of closure in how this has all panned out despite this.
Time will tell.
I spent a great deal of Sunday morning uploading songs to my Spotify account, dictated from a book I discovered in the wooden chest I had explored with curiosity the previous weekend while searching for clues to the identity of my biological father.
The book was a little floral covered notebook where my mum had carefully and dutifully handwritten a list of her all time favourite songs. I remember as a child and teenager that on weekends mum would pop in her old cassette tapes (the kind that were recorded straight from the radio) and blast her favourite songs, a myriad collection from November Rain by Guns n Roses to Little Red Corvette, a classic Prince track and everything inbetween.