Five Years - Just Like That! in Scottish Meanderings

This wee pop started school yesterday.


Here are a couple of my first cuddles not long after she was born.



Where did all that time go?


She looks so grown up in her uniform!

She was sooooo excited, was first there in the morning and absolutely loved it! And Nikki had no time to be upset as she was also back at work 15 minutes later, welcoming mums to her playgroup so that distracted her sufficiently😊.

Lily's doing the whole graded time thing where they only go so many mornings/afternoons to get them used to it which I always think is so ironic these days. When my brothers were growing up there was no kindergarden, pre-school, nursery or anything else and poor Ian, who was always much more sensitive than Mike despite being the eldest, went from being with Mum every single day to suddenly having to go to a completely strange building (no Open Days in these times!) with completely strange people looking after him for the WHOLE day. For FIVE days a week! Can you imagine the trauma?!

Whereas these days little kids of that age generally have a much more social calendar than their mum and dads sometimes and have usually been to some form of pre-school for a year or two beforehand so are much more acclimatised for the transition to school.


I've had an absolutely hellish month. No idea what's going on but it's all got worse and I'm virtually unable to leave the house at the moment. Last month I saw a homeopathic doctor on the other side of town and even getting there was a complete nightmare - I stupidly tried to drive my own car with Nikki following behind as back-up. Had a massive panic attack about three-quarters of the way over and had to pull off the road. It didn't help that Nikki had got stuck at traffic lights miles back and had disappeared but I managed to phone her and she eventually found me. She persuaded me to carry on in her car so that at least she could call in and cancel the appointment (although we both knew she was desperately trying to get me there come hell or high water!) and I reluctantly agreed, whilst trying to stave off the fear of knowing that the traffic was already building up to rush hour and it would be at least another hour before I could back to the safety of the house and rest and worse if we left it any longer.

She spoke to the doctor who was meeting me and persuaded me to come in and say hello to him and I suppose, in one sense, he was then able to see how bad I was but in another, I was unable to have much in the way of coherent conversation which was a shame. However I had completed a very comprehensive patient information form previous to that so he used the info from that and prescribed some herbal remedies. Unfortunately I wasn't well enough to wait until he wrote out the prescriptions so he said he'd post them out to me instead. All well and good but he took 2 weeks to do that then only photocopied the prescription and scribbled how much of each to take without any more info and I could find very little online myself. It took another week before we got them to a chemist then came the disappointing news that they'd take yet another 7 days as they'd have to be ordered.

Not that it mattered because when I finally got the stuff, the drops prescribed for nighttime put me into a very restless sleep and made me wake every hour to pee, making me even more exhausted the next day, and the tablets prescribed for anxiety made me really nauseous to the point I was miserable and could do nothing. And appeared to make the anxiety worse. So that was a bust. Nikki's going to try and phone the doc at some point though to ask for advice and to see if he'll do a home visit because every time I leave the house at the moment I become ill.

I'm trying to do small trips in the car by myself because there's a very real fear now around going too far away from safety and we all know how that will feed on itself if left unchecked. Last night I went for a walk and only just managed 15 minutes, crashing badly afterwards. That scared me so today I'm not doing anything outside. My goal today was to get an entry done on here so at least that's been achieved.

So there's been lots of tears this month but my lovely daughter made a smart move this morning. In an effort to lift myself out of a major depressive funk 2 days ago, I managed to find some blank cards I'd bought yonks ago and with the help of some stickers, glue and photos, made a homemade 'good luck for starting school' card for Lily.

Of course anyone with more than one grandchild knows you have to constantly be on guard about singling one out so I made one for Lilah as well, making sure I had the same number of stickers on each (wars have been started for less!) then endured a massive anxiety attack getting them to the postbox which fortunately is only 5 minutes walk from the house.

Nikki had the wherewithal to take a video when they arrived.


I love the way when Nikki says "and what do we say to Granny?", Lilah looks at Lily as though to say 'Granny's not here you numpty'!

But the timing was perfect. The mornings are truly awful at the moment and today was no exception. However I'm desperately trying to be as positive as I can and come to terms with the life I've lost so instead of automatically logging into Prosebox, I had gone onto the chronic fatigue forum to find like-minded souls and forced myself to post a few replies on there and that had led to a couple of interesting websites worth investigating. Plus the messages I read were quite uplifting so that helped.

Sometimes it doesn't. There's so much information and research on that site that I can very easily get overwhelmed and there are also reminders everywhere that this illness can get far, far worse than it is for me at the moment - and - just occasionally - that's too much to take.

Anyway Nikki's video came through in the middle of all that and I was literally crying watching it. Even though the cards were pretty primitive stuff, thankfully 2 and 4 year olds don't care about that and just - thank God for technology that I was able to watch them open them from half an hour away. Well worth the effort.

I was watching quite a good documentary on Netflix the other night and there was a quote from Nietzsche on it which I left in a note to one of my Friends on here.

'To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering'.

I'm not sure I entirely agree that living should be all about suffering but I agree with the second bit and that's what I'm trying to do now.