adoption week coming up - please tell anyone you think would be a greaat adoptive parent there are 3,500 kids in care.

PRIVATE HOUSE

The story so far: 

Zachary is five. He has just married his aunt. The cat jumped on the roof and mum rescued him. Dad was found with his head in the oven but has been dragged out and has survived to make the breakfast. Cynstia, the baby, has been christened and everyone had a party outside the house...


I'm told this is all private and shouldn't be discussed, and frankly it is such a dysfunctional set up that maybe it is best brushed under my mother's perfect needlepoint rugs, which grace the kitchen.


It was the best bit of my day.

REALLY TRYING NOT TO CREATIVE DIRECT THIS…….

LEACHING THE DREAMSWEET.

When I wake up in the middle of the night and my head is full of fear shadows, I feel her fat foot jammed up against me and it's so solid, so viscerally there that somehow it makes me think everything just has to be alright, and if it isn't then there is nothing I can do anyway. I stroke her hair as if it is her that woke up and needed soothing and then I go back to sleep.

My mother said that she survived  looking after three children while her husband was away at sea by saying most days to herself at any time after midday: "I'm just tired, everything will seem better in the morning."

I find that playing with a dolls house helps a bit. The world reduced to shoebox size is easier to cope with. Sometimes I let her play too.

A lesson in the internet

By Hyper Islands youngest tutor, aged 4. Am a bit confused by the print outs of dresses app, which clearly frustrates the born digital.   But loving the bubblemixure platform. 

WHO CARES? 

My dear, dear friend Tracy has started to blog and I didn't even notice!  Actually, she isn't blogging she is  blethering. Blethering, as anyone from north of Watford knows, is a little like mithering or blathering but, being from USA, it's a term Tracy has learned from a Scott called Scott, who is Tracy's husband.  I don't think I have ever heard Tracy blether in her life. She's a NY 'career woman' (though also with two children and a husband) who runs massive accounts like Kraft for digital ad agencies. Or at least she did before she went on a summer career break. Now, much as Tracy may love her husbands Scottish way of talking, I love Tracy's American style. I love the way she casually tosses out the term 'career break', as if it is so easy to wander away all summer from a high-powered and high paid job in NY to look after her two children, when we all know there are implications and choices are not easy.  I take my hat off to her for it. It is so much easier to get "career breaks" the way that I do -  when they're imposed upon me. Next time I'm casting about for work I will tell everyone I'm on a "career break", including myself. So much more positive. One day my career will break so many times the wheels will fall off it and then I shall say I am retiring.

Anyway, I recommend Tracy's insightful latest piece, who cares and I do care about her for a million reasons to do with how incredibly dyamically she manages to have that elan and savoire faire in life that probably really does come from a who cares attitude in all kinds of subconscious ways. She also really, really cared for me. Without her support when I was facing not ever, ever being a mummy I doubt I would be one now. Tracy scraped me up off a cosmetics shoot in Malaga in a jibbering mess when even enough valium to slew a horse could not get me to relax ( I kid you not, the doctor in the hotel said that he had already given me enough to slew a horse ), and she flew me back to the UK and got me into the Florence Nightingale hospital when I thought I would die from grief of childlessness. Drama queen, or what? This left Tracy, inconveniently, to pick up the pieces of the job we were doing together. In my defence, I would like to say that the pre-production is the biggest part of any shoot and caring too much not too little was probably my problem, even with work. Sometimes it is impossible not to care but take it from me, displacement activity only works when it is not used as slow suicide by exhaustion. I reckon Who cares? is often a great motto for a working woman as well as one on a career break.


PS: Just realised this post will  probably mean I will never get a job on a shoot ever again. Oh, well. Who cares?

LIMONCELLO OR RUM?

A friend of mine called me to tell me about a site full of great food for children. 

It is a paradise of recipes from Italy, the place where all children ( even the nasty smelly rude ones) are considered little putti. 

http://yummybambini.com

I particularly liked the choccy salami- X's fave foods being both chocolate and salami. And the write up made me smile: 

 salame al cioccolato

This fun no-cook chocolate recipe comes from a headmistress in Naples. She told me it’s a firm favourite at birthday parties. She should know. She has a family herself and has been a teacher for over 3 decades. I did a bit of a double take though when she sent me the recipe and I saw limoncello (lemon liqueur) on the list of ingredients. I called her up to check.  “Are you sure about limoncello for kids?” I asked

.“You don’t have to use it” she answered, “rum works just as well”. 

 

Gone to real life.


About six months ago X's best friends mum called me and told me that she thought I ought to know that my daughter was telling everyone  at school that the reason she hasn't got a daddy is because the police took him away. 


During the adoption process we are strongly advised to tell the truth and be open about biological parents so what I had told X was simply that we didn't know who her father is. That is the truth. But of course it's impossible to let a truth like that rest. So in her little head she rationalised what this meant to the fact that he had been taken away. 


X and I had a little chat about the fact that her daddy had not been taken to prison, in fact I was pretty sure he must be a very good person, as he had such a good little daughter. A little later she told me that she thought he had gone to another country, which I thought was a much better explanation. 


While riding a horse in the playground the other day she turned to the little girl next to her, who she didn't know, and said: 
"I've got no Daddy."
The other little girl looks puzzled, "did he leave?" 
"No, he's dead, " says X. 


A bit later I asked her if she knew what being dead meant. "Yes, Lola told me,"she said.  According to Lola from the childminders, aged five, it means:" gone to real life."