NotSheep

It’s been a busy few days, making up for lost time while we were sick, and trying to get back into some semblance of a routine – lost completely over the summer while I wasn’t up to running the place. As mentioned, we went out geocaching; afterwards the kids made most of sunny weather by staying at the park for as long as possible, but Louie had had enough, so I brought him home and we had a peaceful hour in the house before everyone else came back.

Tuesday night saw Jack back to Beavers (having missed the week before due to being ill). I can honestly say that I like every one of our current Beavers – sometimes you get a kid who you really wish didn’t come, but ours are all terrific right now. Some of them were quite challenging at first (I’m thinking of one in particular here, who was horrendous at the beginning – I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a second! – but he has settled well and enjoys it so much that he is cooperative and charming now!) I daresay we’ll get a few new kids over the next few weeks, and we have a few who will be moving up to Cubs shortly too. We’d a good meeting, making paper monsters which stood up (sort of), and we played games, and then at the end I chose the “most monstrous monster” – no prizes or anything, but the boy who made the most monstrous one was happy

On Wednesday morning I attempted to get everyone out to the library, but before we knew it, it was lunchtime, and then before we knew it, it was mid-afternoon, and I decided not to bother. My hospital notes finally arrived – full of inaccuracies, most of which don’t matter much but a couple of them really need corrected. They confirmed that I was indeed jabbed all over while I was unconscious in attempts to insert IVs (I knew because of all the needle-holes and bruises they left!) There’s no pathology report on the fibroid, and I’ve asked the records people to investigate that, because I was told that it was definitely sent to the pathology lab, and it’s something I do want to see. There’s very little from the consultant obstetrician – just a copy of a discharge letter to my GP (who’s never even clapped eyes on me) and a note, made after he visited me the day after the c-section, that I was an “ungrateful patient” – I suspect he expected lots of grovelling and licking of boots, whereas what he got from me was “yes, I understand why it was necessary, but it will take a while for me to get my head around it”. Reading the notes has felt like – well, a bit of an anti-climax, really. They haven’t provided any more information than I already had, and they haven’t filled in any of the bits I don’t remember. I think I was expecting some kind of closure from getting the notes, but I mostly still just feel numb.

On Thursday morning I announced that I was leaving the house for the library at 9.30 and anyone who wasn’t ready could sit in the car in their pyjamas. Strangely, everyone was ready to go when I was! Before going to the library, we stopped at a nearby churchyard to look for another geocache. We didn’t find the cache, but we did find lots of interesting headstones, many of them from the nineteenth-century: a stone put up in memory of three brothers, one of whom was buried there while the other two were buried in the US and Australia; another marking the grave of a woman in her 20s along with her three-year-old and ten-month-old children (three different dates of death), then, years later, her husband and his second wife; several headstones with the name of the family our area of town is called after; and one for a man who’d been Lord Mayor of Belfast. The oldest headstone we were able to read was for someone who died in 1801, but there were lots of others which were so worn that the words were no longer legible, and which are almost certainly older – the church itself was built in the 1180s – yes, the eleven-eighties! – around the same time as the Castle, and by the same person. Who needs books and classrooms to study history?

At the library, we returned lots of books and discovered that the grumpy librarian was on duty again, so I waited until she took her coffee break before I went up to talk to someone about two books which had been returned but were still on the computer system as being borrowed by us. Their computer system is a disaster – it regularly refuses to let me log in, it has all the boys’ records linked to mine but sometimes won’t let me see what one of them has borrowed (while letting me access the other records), the search often doesn’t find things that are in the library (or even showing up as borrowed by me!), and it regularly tells me I’ve borrowed things I’d never heard of. Last Tuesday it showed a book on Barney’s record that he’d never heard of, but didn’t list one of the books he had borrowed, and my own record was even worse, with none of the five books I’d borrowed showing up, instead listing nine copies of the same book – one I’ve never heard of…

Friday was quiet, but Saturday found me cooking up a storm – maple baked beans for dinner, served with bread and with brownies for dessert – all home-made from scratch. On Saturday morning, Barney and George and I studied geometry – planning a new table for the kitchen. We have a sort-of-breakfast-bar table-thing in the kitchen – the cupboards and counter come out into the middle of the room, with an octagonal table stuck on the end, but with a bit cut out of it to make it fit around the end of the cupboard – and the table is table-height, rather than countertop-height. It’s a very workable system, but unfortunately doesn’t fit more than four comfortably, so we end up eating in the conservatory (when it’s warm enough) or the dining-room (when it’s tidy enough) or with some of us standing up in the kitchen holding our plates. So we’re experimenting to see what the best solution would be, and I think the easiest and most effective thing to do would be to get a table or piece of countertop cut to replace the current table-top. Same fitting-around the cupboards, but bigger. It doesn’t need to be a lot bigger to increase the perimeter by quite a bit, so it won’t take up a lot more of the room, especially if, instead of adding more chairs, we add stools for people to sit on.

Hence one of our errands today was to Ikea, to investigate countertops and tabletops and stools, amongst other things. I finally succumbed and bought Toby one of their mini-Poang chairs. I had Barney, Jack and Louie with me, while George, Freddy and Toby had stayed at home with Scratchy, but we all met up for lunch and watched the planes landing and taking off as we ate – half of the restaurant walls are made of glass and overlook the runway. The original plan was for Barney to stay at home today – his choice – while Scratchy dropped me off with Jack for an appointment with a homeopath, and then for Scratchy to go to the Asian supermarket before coming back for us – but Barney was so incredibly grumpy and horrid to everyone this morning (and yesterday evening) that I decided he wasn’t to be trusted at home alone. So instead I had to take my car and find a parking-space in one of the most difficult areas of the city, and then go to the Asian supermarket myself. Meanwhile George was having meltdowns at home *sigh*. After our appointment, on the walk back to the car, Barney and Jack collected conkers, but it was the only bit of the day when Barney was at all pleasant. He was back to hormonal and grumpy by the time we got part-way around Ikea, and stayed that way all the way home. Jack listened to nothing anyone told him all afternoon, and Freddy had a tantrum because he wasn’t allowed to sit in the front seat of the car on the way home! By the time dinner came around, I was ready to send them all to bed hungry, but instead Barney was sent to his room to decide whether he wanted to spend his days at home with the rest of us or at school where we wouldn’t have to put up with him. Having decided he’d rather make the effort to treat the rest of us civilly, Barney has gone to Air Cadets this evening, while George and Freddy are at ju-jitsu. Me? I’m going to bed!