On Monday Andrew had the day off work (it was our wedding anniversary, 7 years!) and we all went out for lunch. Sitting in the restaurant was obviously very tiring, because Jessica had to have a little lie down. From her position on the seat opposite Andrew she commented “The light on your hair makes it look mmmppphhhh”.
Andrew : “Makes it look what? Makes it look red ?”
Jessica : “No Daddy. Makes it look grey .”
It was Ben’s school fair today. As he was showing my mum the way to go, he told her “This is the big field. It’s called that because it’s big, and it’s a field.”
Not a lot else to say really.
Louise is away at the moment, visiting her aunt, uncle and cousin down in Devon. This makes me solely responsible for the children for a whole two days, which is a rare experience. So far so good, though.
This morning I took the children to do the weekly grocery shopping. We left fairly early to beat the rush, which wasn’t hard seeing that they’d been awake since 6.30 with me following (inevitably) shortly after.
We rocked out to some Kings Of Leon on the way. Later, Ben asked if he could buy the same “music stick” as me when he grew up. I asked him why and he said it was so that it could have cool music like mine on it. Go the Kings!
We drove through the now-characteristic British summer weather — grey skies and light rain — and easily found a spot in the car park. This was when I realised that I’d forgotten the carefully prepared shopping list. Oh well, I thought, I’ll wing it and probably won’t forget too much.
My… god! I hate shopping. Louise normally coordinates our shopping activities. If I’m in attendance, it’s more as mobile child minder and high shelf reacher than as an active shopper.
This time I had to make all the choices myself. Now, if I didn’t care about Issues then this would have been easy. But Fair Trade and Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley Bloody Eats-It-All have done too good a job at educating me to the plight of farmers and chickens and the environment in general, so now I have to think about everything I purchase.
Is that chicken from the UK? Is it farm assured? Where have those apples come from? What?! I can’t get apples from the UK? Oh, maybe that’s right: seasonal. So how far have these ones come from? Brazil?! New Zealand?! So, which of those is further? Can you get Fair Trade apples? Argh!
And don’t even get me started on China. Here’s a little challenge: Go into any homeware section of a supermarket and find something made somewhere other than China.
Now that last paragraph might sound a little xenophobic and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a component of the sentiment — I don’t like the thought of our country being beholden to another entirely alien culture on the other side of the planet. But… is it really right that a large proportion of the goods purchased in this country are shipped from halfway around the world from a country that has such differing standards to us when it comes to environmental concerns and civil liberties? People often ask “how can they make these so cheap?”– there is an explanation but I don’t expect they want to hear it.
So, I’ve managed to spiral this post from something cheery and life-affirming into a bitter rant on the injustices of the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t write at this time of night but it is kind of how I feel right now… I learnt about stagflation today. Yeah, the future’s looking bloody marvelou right now.
On Friday 23rd May, at 0959 to be precise, Ben was five. It also happened to be an Inset day at his school which was nice for him, although he now does think he will have his birthday off school every year.
After collecting Jessica from pre-school, Ben, Andrew and I headed off to Pizza Hut where we met a couple of Ben’s friends and their mums for lunch. We then went on to The Mad House, a soft play centre. Because it appeared to be only Ben’s school which was closed that day, the place was nearly deserted apart from a small number of pre-school age children. It meant that Ben, Jessica, Joseph, Megan and Katie had the place almost to themselves, and the grown-ups, Andrew, Wendy, Claire and myself had free choice of comfy sofas to sit on and watch the children.
All in all it was a pretty nice day, Ben got lots of great presents including a camera, Transformers, Lego, Power rangers Watch and SpiderMan toy, and on the Saturday we had a family tea party complete with birthday cake where he received even more presents like a Power Rangers suit and toy phone, Power Rangers figures, bike stand and more Lego. We are off to Legoland in a couple of weeks, have a feeling his collection will grow some more….
A couple of weeks ago I came to the realisation that Louise and I don’t use our CDs any more. We have a big old glass cabinet hanging on the wall, half full of CDs and half full of DVDs. The former are almost never taken out. The only music we tend to listen to is on the radio or on our MP3 players, typically in the car. So why are we wasting space on storing these CDs when there were piles of DVDs stacked up around the TV?
Thus started my Ripathon, wherein I ripped every CD in the house, including all the weird and wonderful discs previously banished to the loft. After several weeks of fitful work I am finished; I am the proud owner of 1400 tracks and Louise has a more impressive 2400. Or in time terms, it would take me four and a half days of continuous play to listen to my collection, or six continuous days for Louise.
I now have the largest playlist of my life to listen to. I’m about 220 tracks in, rating the tracks as they go by. For a long time I resisted the urge to get into the whole “star rating” idea. Being a bit obsessive, I worry about issues such as the difference between two stars and three. And you mean I have to decide this 1400 times?! Why can’t the machine learn what I want to listen to? Oh well, better a half-good playlist today than a magically learning system next year.
Jayne asked me if this all meant that I’d start downloading tracks instead of buying CDs. I’m not entirely sold, mainly because you don’t get entirely the same quality of sound (theoretically) from an MP3 as you do a CD. In addition, I prefer to use Vorbis in place of MP3, which gives you better sound quality compared to an MP3 of the same file size. That said, with the death of DRM, I’m a lot more prepared to court the idea.
All this, of course, doesn’t help me get at the boxes of vinyl stuck up in the loft. Given that I’ve touched these, I think, on one occassion in the last ten years, I’m also wondering if it’s time to sell my 1210s. I’ve held off doing this (if it’s not stating the obvious at this stage) for a long time. For much of this time I’ve considered teaching some of my old skills to Ben or Jessica in a few years from now but the more time passes the more I wonder if the world has moved on…
Update: My postings seem to be exhibiting a certain synchronicity with the news at the moment: Napster is launching a music download service without DRM.
It is a year today since Madeline disappeared, and it is her birthday on 12th May. As a parent I can’t imagine the pain her family must be going through, not knowing if she is alive or where she might be. I think it is also brought closer to home by the fact that I belong to a May 2003 baby forum on the internet.
I signed up when I was pregnant with Ben, and “met” a whole group of ladies from around the country, the only thing we have in common is that all our babies were due, and born, in May 2003. It wasn’t until we all met up in 2005, that Andrew realised that one of the ladies I had been chatting with was in fact the lady who was opposite me in the hospital, and who I spent 3 or 4 days with - our children were born on the same day.
I can’t help but think that quite easily Madeline could have been one of the children in our group, and her mother could have been someone I knew or had met. Whatever did or didn’t happen on the night she disappeared, what should or shouldn’t have been done, despite all the rumours and speculation, the bottom line is that on the night of May 3rd, a little girl was taken away from her family and friends. And that is what we shouldn’t forget.
Ben started Infant school on Monday 21st April, and Jessica started pre-school the next day. Ben has quite a long day, lessons start at 8.50am and pick up is at 3.10pm. Jessica goes from 9am to 11.30am, which is quite long enough for her, most days she is very tired in the afternoons, but I think she will get used to it.
So far Ben seems to be really enjoying school, although complains that they haven’t actually taught him anything. Ben did say he didn’t need to go as he could already write his own name, knew how to count to 39 and spell some words. We convinced him he would learn how to read whole books at school, I think he thought they would teach him on his first day. He has been ready for school for some time, and has been looking forward to it and I am really pleased that he seems to have settled right into it. He is quite happy at getting on his uniform in the mornings and setting off, he goes into the classroom very confidently on his own.
We have had the first episode of peer pressure conformity - I was told last night that I wasn’t to cut his sandwiches into two big triangles, he wanted four small squares as “that’s what everyone else has.” I have also shown myself as “bad mummy”, by neglecting to notice one morning that Ben wasn’t wearing a polo shirt under his school sweatshirt, on possibly one of the hottest days of the year so far. I had to drop a shirt off at reception for him.
Jessica has likewise settled really well. She had been wanting to go “Ben’s nursery” for about the past year, she already knew her way about, and what went on, and had to be dragged away every day after dropping Ben off. Now she gets to stay, and is in her element. Every day she brings home paintings or models, has made new friends and caught up with some old ones, who had left her behind at nursery when they went onto pre-shcool.
The most exciting thing to be happening soon is a farm coming to the nursery - there will be a cow, donkey, dog, chicks, sheep and lambs, guinea pig and rabbits. Already Jessica is telling everyone she will be feeding the lambs milk and grass - and planning on bringing one home.
I was just ploughing through my Google Reader backlog when Ben walked up and asked, “How do you make it go up and down?” He was referring to the page on screen.
“I use the mouse wheel, you know, on the mouse. The little wheel you use to make things go up and down.”
“Can you use the arrow keys?”
Without waiting he reached out and sent the page flying across the screen. Laughing he said, “Why does it go up when you press down?”
I had to stop for a moment and suddenly I was thrown back to the mid-eighties and the first time I used an AMX mouse with AMX Pagemaker on our BBC Master. The problem is, to go down the page you press the down button but in doing so the page appears to move up the screen.
Clearly our brains are wired the same way.
While writing this post I had music on random play and it produced a surprisingly good track transition: From Hemp by Living Colour into Into Temptation by Crowded House with a three second crossfade. Not perfect but not bad for a random selection!
Ben : “Mummy, when I’m grown up, like when I’m six, can I go to the skate park?”
Me : “Umm, I’m not sure, where is the skate park?”
Ben : “I don’t know exactly, but you have to climb over a fence to get there.”
“Mummy! Daddy! Guess what?! It’s snowing! It’s amazing!”
And so started our Sunday morning at 6.55am. This is one case where I’ll let the pictures do the talking.