January in Numbers

Wow - February already.  January felt like a very long month but it does seem to have come to an end quickly!  So here is my month by numbers:

3.65 - the number of the hair colour that Allie and I used to die our hair - it is Deep Cherry Brown.  Allie wanted to die her hair dark and I wasn't keen on black but this is a lovely dark reddish colour which really suits her.  It was a foam application which was pretty easy to add to her hair and after we'd finished there was some left so I decided to finish it off on my hair.  I think with my hair being so short it actually came out darker than hers but we were both pleased with the results.  However, I had missed a few bits of her long hair so we had to buy another bottle to give it another application a week later.

8 - Chorley Roses were 8 years old this month!  I remember the first time we all met at the hall in Chorley, Lancashire as a Crop group.  We were allowing children so Allie and I set off to do the one thing you tell kids never to do on the internet - meet "virtual" friends.  I did mention to my husband that I was driving 35 miles to Chorley to a place I'd never been before to meet a group of people I had only ever spoken to online at UKScrappers and he did wonder if it was safe to take our then 6 year old but she and I still set off with our scrapbooking gear and directions from Tree who lived in Chorley and had arranged the meet up.  So we got to Chorley and we went round all the roundabouts on the directions and we got to a Church Hall but there was no-one there.  We sat for a while contemplating what to do and then I realised the name of the Church was different to the one we should have been at.  After a quick mobile phone chat it turned out Tree had missed one of the roundabouts from her directions and almost everyone had got lost on their first visit.  We eventually got there and have been going ever since for 8 years.  Not many of us actually scrapbook anymore but we do still do arty stuff.  However, what we really do is chat and drink brews and eat cakes and laugh lots!

£3.75 - that's all it cost off e-bay for 50 mini glue sticks for Allie's glue gun and it included postage - bargain!

5 - that is how old my GREAT niece Kenzie was this month.  She is the daughter of Jeff's niece and I can't believe we are old enough to have GREAT nieces and nephews!

632 - euros - that is the cost of the hotel my best mate Kath and I have booked in Rome in September for her 40th Birthday celebration.  (She is actually 40 in June but it was easier to arrange a long weekend away just her and me in September).  She's booked the flights and I've booked the hotel and now we can save up and book some trips - so excited!!

High 5 - the score 2056 Knutsford Sqn got out of 7 on our Annual Inspection from Wing.  We had a good turn out of cadets who all looked very smart in their Wedgewood Blues and we'd managed to get the admin and office straight ready for the inspection.  Very proud of our Sqn!!

And that is my month in numbers.  Take a look at this blog for the origins of this idea

http://notesonpaper.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-month-in-numbers-2012-january.html

Happy Birthday!!

Last Saturday was "Crop Day" when Allie and I go and meet with friends in Chorley to (in theory) crop.  We started out as a scrapbook group and we all duly brought along our stash and created LOs but over the years we have morphed into a kind of crafty group who sometimes do some LOs, sometimes make cards, sometimes   knit, sometimes cross stitch but mainly have brews, eat lots of biscuits and cake, talk and laugh and it is that last thing which I think has kept us so close - we laugh a lot!!

This January we worked out it was our 8th Birthday and over those 8 years we have been through all the ups and downs of each other's lives offering support, advice and just generally shoulders to cry on and I would now class us not as a crop group or a craft group but a group of friends - friends for life!

One thing that stood us apart from a lot of crops when we first started is that we allowed children to come along so as well as a group of adult friends there is also a group of children who have grown up together and are also good friends so when we had our "birthday" photo taken (well we are originally all scrapbookers) we had to have one with the kids too

Wicca

During 2011 Allie has become interested in Wicca. None of our family go to church and when we had Allie Christened we skipped the church bit and went straight to the family party at which my dad followed the Arabic tradition where the male head of the family introduced the child to the family (we probably strayed off the Arabic traditions after that as we also toasted her arrival with champagne!)

She has “Guiding Lights” rather than God Parents and we picked people who do go to Church so that in the future if she wanted to know about God and the Church she could ask them. As she has grown up I have told her that her religion is her choice and she can be whatever she wants to be so she has decided to follow Wicca.

I have to admit there is an influence from me because Wicca and the surrounding paganism is something I too have always been interested in and there are quite a few books in the house about it but Allie has actually taken the time to find out about it all properly and to follow it correctly.

Now before you all throw your hands up in horror and declare her a witch following the occult, she has done her research properly and is treating this as her chosen religion. She is worshipping the ceremonies such as Yule and Beltane, has a beautiful alter to the Goddess in her bedroom and is respecting nature and the world around her. I am quite proud at how “grown up” she is being about it and I hope it is a faith that she finds helps her through her life.

Fairies Welcome!

Q. What do you get if you give a child (well a 14 yr old anyway) a glue gun, some craft lollipop sticks and some pink ink?

A. A beautiful house for fairies that Allie made for me.

I think Allie's favourite Christmas present this year was the glue gun she got in the Secret Santa swap with our crafting buddies - she has been gluing anything and everything in sight!  Last night she sat down and said "what can I make" and off the top of my head I said a fairy house.  Well a few hours later (I went to bed and left her to it!) she produced this gorgeous little house.  I now need to find somewhere quiet to put it so we can attract tenants :-)

My Month in Numbers - December 2011

Whilst surfing UK Scrappers for some inspiration to write up my blog regularly I came across this:

http://notesonpaper.blogspot.com/p/months-in-numbers.html

I really like the idea of blogging by numbers and I’ve decided to join in for 2012 and see how I go. Even if it means all I do is blog once a month that is once more often than my current average!

So December wasn’t planned so it is a bit haphazard and has not photos but here goes:

18 as the 18^th of December was Allie’s Birthday. As it is the week before Christmas it can be difficult to arrange a party or get people to buy her two presents rather than joint ones but we did go out with my best friend Kath and her daughter Kaitlyn on the following Wednesday for pizza and a movie.

14 oh my!! Baby Allie is now 14 years old! I was dreading her becoming a teenager last year and there have been times I’d quite like the little toddler back but all in all I am very proud of my grown up daughter.

4 duck breasts for Christmas lunch. None of us are particularly bothered about turkey and we usually do a full roast once a week, normally chicken so to have something different we get a duck for Christmas. However, the past couple of years we have had a full duck and not really enjoyed it – there isn’t quite enough meat to get your teeth in to! This year I bought four duck breasts from Waitrose (they came in packs of two so had to buy four for three of us!) and I did them with all the other trimmings (we still have pigs in blankets LOL). The meat on the duck breasts was lovely and Allie finished off the fourth one as her supper that evening!

15 air cadets. Allie is an air cadet of 2056 Knutsford Squadron and Jeff and I are Civilian Instructors (CIs) so we get quite involved with the running of the Squadron. As a Christmas treat the Officers and CIs took 15 cadets to the Trafford Centre for a Chinese meal, a round of crazy golf and a game of Laserquest. I must admit at one point we were sat in traffic with two cadets in our car and I thought why are we doing this a week and a half before Christmas at probably one of the busiest shopping centres in the country but we all had a good evening and managed not to loose any cadets!

3 carrier bags of clothes and toys. I finally persuaded Allie to have a sort out and by that not just tidy her room but actually put stuff out for the bin / charity / re-cycle and we ended up with 3 carrier bags full. There could have been more but one step at a time………

6 frogs. When my grandparents moved to the care home they left their room at home almost as if they had just got up and walked out. There is very little room in the home for ornaments so they only took a few precious ones leaving everything else for my parents to sort through. When I was younger my gran had always collected ornamental frogs and it became a ritual for all the family to buy her a frog whenever they went anywhere. It grew in to quite a collection. As part of their moving in to the home my grandparents wrote a “living will” leaving certain items to various family members and the frog collection was left to Allie! She was quite sensible and decided we didn’t have room for all of them so she took a few she wanted and asked if I would like any so I actually kept 6 – there is no particular memory of those 6 I just liked them the best. My mum is going to see if she can auction the rest of as a collection along with many other things left in the room when my grandparents moved out.

So that is December in numbers - I have already started thinking about January and hopefully this will encourage me both to blog and take more photos.

What can we do today?

Now that the festivities are over, the left overs are either eaten or in the freezer and we've found a home for all our new goodies my daughter is BORED!  Her constant question is "what can we do today?"  I wish I could come up with loads of exciting, creative things to do but my mind goes blank and I can usually only manage "read a book" (she would rather poke herself in the eye than read a book!), "play on the computer" (oh no she can't do that I'm on here!), "go and play with a friend" (they are all off skiing or similar!) so we end up either hanging about getting on each other's nerves or going somewhere that requires me to spend money.

Why can't I think of more interesting (and cheaper!!) things to do?  I think the problem is when I was her age reading a book was something I loved to do.  I can't understand why she won't sit and read.  Every now and then she will pick up a book and read but only a few pages and she stops.  She did once finish a book and say she'd got involved in the whole thing and it had felt "real" which is what I believe a good book should do but for some reason Allie can't quite get involved in a book like that normally.  I think part of the problem is that she does have such a vivid imagination that any books don't quite meet up to it plus it all has to be done quick - she can't get to the end fast enough because she just can't physically read that fast.

So what can we do today?  Well at 10.30am she's still fast asleep upstairs LOL  But when she does get up I have nothing to offer other than a trip to the bank to pay in her Christmas and Birthday money.  OK that will be fun for about 10 minutes but then we are dangerously in town where she could spend money (and it won't be her money safe and sound in the bank!).

Was it easier when she was little?  I don't think so.  I signed her up to Stagecoach not because I wanted to create a little stage star but because it gave her something to do for a few hours on a Sunday.  She's an air cadet not because we want her to be a pilot but because she gets away from the TV or computer at least twice a week (and weekends when there are camps on).

I've tried the "planned" days out with picnics, visits to parks, gardens, stately homes etc and yes we've had fun but usually I've had to pay out money somewhere (even if it is just for an ice cream LOL) and Allie never seems to have had as much fun as I had hoped.

Am I missing something on what teenagers do with their spare time these days or am I setting my own expectations too high for her to have a good time?

Well she's now out of bed and prowling the kitchen like a hungry bear so I'm off to find her breakfast (should that be brunch?) and then I am sure her next question will be "what can we do today?".............

Let's try that again...

I am so bad at keeping up this posting lark!  My friend Karen has really put me to shame this month by journalling all the fantastic things she's being doing in preparation for Christmas with her two children and I envy her blog .... is that a new "sin" - blog envy? LOL

So I am going to make a New Year resolution to attend to this blog  much more, take more photos to blog about and write more about what's going on in my life to remind me when I'm older.

One thing that made me think about having reminders of my past is visiting my grandparents who have recently moved in to a care home.  They used to live with my parents and since they couldn't take a lot of stuff with them to the home my mum and dad have spent the last month trawling through masses of papers and photos (my grandad is a bit of hoarder to say the least - we even found the notes he made about how to use the guns whilst on board ship during WW2!).

Dad has gone through literally thousands of photos all neatly stacked in their little packets - mainly of back gardens in houses none of us remember, cakes and meals laid out for special occasions we can't remember and the odd one or two of people who we don't know the names of.  In the end he kept the ones of people we did know and just had to throw out the rest.  However, photos are still a big part of our family and as a Christmas present for my grandparents this year I have made them a little stand with pages of photos that flip over so they can see different pictures whenever they feel like it (bearing in mind they don't have much room in their new home to display many things).  I went through my photos on my drive and picked 12 that span mainly over our daughter's life (14 years now!) making sure they all had family members in them.

When we visited Gran and Boo Boo today he liked the photos but my Gran seemed fascinated by them.  She suffers from Alzheimers and her memory has been getting steadily stuck in the past - she took these photos and looked and looked and looked - every time she got to the end, she went back to the beginning and went through them again. She didn't ask any questions as to who the people were so I think she recognised them but it was as if she was willing herself to remember the events around the photos.  it made me realise how fragile our memories can be and how important it is to scrapbook, journal, blog and write about what we are doing now so we can remember it in the future.  Our lives are made up of moments that make us smile, laugh, cry, come together as family and friends or just be alone with beautiful views and thoughts but if we don't capture them what is left?

Allie with Gran Gran

Allie with Boo Boo