Friday morning bath entry! 30th May. in crawling into 2014.

And I can lounge for longer since it's half term and my first (and only) kid arrives at 8am. Yes, work is back on today but she's on a half day so I'll be finished by 1pm :-) and everyone adores her. Funny thing about Britain, it seems to be taken as a negative personality trait to believe in yourself openly. Kids aren't supposed to tell people that they're good at things. Well, I actively encourage my kids to big-up their strengths and try hard at anything they find hard. We celebrate and high five achievements. I allow my eldest to critique my writing because she is so much better than me, and no, I'm not putting myself down. You should hear the natural way that her words just fall onto the paper. Where I would write "the boy walked slowly along the pavement" she would probably write " as darkness fell, the boy meandered. He longingly thought of his hamster, the one that died" (or something like that). When my girls do some good work at home I encourage them to take it in and show their teacher with pride.

And where did this rant stem from? The gorgeous little girl that I look after today lives with her adoring parents, grandparents and older (teenage) sister whose friends all adore her too. She knows that people like her, she doesn't know any different, and I think that's fabulous :-)

I do, of course, teach my (and others') kids to think of others, we know about treating others as we would like to be treated (although we don't always remember to follow it), we know that when someone is being mean we should just walk away, remove ourselves from the situation.

And we know that mama bear (i.e. me) will be there to take your corner, any time I'm needed.

I wasn't even going to talk about this stuff, it just all fell out of my head. Of course, that's why this format is great for me. In the olden days, the early diary years, I used to call it Talking Bollocks. That is, starting with no idea where it's going. If it does go somewhere - like this - it means there's something going on in my head that, oftentimes, I didn't know was there.

In other news, I've finally organised some people to come to give us quotes for a new fence and others to re-enamel the bath (it's in a real state, a lot of the enamel has chipped away). Rich has a friend who may be able to help us out with a bit of decorating too. Things are moving again.