Hello March!

What happened to winter?

I think it may have been playing the USA and Canada for far too long this year. We seem to have lurched from a wet and windy autumn to a wet and windy spring without seeing winter in between. I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to de-ice the car this year. However, I have lost count of the number of days the monkeygirl has been anxious about indoor playtime (Asperger’s and noise sensitivity) due to the rain! I have never known our little corner of Essex so wet! The local drains have failed miserably to cope with the volume of rain leading to huge puddles on some of the roads which take days to disappear and the town’s green spaces have been turned into muddy bogs.

I am sure the persistent greyness and dampness hasn’t helped my mood this year. I’m never normally affected by S.A.D. too much, I love a cool, crisp winter morning with the sparkly frost creating beautiful patterns on all sorts of surfaces, ok, so I hate de-icing the car as much as the next person but I’m not a fan of heat and humidity. This winter I’ve struggled to brighten up at times more than I would have anticipated even accounting for my present need for medication.

The summer is my least favourite season, I just don’t deal with heat well. I love spring; the colours, brightness and new life.

This year we have white snowdrops, purple croci, bright yellow daffodils, pale yellow primroses and pink hyacinths all flowering simultaneously in the churchyard. It is wonderful to walk through. In the monkeygirl’s opinion there is only one thing lacking so far… pink blossom! Thank goodness for a shrub close to school which seems to have little pink flowers all year! I cannot recall seeing all these different plants flowering at the same time before. It’s beautiful.

Atchoo!

The wonderful (not!) cold that I’ve had all week resurrected itself today after almost going yesterday… I’m not impressed. I’ve sniffed my way through today…

Despite this, I have had a good, though tiring day. Church this morning was followed by a rush up to Cambridge to meet the lovely in-laws for lunch and a play in a playground for the children. It was fantastic to see them again and see how much our precious nephew has grown. The monkeyboy was a pain in the restaurant, unless he had food in front of him he was wandering/crawling under the table and generally being silly. Nothing I said seemed to make any difference whatsoever. Thankfully he was fantastic after a firm talking to when we left there and was a superstar at bedtime (maybe his sleep in the car on the way home helped that!). The monkeygirl, on the other hand, was great in Cambridge but whiney on the way home (traffic was stop start for a while, she doesn’t cope well with that) and downright obnoxious at bedtime. She did her bathroom things without trouble but refused to get into night clothes and lay on the landing shouting that she was too tired. I ended up having to change her myself, pick her up and put her into bed  and shut her door. She screamed and shouted for the next 10 minutes then calmed enough for me to go in a talk to her, she eventually admitted she’d not been good and it was her choice to be naughty and get some of her cuddlies confiscated, she’ll get them back on Wednesday. We count to 5 if we feel the need to threaten that, usually the children will be doing what we asked before we get to four, but not today. She just shouted. She was definitely a tired girl, I’m not sure whether anxieties about which teacher she’ll have tomorrow will have affected her today, she did tell me on Friday she didn’t want to go in unless her normal teacher was back. Hopefully she’ll feel better in the morning anfter a good night’s sleep.

Life is a rollercoaster…

It seems as though every good day is followed by a bad one at the moment.

My day didn’t start well, l had at least two very vivid, odd dreams last night which woke me up. Both of which l could remember most of the details of in the morning (usually I’m aware l dreamt but l don’t remember what about). l started the day tired and not wanting to get up. Once l got moving l discovered that l have an infection in my toe. Every step has been painful. It’s my own fault, I pulled a dry bit of skin which was digging into the next toe a few days ago.

The monkeygirl also had a huge meltdown this morning. She’s got a bit of a cold and that combined with uncertainty at school (her teacher has been off side since half term) left her unable to cope with the simple decision of what to have for breakfast. We were late for school, which didn’t help her, she needs to be early or at least prompt for things but she did accept she was the person who made us late.

Tiredness and the stressful start to the day just left me feeling kind of lost, that’s the best word l can come up with for how I’ve been today. It’s been hard to focus my mind on anything. The only thing I’ve wanted to do was sleep. l did manage to sort out the contents for the shoeboxes we’re putting together to send off for Operation Christmas Child ready to pack with the children tomorrow.

Hopefully a better night’s sleep tonight will leave me more motivated to do things tomorrow. I’m on top of the housework enough that missing a day doesn’t worry me too much, but missing two would not be good.