I’ve been on the virtual tour for Dilbert’s Ultimate House (DUH) and have to say that it’s pretty nifty. Wouldn’t mind living there at all. Can’t see a price tag anywhere on it though, unfortunately.

In other housey news, our extension might actually be built within the next year! More updates as we have them…

Can someone tell me why parliament are able to rush through a ban on fox hunting within 3 months, yet are unable to bring in a smoking ban sooner than 4 years?!

Sorry for being a bit quiet on the blogging front. We’ve all gone down with Hand, Foot & Mouth (no, not the same as the cattle Foot & Mouth!!) so we’re functioning very much on a minute by minute basis during the day.

Apparently, it’s rare for adults to be affected, so of course, I seem to have come down with it worst in the family. I avoided most of the childhood illnesses except measles in my first year of Secondary school, as a result I’m getting them all as an adult. Even so, I seem to have got off lightly – at the moment it just feels like a very heavy cold plus a load of cold sores in my mouth. Akra Jr so far only has ONE spot (and has done for the last 48 hours, so I’m hoping that’s his lot) and Li’l Bhaji has just been a bit clingy and needing night feeds again. None of us have a temperature.

The only main problem with being ill but not that ill is that everything tends to be put on hold. Akra Jr hasn’t gone to nursery yesterday or today (although he’ll probably go back tomorrow as the nursery aren’t fussed as long as he feels well enough in himself – after all, he’d have infected everyone last week anyway) but is still well enough to want full entertaining. Entertaining which usually needs to be done with a baby in my arms at the same time. As a result, I’m now behind in my copywriting work (still well within deadline, but the time left to do it is rapidly diminishing) and I think the NaNoWriMo novel isn’t going to make it this year. I reached 20,000+ words, but am now far enough behind that with my other commitments at the moment is just too far to warrant the stress involved to catch back up again. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Just a quick entry, because I’m knackered.

Li’l Bhaji had his naming ceremony today and it went very well indeed. It was nice and relaxed, the attending children seemed to have a great time and were impeccably behaved, and we got to chat to some people we haven’t seen for a while.

Photos impending… we left disposable cameras on the tables so people could help us with our album. Most of the kids appropriated them though, so we could have some interesting photography there. Hopefully at least 1 or 2 nice snaps out of the 270!!

Apparently, I’m in the demographic that all the politicians want to target at the moment – I’m a mother of pre-school children.

At the moment, all parties seem to be falling over themselves to woo me with promises on a variation on a theme of cheap affordable childcare. Um, but I’m a stay-at-home mother – what about us? Do we get any financial incentives please?

Okay, so maybe I’m just being a little selfish, or am I? I really do think the politicians are missing the boat here. In most of my mum-to-mum conversations, an awful lot of people aren’t saying, “oh I wish there was cheaper childcare around here”. Well, they are, but primarily they’re saying something else: “I wish I could afford not to go back to work”, “I wish I could afford to cut down my hours so I could spend more time with my kids”, “I wish that I didn’t get up before my kids were awake and get back home when they were already asleep”. Damnit, people don’t want *more* childcare – they want to be able to need less of it!

I am 150% behind ANY mother who wants to go back to their career and don’t begrudge any incentives to help them achieve that goal, but I do wish there were ways to help those parents (mums or dads) who want to do the opposite too. The politicians have missed the point. They should be looking at why high house prices mean that more and more families can’t survive on one income anymore. They should be looking at ways of helping mums and dads cut down their hours if they want to, especially looking at the culture where it’s acceptable for mums to need to take time off for childcare reasons, but still expect its dads to not return home until after the kids’ bedtime. They should be realising that a child doesn’t stop needing its parents once they reach a year or even four years old – teenagers need parental time too. Can’t they come up with something slightly more imaginative?

Okay, can someone tell me what this is and what it’s good for?!

We have a small epidemic of them here at the moment – for every one we squish another ten rise up to take its place. If you’ll excuse the very bad pun, it’s bugging me… (*boom* *boom* *tish*)

Right, well we have been to a second school to compare the first to, and I think we’ve just ended up even more confused. So I shall do a breakdown of pros and cons and see if I come up with any insights in the process:

School A

Pros

• Within walking distance of home

• Modern purpose built building
• Young, enthusiastic teachers who are prepared to think outside the box.
• Extremely good reputation – excellent Ofsted
• Technologically strong in terms of equipment, knowledge and making full use of everything.
• Kids seemed to be interested in the activities and seemed very confident.
• Highly recommended by many parents with kids there.

Cons

• classrooms are open plan so noise carries – could be distracting?

• lot of teachers on maternity leave at the moment, high turnover?
• hard to get into – even being in the catchment area doesn’t guarantee a place
• Potential of using technology too often just for the sake of it?
• No hot meals available – packed lunches only.

School B

Pros

• Building better planned and individual classrooms

• More mature, experienced teachers
• New headmistress seems to be doing a lot for the school
• More traditional learning
• Can have a hot school dinner if he wants to.
• Kids seemed polite.
• Recommended by a friend of mine whose eldest goes there.

Cons

• would be a car journey to get there.

• school only just come out of special measures
• seem less inclined to try new initiatives
• headmistress came across as a little insincere to me.
• Kids also seemed a little subdued.

Can’t we just create a new school half way combining all the pros of each?! Going to visit another on Friday so I’ll probably be in an even greater dilemma by then.

I’ve kept very quiet on how NaNoWriMo is going this year, so I thought I’d give you a quick update.

I bet you thought I’d given up, didn’t you? Well…. WRONG! I’m currently at:

16,258 / 50,000 (32.5%)

The first week was hell. I have to confess I was THIS close to giving up. My writing was dire, I was yawning the plot was so uninteresting, I was bored with the whole project. Sylvia FORCED me to carry on…

… this week I don’t think I’ve spent more than 1hr 15mins reaching my 2000 word target (in 15 min bursts throughout the day), I’ve finally found a plot AND a sub plot! Okay, it’s still crap, but the very important thing is that it’s MY crap!

Let’s hope I can keep up the pace…

Well, I’ve finally upgraded to MT 3.121 and also upgraded the MT-Blacklist (well, when I say that I’ve done it… in fact it was Akra that did all the hard work!) You may now find that if you comment on a post older than 14 days that you won’t see your comment straight away – it now has to be approved by me (but recent entries you will still see your comment straight away).

Apologies if that makes your life harder, but I’m getting swamped with spam comments these days.

As always, if anything has got broken in the process, please let me know or email me: Pewari [at] may [dot] be and I’ll try and get it unbroken as soon as humanly possible.

Li’l Bhaji’s first taste of baby rice (okay, most of it went over his face rather than in his tummy, but I think most of babies’ food is absorbed through the skin anyway). This week baby rice, next week curry ;)