Happy June

I have completely neglected to tell you about The How of Happiness recently! How remiss of me! The last I mentioned, I was planning to spend April not overthinking negative things, and avoiding social comparisons. This, it turns out, is much the same as my normal life. The only thing I do occasionally do, which might be considered comparing myself to others, is hunting for dream homes on the internet. I know this is not a good thing. It definitely doesn’t encourage me to be content with what I have. Unfortunately this thought didn’t cross my mind until after April was over, and that task complete.

In May, I performed acts of kindness. This included making Miss 10 some cushions from some hideous zebra skin design fabric. She loves them, and even I have to admit that they do go very well in her room. When you can see them amongst all the mess.

I did feel that consciously doing kind things did make me feel happier, at least in the short term. Whether it has a long term effect, I’m not sure. I still scored a 4.5 in the happiness questionnaire  at the end of the month, so no change according to that.

This month I am Savouring Joys. This means, three times a day I make sure I slow down and appreciate the moment. I have savoured some jaffa cakes. I have spent time smelling the wonderful caramel coffee I bought last weekend. I have enjoyed a hot bubble bath. I have spent time looking at nature. Particularly this:

These have been fluttering round our garden. I have never seen a moth like this before. The wings below are totally red, and that’s the colour you notice as it flutters past. It made me imagine a vampire with a liking for a nice cerise silk lining in their cloak.

Worcester Wanderings

We had to take a car to Kwik-Fit today. We needed a couple of new tyres, so we booked it in to the Worcester branch, and thought that we would have enough time to pop in to Worcester for a spot of shopping. We did have time to shop. Nearly four hours in the end. Slo-Fit would have been a more appropriate name today.

Unexpected as it was, we had a lovely time. We discovered a new shop, Wise Owl Toys. This is a lovely toy shop. It is a brilliant example of the advantages of real shops staffed with real people as opposed to on-line shopping. Now don’t get me wrong, shopping via computer is one of the huge conveniences of modern life, but I do love actual buildings with stock you can see and touch.

We had a lovely chat with a real person, who managed to get us and all the kids playing a game together. Dobble. Now this is the sort of thing you can walk straight past on a shelf, or not even notice on a website, but get the whole family playing and it’s great fun. We bought it because it was so nice to see all the children enjoying it, and it’s a game that anyone can play and enjoy from young to old. We’ve had it out already, and played it with visiting family.

Miss 10 also had the chance to spend some of her birthday money. She wanted some make-up so we went to Superdrug. She chose some, and then had to go through the tills in two separate transactions, to take advantage of the ‘Spend £3.50 and get a free nail varnish’ offer twice. How’s that for a birthday present – make-up and lessons in how to be a savvy shopper!

Tomato Plants

I really thought I had killed off all my tomato plants. I grew them, hardened them off, and planted them outside. Then the weather turned cold and miserable and my poor tomato plants didn’t know what hit them. No more centrally heated windowsill.

However I now know that their suffering was not entirely my fault. As the weather has improved a significant difference has become apparent. This is how they look today.

Tomato plant in B&Q’s cheapest compost:

Tomato plant in Morrisons compost:

And believe me when I tell you that this plant is looking better since we fed it. That green at the top wasn’t green a few days ago.

I am hugely surprised at the difference. Especially considering that the healthier plants are in the cheaper compost! I am so glad that I planted the last few in the B&Q compost, because otherwise I’d have simply blamed the weather and had no tomatoes this year. As it is, they’re probably not far enough along for us to get any fruit this year – not unless we have an absolutely stunning summer and autumn, but I live in hope. Any home grown tomatoes this year will be picked, washed and savoured as a delicacy.

Mums Should Go Back To Work. Discuss.

So the government has said that mothers should go back to work to help the ailing economy. If every mother who wanted to was in a job, the economy would be something like ten percent bigger than it is, and that can only be a good thing. Yes?

Apparently, some of the problem of women not working after having children can be solved by encouraging them to study science and engineering and make sure they get started out in good careers. I did that. I have a physics degree. Before having children I was a software engineer. I was earning £40 an hour, so in the year before our oldest child was born I took home about seventy thousand pounds (less rather a lot of tax). Funnily enough, this has not led to me being a working mum.

I always knew I would give up work when I had children. I didn’t want to have children, and only see them for long enough to tuck them up at night. I believe that the best start you can give a child involves time. Lots of it. I was lucky enough to have a husband able and willing to support us all financially. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. (Except on a bad day, of course, when I’d have bitten off your hand for a job that meant I could sit in a nice quiet office and drink an entire cup of coffee before it got cold.)

I was a little bit depressed after the birth of my second child. That was the point at which I realised that there was absolutely no chance of getting back into a job anything like the one I had had. Once you are out of IT for more than a year or so, that seems to be it. My most likely next job seemed to be as a supermarket shelf stacker. So I started a business.

This is one of the other points the report made today. Women should be more entrepreneurial. That’s another tick for me. Science, engineering, good job pre-children, start up business. It was fun and I learnt a lot, but it never made enough for the hours to be worth it. I had a toddler who hated TV because she knew that when I put the TV on she was going to be neglected for an hour while I packed up parcels!

Going back to work has been creeping up my list of important things to do. Now that Mr 5 is at school I wouldn’t feel so bad working full time, but how? I have been retraining as an accountant, but I am in that position where all my CV demonstrates is that I have not had a ‘proper’ job for more than a decade. For the sort of jobs I am qualified for, I first have to convince them that a 38 year old will be just as good a choice as the person 20 years younger they were expecting to apply. How can I convince the bored person glancing at the 26th CV of the day that actually I would be great, despite the fact I have no recent employment to demonstrate the fact I am quite capable?

If the (very expensive, I’m sure) government report can answer that question, I would be most grateful.

Cake Decorating

Miss 11 has taken over the decorating of the cake for Miss 9′s upcoming birthday, for which I am glad, as Miss 9 wanted a Minecraft cake and Miss 11 knows far more about Minecraft than I.

We will be having an ‘official’ birthday tomorrow, as Miss 9′s actual birthday is on Monday, the first day back at school. The first day back at school is not the ideal day for celebrations.

I shall also have to find somewhere safe to keep the cake until tomorrow, because places we had thought safe from the cat, are apparently not.

A Sunny Bank Holiday

We have been out and about.

Yesterday we went to Herefordshire. The girls had been invited to a party in Hereford in the afternoon, so we decided to make a day of it. We went to church in Pembridge, and caught up with people we hadn’t seen since we left. It was nice to be back among friends we know well.

We decided to pop into the shop. Ye Olde Steppes is the Pembridge village shop. It was closed for a long while, then Mark and Gary came along and have completely transformed it. We went along to the opening in January last year, but it has been re-arranged since then, and extra space turned into a tea-room. I tell you, we would move back to Pembridge just to be near that shop! It is lovely. So lovely that they won the Best Hospitality Provider 2013 at the HEFF Diamond Awards last week. It’s very well deserved.

We went on down to the Water Gardens for a bit of lunch. It makes such a change to be able to sit out in the sunshine! We also bought a new gunnera there, although whether it will do as well here as the last one did in our old garden, I’m not sure. We have very clay soil here, so we’ll see how it grows.

Then it was off down to the leisure pool for the party. Great fun for the girls, and lots of brief hellos for me.

Today we went walking. We have started walking regularly. I bought a book a while ago called 50 Walks in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, published by the AA. In the last month we have done walks round Broadway, Cleeve Hill and Badsey. Today it was the turn of Upton Snodsbury. Upton Snodsbury – Isn’t that a glorious name for a village? We had a pleasant walk through  farmland and a bit of woodland. We also got to see Huddington Court, which was the home of a couple of Guy Fawkes’ co-conspirators. It looks like it would be a lovely place to live if it didn’t have a public footpath running right through the garden!

When you walk a walk like this you can sometimes tell where land ownership changes. There are many fields where there is a right of way running diagonally over it. Some farmers plant their crops, then drive their tractor in a line from one stile to another, so walkers have a visible path across, and know where they are allowed to walk. Other farmers don’t bother. I have to say I have no compunction about trampling crops when the crops are planted on the footpath. Particularly if efforts have been made to obscure the public footpath signs.

We are hoping that the kids will speed up on these walks soon. We average less than two miles an hour, which seems awfully slow. It’s slower than we walk every day on the school run, so I’m not quite sure how we manage to dawdle so much! As a fitness regime, I’m sure it would be hugely beneficial to up the pace a little bit. It’s only been four weeks, so perhaps once the kids are a bit more used to it, we’ll get a bit quicker and be able to go a bit further! We broke the 5 mile barrier today (But don’t tell the kids – we’re under instructions to only do the short walks).

Magic, Imaginary, Invisible Things

Mr 5 has been banned from the computer. This has led to a strange side effect.

He has an imaginary keyboard.

He enjoys getting other people to play on his imaginary keyboard, although as far as I know, he is sensible enough to restrict this generous offer to those within the family.

He spent an entire trip to school trying to get Miss 9 to play his keyboard. Once she had been dropped off, he became unaccountably upset. It took me a while to figure out that it was because Miss 9 had walked off with his Magic Invisible Keyboard, and wouldn’t know how to turn it off because it doesn’t have an off button.

OK.

‘And I won’t be able to play it, because I didn’t make two!’

I suggested he make another straight away, then.

This became his imaginary laptop. He spent the rest of time before the key stage 1 base opened trying to get me to play imaginary Sims. I could be a vampire or a ghost sim. I chose to be a vampire. He then regaled me with advice about biting. Only bite people you like, because it’s not good making people you don’t like live forever. Oh, and never bite a ghost, because then you’d have an undead dead person, and that just wouldn’t be right, would it?

I hope I didn’t accidentally walk home with his Magic, Imaginary, Invisible Laptop.