Friends like me.

So, a while back, we went to stay with a friend for a few days. I decided I'd be kind and generous, and brought a bag of fresh mushrooms from my parents' garden. Organic, brown and white, big, beautiful, the finest recycled mushroom compost can provide. And so we loaded the bus, and off we drove, and after a lengthy tour of the country, there we were. And we unloaded the bus, dumped foodstuff in the kitchen, and collapsed in a heap in the sitting room until much coffee had been consumed.

Girls to bed, grown up conversation, civilised meal, more conversation and a rather late night. And in the morning, children, busyness, plans, more food, etcetera and so on. And an increasingly pervasive odour of ancient fish. Being the polite kind of a person that I am, I ascribed it to drains and ignored it. And being the polite kind of a person that my friend is, she too ascribed it to drains and surreptitiously cleaned the sink, scrubbed the loo, and sterilised the dishwasher. And the fish persisted. Until, eventually, in desperation, my friend picked up the bag of mushrooms to clean underneath them. And the bag collapsed, and the fishy smell multiplied, and a thin stream of foul-smelling fluid flowed gently out of the bag and across the room, under cupboards and into packets of biscuits and over the kitchen appliances, carrying with it a tide of baby woodlice.

The gift that keeps on giving.

My friend retaliated by giving me a box of chocolates on her return visit. I'm assuming she didn't know about the whole "Tia's having a madly healthy month or so and actually shedding pounds for the first time in years thing." It couldn't possibly have been revenge by sabotage, could it?

We agreed it would probably be best if I never again brought food to her house.

We've had a bit of a houseparty. My Trojan Mushroom friend for two nights from Thursday, and other friends on an epic journey from the frozen wastelands soggy city of the North to collect a rather special chair from somewhere considerably closer to us for the weekend. We have made the satisfying discovery that there is just space for a cot mattress on the floor of Mog's bedroom (and I do mean just space; to enter the room you have to stand on the mattress), and that Little Fish is very happy to sleep there and does in fact prefer it to her own bed in her own bedroom. We just about have enough sockets for their various breathing devices, and by clamping the door properly we can contain two girls in a bedroom only five foot wide; I wonder how long we could do this for without either of them getting bored or Mog's carers objecting to standing on Little Fish whilst getting Mog dressed? I also wonder what social services would make of me parceling both of them into the smallest room in the house so shall take the opportunity to point out to any SWs reading that it was in fact a purely overnight device despite any inclination to make it longer term. Ahem.

One of those beautifully relaxed mornings on Saturday. A house full of friends, children all pleased to see each other and content to gaze at each other and giggle, and show off to each other and be entertained by each other, and to need only minimal adult attention. Leaving three adults free to sit and chat and drink tea and coffee and eat breakfast and make more drinks and chat some more. And working in a kind of synchrony which had one friend rootling through the 'fridge as another poured muesli,and as I lovingly sliced and toasted some extra delicious bread yet another friend had made for us a few days earlier. I passed the toast across and sat back with more coffee.

And a small, diffident voice asked "May I please be excused from eating this?" And we looked, and realised that not content with the mushroom incident, I had somehow failed to notice the rank mould thickly coating the bread, which had turned a vivid blue whilst being toasted.

We had Tesco Sandwiches for lunch. And, oddly enough, my friend decided to leave before tea on the Saturday. For I am truly the hostess with the mostest. She had her revenge again though; leaving hot chocolate souffles and cream which remaining friend and I were forced to eat last night. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.

And now they've all gone, and the musical beds have stopped, and the girls are sleeping sweetly in theirs, the cats have settled for the night on the shower bench, and I can hear my own bed calling my name.
Tia

How many hands?

does it take
To make a decent mould
for what we all hope
will be a more comfortable wheelchair?
If that shape's correct, it's no wonder she stopped tolerating the old one.

We saw wheelchair services in May. They suggested we try a Triton. The Triton arrived for trial back in July. We liked the Triton, but it needed a moulded seat for Little Miss Asymmetry. Yesterday was the first moulding appointment. We go back in four weeks for the mid fit. And then two weeks later for the final fit, by which time the Triton which "oh yes, it's definitely been ordered" will hopefully be here. Five months after the initial appointment. Thirteen months after Mog started having such big problems with her spasm. And apparently the service has been improved by the recent changes. If this is an improvement, I don't like it.
Tia

Domesticity

There's nothing like the hint of a cool snap in the air, the ground gaining a carpet of golden leaves, and the general clunk swish of the central heating kicking in after a few months' leave of absence to get my thoughts turning to the inside of the house and to the joys of cosy evenings curled up with curtains drawn and candles burning.

Forget Spring Cleaning (Why not? I usually do); the weather starts to turn and suddenly neglected corners of my house start crying out for attention. Well, that, the prospect of visitors, and the fact that I could no longer open the pantry cupboard without dodging falling tins and flour-bombs. The realisation that with our new streamlined rubbish collection system (rationed to one wheelie bin a fortnight for general rubbish and one for recycling; interesting with two girls who can between them produce a vast amount of medically-based waste) I will no longer be able to sling out an extra couple of binliners whenever I do have a general sort out was a good motivator too. So, I gathered the essential tools of the trade, and made a start.
One box for the inevitable duplicates; cunningly providing us with cans for Harvest Festival on Sunday too. One bag for hopelessly out of date or else unbearably sticky stuff (there was an unfortunate incident involving a packet of ground ginger, a jar of marmalade and a box of rice cakes longer ago than I care to admit, considering some of the debris remains welded to the shelving and to anything which sits near it), and fuel for yours truly.

Half a shelf down, I'm finding packets with a best before date of 2005. Not great, but hey, flour doesn't really go off does it? I think the powdered milk might have had it though.
And this one is particularly worrying, considering we didn't move here until 2003. Why on Earth did I feel the need to bring out-of-date foodstuffs with me?
I'd allowed myself a generous ten minutes per shelf - bin, donate, or dump on the side, wipe down the shelf and replace. Four shelves, forty minutes?

Four hours later, two bin liners full of the rejects, one box containing eight cans of tuna, three of condensed milk and very little else, the shelves looked more like this.
That's better. And very nearly neatly organised. All the food about to expire neatly stacked towards the front. And a determination to be a better steward, and to use the short-dated stuff first. Of course this means we're going to be eating eleven packets of chicken noodle soup, livened up with some tasty suet dumplings, and finishing every meal with tinned mandarins, but that's balanced, right?

Tia

Say What?

Little Fish likes to sing. First there was Mamma Mia, here we go again, my my, how I am your sister". Now she's not so wedded to one song, but comes home from school crooning whatever she's been singing in class. Or nearly.

I did enjoy Sunday's "You are in my tummy, God" (Eternal God). But I think today's offering may have the edge.

"Who built the Ark? No one, No one. Who built the Ark? Bother! No one built the Ark."

Tia

Nature or Nurture?

Tell people that you plan to adopt, and you'll get a huge variety of opinion, whether you want it or not. Some really helpful pieces of advice from people who actually know, and some slightly less welcome information about how adopted children will ruin your life and turn out just like their "real" parents and never be grateful (I'm not asking for their gratitude). And some well-meaning but whittery praisey phrases about how all they need is love and aren't you wonderful for doing it.*

It's the old nature/nurture debate. Either these hypothetical adopted children will take after their birth parents (who must, in the eyes of many people who have never met them, be strangely evil monsters if they aren't parenting all the children born to them), or else they'll instantly manage to switch off their past and become the child you the parent shape.

And there's just enough truth in each cliche to keep them both alive. And of course adopted children and adoptive parents will grow to resemble each other, taking on family expressions and habits and of course all children will bring their own personal quirks into the family, some shaped from early experiences and some from genetics and some from just being individuals.

But, today, I discovered that the Nature side of things has had far more effect in Little Fish than I had ever previously realised. I know quite a bit about her life before she came to me; it's fairly intimately chronicled, and not my story to tell on here. But she's been surrounded by loving arms from very early on, and although we keep in contact with her foster carers, she does not appear to remember living with them at all.

Tonight though, something happened which brought it home to me that she is not and never will be my genetic offspring. Tonight, I gave her her tea. And she ate nearly everything on her plate. And then she handed me the pieces of Toblerone I'd put on the side, and politely asked me if she could have an orange instead.

I'm not sure I'll ever recover.
Tia

*Question, if the only thing any adopted child needs in order to turn out to be a well-rounded human being is love, why don't more people - who have infinite capacity for love - adopt?

Obedience

Slippery as her nickname, Little Fish squirms around just outside my grasp. I take hold, and we make contact, and she realises that I really do mean it. And she submits, and eats her breakfast without complaining, or gets her clothes on without screaming, or settles for the night without calling me back into her room a dozen times. And it's great, and I think she's finally learning that I might just actually be in charge, at least some of the time, and I start to relax a little.

And then I notice that she's still slipping away. That I ask her to eat her breakfast at the table, and she agrees, and doesn't scream, but flips her legs around so she's sitting sideways on to the table, leaving a lovely Marmite or Cheerio trail across the floor and her clean clothes. She gets her clothes on, but her pyjamas are stuffed down the side of the bench and left in a puddle of stagnant water from the shower. She settles for the night, but only if I leave the door open.

Compromise? Or control? She's still in control, still deciding how much she'll allow me to have things my way. I don't mind compromise; I'm all for negotiation and thinking problems through and mutual decisions. But I'm not sure I'm supposed to be the puppet on her strings.

So I take hold of her, and draw her in close, and she squirms one little bit of her out from my arms, and suddenly the whole of her is somewhere else entirely, and I'm left holding her shed skin. And there's a still small voice at my shoulder saying "Sound familiar? Don't you do this to Me all the time? The appearance of obedience, a semblance of submission, and I go my own way again even as I say "Yes" to whatever it is I ought to be doing. But, like Little Fish, I like to think I'm doing the right thing; I'm doing most of it, aren't I? I can do it and do that other thing at the same time, can't I?

Maybe I can. But can I do it and expect to teach my daughter what it means to be wholehearted at the same time? I'm not so sure about that.

Tia

Little Fish Would Like To Let You Know

"I did get all my own clothes on today all by myself. And, and, I did be careful and take my clothes off all by myself too! Do you know, I can dress myself now? "

Tia would like to know why Little Fish felt the need to scream for ten minutes that "My button is done up I not managing oh OH OH my button is not undone!" When she eventually stopped squawking I suggested she undid the button. Which took her 30 seconds, after which the shirt was off. But how, why, could she not have joined the dots herself?

Still, a child who can strip herself (mostly), dress herself (mostly), then go to bed, lie down, and go to sleep within minutes is much appreciated. And Mog still gets to have a good giggle over LF's screeches, so I suppose we're all winners really.

Tia