Holly finds the first strawberry

It's necessary for me to do some extreme positive thinking today. Someone (Holly, no doubt) put two nappies into the washing machine some time in the last few days. This morning I put on a full wash. Suffice to say that I nearly went spare at the end of the cycle when I saw all the nappy crystals in the machine, pouring out of the machine and on every item in there. At least I can safely assume that the nappies were unused (please let me be right. It was bad enough).

So, to the garden for positive thinking! I won't give you any overall views because we have a lot of areas of crap so I'll zone in on a few of my small projects.

After nearly six years we feel we have the back broken in the garden in terms of planting and digging beds. A lot of the trees and bushes are still small but they are established and will look amazing in two years' time. Hopefully at that stage, they'll also help to reduce the gales that blow through our property.

Inside the house, we have to be careful about moving ferocious creatures because Sadie and Holly go mad if you interfere with their setup. This often makes simple tasks very difficult.

Outside the house is no different, we have to watch out for toys and make sure they stay where they were put.

I keep any freebie plants that show up in the garden at the back door. We discovered the big holly at the back of the photo when Holly was born and there's another miniscule one that you can barely see. There's also thyme and rosemary here. The other pots are things I'm not sure will come on and ones that I'm not sure where to plant yet. I bet you didn't know that green plastic dolphins like sit in with the mint.

This old tractor tyre came with the house! It's our herb wheel outide the kitchen. It's very handy because the vegetable patch is quite far away when you're only looking for a few chives. Here we have chives, parsley, lemon balm, sage, thyme, watercress.....and a dinosaur of course.

I'm all for little areas within a property. Ours aren't that distinct yet, but as things grow they'll become more defined. Here is one bed with almost-boulders at the back and large stones in front. We have the tiniest hawthorn plants behind the fence (I got 30 near-dead ones in Aldi and they've all come on. Great value for €2) and in front you can see the soldiers of Summer, the gladioli. The beech tree is obvious in the photo but there is also euonymous, sage (we have lots of sage), rose and fuschia. At the very start of Spring a line of crocus dressed the front of the bed. The fence is only stopping the dog and children running through at the moment, it will come out in the future when this all comes together.

I'll ignore the veggie patch and lawn for the moment because we are still planting veg. and my plan for the lawn has only just begun. We have a
little orchard of four trees above the veggie patch and a lot of fruit bushes.

On one of the beds in the veggie patch we have some cuttings from last year (more freebies but from Martin taking them, not from self-seeding). There's dogwood, goosberry and blackcurrant and they're all doing well so we'll be able to plant those out or pot them for a while once Autumn arrives. This is a regular pitstop for toys who seem to prefer sitting in with the plants than risking getting soaked in the tunnel. As you can see today was a cape day in our house, Barney and the two plastic dinosaurs -that Sadie and Holly know the real names of- are sporting purple wrapping paper and stickytape capes.


These are the broadbeans in the polytunnel. (Let me see if I can get this part right:) Martin's mother's cousin's husband, Peter, gathered the beans from his own plants and sent a packet of them to Martin from the UK. They're flying. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of insects flying in there. My dad recently gave me four courgette plants and a cucumber plant and also a recipe for a garlic and water mixture that I'll be able to spray everything in here with. I'll definitely have to do it soon. I'll put the cucumber plant and two courgette plants in the tunnel. The courgettes take up a lot of room so I'll harden the other two off  and plant them out.

Sadie and Holly like to check on everything in the polytunnel. I presume they're copying what they've seen Martin doing. They lift the leaves of some plants and ruffle others. Today, Holly shrieked with delight when she found a red strawberry. She's been begging to eat the green ones for a while and knows the ones outside are nowhere near ready so I reckon she's had her eye on the very spot she checked today.

There was fierce excitement as we hosed down the giant strawberry.

And then the washing-machine-crystaliser and her sister took a break from their labours.

Sadie and Holly say the funniest things

There is no way I could record all the funny things Sadie and Holly come out with. When I ran off to the toilet (yes, the one time I did that) yesterday I had just closed the door when I heard the running down the hall of two girls hellbent on not allowing me that two minutes. They banged on the door and breathlessly cried out, "there's a creature" and "quick" and "help us" between them. They had obviously designed the drama so that I would come quickly and I did.
They found my annoyance hilarious when the creature turned out to be something only they could see somewhere out there on the lawn. Eventhough I was annoyed I was impressed by Holly asking me, "did you fool yourself?" I told her that she had fooled me and she then thought that I was the one who put the sentence the wrong way and burst out laughing at me.
To add to the strawberries, carrots, broadbeans and potatoes already growing in the veggie patch and polytunnel, we planted sweetcorn, peas and onions yesterday. All went well until Holly realised what we were planting and wanted to eat everything and began raking over the drills with a bit of bamboo to unearth some food for herself. Please do not send us €7 a month, she really is well fed. Grateful as I was that nobody heard about Holly's desperate search in the dirt for sustenance I was more grateful that Sadie's question about Mr. Fothergill wasn't overheard.
Holly got distracted from her food search by the picture of who we must presume is Mr. Fothergill on the seed packet. She held the packet and showed it to me and said, "look at the cootie" (cootie=cutie). Holly's statement brought Sadie back from picking every single leaf off every plant in the garden and when she saw Mr. Fothergill she looked to the ground we had just planted and asked, "are they man seeds?"
I moved us away from the newly planted patch as worries about Holly digging for food turned to worries about Sadie starting to dig for little man seedlings. We threw sunflower and sweetpea seeds in all over the place. Holly decided she'd had enough after a bit and said she wanted "a hot drink of tea" so we went back to the house. Sadie isn't usually a tea drinker and said she wanted "a cold drink to cool me up." Sadie went back out and I asked Holly where she wanted her tea because often she'll want it in the living room eventhough Sadie will be outside. Holly thought about it and answered, "em, em, I want it......, em.....em, I want it.....in a cup."
Sadie and Holly are always excited when Martin comes home. Yesterday, for whatever reason, when Sadie heard the car she looked out the window and declared (yes, she declared), "oh, I missed him so much!" I don't know where that particular dramatic exclamation came from and she repeated it when she saw Martin, "I missed you so much, I want a hug." Martin told her he'd hug the daylights out of her and she ran down the hall screaming. From the apparent safety of the end of the hall she shouted up, "leave my daylights in me!"

Holly puts Tilly straight

We were outside a lot of this morning and practically all of yesterday. It was hot and sunny yesterday and today was overcast and a bit chilly but both days meant the same to me, it's great to be outside. It now takes the three of us to water the plants, sometimes four or five if Scooby Doo and Roly Mo are holding on to the hose as well. I don't mind them but I'm not a fan of Sadie bringing Sparky along because, as befits a dinosaur, he roars with every movement.
As you can imagine this makes watering take far longer than it should and usually Holly gets bored holding the hose at some point and tries to go under the spray of water so it can take longer again. Holly sings everything now. From first thing in the morning when she and Sadie do the "wakey shake" (this is what they shout at me while shaking me) Holly will start singing "I way-ay-ked up and I got my mole and we jumped out the bed" and then she'll move on to singing, "I eatin' my sirilals with Say-aydie Wadie" (sirials=cereal) and so goes through the day in song.
Today, on our watering mission, she produced two farm animal figures from her pocket. She had a sheep that she calls Sheep and a cow that she calls Tilly. Apparently Tilly is different to the other nine plastic cows that came in the pack. We all know that Holly considers Sheep to be Tilly's mother. We don't know why. We have had discussions about the impossibility of a sheep being a cow's mother. So today Holly gave up holding the hose and started singing in what would seem to have been in Tilly's voice which was like Holly's but very high-pitched, "I lift my mom-meeee up to my face" and then she lifted Sheep up higher and started singing in what would seem to have been Sheep's voice and sang, "I'm not your mom-meeee. Your mommy is a cow."
I felt bad, like I had ruined a perfectly good mother-daughter relationship that worked for Holly as well as for the plastic pair of animals. And I felt bad that Tilly was so mercilessly denied what Holly takes for granted. When we came back in I said to Holly, "lift me up to your face" and she said, "I can't, you're too big" but she continued in song, "will you lift me up to your face, Mom-MEEEE?"

Today is World Meningitis Day

Touch wood, I have never thought my children might have contracted meningitis. But, until today, World Meningitis Day, I hadn't known of all of the symptoms of the disease and I also didn't know that the obvious ones like a stiff neck or non-blanching rash do not have to be present for meningitis to be.
Meningitis makes me think of Summer 2011 because we got a fright when Sadie suffered a convulsion. I had made the mistake of putting a blanket on her when she fell asleep on the couch eventhough it was quite warm. The convulsion was scary as Sadie's eyes rolled back in her head and had a fit in my arms. When I spoke to my mam later and told her what had happened, that we had been to the hospital, etc. she told me that I had had the same type of convulsion when I was about 1. She said that she had taken me to the hospital and that they had checked for meningitis via a lumbar puncture and, fortunately, had been able to rule out meningitis and confirm that it had been a febrile convulsion caused from making me too warm.
The conversation led to my mam telling me that my aunt, Rita, who is now in her seventies, was one of the first survivors of meningitis in Ireland. Her family feared that she would die when she contracted the illness. Today, meningitis can still kill within 24 hours. It is of vital importance for Irish parents to know that the main cause of meningitis is meningococcal disease and Ireland has the highest incidence of meningococcal disease in Europe.

So, what is meningitis? It is "an inflammation of the lining surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It is caused when germs infect the fluid which circulates around the brain and spinal cord. Septicaemia is the blood poisoning form of the disease, which can cause shock, multiple organ failure and tissue destruction."*

"Meningitis and septicaemia can affect ANYONE. However, the majority of cases occur in children under five years with those under one year most at risk."*

Please take a few seconds to become aware of the symptoms of meningitis:

 

Fever                    Vomiting                    Severe head ache                    Painfully stiff neck   

 

Sensitivity to light            Very sleepy                      Confusion                        Seizures 

 

Non-blanching rash (the rash doesn't disappear under pressure)  

This blog post is part of the Irish Parenting Bloggers blog march that asks you to KEEP WATCHING for the symptoms of meningitis. Please take a look at the Meningitis: Keep Watching Ireland Facebook Page .

*The definition of meningitis was taken directly from the Meningitis: Keep Watching Ireland campaign literature. The campaign is being run by the Meningitis Research Foundation Ireland, who are supported by Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Limited.

Other posts for World Meningitis Day:
Awfully Chipper, Carmel Harrington, Debalicious, Glitter Mama Wishes, Looking for Blue Sky, Mama.ie, My Internal World, The Clothesline, The Dare Project, Wholesome Ireland

I get organised

Six years ago I saw Duncan Bannatyne interviewed on TV. I can't remember what show it was but I know it was about his book Anyone Can Do It: My Story. I knew who he was from Dragons' Den, from which he had made no impact on me, but in the interview I was fascinated by him. He said that anyone can be successful but that it is necessary to be organised and ready and to remove distractions from your life. One of the examples he gave was that if you watch too much TV then you should get rid of your TV until you've reached where you want to be.

For the last four to five years I didn't think about it seriously because I was exhausted all the time and because my distractions were pregnancies and babies.

I've started to think about Bannatyne's words of wisdom recently. I don't watch much TV but my children do so I'm not considering getting rid of that particular distraction. However, I have made a number of changes so that I can take on a few projects that I am looking forward to getting stuck into.

The only thing I could claim to do regularly and effectively up until recently is that I change the bed linen on a Monday. Everything else that has to be done in this house has gotten done but in the most disorganised and tiring way. I've spent two months trying to get a handle on things and get some sort of routine going. It has been a system of trial and error and finally I think I'm getting there. I think this will be better for me but also the girls, I want something of a reliable routine and for them to know the difference between weekdays and weekends. I have been trying to be up in the mornings before Sadie and Holly for months now and still haven't made it an every-morning thing. I think it will make all the difference when I master this and start each day with a bit of time to myself.

I have thought and thought about the aspect of eliminating distractions and I think I've gone a long way to dealing with it. In real life and virtual life I was in a number of groups that I have now left. There were really only two groups that I cared about being in anyway but I feel I've taken and given as much as I can to and from those. I am hopeful that the friends I've made through those groups will continue to be my friends, there have been days when they have saved my sanity.

I've decided that I want my blogs to return to their original states in that I'm going to deactivate comments on posts and I'm not going to put links to my posts on Facebook or Twitter unless I feel there's an important message in them. I feel even those little actions have been taking up unnecessary time when, at the end of the day, if anyone reads my posts and enjoys them then I'm happy but also I'm happy if no-one reads them. The posts in this blog are only in storage here for my children. I don't check my stats. The only reason my blogs exist is that our computer kicked the bucket and I lost everything I had written on Word.

I want to return to my original state too, I want to read blogs. I want to bring the laptop into bed with me and see what's new on my reading list and indulge. I don't want to find the same post that I read through my reading list on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. I want to share or retweet without anyone feeling that they have to return the favour. I want to notice when my sister posts a photo of my nephews or when my friend tells a funny story, things like these are getting lost in my personal news feed and that seems silly to me.

Well, Mr. Bannatyne, we will test your theory and see if indeed anyone can do it!

Sadie and Holly check for chicks

It's been tough for my two small girls recently; they've been indoors so much that the three of us have got serious cabin fever. It doesn't make all that much difference to go somewhere indoors to play either, they need fresh air.
I've tried to keep them busy. There are stickers everywhere, every colouring pencil, marker and crayon has been sharpened into oblivion, worn out and broken.
There was a glimmer of hope during the week when the sun shone. I layered the children up and threw them out the door. They smiled and started discussing where they would start digging and I smiled and started to layer myself to go out there with a cappuccino. It couldn't have been more than one minute later that shrieks were heard from the yard and both children were back inside. "The water bited me." So the two of them had gone outside where there was no water to be seen and found the tiniest pocket of water and shoved their fingers into it.
I thought I had a trump card. Sadie and Holly desperately wanted to paint eggs. I tried my hand at preparing egg shells for painting a few days ago. I found a link to what seemed to be a great idea and failed miserably....maybe other people are better at gluing two halves of an eggshell back together.
I took what I thought was the easy route in the end: I hardboiled eggs and the girls painted them. We made little nests for them and all was calm in our house for three minutes. Egg shells take a long time to dry (when they've been plastered with way too much paint) and Sadie and Holly have to be commended for their patience here, they waited hours for their eggs to dry and were thrilled to bits to be placing them into the nests. Then Sadie asked, "where are the chicks?" I told her we'd make them another day.
I walked about ten steps away from the proud eggpainters to load the washing machine and almost immediately smelled the most disgusting smell behind me. I went back to the kitchen table to find Sadie and Holly three-quarters of the way through picking the painted shells off their eggs. Then Holly pushed a finger through her stinky egg. I rushed and gathered everything up, shouting, "what are ye doing?" Holly, very calmy, informed me, "we lookin for the chicks."
I threw the whole mess into a nest and said I was putting it all in the bin. Sadie followed behind me and, just before I dropped the lot in the bin, put a baby wipe over it all and said, "goodnight."
We have all gone mad.

Holly sniffs for clues

Sadie coined the phrase "lift me up to your face" when Holly was a newborn and Sadie would want to be up in my arms at the same time as the baby and was reluctant to settle for being lifted and then plonked next to me. She'd insist on us sitting cheek to cheek for a few seconds before she'd take second place.

As Holly has become a walking, talking toddler she's picked up on the phrase and, if Sadie is sitting on my lap, will make the demand in order to get the better spot. I always thought it was adorable.

It seems, however, that Holly has been using it to find out what secret treats are in the kitchen. She got away with this for quite some time until I recently realised what she was doing.
She obviously copped on to the fact that I'd sneak a little treat for myself when I'd go out to the kitchen to get them their apples, carrots, cereal or whatever they'd be shouting for at any given minute.

I noticed that she'd pounce on me when I'd come back with their food and shout, "ip me up to your face"(ip=lift) and then she'd smell me. I honestly thought it was cute, that she wanted to smell me and know I was there with her. It took me a while to realise that the sniffing would be followed with, "em, I tink I like ... em ... some .... em .... Kinder." It could be Kinder or "cips"(=crisps) or "dellies"(=jellies) but her decision would come after a sniff of me and a little think.

I'm on to her now though, she was smelling my breath to see what I had eaten that I was claiming wasn't there.

I think we might have a future sommelier on our hands or just a nosey parker.