Oh God is this how it starts? I bought a lovely colourful duvet set in ASDA yesterday to cheer myself up - only to discover when I put on the washing today I’ve already got it!
So I’m swinging in here at the end of the month by the skin of my teeth because I’ve been completely floored for most of June by a horrible ear infection.
OMG the pain! I had some inkling they could be painful but I had no idea just how much - I felt like someone was constantly stabbing me with knives inside my ear! It took me a while before I realised it was an infection in the first place as I’d had a build up of wax in my right ear and had been trying to resolve that by spraying ear oil into it regularly. It’s really hard to get it to stay in though so I’d been sticking the spray thingie in my ear as far as it would go and I think that’s what did the damage.
On Thursday last week the pain had become unbearable plus I was feeling sick and had gone off my food so I decided to check the symptoms and realised it was very possibly an ear infection and needed seeing by a doctor. Went online next day to book an appointment at the surgery and the first date which came up was the 16th July!! That’s almost a whole month!
Someone suggested going to a Pharmacy because Pharmacists were given more power to prescribe antibiotics a couple of years ago to try and keep surgery appointments down so I popped into Tesco on Monday afternoon but they couldn't do anything without a prescription from a GP.
Luckily I’d discovered I had some left over 2 year old Amoxicillin in the house which is the antibiotic they prescribe (as long as it’s a bacterial infection) so I thought I might as well use that up until the appointment. Normally I get very nauseous on them and can’t usually finish a complete course (hence having some left over) so I was delighted when that didn’t seem to be happening as intensely as normal this time. However I suspected it might be because they were out of date and sure enough, I discovered an expiry date of 01/19 on them! So I’ve been chugging painkillers as well but trying to space them out and not get too used to them but still that nagging stabbing pain persists, getting on my very last nerve. I’m really sick of it.
The level of fatigue has been something else though. I suppose that makes sense when I think of it - if my body struggles to deal with basic energy because of whatever has gone wrong with it, then it fits that an extra attack like an infection will cause it to struggle even more. Such a pain though - literally and figuratively - because it’s really slowed me up this month and I’ve fallen behind with everything as a result.
Some of the family have been discussing a short diary Dad wrote when he worked in the bomb disposal squad in the war. It's more like scribbled jottings in a notebook than a diary and we think that may be because it was too dangerous to have detailed accounts anywhere in case they got into the wrong hands. Makes sense.
We’re struggling to find out more about the particular squads he was in though and cursing ourselves for not asking him more about his wartime experiences but we had no idea we were only going to have him around for such a short time (he died in 1976 at 54) and anyway men generally didn't talk about their experiences in wartime - not even to their wives - how could anyone who hadn't been there relate to it? And of course for some it was just too painful and traumatic to recall.
But it got me thinking about how much recorded stuff we have available nowadays with all this technology at our fingertips and what will happen to it after we die. Is anyone going to bother wading through all the stuff I’ve written online and in private? And - even more importantly - will I remember to list usernames, passwords and the like somewhere useful??
When Nikki was in hospital at Christmas we got into various chats and one of them was what was going to happen to my diaries after I'd gone. I think she mentioned she's probably going to keep them but wouldn't want to read them because of all the negative stuff about her which would be in them! She wasn't talking about the last two years either - she meant the problems she had as a teenager (of which there were many)!
I would rather they were kept but more for the grandkids than anything because I feel I hardly got to know my own grannies. Dad’s mum died when I was only 6 but I do remember a little bit about her. She lived 100 miles away in Edinburgh but we visited fairly regularly as most of Dad’s family lived down that way by then. She was a really lovely, gentle soul.
Granny Morrison, Mum’s Mum, died when only in her forties and never knew any of her grandchildren and I find myself being very curious about her because I get the impression I’m quite like her in some ways. Mum spoke about her very occasionally but I really know very little about her - or Granda Morrison who died when the boys were about 4 or 5. At least with (my) Dad I have his letters he wrote to me when I left home and I also have a few poems and a story he wrote (I think he would have been a budding writer had he had more time or opportunity) but I have nothing of the grannies at all.
So it made me curious as to what you guys are going to do with your diaries? Do you have any concrete plans or are you not in the slightest bit bothered?
One practical thing I’d like to do at some point is get my Open Diary entries transferred over here so that everything is in one place. I did copy and paste the most recent entry over just to try it out which was relatively painless but to do that for each and every one will take for ever.
And, despite checking the box so that they aren’t marked as revised (and therefore show up on the Bookmarks List), they did! I did e-mail Admin to ask about it yonks ago but never got a reply so if anyone has done anything similar and discovered the secret, please let me know.
I’ve managed to do a couple of babysitting stints with Ruari in the last month or so which have gone okay. My main problem is having enough stamina to rock him if he’s unsettled for any length of time - I’ve noticed if I’m holding him or nursing him for an hour or so that it really affects me energywise. The first time I babysat, Nikki was only in the next village to watch the Eurovision Contest with her friend so could come home easily enough if necessary. She left me the buggy in the sitting room and I managed to pop him in there after his last feed and push him up and down then transferred him to the automatic swing and sang to him and that got him off to sleep.
Success! (Love his spiky hair)
However he’s changed his routine now and gets himself off to sleep! Nikki just pops him into his cot (one of those which adjoin her bed), gives him the dummy for a few seconds, lies down on the bed, puts on his music then he grizzles for a little bit and falls asleep by himself. Last time I was out we did a practice run just to make sure I could actually place him in either cot (she has a proper full size one in the girls’ room) and then she went through the routine while I watched on the monitor in the sitting room.
Which nearly had me in tears.
Each child, when a baby, has had various spells of gazing quietly for long periods as though looking at someone and we’ve always said it was Dad watching over them :) Dad absolutely adored kids but only got to see his first grandchild once in real life before he died - however I have no doubt he’s ‘seen’ the other 8 plus his 13 greatgrandchildren (14th on the way) - just in a different way. I’ve been slightly cynical of this I have to admit but oh man when I was watching him that night - he definitely seemed to be gazing at someone or something in the corner of the room for ages. What broke my heart was when he suddenly started ‘newsing’ to them! That’s exactly what he does at the moment when he’s with a ‘known face’ - starts telling them his ‘stories’ - and I suddenly had a vision of Mum standing there singing to him as she did to all the little ones when they were trying to get off to sleep :)
Anyway tonight I have my first ‘proper’ stint - Nikki’s away into town for the evening for a friend’s birthday night out - but the girls are away at Joel’s so I’ll only have Ruari to look after. She’s promised to come back around oneish but with it being her first proper night out for months, I’m fully prepared for a couple of tipsy texts asking if she can stay out later! Ruari generally goes down around nineish so if all goes well I should only have a couple of hours of actual babysitting to do then can rest the remainder of the evening. (Hope I haven’t just jinxed that.)
Then on Tuesday she has her Open Day for the Midwifery degree course she’s interested in doing so wants me to take him for the afternoon at my house and her friend Tracy will look after the girls after nursery/school at their house. Tracy is trying for a second baby at the moment but Nikki is nervous at watching her not coping when their friend’s baby starts crying or fussing so says she would rather I looked after Ruari instead. I’m chuffed she feels like that but just hope I can last out the afternoon because my house is in two levels whereas hers is just one. Makes a difference when you're lugging a baby around! I’m hoping it’s a really nice day because she’s leaving the buggy with me so if he doesn’t settle I can take him out for a walk.
She found the perfect mantra for her on a t-shirt the other day -
And now if you’ll excuse me the sun is at last shining so I’m away to get some much needed Vitamin D in the front garden. It shone all day yesterday too but unfortunately the table tennis group had picked that day to have our summer lunch at a well known fish restaurant so we were stuck inside having greasy fish and chips most of the afternoon!
Sod’s Law :)
So I’m swinging in here at the end of the month by the skin of my teeth because I’ve been completely floored for most of June by a horrible ear infection.
OMG the pain! I had some inkling they could be painful but I had no idea just how much - I felt like someone was constantly stabbing me with knives inside my ear! It took me a while before I realised it was an infection in the first place as I’d had a build up of wax in my right ear and had been trying to resolve that by spraying ear oil into it regularly. It’s really hard to get it to stay in though so I’d been sticking the spray thingie in my ear as far as it would go and I think that’s what did the damage.
On Thursday last week the pain had become unbearable plus I was feeling sick and had gone off my food so I decided to check the symptoms and realised it was very possibly an ear infection and needed seeing by a doctor. Went online next day to book an appointment at the surgery and the first date which came up was the 16th July!! That’s almost a whole month!
Someone suggested going to a Pharmacy because Pharmacists were given more power to prescribe antibiotics a couple of years ago to try and keep surgery appointments down so I popped into Tesco on Monday afternoon but they couldn't do anything without a prescription from a GP.
Luckily I’d discovered I had some left over 2 year old Amoxicillin in the house which is the antibiotic they prescribe (as long as it’s a bacterial infection) so I thought I might as well use that up until the appointment. Normally I get very nauseous on them and can’t usually finish a complete course (hence having some left over) so I was delighted when that didn’t seem to be happening as intensely as normal this time. However I suspected it might be because they were out of date and sure enough, I discovered an expiry date of 01/19 on them! So I’ve been chugging painkillers as well but trying to space them out and not get too used to them but still that nagging stabbing pain persists, getting on my very last nerve. I’m really sick of it.
The level of fatigue has been something else though. I suppose that makes sense when I think of it - if my body struggles to deal with basic energy because of whatever has gone wrong with it, then it fits that an extra attack like an infection will cause it to struggle even more. Such a pain though - literally and figuratively - because it’s really slowed me up this month and I’ve fallen behind with everything as a result.
Some of the family have been discussing a short diary Dad wrote when he worked in the bomb disposal squad in the war. It's more like scribbled jottings in a notebook than a diary and we think that may be because it was too dangerous to have detailed accounts anywhere in case they got into the wrong hands. Makes sense.
We’re struggling to find out more about the particular squads he was in though and cursing ourselves for not asking him more about his wartime experiences but we had no idea we were only going to have him around for such a short time (he died in 1976 at 54) and anyway men generally didn't talk about their experiences in wartime - not even to their wives - how could anyone who hadn't been there relate to it? And of course for some it was just too painful and traumatic to recall.
But it got me thinking about how much recorded stuff we have available nowadays with all this technology at our fingertips and what will happen to it after we die. Is anyone going to bother wading through all the stuff I’ve written online and in private? And - even more importantly - will I remember to list usernames, passwords and the like somewhere useful??
When Nikki was in hospital at Christmas we got into various chats and one of them was what was going to happen to my diaries after I'd gone. I think she mentioned she's probably going to keep them but wouldn't want to read them because of all the negative stuff about her which would be in them! She wasn't talking about the last two years either - she meant the problems she had as a teenager (of which there were many)!
I would rather they were kept but more for the grandkids than anything because I feel I hardly got to know my own grannies. Dad’s mum died when I was only 6 but I do remember a little bit about her. She lived 100 miles away in Edinburgh but we visited fairly regularly as most of Dad’s family lived down that way by then. She was a really lovely, gentle soul.
Granny Morrison, Mum’s Mum, died when only in her forties and never knew any of her grandchildren and I find myself being very curious about her because I get the impression I’m quite like her in some ways. Mum spoke about her very occasionally but I really know very little about her - or Granda Morrison who died when the boys were about 4 or 5. At least with (my) Dad I have his letters he wrote to me when I left home and I also have a few poems and a story he wrote (I think he would have been a budding writer had he had more time or opportunity) but I have nothing of the grannies at all.
So it made me curious as to what you guys are going to do with your diaries? Do you have any concrete plans or are you not in the slightest bit bothered?
One practical thing I’d like to do at some point is get my Open Diary entries transferred over here so that everything is in one place. I did copy and paste the most recent entry over just to try it out which was relatively painless but to do that for each and every one will take for ever.
And, despite checking the box so that they aren’t marked as revised (and therefore show up on the Bookmarks List), they did! I did e-mail Admin to ask about it yonks ago but never got a reply so if anyone has done anything similar and discovered the secret, please let me know.
I’ve managed to do a couple of babysitting stints with Ruari in the last month or so which have gone okay. My main problem is having enough stamina to rock him if he’s unsettled for any length of time - I’ve noticed if I’m holding him or nursing him for an hour or so that it really affects me energywise. The first time I babysat, Nikki was only in the next village to watch the Eurovision Contest with her friend so could come home easily enough if necessary. She left me the buggy in the sitting room and I managed to pop him in there after his last feed and push him up and down then transferred him to the automatic swing and sang to him and that got him off to sleep.
Success! (Love his spiky hair)
However he’s changed his routine now and gets himself off to sleep! Nikki just pops him into his cot (one of those which adjoin her bed), gives him the dummy for a few seconds, lies down on the bed, puts on his music then he grizzles for a little bit and falls asleep by himself. Last time I was out we did a practice run just to make sure I could actually place him in either cot (she has a proper full size one in the girls’ room) and then she went through the routine while I watched on the monitor in the sitting room.
Which nearly had me in tears.
Each child, when a baby, has had various spells of gazing quietly for long periods as though looking at someone and we’ve always said it was Dad watching over them :) Dad absolutely adored kids but only got to see his first grandchild once in real life before he died - however I have no doubt he’s ‘seen’ the other 8 plus his 13 greatgrandchildren (14th on the way) - just in a different way. I’ve been slightly cynical of this I have to admit but oh man when I was watching him that night - he definitely seemed to be gazing at someone or something in the corner of the room for ages. What broke my heart was when he suddenly started ‘newsing’ to them! That’s exactly what he does at the moment when he’s with a ‘known face’ - starts telling them his ‘stories’ - and I suddenly had a vision of Mum standing there singing to him as she did to all the little ones when they were trying to get off to sleep :)
Anyway tonight I have my first ‘proper’ stint - Nikki’s away into town for the evening for a friend’s birthday night out - but the girls are away at Joel’s so I’ll only have Ruari to look after. She’s promised to come back around oneish but with it being her first proper night out for months, I’m fully prepared for a couple of tipsy texts asking if she can stay out later! Ruari generally goes down around nineish so if all goes well I should only have a couple of hours of actual babysitting to do then can rest the remainder of the evening. (Hope I haven’t just jinxed that.)
Then on Tuesday she has her Open Day for the Midwifery degree course she’s interested in doing so wants me to take him for the afternoon at my house and her friend Tracy will look after the girls after nursery/school at their house. Tracy is trying for a second baby at the moment but Nikki is nervous at watching her not coping when their friend’s baby starts crying or fussing so says she would rather I looked after Ruari instead. I’m chuffed she feels like that but just hope I can last out the afternoon because my house is in two levels whereas hers is just one. Makes a difference when you're lugging a baby around! I’m hoping it’s a really nice day because she’s leaving the buggy with me so if he doesn’t settle I can take him out for a walk.
She found the perfect mantra for her on a t-shirt the other day -
And now if you’ll excuse me the sun is at last shining so I’m away to get some much needed Vitamin D in the front garden. It shone all day yesterday too but unfortunately the table tennis group had picked that day to have our summer lunch at a well known fish restaurant so we were stuck inside having greasy fish and chips most of the afternoon!
Sod’s Law :)
Loading comments...