Sarah – Page 73

Sarah November 16, 2012

Red….is for rage..

Red is one of those winter colours that makes you feel warm and cozy which is funny as it is so often referred to as the colour associated with anger. This week has been a funny week of little irritations that build up and up like a pressure cooker until it there is usually an explosion and some innocent bystander gets the full force! (usually that would be the dog! send treats!)

My top ten annoying things from this week – its a red day rant..

1. Dog Poo!! yes I am a dog owner but I always PICK IT UP! There is little else that will send me into more of a rage than people that don’t pick up their dog’s c*ap. Someone this week let their dog poo right outside our driveway on the pavement. If i see them i may hurl a wheelie bin at them.

2. Students who get OFF their bus and look straight down at their phones while walking! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! you dont have eyes in the top of your head! LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING!

3. Teachers who cheerfully tell their kids that ‘pyjama’ day will mean that their mums will have much less work to do on a school morning because they wont have to get dressed!…they might have liked to be in my house this morning is all im saying.

4. Cyclists who cycle on the pavements when there is a cycle lane and no, there was no cars parked in it. This ADULT was on the pavement and narrowly missed my 3 yr old who was on her scooter. I yelled at him…he was probably plugged into an ipod!

5. Toddlers who have tantrums and stand still when everyone else is carrying on walking. Its not smart and i think she learnt her lesson by scaring herself when she couldnt see us. Heart stopping moment for me though and eternally grateful to the lovely mum who looked after her.

6. Big toddlers who wake up smaller toddlers by yelling “IVE DONE A POO!” at the top of their voice from the bathroom. It’s all glamour.

7. Drivers who run red lights. Punch them hard. That is all.

8. The dog thinking that discreetly grabbing the cellotape from the table when i was wrapping a present was a FINE game. I mean, AS IF i need someone else in this house moving things from where i had put them down. One more moment when i feel like im loosing my mind!

9. The smallest toddler in our house has a thing about doors and keys..this week she has lost the backdoor keys, locked us in, locked us out. Smiled and chirped ‘i dunno mammy’ when i manically ask her ‘where ARE the back door keys??.’ This week i found in a random little bag, our house phone, my video camera, some keys and a few hair bobbles. SAVE ME..I live with squirrals!

10. My dodgy computer table which to be fair cost about 2p and is the cheapest, horrible wood effect nonsense..but it keeps dropping bits of screws, ball bearings, bits of metal. Now the keyboard table is at a jaunty 45degree angle. pffftttt.

and to finish off..today we were not able to leave the house because of a delivery…..i LOVE those sort of deliveries don’t you. The kind that you have a funny feeling you will go to the loo and by the time you have washed your hands there will be a ‘we tried to deliver something but you weren’t in” gloating at you from the doormat. So thinking on my red theme for today, i got hold of my camera and macro lens and went searching for some inspiration around the house..its hard to find inspiration in something you see every day. But i had a go….

Tomorrow is World prematurity day. Im celebrating by working tonight looking after our smallest miracle babies. Have a think tomorrow about all those wee ones that were born too soon.

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Sarah November 15, 2012

yellow days

My son is 10 now, which means that for the past 8 years we have had toddlers and pre-schoolers in this house. Yep. I might need some sort of certificate. 🙂

Like probably loads of mums to the under 5’s that little oasis of calm in the middle of the day when your babies (generally) go down for a nap is something you might guard with the snarly madness of a rottweiler. That time for me is ..making tea time, doing washing, tidying…and then maybe a cuppa before the inevitable school run crazy hour.

Thing is generally your pre-schooler is going to drop that sleep long before they start school so that period of time in the day after lunch before school can stretch out before you like a line of peppa pig characters. I have for the most part of the 8 years had an older toddler and a younger one. The younger one needs the sleep, the older one doesn’t. So we are often times confined to the house. Which is good for getting jobs done but not so great when you are a lively 3 year old who looks blankly at you when you say in your best cbeebies voice ” HEY you want to help me sort some socks!!!” IT will be SUCH fun!.

So what do we do? Walk that fine line between allowing the one eyed nanny take over the entertainment so you can get some stuff done or give over the whole afternoon to building track, play dough and crawling around on your knees pretending to be a dog.

Lately I have started to try and plan these times..not all the time but when i can. This time can be so often just be the same, for me, the toddler. They are yellow days when things merge into others, days fly past and my little ones can just be passengers on the journey that revolves around my older kids. I have started doing regular baking with my pre-schooler. To break up these yellow days when it is so easy to let the afternoon gallop by and Im aware that as one of 5 she gets little time by herself and this opportunity will disappear in September when she starts school.

This week we had lots of lemons, they were on offer in Aldi..so when life gives you lemons…well we made biscuits!! Seems appropriate on my autumnal theme week that we go with lemons. They turned out to be pretty yummy too!!

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Sarah November 13, 2012

Orange…

The other morning there was this weird orangey light. It was like the whole of outside had an instagram filter applied to it. It made me want to blink hard to try and re-configure the light, it didn’t seem right. I remember years ago when there was a massive dust storm somewhere in central Europe ( im a bit sketchy on the details!) but where we were living at the time in the south east of the UK..there was a light covering of red dust on everything and the colours around at that time reflected it. It was bizarre, like being inside one of those seaside sand shakers.

It was a nice light this morning of orange..but it felt odd…my eyes frantically sending messages to my brain along the lines of ‘the sky is supposed to be blue, this is ALL wrong!’ Our brain has its colour pallet and when things don’t quite fit into that it sort of goes into a mad scramble to sort it all out and make sense of it. The sky should be blue, the grass should be green, that fence should be brown etc etc….

I like the colour orange, its such a cheerful colour and so fantastic at autumn time, so many different types of orange just in the trees…but when the light gets involved too….

Its a little bit special…you just have to tell your eyes to go with it….

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Sarah November 12, 2012

Facebook…

I used to be a real fan of facebook. Really..i was.

I remember first being told about it by a friend and he was explaining how his sister in America used it a lot and it was this new big thing. I remember logging on (on dial up..which takes some patience!) and not being able to understand why it would ever be useful. I think i logged on, got an account and then promptly forgot about it…

Then dawned the age of the iphone and for me this opened up a whole world of possible surfing opportunities and in a moment of mild interest i loaded the facebook app from itunes and then facebook became part of my daily catching up, finding friends from years ago, seeing kids grow up and change, finding out news and of course that delightful past time of rolling your eyes at how wonderful everybody’s day, holiday, family, car, weekend etc are…yeah yeah don’t go on there after you have had a wet week camping in Devon you are going to depress the C**P out of yourself flicking through the 200 pictures posted by someone you vaguely know of all their inclusive, sun soaked, smiley, happy, sangria holiday. 😉

Anyhoo…Recently i added a business type page for my photography and it has been amazing for referrals and a quick way of communicating with my clients.

Then things started to change and i heard scary stories about photos loaded to FB being the property of FB, entire pages just disappearing without a mention. More recently there seems to be much more control over what you actually see in your news feed. The OH and i have had many conversations along the lines of..

‘hey did you see X’s photos of his kids?’ –

‘er…no’ and then i discover that, that person’s updates are not featuring in my newsfeed AT ALL despite being a friend of mine and you know a proper friend not someone who you vaguely know. 😉

This has been happening more and more. I see less of actual updates and more and more of company promotion.

Now it appears that if FB think you are newsworthy enough then you will feature in newsfeeds……nice… so companies that rely on reaching their clients via fb are now finding that they are only reaching (in some cases) as little as 10% of their followers because fb is not deeming their news worthy enough to go into all their followers newsfeed.

The newest development? The option to ‘promote’ your posts which means that you can pay for your posts to be in other people’s newsfeeds. Click on it and facebook will cheerfully ask you for your paypal details and off you go. *shakes head* you would think that promoted posts would only be from people that you are friends with or pages you like. Not so…i keep getting promoted posts from facebook accounts that i have never had anything to do with..

I remember reading something about Mark Zuckerberg saying facebook would always be free…hmmmm..guess that changes when you have shareholders to satisfy now eh?

twitter anyone?

🙂

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Sarah November 11, 2012

a long walk in the sand….

We took a trip recently to Hilbury island. Its an Island off the coast of the wirral that at certain times of the day the tide goes out far enough to walk to.

My OH has been keen to walk all the way out to the main island but we have never made it. There are a succession of points you have to pass first, middle eye..

then we walked to middle eye…it was quite a way and we had to navigate a lot of wet sand and rock..

we made it to middle eye and discovered a little beach (within a beach) and some cool caves and rocks…as it was getting late we decided that going on to the island itself wasn’t a great idea. But the kids didn’t seem to mind!!