A bit of a break

Posted by Caroline Elliott

My word of the week this week is break. You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on here this week and that is because life at home is currently very hectic, so I have taken a bit of a break from blogging. There is still tonnes I would like to write about but I just haven’t the time or energy for it at the moment with everything that is going on.

Our garage conversion and building work is going really well and when this is published, in theory the new room/old garage should be finished and ready for furniture to go in. As I write the plumbers are plumbing in the radiators and the carpets should go down in a few hours. This is a huge relief as the last couple of weeks have been hard work.

The first stage of the building work was all outdoors and so other than being noisy didn’t really interfere with our day to day life much. Since cutting the doorway between the new room and the lounge it has been a very different story. The dust has driven us mad. Not fun at the best of times it is definitely less than ideal with a 10 month old crawling everywhere and getting in to everything!

So we have been covering furniture with quilts and sheets (meaning lots more laundry to do, as if we don’t produce enough laundry already) and I have lost count of the amount of times I have swept the floor and steamed and been on my hands and knees trying to clean up the dust…

It has also still been noisy and smelly (paint) and there has been people in and out a lot. Our builders are a really good bunch and they love the kids but having strangers in your house all the time is just a bit weird and parenting with an audience really isn’t fun! Plus the conversations I have had to listen to/be involved in (generally moaning about their wives and women in general, fun, and occasionally sharing how little sex they have, way tmi for me!) is just a bit weird.

So the kids and I have been playing upstairs a lot to keep put of their way. Plus of course lots of trips out in between the rain (or even when raining).

Going for a walk in the pouring rain ay 9am on bank holiday Monday while the builders fitted the door tp the new room

Going for a walk in the pouring rain at 9am on bank holiday Monday while the builders fitted the door to the new room

LM has actually coped really well with it all so far, basking in the adoration of the builders and giving them the biggest smiles, but the strain is starting to show with Monkey. He still wants to be a builder and is ok with them but he doesn’t like them being in his domain I don’t think. If I have to pop out of the room to deal with LM he doesn’t like being on his own with the builders so wants to follow me everywhere or stands and cries. Honestly this morning I was settling LM to sleep while the builder was cutting bricks outside (SO noisy) and she was trying but obviously struggling through the noise. I got her to sleep and came back down to find Monkey (who I had convinced to stay downstairs for a few mins) hiding with tears in his eyes. Pfff. Poor thing but I am at a loss what to do sometimes, I can’t be with him every second of the day.

We also haven’t had a front door for a couple of weeks now so have been traipsing round the back all of the time. Meaning the buggy, shoes coats, etc have all been living in the lounge along with the dust and the builders… just not ideal, any of it really and I have to say that being able to actually use our new front door for the first time was very very exciting!!

One of the purposes of the new room will be toy storage, which is also making us think about storage throughout the house. It is also going to be Hubs office so a lot of the office stuff and files will come down from upstairs and go in there. So my word of the week was nearly sorting as we have been using any spare time (?) to go through cupboards. We have been throwing away lots of old stuff and have sorted some things for charity shops too. I have started to ditch some toys (charity shop again) and have more boxes to go through yet. (I swear toys multiply of their own accord, they are taking over our house!!).

So yeah not a lot of time for blogging really (I wrote most of this on my phone while watching bake off and the rest in 5 min bursts as today has been chaos).

At one point today we had the builder, 2 plumbers, an electrician, and a carpet fitter here at the same time. t worked well and lots got done but it was chaos!

At one point today we had the builder, 2 plumbers, an electrician, and a carpet fitter here at the same time. it worked well and lots got done but it was chaos!

But a break probably is no bad thing. I have been feeling slightly disillusioned with blogging for a while, possibly because life is busy and I am exhausted, but all of the commenting and linkies and sharing, let alone writing, has been feeling like a chore.

But I do love writing and that is why I blog really, as well as to create a record for the kids to look back on. So it won’t be too long a break I am sure… just a break until we return to something resembling normality I think!! I was going to add I some shots of how it is all looking now but it has taken me so long to write this post that I can’t be bothered so will save them for another post.

How has your week been? Slightly less chaotic I hope?

Loving our Garden

Posted by Caroline Elliott

I have never been much of a gardener, and in all honesty have been pretty uninterested in becoming a gardener. That is, until we renovated our garden. Suddenly I really enjoy it! I don’t like weeding and I still don’t really know what I am doing but I do enjoy choosing plants and seeing them grow. Luckily hubs knows a bit more about gardening than I do so it is very much a joint effort.

Renovating our back garden was such a good decision as we spend a lot of time out there and it really is looking so lovely out there now. We just bought some beautiful new plants to inject some more colour and texture. We like to try and mix up things that flower at different times of year and are different colours to keep a nice bit of variety. (You can see the before and afters of the renovation here.)

Monkey loves the garden and he loves gardening too. He is great at watering the garden, with the hose or a watering can and he just loves to dig. We do have to stop him digging up plants as he can be a bit overenthusisastic sometimes! He loves helping though and is always happy to push bits around in his wheelbarrow too, little love!

I’m also really proud of him as lately he has gotten so inquisitive with bugs and beasties that we find when gardening. He so so loved finding some wiggly worms when we were digging at the weekend. just love seeing how happy he is to touch and explore them. He has picked up woodlice, ants, ladybirds and all sorts too. Monkey and worm

I’m proud of myself too as I hate all these things and don’t like touching them but I try really hard not to share my fear with him. I really don’t want him to learn to be scared of things because they scare me, if that makes sense.

We really enjoy all of our time outside together and hope we can continue to for many years, and get LM involved too when we are less concerned about her eating mud and worms :).

Do you like gardening with your kids?

My word of the week is gardening.

Making good progress

Posted by Caroline Elliott

My work of the week this week is “progress” as we are making some great progress, on a number of fronts.

I wrote last week that we are starting our new big project, and honestly the builders have worked so hard and only 1 week later, the progress is incredible! They’ve obviously got a way to go yet but the work is well underway!

The old garage is feeling much more like a room, now the stud work is up, it is insulated and has the plasterboard up. The new, larger window has been created and the old garage doors (front and back) are well and truly gone. The foundations have been dug for the new wall on the garage and what will be our utility room, and today these were filled with concrete.

It’s very exciting though my word could also have been chaos as of course it has been noisy and hectic and a bit chaotic having the builders in – and they will be around for a while yet!

We’ve also made some progress getting rid of some of the old stuff from the garage and have sold a few things on ebay, which is brilliant. No point stuff we don’t use going back into the new garage! We’ve given away lots of baby clothes and other bits including a moses basket and nursing chair to friends. We know we aren’t having any more babies but it is lovely to see our bits go to a good home,

We are also making progress in a totally different area, potty training Monkey! I haven’t mentioned it but we also started potty training last week and Monkey has been doing amazingly. We’ve had less than 10 accidents all week and he is getting better and better at telling me he needs to do a wee (rather than just going when I take him). He goes a couple of hours between wees and has even had a few dry nights which we are hugely impressed with! I will write more about how it’s gone in a later post but I am so glad we waited until he was ready.

We tried earlier this year and he wasn’t ready, but now he is and he has just got it straight away. I know we all feel the pressure to do it early and having a 3 year old in nappies certainly what I thought would happen but waiting until he was really ready and following his lead has been absolutely the right thing for us. It has actually been really easy, which is a huge relief, and it is lovely seeing him in pants rather than nappies!! 🙂

In many ways it has been a tough, and certainly busy, week with the builders, LM and I have a cold and Monkey is a bit ratty and not 100% either. But it is good to feel like we have made some great progress and are really getting somewhere!

How has your week been?

Our next big project

Posted by Caroline Elliott

We moved into our house about 3 weeks before Monkey was born. It is in the area both Hubs and I grew up in, an area that we love. We got it at a really great price because it needed work doing to it, more work than we initially realised to be honest! We moved in to a garage that was basically flooded from an old roof, a kitchen that was falling apart, rotton soffets with birds nesting in the eaves, pretty nasty bathrooms and both front & back gardens were a mess. Initially we thought we could live with a lot of it but gradually we realised we needed to do some work sooner rather than later.

So when Monkey was still a baby we did many of the repairs needed, had a new kitchen fitted, a new bathroom, and created a shower room out of the existing downstairs toilet and hall cupboard. We completely gutted and landscaped the back garden and made some “smaller” changes to the front, including a new gravel driveway area.

The ‘small’ changes to the front garden!

Our itchen when it was brand spanking new!

There have been smaller changes over the last 3 years, lots of decorating and replacing ceilings but one of the things we loved about this house was it’s potential to grow with us. Since early this year Hubs has had a bee in his bonnet that he has wanted to start this process. He felt, quite rightly, that if we want to extend in any way then we should do it now when the space is really useful to us. If we wait until we can more easily afford it then the kids will be older and it won’t be as useful to us as it is now.

So, it has taken months of decisions and back and forth and organising architects drawings and building regulations (thankfully we don’t need planning permission) and now it is finally happening. We are converting our existing Garage into a Study/Playroom, and the carport will become our garage. We are also moving our existing front door, gaining a utility room and potentially re-doing our driveway. Eek!!

We thought originally we had a month or so before work started but all of a sudden the builder is available and bam it starts this week! So we came back from holiday a little earlier than we would have, and have had some work to do ourselves. Thankfully we cleared out the garage a few weeks ago but we hadn’t got round to selling some of the stuff we want to sell :S. So all of that stuff, plus other garage bits are now filling our conservatory!

Plus because we are moving the front door, we have some bushes and plants to move around too so we have had some old horrible plants dug up and then we have been moving the plants we like into the spaces they left behind.

We have also been working out how we want our new room to look so have already ordered most of our furniture, some before we went away and some while we were away! All very exciting but always nerve wracking! Fingers crossed it all looks the way we imagine… I will share more details with our choices in another post.

I am nervous, excited, apprehensive and everything in between. Wish us luck with the chaos and noise and fun having the builders in for the next 8 weeks or so (!!!??!!!) will undoubtedly bring!!

So bye bye garage, car port and front porch, with the annoying front step and garage doors that barely close let alone lock. Spiders it is time to find a new home! 🙂

My word of the week this week, is project!

An exciting week..

Posted by Caroline Elliott

My word of the week this week is excitement, as it has been a bit of an exciting week, in more ways than one.

If you follow me on facebook or instagram you may have seen that I had a day off from being Mummy this week, which was very exciting for me indeed. I will go into more detail in another post but it was AMAZING to have a day off from being Mummy. Hubs and I got a bit of time together and then I got to relax with a friend over a glass of wine on the Harvery Nichols roof terrace. Just lovely! I also got to see the Kensington Roof Gardens, which I have always been intrigued by, so that was quite exciting too!

In other exciting news, we are making some plans at the moment for a conversion/extension. We currently have a garage and car port, and the plan is to turn the car port into a garage and the garage into an office/playroom/toy storage room and we will gain a utility room too.

We have been talking about it a lot this year and it has been a slow process getting the drawings done and quotes, seeing how we can afford it etc. etc…. But it finally seems to be coming together now. Eek! So last weekend was spent clearing out the garage (a heck of a job believe me!) ripping down shelves and breaking up old furniture, sweeping away hideous cobwebs and horribleness. After 2 days of hard graft and 3 trips to the tip the garage looked like this. So weird to think of this being an actual room one day soon!

We have also been talking a lot about layout, colours, styles and all fun parts of interior designing which I love and is very exciting. We keep changing our mind at the moment though over what we want so thankfully we have a bit of time before any building work starts to decide. We are still waiting for the building regs at the moment though thankfully don’t need planning permission. So, well, watch this space as I am sure there will be more updates to come over the next few months!

Another bit of exciting news is that we may have stumbled upon a solution to LM’s sleep regression, or rather my lovely Mum has! I only blogged about it this week but it has been troubling us for some time. When my parents babysat for our day in London Mum mentioned she had got LM to sleep with no fuss at all, because she rubbed her tummy for a few minutes to get her to sleep.

I couldn’t believe my ears! After weeks of fussing a bit of tummy rubbing soothed her to sleep? Apparently my Mum did it with us as babies so it was just a natural instinct for her to rub her tummy. That night I rubbed her tummy but she didn’t seem to want to sleep so I left her to it… and she did then fall asleep by herself, with no tears. No tears! For the first time in weeks!

The next day at naptimes she wanted to sleep on her tummy so I rubbed her back and each time she feel asleep in minutes and slept really well, despite having a cold. I couldn’t believe it!

So far so good but I am excited to think we will have less stressful naptimes and bedtimes… fingers crossed anyway!!

The final bit of excitement, yes there’s more, is getting ready for holidays in a couple of weeks. We are housesitting for a friend in Dorset so yay, free holiday on the south coast! Amazing!! It has come round really quickly all of a sudden so I am excitedly planning where we are going to stop on the way there and what we are going to do while we are down there!

So yes, lots of excitement at the moment, which is really lovely 🙂 How has your week been?

Adding some spring colour

Posted by Caroline Elliott

So our house is full of illness again. Honestly this year has been a year of bugs and to tell you the truth I am fed of talking about it. So I am not going to write about the horrendous cough that Monkey had and now poor LM has, or how I had to doze in a chair all night last night so she could sleep upright and stop coughing so hard she was sick every time she tried to go to sleep… no I am not writing about that. Instead I am looking outside and writing about the lovely spring colours in our garden. In the hopes that spring will bring less bugs… eventually!

What a difference a year makes. This time last year we were very much in the throes of Operation Garden Renovation and our garden was basically a mud pit at this point I think! It has since been well and truly transformed but is still very much a work in process. (Excuse the toddler toys but hey, it’s his garden as much as ours :))

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Am I living a Groundhog Day?

Posted by Caroline Elliott

At the moment I feeling like my life is like Groundhog Day. I am living the same thing over and over and over every day. Does anyone else ever feel like that? Please be warned that this is quite a moany and definitely rambling post so be warned and feel free to stop reading at any time!

Monkey’s chatter at the moment, is very cute and lovely… but it is also incessant. He just never stops and just jabbers away constantly. When he was younger and was a bit delayed in his speech people used to say to me that there would come a time when I wished he was quiet. Oh how right they were!

It doesn’t help that LM stresses me out a lot at the moment with her teething and lack of sleeping. When she is screaming, moaning or unhappy my tolerance levels for any noise reach zero and I can’t even have a conversation with hubs while she is crying without getting stressed. Monkey’s chattering at these times drives me completely potty and I do sometimes tell him to just be quiet. I feel like an awful parent but my brain just can’t take it! He generally doesn’t listen to me anyway and carries on jabbering away. Occasionally there is a couple of seconds pause, or he whisper shouts instead of normal shouting but mostly he just carries on at normal or shouts even louder to spite me!

He is also massively contrary at the moment. It is worse when he is tired or not feeling himself (we still seem to have a cold continually in our house with at least one of us snotty and grouchy at all times!) when it reaches extreme proportions but he is contrary a lot of the rest of the time too. Reverse psychology is in constant use and even that backfires a lot. Here is an example of a conversation this morning. Me in purple, Monkey in blue

Eat your breakfast please. It’s not breakfast, it’s dinner. (Sigh) Fine, then eat your dinner please. It’s not dinner it’s breakfast. Fine. Just eat it. I don’t want to. Ok then shall Mummy eat it? No I wanted it!

If only that one conversation actually meant that he then ate his breakfast without further chatter and debate! It’s not only food over. We have the same conversations over TV, clothes, activities. Even when he was helping Daddy make biscuits at the weekend ( an activity he loves) he was deliberately arguing against every suggestion Daddy made. Would you like to roll the dough? No I don’t want to. Right I’ll do it then. No I wanted it! …Oh I don’t want to! I have to admit it was a little gratifying when Daddy got stressed out by this as it made me feel like less of a terrible impatient Mother when I get annoyed by it on a daily basis!

It’s not just Monkey related though. The laundry is doing my head in at the moment. The step up from 3 of us to 4 of us seems to have trebled our washing (I think Muslins take up a huge proportion of that) and it just feels relentless and never ending. No matter how much laundry I seem to do the washing baskets seem to be constantly full! It doesn’t help that LM refuses to sleep when the washing machine is on so it has to be timed to be on when she is awake, and we daren’t put it on at night at risk of it disturbing her. Our sleep is too precious! Then there is the tumble dryer which again is on all the time – a constant ( well I was going to say hum but it is a lot louder than that) rumble(?) in the background which also drives me crazy.

I went on a bit of a subconscious laundry strike last week. I just couldn’t face it and ignored it (which is very unlike me) and well that certainly backfired as of course the piles reached epic proportions! Hubs said later in the week he wished I had said something to him as he could have tried to do it instead, but with it being a subconscious strike, in that I didn’t consciously decide to stop…. I just didn’t do it for a few days.. I hadn’t thought to mention it. Plus mentioning it would have meant actually admitting to myself that I was doing it and would have forced me to stop being so daft and just do some blimming laundry.

Then there’s the constant amount of crumbs on the floor and the never ending hoovering and sweeping that needs doing. (Even seconds after hoovering every inch of the downstairs I see a new crumb or get one stuck to my foot. I swear they reproduce or grow out of thin air!) And the washing up, and cleaning the table, and cleaning bathrooms and windows. Plus of course the formula preparation and the cleaning and sterilising and all of that rigmarole that needs doing every day. Loading and unloading the dishwasher… the list of housework goes on.

Oh and all the nappy changes…. I really wish Monkey was ready for being potty trained. Not that I am looking forward to actually doing the training, I am very much looking forward to him using the toilet rather than needing changes. Changing two of them all day every day makes it feel never ending . He is nearly ready I think and we are laying a lot of the groundwork, but I really don’t want to rush him as I know from friend’s experiences that that only ever makes things harder. In the meantime, all the hand washing and hand sanitiser from the constant nappy changing are making my hands so dry and horrible. I now wear rubber gloves for washing up and leaning, but they aren’t really so good for bottom wiping or bathy time!

My Mother in law said something the other week (about a totally different subject) that really stuck with me. If you can’t change your situation then you have to change your attitude about it. I can’t stop the amount of laundry that needs doing, or stop Monkey being contrary (hopefully he will grow out of that one day) and we have a while to go with nappies as LM is only 5 mths old. So I need to try and change my attitude. As ever with this kind of thing that is a heck of a lot easier said than done but I need to try as I am a bit of a misery guts at the moment.

A lot of it is down to LM’s randomness and continuing lack of routine (despite our best efforts we still have a mix of good days and bad) which makes me grumpy and I haven’t worked out how to manage my time best, when I don’t know what time I am going to have. I am trying to accept that she doesn’t have a routine and not expect to get things done, as that stresses me out when I don’t achieve things. But then I am still getting stressed because I never achieve anything and can’t even plan how to achieve the things I want to because of our lack in routine! It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

I keep trying to remember how lucky we are, both kids sleep from 7pm at night and she goes through til 530am which is early but not terrible. Monkey sleeps til nearer 7 and he still naps a few days a week, for a good 3 hours at a time so I know how lucky I am with that. I also know that all of this is only temporary but I don’t like feeling like I am wishing away this time. I also realise that as an SAHM at least I don’t have to worry about all of this as well as being at work… but I also get no break from the monotony.

I made a choice to become a SAHM and I don’t regret it as I have loved watching Monkey grow and learn, and I know I will love doing the same with LM too. But it isn’t always easy and I guess that’s my point.. if I have one at all! I told you it was a rambly post! IBut I do feel better for having a bit of a vent so if you have made it this far, thank you for reading :).

A Spot of Gardening

Posted by Caroline Elliott

It seems that Spring is springing into action at the moment doesn’t it? We have had some lovely sunny days and some have actually been really quite warm too which makes a lovely change. Saturday was one of those days, and with the sun shining, Monkey’s Chicken Pox clearing up and some bluebells to plant from Hub’s Dad we spent some time enjoying the sunshine in the back garden.

Monkey loves a good dig in the mud and Daddy likes to put him to work… though unfortunately he always ends up targeting plants rather than weeds and there is one that we are hoping has survived being attacked by Monkey’s trowel…

While Hubs and Monkey were planting I was doing a bit of pruning, dead heading and leaf raking that we didn’t get round to in the autumn (we aren’t the best gardeners in the world!) and enjoying the signs of spring. The crocuses and daffodils blooming in the front garden..

and the buds on one of our new trees (we got these in the sale in August, already marked down to £15 which we thought was a bargain they actually only cost about £8 each), this one looks like it is going to be beautiul once it is in bloom!

Then we had a lovely moment watching some Bees collecting Nectar from the crocuses talking about how Bees make Honey, was very cute!

With yet another week of illness (my turn now) I am hoping that Spring will bring some better health along with the sunnier weather so this week my word is Spring.

Playing outside in the Winter

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Monkey, like most toddlers I imagine, seems to have boundless energy. He is always haring about the place so we try to get out of the house as much as we can. Last year we started our “operation garden renovation” to turn our mess of a garden into somewhere he could play without us having to go anywhere. This was aimed at being ready for playing outside while I was pregnant, and it was amazing. It is still amazing now, as when LM sleeps upstairs, Monkey and I can get outside and burn off steam – even in the middle of winter!

We don’t very often get snow where we are but we have been enjoying running around on frosty mornings. He loves legging it round the garden, pushing his buggy around, and of course Mummy has to run too.

Mummy getting told off for not running!

And we finally got our first smattering of snow last week, which Monkey was HUGELY excited about! We thought this may be the extent of what we would get this year so we were out there making the most of it.

Then, much to our surprise, a few days later we got a proper covering! So Monkey and I went out while LM was asleep and had some more fun. I have to admit, I love snow. I am a big kid and love building snowmen and snow just makes everything so pretty and white (until it turns into slush anyway, yuk!) and I was determined to build a snowman. I tried to get Monkey involved but he was too busy stomping around making footprints and was more keen on knocking over my snowman mid-build. “Twease, twease, knock it down, twease” um no.

I managed to fend him off and here is the finished result, thankfully he loved it when it was finished and even gave him (apparently it is a Daddy snowman :)) cuddles!

We love playing outside, even in the winter, do you?

New Year, Time for Me

Posted by Caroline Elliott

Happy New Year Everyone! 2015 I am pleased you are here 🙂

Are you making any resolutions? I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions as I feel that if you want to do something then you should just do it, not wait for an arbitrary date to start. However I do think that New Year comes at a good time for those of us that have over indulged over Christmas and want to make a fresh start so I never begrudge anyone that.

I have definitely over-indulged lately… not just because it has been Christmas but because the last couple of months since Little Miss arrived have been really hard. And I am a comfort eater. I have been sleep deprived, poorly, exhausted and generally unhappy. So when I feel like this I eat. Chocolate yes but actually crisps are my biggest vice. And coleslaw, and pate and cheese and lots of other full fat options! So even though I lost some of my baby weight shortly after LM was born, I have now put it all back on and my clothes are definitely getting tight. I gave away my maternity clothes already and refuse to buy bigger sizes so it is time to do something about it.

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Becoming a Stay at Home Mum

Can I really do this?

Home & Garden

A bit of a break

Loving our Garden

Making good progress

Our next big project

An exciting week..

Adding some spring colour

Am I living a Groundhog Day?

A Spot of Gardening

Playing outside in the Winter

New Year, Time for Me