light at the end of the tunnel…

If you are like me then sometimes the winters seem really long and bleak and dreary. The thing with our winters here is that they are so…well…grey.

It is not often that we get the sunshine and blue skies with the low temperatures that frequent the alpine regions in Europe. Which is a real shame…

We get lots of long, grey d-r-i-z-z-l-e. I know that folk love the cuddling up under the blankets and watching a movie..but really there is only so long that, that is attractive and actually the longing for the sun..the warmth..gets to be a somewhat of a yearning.

Sometimes you only realise how much you need it when you feel the sun on your face, like your very soul is waking up and you suddenly feel like crying with relief. The light is coming back…its not so dark, not so cold and there is less of the huge struggle to get everyone dressed like a eskimo to actually step outside the door. I miss the sun. I love the sun.

I love snow, really i do….but i love it when combined with blue sky mountain days, ski lifts, big warm jacuzzis for apres ski and the sun. I love it with the sun. Which i guess is only possible when you are high up in the mountains. Here it is slush and the school run. Absolutely no fun!

So that light at the end of the tunnel. I think this week it got a bit closer 🙂

My giveaway this week is from one of my favourite shops..the shop you can smell from down the street! A gift box from the fabulous Lush handmade cosmetics. A little bit of sunshine in a box. Simple to enter just follow the rafflecopters!

Check back next week for the results.

Last weeks winner was Hannah Deane! Congratulations.

themondayclub Motivational Monday

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we are the dancers..

well Im not..but maybe like to think i am but i have girls so there is much dancing in our house..the boys get involved too!

Both my older girls dance at the same balletschool. One of them recently had a bit of an issue with going to a lesson which resulted in a nearly half hour stand off between said daughter and me about whether or not she would go into the class. Has to be said this was..outside, in the cold and there were 4 other kids slowly getting cheesed off. I tried every thing possible to convince her to go back in but she wouldn’t have it and in the end, to cut along and gory story short, I told her that we weren’t going to freeze waiting for her to decide what she wanted to do and that she had to come home with me, as she had missed most of the lesson anyway and then she would be going to apologise to her teacher at the next lesson.

At the next lesson, after my daughter had gone happily in. The ballet teacher grabbed my OH and told him that our daughter was very talented at ballet and had exactly the right kind of personality for it!!

er…excuse me? so the right personality for ballet is to be obstinate and stubborn? hmmmmm….really?

She obviously felt so strongly about it that she repeated it to me next time i dropped the girls off and also added ‘its important not to squash these strong characters!’

to which i responded… ‘yes i totally agree with you..but parenting those strong characters is no picnic!’

She gave me a wry smile…im thinking she may have, herself, fit into that category. 😉

 

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under pressure…

My daughter has a ballet exam today, maybe just as you are reading this and tonight while she was going to bed there was some definate nerves going on. She was being that jumpy, silly, almost naughty way they act when underneath its all nerves and anxiety.

“you are going to be great” we re-assured her over and over again. Along with lots of ‘just do your best and thats all that matters’ type comments that we know we have to say to our kids so that they don’t feel like they are failing or not doing well.

Thing is..i know that her ballet teacher pushes them and probably does openly praise the kids in the class who get the dance right straight away or have the best pointy toes (or whatever). So there is a bit of tension i would imagine in the mind of a small child when their parents are saying in a floaty fashion ‘just do your best, we will be proud of you, whatever you do’ and then they are hearing their ballet teacher wondering out loud in a ballet lesson ‘SO who will get a distinction and do me proud then girls?’

Im never sure where to pitch it when it comes to this sort of dilemma. I read an article at work today about Louis Smith (the olympic gymnast) and he was saying that his hero was his mum. awwww. Now im guessing as the mother to a young guy who eventually went on to be part of the olympic team and then a medallist..you must have to do a fair amount of pushing…and yes, applying a bit of pressure to do well. Otherwise how to they make it? Is that just the job of the coach or do we, as parents, wade in and start applying the ‘thumb screws’ too, so to speak?

Im not sure. what do you think?

(btw, for the record I have never actually heard the ballet teacher say those words) 😉

 

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to pay or not to pay…

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma.

Did you hear the news that certain large retailing chains are using “legal’ and sophisticated accounting routes around paying what could be deemed as their fair share of tax in this country. The likes of Starbucks and Amazon spring to mind.

I have listened to couple of arguments on this and the pro-tax dodge folk seem to say something along the lines of ‘it is legal, its the governments fault for allowing the loop holes to exist’

hmmm… so they are not breaking the law, no they are working inside the law but does that make it okay?

Its like when kids try and walk UP the slide. It might be the quickest route to the top but the fair and proper route is the steps. I guess the folk that have made Starbucks and Amazon the mega retailers have not done it by going up the steps. 😉

My dilemma now is whether or not i give any of my TAXED income to their tills. In the case of Starbucks it wont be hard to resist. Im not a big coffee shop type person…well unless i am ‘sans enfants’..which is um….never. Also, incredibly, where i live there isnt a Starbucks on every. single. street. Costa sort of rules the roost over this way..i wonder if they pay their taxes? 🙂

But Amazon? That is going to be harder. Its just so easy and their delivery options are generally pretty reliable…yadda yadda..BUT I sort of feel like if a company is going to be part of  a society then they should contribute to that society.

Just sort of makes sense to me.

Anybody else?

 

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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?

🙂

one week

themondayclub

 

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