Malbridge House

Well, I’m back, I feel loads better, we took a couple of days off and boy did it help. I think I just got so exhausted, what with camping every couple of weeks and HE, trying to please everybody and generally running around single-handedly doing everything.

Ive had a talk with Malc, bless him, he’s great but it seems to be a common trait in men that if you ask them to do something they will do it but they don’t actually see what needs to be done themselves.

I’ve had  chat with Eden about what she would like to do and how we can accomplish these things and what we expect from her. The upshot of that is that she’s been really good doing her work, she’s really knuckled down to it and in return we’re going to have more friends to tea and allow her more time to play with friends. This has been quite hard because a lot of her old school friends are all in their own little groups and we have to consciously make an effort to find girls her own age when we do anything, most are younger. She goes to Guides and Book Club, she’s just started the Church choir  at least I don’t have to worry about booze and drugs there!! She is a very social person and is missing somebody to share her girlie secrets with I think.

Cal has said that he wants more of his old friends to play over which again we’ll have to try and do that for him. I know it’s no excuse but sometimes it’s hard enugh looking after the ones I have let alone their friends as well.

Then we come to Clark, he’s never been to school so he’s not got any old school friends so when the others have theirs over he’s constantly trying to muscle in or show off, to the extent that when Cal had his little girlfriend over about 18 months ago Clark thought it would be really funny to completely undress and run along the landing in all his glory, luckily she has a brother!! So we’ve got to make a effort to have somebody for him over to play. The problem we’re getting with Clark is that he’s saying that nobody we know is the same age as him, which I always thought was a school thing that all your friends were the same age. None of my friends children are the same age or if they are they’re GIRLS!

Anyway we’ve got foundations to work on, funnily enough during all of this they’ve all worked really hard, it was just their behaviour that was causing me concern, real backchat and a total disregard for anything I did around the house. So I think I was feeling a bit unloved and taken for granted.

Thanks for all the hugs and comments, very much appreciated.

So much has happened that I’ll just briefly outline it, we went camping and went to Ringwood Carnival.

They have an afternoon procession and evening one, both last a couple of hours, the evening one is spectacular, the marching bands have lights on their uniforms and the floats are lit up, it’s really worth going.

Sept 26th was Callums 8th birthday, so on the Sunday he had a party for 23 of his friends, so that was a frenzy of baking and party bags, it went well though and I think it was enjoyed by all.

This last weekend the children went to Poole Watch Wildlife Club We were planting one hundred daffodil bulbs.

Even Cody helped, everytime we needed a bulb he would go off with his spade and get one out the bucket, put it on his spade and carry it to you.

Eden with a hole maker, in the end we gave up on them because the ground was so hard they were really useless, so we used an ordinary spade instead.

Of course the Flats helped!

The flats with everybody looking at the camera!

As I said Eden has joined the church choir and on Sunday she was meant to do her first stint but she woke up with a really sore throat and couldn’t go. We’d been invited by Mum to dinner anyway, so we still went there. I wasn’t going to miss dinner being cooked for me! We had a lovely dinner, I made blackberry and apple crumble with the apple and blackberries that we picked a few weeks ago and frozen so we had that for pudding. Then we watched a video called "Finding Neverland" It’s the story of J.M. Barrie who wrote Peter Pan and how he was inspired to write the play. I’m not sure how true to life it was but I would recommend the video, I even shed a tear or two at the end. It was a lovely was to spend a Sunday afternoon.

So we’re all back on track, HE is going really well, but I’ll explain more in my next post.