T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I’ve been tagged for this one by Jax at Making it Up .

Rules:
Please post the rules
Answer the questions in as much or as little detail as suits you
Leave a comment on mother.wife.me so we can keep track of the meme
Tag 3 people and link to them on your blog
Let them know you tagged them
Tweet loudly about taking part (well ok, that isn’t a rule, but how about if we start a hashtag – #amothersworkmeme)

1. Did you work before becoming a mum?
Yes.  I left school and did temping work (mainly answering phones) for a while before briefly joining the WRNS.  Dodgy knees cut short that career but I think, in the long run, a military career wouldn’t have been right for me anyway.  After that I worked first in a hospital lab and then for ICI/Zeneca in their labs doing nothing very exciting but being paid well to do it.  I was surplus to requirements when they merged with Astra and, with perfect timing, my redundancy came just as I fell pregnant with Aprilia.

2. What is your current situation?
Currently I wear several hats, some of which pay me, most of which reward me far more richly.

I clean for arround 14 hours a week in a local play barn and gym.  It’s mindless work but it pays the food bill and for such luxuries as horse riding for Aprilia and a few outings here and there.

I also do a bit of paid work for the Red Cross, alongside the volentary work I do with them.  Mainly this involves sitting either in the front seat of an ambulance or the ready room of the medical centre at Oulton Park.  Very occaisionally it involves me treating someone who is ill or injured.  There is a funny sort of camaraderie that develops with that sort of “job” though.  I suppose when you can be supping tea one moment and dealing with a very poorly person (and their reletives) the next it does something to how you look at people and at life.  I trust most of these friends absolutely, have shared hotel rooms with some of them without ever worrying about what may happen, three of them are Aprilia’s Godparents, two named as guardians for her if she still needs care after my death.

I’ve also dabbled in self employment a couple of times but nothing has really worked out.  I’ve given it my best shot though and got a lot out of both ventures.  The nappy business eased our transition from double to single income nicely and gave me a lovely sewing machine, overlocker and (very under used) embroidery machine.  The massage business is temporarily on hold as no one really has the money for that sort of thing just now but the equipment isn’t going to expire any time soon and the skills I learned have been so useful for treating Aprilia’s sore, stiff muscles so I consider it successful.  Duke keeps trying to find some craft related self employment for me to do but the thoughts of spending my weekends at craft fairs peddling bits of stuff that have taken me all my evenings to knock out dampen my enthusiasm somewhat.  I may try flogging hand spun yarn to reenactors if I ever get any good at it though!

Mostly though, I’m Mum.  I don’t really count Child Benefit as a wage but I suppose it is part payment for my attempts at raising a half decent child!  She’s rewarding in so many ways though and I wouldn’t swap my time at home with her for the best paid job in the world.  You just cannot buy the feeling you get from watching your baby grow into a young woman before your eyes.

Oh, and I’m a Guider for Rainbows and Brownies (no, we don’t get paid, unless you count the smiles and satisfaction from watching little girls blossom and grow).

3. Freestyle

Really not sure what to add here!  I do feel that there should be more support and encouragement for families to work differently than there is now.  I know that there are going to be changes to tax credits but really, that’s just plastering over the cracks of a broken system.  Whilst people are forced into jobs that pay so badly that the state needs to top up that wage to quite a huge degree then something is really not working.  Reducing that need to top up would reduce the cost of running the country hugely which would in turn mean that there could be a much much reduced tax burden on us all.  And it would free up money to support people who really desperately need support.  Ideally, I’d like to see the payments that are made available to parents to pay for childminders made available to mothers to mind their own children.  I know, it’s not going to happen, but hey, I can dream can’t I?

So, tagging then.   Hmmm you know, I hate doing this bit.  I’m going to break the rules.  I do that a lot you know, I’m totally incapable of following instructions properly (as anyone who has ever tried to get me to follow a recipe or a knitting pattern will know!) so, well, TAG YOURSELF IF YOU WANT TO PLAY!  Okay?  Come on, 3 willing victims, sorry, I mean volenteers……

I’ve had a spammer telling me how my blog looks like an explosion in a crayola factory and how it would be so much nicer without the random colour everywhere making things difficult to read. Well, at least I laughed before I hit delete!

Having spent most of today making one final attempt at the essay, I really have to conclude that I took this course for all the wrong reasons and it really is not the one for me. Frustratingly, as I’ve soldiered on for over half of it, I won’t get any funding back to count towards another attempt at honours but then, I can say I have a Humanities with Literature degree and really, that’s enough so I may not bother with honours at all. If I do then I’ll just have to be like a real student and take out a loan won’t I.

Am going to celebrate by listening to the first random audio book my mouse pointer lands on and then I’m going to actually sit and enjoy literature again instead of trying to spot the veiled innuendo and hidden sub plots. And you know what? I’m even going to listen to the books for this course and ENJOY them instead of studying them.

Yesterday Aprilia and I went to a spinning class.  I am tempted to make some inane joke here about spinning and aerobic exercise etc but you all know I’m not talking about that sort of spinning class don’t you?  Yes, I thought you did…..

Anyway.  I got spindles for the pair of us the other week from a lovely little on line shop as I wanted to be sure that we had ones without modern styling and so on as that way we would be learning on equipment that would be as close as possible to Tudor stuff so as to make it easier if we do end up doing the wool shed at Kentwell.  As it happened, the ones that the tutor had ordered for everyone were also traditionally styled and were smaller than ours and came with 2 huge balls of carded wool at a cost less than I can find just the wool on line so I got those as well.  So now we have spares which is handy if you want to do plyed yarn.

The class was really good, we all sort of got the hang of drop spindle spinning although Aprilia did find it a bit of a challenge and we all had a go on a travelling spinning wheel like this one but with only 1 pedal not two.  I was pretty dire at this but still managed to produce some yarn, Aprilia was rather good at it and made some lovely thin, even ply that the tutor was impressed with.  So guess who now wants a wheel….. u-huh?  that’s SO not happening!!!

By the end of the day I had filled one spindle with Jacobs wool which was a lovely grey/brown colour and one with a creamy merino.  Feeling rather brave, I “plyed” the two together (spin both balls onto a single spindle which you twist the oposite way from the way you spin initially so that they twist together) and ended up with a small ball of two coloured yarn of which I was riduculously proud.

Obviously Ihad to knit it as soon as I got home really didn’t I?  It’s a bit “slubby” (cough) but was rather lovely to work with and has given me the bottom corner of what will be a very thick and warm shawl if I don’t learn to spin more evening and thinly soon!  I may just need a few more big balls of fleece to make anything capable of keeping anything bigger than a doll warm but still, here it is, scuse me whilst I bask in a riduculous degree of pride!

Here’s my lovely (centre pull) ball

Did I mention that it was just a bit slubby?  well, okay, so a lot slubby, in fact there may be a few bits that weren’t spun at all hiding in there….

A very warm shawl for a very small doll!

What you can’t see is how soft it is…… you will have to take my word for it because it’s the squashyest snuggliest pure wool I’ve ever had in my hands!

yesterday Aprilia and I went out for a lovely lunch with the ladies from Slimming World. We were out for over 3 hours, giggling, eating and chatting. It was so lovely just to be social and relaxed. Aprilia adores the ladies there and they all seem rather fond of her too, she had such a good time.

With apologies for two whining posts on the trot (good post promised soon honest)

A few weeks ago we went back to the paeds at Leighton. I had specifically said I needed to speak to the same person we saw last time as I needed to progress stuff that I’d discussed with her last time. I was assured that she was available that day. She wasn’t. Instead we saw a very lovely registrar who was very compassionate, listened politely, didn’t give any indication that he thought I was being a total psycho mother etc but couldn’t actually do anything useful for us.

I needed assurances that, having had all the preliminary tests done as required, that the referral to GOSH for auditory processing disorder was going to be progressed. He couldn’t do that because he didn’t have the authority. Instead he has referred us to Alder Hey audiology dept who will almost certainly do all the same tests that the local audiology dept did. They can’t do the assessments we need though, unless they have changed what they can do since I last contacted them. So then we will need to wait for them to refer us on to the people who can (at GOSH)

I needed the paed to discuss with me if she was happy to write a useful supporting document for Aprilia’s DLA claim. Several phonecalls later I now have a message from her secretary saying Paed is happy for her name to be on the form but no indication of if she will support me or write a load of stuff that will kill this claim as dead as the last one (which was based on a community paed report which said that there’s nothing wrong with Aprilia that school won’t cure)

I needed some suggestions for different medication that will control Aprilia’s pain better. She’s starting to develop problems with the large doses of ibuprofen she needs and I don’t want to add to her gastric difficulties if there is something else she can take. She can’t increase her paracetamol intake for another 12 months and quite honestly, an adult of her size wouldn’t find the paed dose of paracetamol effective and neither does she. The registrar’s chaperone looked in the BNF to confirm that I’m right about dose restrictions for children but neither of them offered any constructive suggestions at all.

He asked what our OT had said about adaptations to make daily living easier for her, I said that we had never seen an OT and was this something he could organise? He didn’t know.

So, I went to see our lovely new GP who agreed that pain management was important and said she would refer Aprilia to Professor Berisford at Alder Hey. He is the local expert on Hypermobility Syndrome and is, aparently, a great bloke. She also said she would see if we could access hydrotherapy at the local special school as a good option for pain management. Oh, and she gave us presriptions for over a month’s worth of her current meds in one go unlike old GP who used to give her enough for 4 or 5 days and only issue 2 scripts a month. Yesterday I got a letter from Alder Hey saying we have an appointment with a rheumatologist who specialises in connective tissue disorders. Now, HMS is, at root, a connective tissue disorder, it’s a fault in the collagen, but I’m just frustrated that she’s not being sent to the person the GP specified and who is the expert on Aprilia’s specific condition.

And I know I’m being petty and pouty about it all. In the grand scheme of things we have little to worry about really but I am just so tired of constantly dealing with it all. Some days I wish she was in school so that I could have a break even though I know how much more difficult it would be for her there, having spoken to other mums of HMS kids, they are off school regularly with fatigue or injuries all the time but at least I’d get a few days to do stuff like essays instead of trying to work with someone coming in every 10 minutes needing something.

Whinge!

Today I sneaked a bit of education in under the wire thanks to Horrible Histories.  I do like that format!  I have been vaguely aware for a while now that Aprilia is more and more capable of finding stuff for herself on the Web which is fab, I’m all for autonomy you know!  However, the downside of that is that now she is more than capable of stumbling into things I’d rather she didn’t.  So, a little internet safety chat was in order.

We began with the “never trust anyone who says you have won a contest you never entered” chat with help from Lady Jane Gray.  Then we moved on to keeping your personal data private and making sure that your friends don’t land you in hot water by broadcasting stuff on social networks that you don’t want the world to know thanks to Guy Fawkes.  Then, on the theme of being careful on social networking sites we moved on to thinking before posting up photos and videos with a bit of help from a Saxon Monk and also touched on being careful about posting up photos of children too.  Then, just because it’s there and I thought I may as well rather than because I think she’s likely to fall onto adult rated sites, we covered not going on 18 and over sites because they are likely to have stuff on them that you aren’t going to like thanks to a Prudish Victorian.  This led onto discussing the fact that some people like taking their clothes off and having photos taken and posted up on the web which she found really rather odd

And then, for some light relief, we watched several other Horrible History videos, wandered onto YouTube and watched a few Adam and the Ants ones and then logged off!

Whilst accepting that I always wobble and wail my way through my OU courses, declaring at times that it’s impossible etc, this year I really am struggling more than ever. I am seriously considering walking away. I have my degree, Honours would be nice but really, I’ve proved my point, I have been able to do my degree and thus, if she wanted to, Aprilia could also do hers this way too.

Part of the course is presented as audio interviews with loads of odd background noises that make them quite difficult to concentrate on – I know I rely heavily on audio materials to learn but books read to CD are normally done in a nice quiet space with no rumblings and whatnot in the background to obscure the voices. I’m not the only person complaining about that, it’s the same for everyone but it makes it hard to concentrate for butterfly brains like me.

One of the major text books for the course wasn’t provided to me as audio until last month, that’s half way into the course. That means that I spend days and days ripping apart a book that I couldn’t read as it was a fully justified, close packed text in a small, serif font just so taht I could scan it one page at a time, run it through OCR software and convert it to a font and layout that I can access for more than 5 minutes at a time without getting a blazing headache and visual distortions that make me dizzy. This is time that I could have been using for oh so many other much better things.

My current essay is all about symbolism and imagery and quite frankly, I don’t get it. If a writer describes some bloke showing off with a sword, that’s what he meant as far as I can see. He didn’t mean that the bloke was using the sword as a willy substitute to catch the eye of the lady he is trying to woo. The next essay is all Freud (or is it Fraud, I’m never sure….) and more erotic nonsense read into perfectly good stories and I’m not sure I can face writing that either.

I took this course on a knee jerk. I needed 1 more course, I needed one that wasn’t going to cost me a fortune in books as Duke was out of work at that point and I couldn’t risk taking a year out as university funding is in a total mess now and no one knows if grants (NOT loans!) are going to be available to cover course fees under the new fee structure which would take the cost of the courses from £700 to over £2k. As all 19th C literature is in the public domain, I knew that I could therefore download all the books for free and save myself all the money. This has been a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, the books that I’ve managed to read have all been great, I do love a lot of the books from that time, but studying them on this course is not great. Not even a bit. I’m just not sure it’s fair on anyone to have me spending hours every week when I should be educating my child chasing her away so that I can try to play catch up.

I’ve got a telephone tutorial booked for next week and the tutor has told me to put the books away until that point (and given me a week’s extension on my essay) but really, if it were you, what would you do?

The other day Aprilia was looking for something in my bedside cabinet and came across a box of little gold and black foil packets… Somewhat intrigued she asked what they were and I braced myself to explain about condoms. I’d barely started when she said “oh, you mean sonkies, why didn’t you say so” Thank you Terry Pratchett!!!!

As an aside, whilst looking for a link to the word sonkies, I found a website that made me howl laughing….. someone in the US is selling soft (fleece) hankies under the name Sonkies and even offers suggestions on how to introduce them to your child including advice like “When you introduce the Sonkie^® to your child, it’s helpful to keep your tone light and silly…you will inspire joy and encourage independence.”  Nope, sorry, I’ve never had a nose wiping rag that could inspire joy or independence and somehow I suspect that a microfleece one wouldn’t either!

As part of my promise to myself this year is to reduce my fabric stash, and because I had enough linen left over from making my skirt to make them, I have started on the coifs I will need if we do Kentwell next year.  This will give me a few less items to fret over this time next year and also means that I won’t have a bit of linen hanging round that’s not quite big enough to make clothing out of but certainly too big to throw away!

I did a prototype in cheap cotton with the intention that I could use it to keep my hair clean when we were painting at work.  I’m one of those people who, no matter how hard I try, always end up painty so keeping my curls out of harms way was an important consideration.  There are a few different patterns knocking about on the web but all of them have no sizing etc included and thus expect you to do that pattern scaling up thing that people who are good at sewing probably do in seconds and mere mortals like me get all stressed over.  I eventually decided taht the easiest way would be to download the  image off The Tudor Costume Page’s Coif instructions and play with the printer.  I printed it as a “poster” over 4 pages, stuck it together, cut it out and “tried it on”  It was a little big but it gave me a good start point.  I used the red line that she marks as the stitching line as a guide to trim it down a bit, chopped about a cm off either end and that was then okay-ish so I made my brim from that and sewed the two pieces up along the outer edge (leaving the ends open and the bit where the centre piece fits in unstitched).  It was at this point that I realised that the picture on the site isn’t actually a proper mirror image so I have a wonky brim.  No matter, I corrected that on my paper pattern (well, duh, that will teach me not to fold a pattern in half and check before I cut won’t it!) and decided that, for this prototype a bit of wonkiness wouldn’t matter.  I needed to make a fairly big seam at the back so that it was a snug fit at the nape of my neck and then I moved onto working out what to do for the centre.

Now, the lady at the Tudor Costume Page was a little vague on this bit.  She used her biggest cook pot to draw round but didn’t say how big her pot was leaving me with not much idea of how big it needed to be….. I used my stock pot and discovered that, after tacking it into the brim, I obviously have bigger cookware than she does!!!!  Moving swiftly on  I actually engaged my brain a bit and tried again.  I put the brim onto my head, plaited up and pinned up my hair and then measured from the brim at the nape, over the fullness of my hair and to the brim at the front.  I added a good inch on for seams and cut out a circle with that diameter.  Well, I say circle… it’s not, I didn’t draw it, I eyeballed it so it’s slightly squarish in places but I doubt anyone will notice.

The next bit is fiddly and I think there may be a better way to do it if I were to sit and think about it but anyway.  I marked each 1/4 of the centre and the brim, threaded up my needle with enough thread to do a running stitch all the way round the centre piece and did loose sts all round, about an inch in from the edge.  Then I pinned the 1/4 marks on one piece of the brim to the centre and carefully gathered it all up so that the centre fitted the brim and went mad with the pins.   Once I’d made a fairly good impression of a hedgehog I backstitched it all into place, swearing regularly as I got stabbed by one of the excessive number of pins.  After that it’s just a case of turning the brim right side out,  rolling a hem onto the side of the brim not already sewn to the centre, pinning it and carefully stitching it down so that the join between the brim and the centre is enclosed inside the two layers of brim.  I whip stitched that down, trying to hide the stitches as much as possible on the grounds that, if I put it on “inside out” by mistake no one would know the difference as the stitches would be hidden.  In retrospect I should have either ironed the brim or at least pinned it with the hems properly pushed out so that the two sides of teh brim were definitly laying flat to each other which doesn’t quite happen in my prototype but it’s not wonky enough to really be noticeable.

The final result was a little deep in the brim, looking alarmingly like a prairie bonnet at the front, but a really good fit and stayed on really comfortably regardless of what I was doing.  As a bonus, it also fitted Aprilia and all her hair too.  So, based on that, and keeping all my little oops moments in mind, I then cut out the linen for the “proper” ones and spent an evening each on those. I took a few pictures but forgot to photograph the really fiddly bit when the centre is being gathered onto the brim. Just imagine lots of wrinkly fabric and a billion pins and you will have the general idea. They really are quite quick once you stop being all brain dead and start thinking about it properly!