First day of freedom

Tomorrow I will have my first child free day in a long time. It's not just a one off day, it's 3 child free days a week for hopefully ever. I love my kids and everything, but imagine the things I will be able to do! I'll be able to poo ON MY OWN. I'll be able to think. I'll be able to sit on a sofa without someone sitting on top of me. I can make a lunch without having to make 2 extra lunches, I can listen to the news on the radio without having to translate it into the language a 5 year old understands and answer questions on it. I will be able to hear the glorious sound of silence!

Percy starting Year 1 today (Eric starts nursery tomorrow)

He came home from school saying "It was a great day! We didn't learn anything!"

I remember way back in the dawn of time, (2015) thinking this baby will never sleep through the night, and that I will never get freedom until he's in school and by then I'll probably have another one, but finally I have reached the sacred time of free nursery hours!

It's not like I've completely not worked since having kids. I went back 2 days a week after having Percy and that was ok for a while, and then I managed to find some other projects after Eric (I do art projects in schools). I had a good few months of work which meant I was able to pay for nursery, but then those projects came to an end and nothing else came along, so unfortunately I had to take him out of the nursery that he'd just settled into. From them on I just did comedy and airbnb for money, because that fits around looking after a toddler in the day.

It feels like a whole new world of limitless opportunities are opening up to me. (Within the hours of 9am-3pm 3 days a week in Liverpool, so still pretty limiting really.) But going from no free time to this much free time is pretty good. I'm going to split my free time into 3 categories: fun, stuff for money and house stuff.

Fun

I think this time is the time where everything gets levelled out. If you compare the effort me and Dan have put into parenting so far we've both worked hard. I've done more hours because he's earned more money, but if you count up all the extra night time hours I put in because I was breastfeeding, I think thats an average of 1.5 hours per night. 

If you include the time it takes to get back to sleep again I think 1.5 hours is a conservative estimate and thats for for 1.5 years per child. So 3 years x 1.50 hours is 1642 hours. Theres about 5 hours in a school day which means I can have 328 days off before I should start feeling bad that I'm having too much fun. So lets say I have one school day of "me time" a week there are approx 190 days in a school year, so one day a week term time is only 38 days per year. So thats 8.6 years till I've made up for breastfeeding in the night time. Which is pretty much until they're both in secondary school.

So how should I fill my 1642 hours of fun? Please let me know some things I can do! I thought about having a whole day of napping, it would be quite a challenge. I might have to then do some intense exercise when the kids are home so that I can still sleep in the evening. I would really like to cycle up the Loop Line (a cycle track right by my house) as far north as I can go. The loop line claims it goes to Southport but actually only goes to Aintree. I'd love to wild swim somewhere, but not sure where is near. I would love to spend a whole day painting. Really a whole day doing anything would be nice. I feel like I so rarely have time away from the kids that when I do I have this mad list in my head of things I should be doing. It's easier without them and it's hard to relax because it's the only time I have to do anything. 

Suff for money

I've written a list of 14 self-employed things I can try to do to make money, I'm hoping some of them will pay off. There's a project that was all agreed for June that should be going ahead this term, and I finally managed to blag a meeting with the school Percy goes to, because the head teacher phoned me about something else and while she was on the phone I managed to get her to agree to meet me. I've got a little mural to finish in someone's garden and hopefully I can get more mural work. And then there's all the comedy stuff I could start doing again. And if all this stuff doesn't work, then I could look for a real job.

Hoping to make a bigger version of this in schools sometime soon.

House Stuff

Since buying our house 3 and a half years ago I've been gradually ridding it of all the magnolia. I like almost every colour in the world except magnolia, it's just such a nothing colour that can't even be bothered to be white. Our whole house was textured wallpaper painted magnolia, with a beige carpet. But I love our house. It's a good size, a nice size garden and it's 15 mins walk to Woolton village which is super posh. But, because it's also 5 minutes walk to belle vale shopping centre, which is a bit of a dive, it made the house affordable (£132,000).

One good thing about the house is that under that horrible wallpaper is decent plaster, so if you can be bothered with the time consuming job of removing it you can make it nice without spending much money. I already decorated all the bedrooms, the bathrooms and the lounge. But now I'm trying to do the dining room. It's going to be duck egg and coral (Dan has no idea what colour either of those colours are). I'm going to try and do wood paneling on the bottom section too. Here's what I've done so far...

The space bedroom

The tropical lounge

The air bnb room

Our room

Right I need to jump in to that bed now, I can't stay up late tonight I need lots of energy for my big day off. Night. x

Jonesfest

Last year we got new decking made in our garden and I managed to acquire a sound system for my comedy night, and when you put them together with a big mosaic I've made, it sort of makes the perfect little stage for hosting a tiny festival in your garden. 

Hosting a festival in you garden is one of those things that I wish was normal. When I've told people about it sometimes they've asked "why?" and I really want to respond "why not? Why aren't you? Why isn't everyone?" Like imagine how good it would be if everyone you know put on a festival every year or 2. Imagine that it was just the standard thing you did, and occasionally you could opt out if you wanted to, but people would stop you to ask why. 

I think the same about slides in houses. I wish it was standard when fitting a staircase for it to be half stairs (for going up) and then half slide. And if you really wanted only stairs without a slide you had to make a point of it and fill in a form and pay a bit extra. That's the kind of world I want to live in.

Dan claims he did not consent to this festival (I didn't - Dan) and as an introvert found it a bit more of a challenge. There definitely were some conversations about it though and if he was on facebook he would have seen an invite and the itinerary! (Without me you'd never have spelt itinerary correctly - Dan).

It was originally planned for June, but obviously that didn't happen and then it was really hard to work out whether we should still do it, as the advice is constantly changing and people's views on meet ups change a lot too. In the end we did a massively cut down version of what I originally planned. I had planned a night of music with face painting and hair braiding for the kids, a night of comedy, a live podcast recording, a Jenga tournament, a clothes swap, weaving and knitting workshops, a ukulele strum along and a few other things. All of those thing didn't happen but we did do 5 fun things.

Day one: a bike ride picnic, where I taught the kids rally 123 (you might call it 40 40 home or something else). It's like a cross between hide and seek and Tig (which you might call "tag" or "it"). Anyway the point of this story is that I got outrun by a 7 year old. Sad times. My friend Steve poured salt on the wound by asking me if I let him win, no I didn't he genuinely was faster than me!

Day one was also kids baking, we made cheesecake and gingerbread.

In the evening of day one my lovely friend from uni days Josh came to stay, and on day 2 he put on 2 circus skills workshops on day 2. 

Me and Josh in our student days just hanging out on stilts.

It was a lot of fun. I learnt that there's some circus things I can only do with an angry face and Dan discovered a secret talent for hula hooping.

 

Day 3 was breeze block sculpture, which is one of my favourite things you can do with a single breeze block. If you're looking to sculpt something and your budget is £1.20 I would highly recommend a thermolite breeze block. The true cost though is £1.20, a trip to L13 and a bit of embarrassment. It's slightly embarrassing just being a woman in a builders merchants, you always just feel so aware that you don't look like a builder the whole time. I once got asked out by someone there which further adds the feeling you have that women never enter these places. If I worked in marketing at B&Q I would propose this as their USP:

"Want to not feel completely self conscious while looking round DIY stuff? Don't mind paying double for the privilege? Come to B&Q where we have women, and the ability to browse without having to state exactly what you want in imperial measurements."

So I went to the builders merchants to buy 5 breeze blocks. It was a rainy day but I specifically wanted dry breeze blocks, you can't sculpt wet ones. I made the builder man get some out that were 5 layers down, just to add the the awkwardness of being a woman, bringing my kids and only wanting 5 blocks. Anyway it was all worth it. None of these are finished yet but I think they all had fun.

The finale of Jonesfest was Drama games led by the brilliant Steph. There were 3 families as well as us, all with kids ages 1-8 and considering some people didn't even want to say their names at first, she did an excellent job of gently bringing us out of our shells. At the end one of the kids was begging her to do more. 

I particularly enjoyed an improvised quick-fire game where someone says "what are you doing?" and you had to come up with an action such as "reading a book" or "mowing the lawn." Percy came up with "killing a cow". I asked him later about it and apparently it was the first thing that came into his head. This led me and Dan to come up with the actions "taking my son to counselling" and "resuscitating a cow".

It was a super fun weekend and I can't wait to start planning Jonesfest 2021! you're invited.

This week feels like the last week of this bizarre season of a pandemic and having the kids 24/7. Today was Eric's nursery trial, he'll be doing 3 days a week and Percy will be starting year 1 on Monday.  I'm going to have some child free time at last!! I'm pretty excited about all the things I could do, but that's a whole other blog post which I'll write soon. Well done for surviving life this far everyone. xx

Food

Lockdown is the time for some deep refections on life and since it's 12.45am and my neighbours are having a party which is keeping me up, I might as well write down some of those observations now.

Today I was asked on twitter what is the opposite of ham. I replied "A happy pig?" Other possible answers include cheese, bread, and eggs.

But I've been having my own food-based ponderings and have managed to write down a list of unwritten rules about bread and toast:

Is this just the UK rules? If anyone is reading this from outside the UK let me know your rules.

My kids regularly ask for weird sandwiches such as a grape sandwich. Peanut butter and raisin is a current favourite of Eric. No pun intended.

A few weeks ago we signed up for a Zoom cookery class. It was a free class and they provide all the ingredients for free delivered to your door, it sounded great. I had visions of learning to make a curry sauce from scratch with the boys, before sitting down to eat our wonderful creations as a family. What actually happened was I pretended to make Jam quite convincingly on Zoom. I knew my B in GCSE drama would come in handy one day. 

Yeah I was not that happy when they announced the first lesson would be jam and chutney and Dan was busy working, so I had a 2 hour Zoom class to make these things with a 3 year old and a 5 year old. And we have Jam! You can buy it for 23p, whereas fresh strawberries are something we treat ourselves to every few weeks in the summer, and we were completely out of caster sugar that week. It was sold out in our local shop, so the thought of turning fresh strawberries and sugar into boring old jam while trying to supervise two kids didn't appeal. 

I made the chutney, that was first, and chutney is even more pointless than jam. I guess it's middle class savoury jam for people having cheese and wine parties, which is very few people in lockdown. And really, if you had a load of good cheese, and wine, no one would miss the chutney. Anyway I made the chutney and then started chopping up the strawberries for the jam and putting them in the pan (which wasn't on) giving them the occasional stir, then I made my excuse to leave because of the kids, (who annoyingly choose that moment to be angels) and then we ate the strawberries. Unfortunately she has asked me to send a photo. If you're the one Facebook friend on this course with me, please don't grass me up. I did the next week; I made pizza and focaccia bread. It was delicious. 

Dan and Eric did the class where you make chocolate marshmallow scones, they were incredible!

Have you tried any new recipes under lockdown? What did you make?

Thanks for reading. x

The Lockdown Birthday Boys

Eric was born 4 days after Dan's 31st birthday, bad planning there. Some people say, when they give birth on their own birthday, "it's the best gift ever." Each to their own, but I always think "really, always having your birthday overshadowed by your child's birthday is the best gift ever?" Have you never received a scalextric? I really tried had to make Eric not be born on Dan's birthday, he was going to be induced early (because he was too tiny and they were worried he wouldn't get enough from the placenta) so I sort of had a bit of a say over the induction day, but in the end he came before being induced so 4 days apart was the best I could do.

It was hard to think of a way to make Dan's birthday special, in lockdown, with our kids, in bad weather. If one of those 3 factors were different I could think of ideas, but you have to be pretty creative to think of a way to make a day special locked in your house with your crazy kids who you've had no break from in 6 weeks. We had a bit of a dilemma about whether he should take the day off work. It seemed a waste of a day, but also we wanted to make the day different, so we decided to do it and it was a good choice. 

I got up first with the boys and we decorated the house with balloons and homemade bunting, he had a couple of presents and we played Happy Birthday (the Stevie Wonder version) as he came down. We actually made him cry! Result!

 

I had collected a few video messages from a few of his close friends, including our old friend Will in Australia, they were really lovely. The main fun thing you can still do in lockdown is eating and we all love to eat nice food, so we had a special breakfast of pastries, a special party lunch and a takeaway for tea. Dan even got these very special artisan biscuits in the post, but when he wasn't looking I switched them for custard creams. Ha ha ha I'm hilarious.

In the morning it was cold and windy but not actually raining, so we used the opportunity to get out to Otterspool. In the afternoon we snuggled up and watched the film "The Incredibles". I doubt it would have been Dan's first choice if we didn't have kids, but it was a nice compromise. The best thing about home schooling is you can just decide to sack it off for the day if it's your Dad's birthday. 

In the evening Dan's sister Lydia organised a family quiz, Dan's brother Josh even got up at 4am in Korea to join! One round was a picture round on famous land marks from above, like the Taj Mahal etc. We couldn't work out this one of a normal looking house, I thought it must be a celebrity house like the childhood home of John Lennon or something, but after a lot of back and forth we realised it was actually our current house!

On Sunday it was Eric's turn for a birthday. I think it's a bit easier to think of fun stuff for a 3 year old, and actually 3 and younger is the perfect age for a lockdown birthday. They are happy with lots of attention from us and don't particularly need loads of other people in the house. He woke in the morning forgetting it was his birthday and said "mummy come and look at the morning mist." He was very excited about the morning mist until he realised it was his birthday. He had a lot more presents than Dan, all the family had sent stuff. He's Fireman Sam Mad at the moment so there were a lot of fireman related presents and a few garden toys. We did the homemade Elmer Piñata too. 

We spent the whole day in several different forms of fancy dress, because why not! We had online youtube church followed by coffee on zoom with our church friends. This was the first time we'd tried this and it was a bit weird because when you're having coffee after church you don't talk to 20 people at the same time. But it was nice and they sang happy birthday to Eric and we cut the fire engine cake.

Then we had some delicious food and social distancing visits from our friend the Nevils and Dan's parents. 

I hope we'll find this photo in the future and wonder "what was going on here?"

We also made a social distancing visit to our friend Steve, who also had a birthday that day. Still in fancy dress obvs.

We had a short virtual party, which consisted of musical bumps which didn't really work because no one could hear our music, a scavenger hunt and a magic show, from our very own magic boy.

We ended the day with a sleepover and watched the new Lady and the Tramp. The boys were super excited to sleep downstairs and we were thrilled to be woken by a lot of jumping the next morning! #sarcasm.

I can't believe my baby is 3! I really am gutted that he's growing up because he's just too cute at this age. I didn't mind Percy growing up I was excited to for him to reach new stages, but it seems really sad now to be leaving the baby stage behind. The little voice, the way he neatly fits onto my lap, the way he walks and moves that isn't quite like an adult. I really don't feel like this about actual babies, I was relieved when we reached his first birthday. It was like "Happy birthday not long to go until you get fun" and sleep deprivation really makes me a horrible person.

Eric at nearly 1

Sleep and money are the main reasons that we're done having babies, but to focus on the positives, I am super excited to be a bit more free again. In September Eric will get his free nursery hours (hopefully if nurseries are open again) so I can get a job, or have more time to give to making comedy a job, or try and go back to the art workshop stuff I used to do. But also we can just do more fun stuff that we've been too scared to try with tiny people, like camping and ice skating and cycling. I hope when the world is open again we'll be ready for a lot of family fun.

Bad Haircuts and Llama Farms.

Hey, how are you all? I hope you're ok. If you're not ok message me, I could cycle to your house and act out your favourite film in interpretive dance, or something, to make you smile. I am really sorry for the people who aren't having a good time, but I'm having a lot of fun! Its hard work and full on, but I'm doing things I would never normally do and I think I feel less stressed than normal, because all I have to do is keep my kids alive and entertained, I don't have to be anywhere, or ever be professional.

I was excited but stressed about the weekend of Eric's 3rd birthday (next weekend). I had a gig on the Friday night, then on Saturday I had my hour long show at the Coventry Comedy Festival and then the Sunday was Eric's birthday. So all this meant I had to make a Fireman Sam birthday cake, learn an hour of comedy, (and also 10 minutes of comedy which needs to be 10 mins of best bits not just the first 10 mins of the show) make childcare arrangements for Saturday, because Dan would have a small part in my show, promote my show, then after the show immediately drive home and then host a 3rd birthday party. All fun things to do, but 3 fun things together does not equal a fun weekend. So I think Eric will have a way better day with just the 4 of us having time for him.

I think these times are great for creative people, theres so many fun ideas going around of stuff you can do with kids. We've done a lot, with varying levels of success. Percy has tried stop-frame animation with lego, most days they do yoga, we made the stairs into a slide, we made bagels that were horrible, we made rhubarb crumble that was not horrible.

Making the crumble

We made dinosaur eggs,

Tape town, 

We made paint bombs and painted the drive, 

We played "what's the time Mr wolf?" a lot, learned telling the time with a paper plate clock, decorated the house for a drive-bye wedding.

We've eaten outside most days. Percy cycled 3.5 miles, we've made toilet roll rockets,

and rainbows,

We've drawn on the walls, (we're going to get rid of this awful wall paper)

I made a pinata, (find out how I did it on my art page)

Dan launched his improvised comedy story-telling podcast

And we did one disastrous haircut that was traumatic for everyone.

Sorry Percy.

It doesn't look quite as bad now, but it's safe to say Dan is not looking forward to his lockdown vasectomy.

We've also had a lot of chats about future adventures, which we do a lot, but I think now that we have decided not to have a third child I would really like to do something fun so that I don't regret not having a third. So I can look back and say "a third child would have been nice, but if we'd had a third we never would have bought that llama farm in Peru." The average cost of raising a child in the UK is apparently £75,000 which coincidentally is also the exact cost of buying a llama farm in Peru.

More likely ideas are moving to the south of France, or having a family gap year and homeschooling the boys in a camper van. This is really a whole separate blog post, there's lots to think about. It's fun to look at what kind of house you can buy for not a lot of money in France, but it's less fun to think about what you would actually do for money, and what you would do with your old house and about how my French is so bad that I once accidentally announced in French to a French person "I am very pretty".

Stay Safe. xx

Lockdown and Homeschool.

Hey, how's everyone doing in day five of lockdown? What I don't get and what I just kept saying while watching the news was "why didn't they close things ages ago?" Schools were still open 8 days ago! and I couldn't really take things seriously when the schools were still open. I mean I wasn't like going around licking Grannies and stuff, but I did meet up with people and take Eric swimming in the last week of schools. It was last weekend I thought "time to take things seriously now the schools are shut."

Obviously we should all be careful and stay indoors and that means hopefully in 2 weeks time not a lot of people will be dying from this. But the people who are dying today got infected when schools were still open and people were still living almost normal lives, and I personally would blame the government for that. I don't know all the ins and outs and science and economics but it's not like we were the first country to get this and didn't really know what we were doing. However much hand washing and social distancing we're doing today it's not helping the people who got it a week or two ago.

My sister Sarah has had a crazy time recently as she was due to get married on 11th April. At first when this stuff came into the news she thought "ok maybe I have to limit the wedding to less than 100 people", then she thought she'd have a very small wedding in the church and a big celebration in a year, then even her small wedding was not possible because the banns of marriage were not published 3 times, and churches were shut. Then she planned an outdoor social distancing small family wedding which would not be legal, but managed to see this wedding wizard guy who did something magic so that the banns thing didn't matter anymore. Straight from there they went to the church in normal clothes, got legally married with 2 witnesses and went back to separate houses. In her head the "real" wedding was going to be in the garden today where she would wear her dress and we would sing some songs and play some games at a safe distance. Then we went into lockdown and this was no longer possible. I suggested we all planned our weekly shop at the same time and that she walked down a different kind of aisle in her dress, but she didn't go for it.

Homeschooling has been quite fun at times, I'm sure the novelty will wear off. I feel like Eric is getting a bad deal. He normally gets me to himself in the day, but now a lot of focus has been on Percy's learning. We have a timetable which starts with yoga at 9AM. I love this kids yoga, Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube. It's basically putting your kids in front of YouTube guilt free, Percy loves it. Eric joins in sporadically. At 10am I've been doing live craft which has been really fun. I like the interaction of it being live, but it is a little stressful when Eric is kicking off and having to make the crafts at a few different stages is effort. Yesterdays was super fun though.

Day 1 weaving

Day 2 Treasure maps

Day 3 Magazine holder

Day 4 Turtles

Day 5 Giant board game.

If you want to follow the crafts like my page.

It 11AM Percy does half an hour of reading while Eric has half an hour of 1-on-1 time with either me or Dan. Percy's reading is painfully slow. 12 is lunch and exercise time.

Then we have a bit of time for school worksheets. The teacher also sends work, yesterday was make a butterfly and we smashed it.

This school time is great if Eric naps, which is not what normally happens. Today we drove to a park (now banned I think) and we drove a bit extra to get Eric to sleep, which meant I could teach Percy properly. I quite enjoyed today's lesson where I taught him about money, how to recognise the coins, what £2 could actually buy you. He loved it, and it was a nice feeling to be like "I actually taught you something you didn't know today." It makes me think I should do more stuff like this in school time.

The kids watch TV at 3 and have daddy time after that. The first the plan was for him to teach music and French, but I think this was a bit ambitious at the end of the day.

Today I was feeling pretty positive, I like change, I've video chatted this week with people I haven't talked to for ages.

Extended family chat

I even played Monopoly with our friends Jess and Martin. It works well if you have two boards and when you owe money you put it in the bank and they take it out of their bank.

It's nice to have a break from doing so much comedy, it's nice to have lunch as a family, and now that they've announce the self employed thing I should be fine for money. But then I watched the news...
People are dying everywhere, but the thing that made me really sad was seeing a massive refugee camp of Syrians who don't have running water. So far no one there has it, but it's only really a matter of time before someone gets it, and then everyone will get it and anyone who would go to hospital here, and have the chance of getting better, will just die.
I don't know what I can do about that other than pray, but there's ways I can help people here. There's friends I can check up on, and I'm helping with a Food Bank. I hope my art is fun for parents out of ideas. I really hope I can be generous, and kind with what I have.

Stay safe x