The Langstons Homeless Shelter

Last time I blogged me and Percy had been traveling all over the country as homeless nomads. Since then we have been reunited with Dan and have settled in to our new temporary home with the Langston family. We have moved exactly 1 mile from the worst bit of L15 to the poshest bit. This was the view out of my bedroom window before:

 and these are two views outside of our bedroom window and the second room we have been given (a lounge/playroom/office room)

(That's a footballer who plays for England mum's house by the way)

The Langstons are a crazy family that we are enjoying getting to know. 4 years ago the they could have bought a nice normal 4 bed in a nice area and lived a nice normal life but they thought "screw that. Lets buy a house made from 12 one bed flats that has no hot water or heating and requires thousands of pounds to make it liveable and lets make it epic." Quite a big achievement when you have a one year old and are pregnant with another.

So 4 years on it's very liveable. It has a gorgeous kitchen, massive dinning room that looks like a UN meeting room with a massive old 18 seater dinning table, lovely lounge, a playroom, a load of bedrooms and bathrooms in various states of finished and currently the piles of mud and junk in the outside bit is becoming a beautiful garden soon to have a zip wire! On the yet to be completed list is the basement and ANOTHER whole floor that is currently unsafe to even walk in. It's been a bit overwhelming for Percy to go from a tiny 2 up 2 down with 2 parents to this house which is currently made up of the 5 Langstons us 3 and another lodger called Karen. We live on floor 4 or 3.5 ish so he has had a lot of stairs practice!

They are currently getting their garden done which means there is a digger outside which is super exciting for Percy.

It's been fun getting to know the kids who are 5, 4 and 3. They love Percy (sometimes a little too boisterously) and Percy loves them too, especially the middle one Abigail, he says her name a lot. I introduced the kids to the concept of dares...can you believe the parents haven't taught that yet? This resulted in the eldest begging her mum to let her wear knickers on her head to school. Next I'll be teaching the kids spin the bottle, knock- a-door-run, and prank calls.

We decided to pull out of the house we were buying (I wouldn't have minded staying in but Dan didn't feel right about it). So we will be here at the Langstons until we find a new house, which maybe a while as we are a bit confused about what we want right now. We have sent our terrible estate agents a complaining letter along with this:

They haven't responded, surprise surprise.

On a more positive note my homelessness has led to a bit of new material for my comedy.

see it here

Becoming 2nd Homeless

Chapter 1, How not to buy a house:

Pay slightly more than you could have paid for a house 5 years ago.

Get pregnant and decide you need a bigger house.

Try to sell your current house off and on at various prices for the best part of two years.

Give up and decide to rent out your house and borrow money from the bank of mum and dad, which can eventually be paid back once the house does sell.

Have an offer accepted on a house (Jan 2016)

Don't specifically ask if the property is leasehold (it is, which means £350 extra a year in ground rent and maintenance charges)

Listen to a mortgage advisor who said "the new stamp duty laws coming in in April for people who own two houses won't apply to you"

Don't be particularly quick about things.

Find out a few days before the law comes in that the law will apply to you. E.g. you owe an extra £5000

Realise you can basically never buy another house.

Get bailed out by the bank of mum and dad again.

Listen to the estate agent who says "you can exchange on 27th May" and don't specifically tell her to inform our solicitors of that date.

Arrange for tenants to move into your current house on 31st May.

Spend ages making a lamp for the new house out of spray painted coconuts.

Buy a Dobbies loyalty card as we'll be living just round the corner from it.

Chapter 2, - Becoming homeless

About 10 days ago we were in the situation of not definitely but hopefully moving house on the 28th May and being led to believe that, if the paperwork was not complete in time, it would be complete some time in the next week. As the tenants were moving into ours this meant we may have had to briefly be housed by our families for few days, which wasn't ideal as we'd have to move all of our stuff into storage for a few days, but no major problem.

Then 3 days before the day we were meant to be getting the keys, we were told "the woman doesn't want to move out yet, she would be ok to move out in another month" and apparently the paperwork will take "a few more weeks"

So initially this was a bit of a shock and we were both thinking, ok, let's drop out because we can't let this woman mess us around like this and who knows when it will actually happen.

We've always talked a lot about moving abroad I actually can't believe we haven't done it yet. We went on our big two month trip cycling through Europe and the middle east in 2013 - this was an adventure to help us decide where we wanted to be, and although we had a lot of fun and went to some brilliant places we missed our community of friends in Liverpool. So we decided let's stay here for a while and "settle down" whatever that means. Since then we've been tempted by sunnier places a few times, but we told ourselves when we get a bigger house, or when the weather gets warmer, we'll feel better about staying. So this whole house situation has opened up all of these questions again.

Is buying a house a bit too normal? We have considered buying a pub, a shop, a house boat and a canal boat. I've got a friend who lives in a converted horse box and he is living the dream.

There wasn't a lot of time for the "what do we want from life?" questions because there was the more pressing question of "where are we going to live next week?"

Moving was hard work. Percy coped quite well with lots of different people coming in and out of the house and boxes everywhere but then when it came to catching the rabbit to take her away to Rachel's house he burst into tears. In the end we had to go to Rachel's to see the rabbit settle in for Percy to be happy.

On my last night in the house we were reminiscing about our first night in the house nearly 5 years ago when we came back from honeymoon and it was the 2011 riots and we could see it all from our window. Aww good times.

The night we left our house.

Don't worry little sunflower one day we'll get you a garden.

Chapter 3 - the adventures start here.

So I'm currently doing a UK tour. First we visited Granny and Grandad in Coventry. For some reason they do anything Percy asks them to do, like in the picture below, where Percy asked them to do headstands. Later on he made them swim like dogs in the swimming pool.

Then we went to stay with Aunty Sarah in her student house in Southampton. Dan is living in Southport with his parents because he needs to be near work. In a few days time we will be moving in with the crazy Langston family who have three kids, plus other lodgers, and live in a house which I think used to be 12 one-bed flats. I'm quite looking forward to that, I think it will be fun.

So what shall we do with our lives? Here are some options:

1) Stop being so dramatic and just move into the house whenever it's ready
2) Buy or rent another house in Liverpool. Percy has helped us design a new house, it even has a mezzanine level and a helicopter pad.

3) Find a job in the Isle of Wight and then buy a houseboat
4) Move to France or Spain
5) Move somewhere really far like Australia or New Zealand or the Cook Islands for a year. (Dan actually emailed someone about a possible 2 year job in the Cook Islands fairly recently.)
6) Buy a zoo in Wales with our friends the Hawkridges... We need more people to get in on this plan though so if you're that rare breed of person that's rich but fun then why not join us?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52246214.html

P.s. I could have made this blog more funny but I'm saving my jokes for some stand up comedy I'm doing on 8th June, at 8pm, at the Lantern Theatre, £4.

A crazy man called Joe

This weekend we drove over 500 miles with a toddler to attend the wedding of Joe and Katie Fredrick. There’s a lot of people we wouldn’t make that much effort for but Joe Fred (as he is known) is a very special friend to us. (We don’t know Katie as well but from what we know of her she is absolutely brilliant fun and a wonderful match for Joe.)

We first met Joe Fred back in 2011 when he came to Liverpool for Uni. 2011 was the year we got married and during that year we were running a group called studio which was for people who went to our church and were interested in the arts. We mainly went to a load of different arts events together, a lot of them were questionable, one of them once involved a performance piece where a woman was wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of red heels and a rubber horse’s head. It was through going to these random things that we got into the Liverpool alternative comedy scene, which we’re still involved with.

Joe is one of the funniest people ever to be around, he is full of crazy ideas and is not afraid to be a non-conformist. Maybe that’s why we get on well. He also loves a deep discussion and cannot be bothered with small talk. Joe and I share a love of bargains and living frugally. In my student days I once lived on £5 a week for food for a month. Joe went through a stage of trying to live without money by trying to do everything for swaps, he managed to get a gym to give him free membership by making them a promotional video, I think he did the same with a pizza place. He would go to far away weddings without booking himself overnight accommodation and then blagging his way in to sleep in other couples en-suite bathrooms.

I love it when people just drop in at our house unannounced and he did that a lot. Sometimes it was when he was just walking past. Once he was locked out and ending up sleeping on our sofa bed and once he phoned us to say “could I use your microwave? I’ve been trying to defrost my mince in a tumble dryer but it’s not really working.”

Joe wearing a suit jacket, a hoody and shorts, carrying a saw and methylated sprits.

One of the best parties I ever went to was Joe Fred's no electricity party. He filled his and his next door neighbour's alley with candles and we had a stage made of bricks where our friend Alex played the cello and Joe performed with his acoustic rap band. I also did a breeze block sculpting workshop. I’d share a picture but only film photography was allowed.

2 years ago Joe got together with the lovely Katie, she was mad enough to consider living in a yurt in Kent with him. In the end they moved down there and are in the process of buying a house. (I know how normal of them, I’m sure they’ll make it wacky though.)

Joe is from a farming family so his wedding was farm themed. The wedding car was a tractor and the reception was in a barn. 

Not one of those posh converted barns that people pay a lot of money for. Their actual barn, with their actual dogs running around, made beautiful by Joe’s brother.  My favourite bit was when we were at the reception and they said "please welcome the bride and groom" and everyone looked at the entrance between the hay bales but then above the hay bales they appeared in the scooper bit of a digger.

We kept trying to teach Percy to say "Katie and Joe" but as he already knows another couple called "Katie and Mike" he kept saying that.

We had to do a lot of breaking up the journey for Percy. Before the wedding we stopped off at my parents house and at a random park in Leatherhead. After the wedding we got to see my Auntie Hilary and her family. Then we stopped at my favourite childhood park in Warwick and then at my parents house again, and I am writing this on the way back to Liverpool. Percy fell asleep in his normal way - chatting himself to sleep. Tonight he said "watch telly watch telly watch telly watch ...toes. where toes where toes.....granny. Ice cream." *a bit of crying* sleep.

Night night everyone.

Big news

I'm going to be doing a 1 hour 1 woman show in the Liverpool comedy festival! It's on September, 27th, you should come!

It came about quite easily really... we went to the Edinburgh festival in 2014, it was like my last chance to live a studenty life style of staying up late and sleeping on floors and stuff, 2 months before I became a mum. People have asked me "do you want to do an Edinburgh show" and I would, but it would be pretty impossible to just go and live in Edinburgh for a month with a small child and it would be a bit rubbish for Dan if he had to quit his job to come and then had to babysit every night. That's not really going to happen. So my friend Alastair who has done several years of Edinburgh shows said "why don't you do the Liverpool comedy festival?" which is a single one hour show and the main benefit is: it's in Liverpool.

So I chatted about it to a couple of my performingy friends (Esther, Danni, Rob and Lee) and Danni said "just book it in and it will make you do it." Nothing's more motivating than being given a date where you'll be publicly humiliated if you don't come up with some funny stuff. So I emailed this guy. I had to give a title and a blurb, he said it was oversubscribed so I wasn't sure if I would get in, but I did!

No idea what will be in the show really but here's the title and blurb:

Hannah Jones: Best Days of Your Life

School days are the best days of your life, if you die at 16 and can’t remember before 4.

Blending the everyday with the surreal, comedian Hannah Jones remembers surviving school in the 90s as a dyslexic ginger.

“Whimsical” and “lovely” comedy, this is group therapy for those who were never cool enough to sit on the back seat of the bus.

18 months of PJ

Today marks a year and a half since a tiny person came out of me. That tiny baby is now a real person who thinks and talks and walks. I'll demonstrate his growth by using a toy dinosaur.

I heard a few different opinions on what 18 months would be like, some people said it was awful because they start having tantrums and some people say it's brilliant because they can do a few things for themselves and they are learning a new thing every day. So far in general I am really enjoying this stage. Percy is now normally sleeping 7 or 7:30pm till 6 or 6:30AM. He's totally off breast feeding and if I need to do something like shower he is capable of watching a 20 minute tv program on the laptop without smashing the keys or diving head first off the sofa.

Here are 18 facts about Percy Jones:

1) He is named after his great great great uncle Percival Drury who died in World War 1.

2) He was filmed for TV twice in his first 2 weeks of life, once for One Born every minute (but they did't use it) and once for northwest tonight.

3) His first 3 words were "quack" "bath" and "Lola" (the rabbit's name)

4) He learnt baby sign language which has helped him learn to speak and also to communicate before he could speak. The first word he signed was "home".

5) The first food we tried him on was broccoli he was not a fan. He loves "babalas" (bananas)

6) He spent his first birthday in hospital with pneumonia.

7) When we go to the park it's all about the slides, swings are for losers.

8) He likes to paint, and if you ask him what colour something is he'll always say "blue" regardless of what colour it is.

9) When you say "jump" he bends his knees up and down but his feet don't leave the floor. Last week he learnt to jump in a swimming pool... well kind of walk off the edge, he will do that whether you're ready to catch him or not.

10) He loves animals, he is very good with Lola and he really likes dogs which is odd because I'm slightly fearful of dogs, once he got licked in the face by a dog and he wasn't that bothered.

11) Two word sentences he has recently said are "bye bye Daddy" "where teddy" "baby sheep" and "silly mummy"

12) He likes to play pretend cooking and make tea for people with his little tea set.

13) The only T.V programme he will watch is Mr tumble, nothing else keeps his attention.

14) He has almost grasped the concept of hide and seek, except sometimes he'll start playing without informing us first and he kind of wants to watch you hide.

15) He loves music and often demands it.

16) When he says "cuddles" it means "pick me up mummy I want to get what you are holding"

17) Yesterday we went to the farm at Croxteth hall with his buddy Mazen.

18) Today he went on the train for the first time. We're gonna make good use of our free train bus and ferry pass: tomorrow we're going on the ferry.

We love you so much PJ. xx

Our Tropical House

We are in the long and annoying process of buying a house... Not helped by Move Residential's least helpful mortgage advisor ever...

January 2016
Me "so I'm a bit worried about the time pressure with the new tax laws coming in in April, we need to get a move on with buying the house." (There are new stricter tax laws for landlords and as we have not been able to sell our current house this makes us landlords.)

Morgage man: "Don't worry about that you are buying a property to live in so those laws won't apply to you, so there is no time pressure"

We decide to re-mortgage our current house first which takes a while.

March 2016
Solicitors: so you'll be eligible for the new Landlord stamp duty, it's an extra 5k.

Me: what?!

mortgage man: yeah you'll have to pay it.

Me: you said it didn't apply to us?

Mortgage man: I don't remember that, of course you'll have to pay.

My parents bail us out -if we sell our current house within 3 years we can claim the money back. The fact that they can give us money is the one good thing about the generation who got on the property ladder aged 21 on minimum wage.  I feel like we're on a property snake. Anyway thanks Mum and Dad.

One day we will get our house and make it into a tropical paradise.  We've been toying with the idea of moving abroad for years and we've gone round in circles a lot. In the winter of 2011/ 2012 we nearly moved to Tunisia on a whim because we were cold. Then we fairly seriously though about moving to Lebanon in 2013. Then after 2 months of cycling from Liverpool to Kuwait we missed our friends and decided to stay here more long term. But then Dan quite recently saw a job in the Cook Islands and we weighed up the pros and cons of that and then my sister and her husband, who are currently in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, are trying to persuade us that New Zealand is the place to be.  Anyway this was all a tangent, what I am trying to say is that we are moving to an area of Liverpool called Speke. People ask us "why have you chosen to move to Speke?" This handy diagram explains:

If your budget is about £150,000 feel free to use our diagram.


Speke is not a tropical paradise, but to compensate we are going to have a tropical themed living area.

I've been making some things:

 Tropical cushions.

What everyone needs: a tropical ping pong bat.... it's going to be a clock, this is the 12, can you see it?

This is half a coconut shell sprayed gold with added glitter. Imagine 20 of these with a fairy light in each one wrapped around something to make a free standing lamp. If anyone wants the insides of the coconuts let me know. I'm making coconut ice cream and stuff but theres only so much coconut one family can eat. I had to borrow a vice off my Dad for coconut chopping coz Dan refuses to hold things I'm sawing. He is so unreasonable!

And imagine some cool wall paper like this.

When we finally get in we'll have a house warming party, there will be lots of coconut ice cream.

Extreme "Where's Wally?"

Today was my first attempt at looking after two toddlers on my own all day. I have a good friend Steph and we had babies one day apart.

Steph has had both children (now 16 months) a few times and has managed amazingly, today was my turn for the challenge. What could be so hard, it's just Percy x2? As long as I don't attempt to do the weekly shop or cook a roast at the same time it should be fine. I'd planned to take them to "sticky fingers" a group run in my church building where there are loads of toys, some soft play stuff, a singing time and a craft time. I planned to spend the morning there, they would sleep in the double buggy I borrowed from Steph on the way back then a bit of lunch, a bit of play and then home time for little Elodie. 

So I drove home from Steph's with 2 toddlers and a buggy and thought "there's definitely a right and wrong order to unload my cargo." Buggy first, while the babies are still strapped in, then Elodie as she was in the car seat on the road side, then grab Percy. Sorted, well done me. No toddlers left wandering in the road while I carry a very heavy buggy. Maybe today will be easy. 

Right, get some toys out to amuse them and then work out how to use the buggy. Ok one of the wheels isn't going round, bums. Stupid buggy. Oh and it won't quite fit through my doorway. Right abandon that go and get my pram that I'd put upstairs out of the way and a sling. I am not a massive baby sling wearer, I like the idea of them but the problem is if you're carrying your baby in a sling then you have to carry all the crap that you need to look after a baby too. Whereas, with a pram you can shove all that stuff in the pram. So, the sling I have is just like a big sash. For a baby Percy's size the way to do it is to put them on your back but I could't work it out so I had to carry him like this:

Except it wasn't like that at all, this woman makes it look too easy.

Anyway we got there even if my spine is now deformed by Percy's weight. Percy ran off straight away and I had to go and put the pram in the pram bit and unstrap Elodie. We quickly found him and then I realised maybe this isn't the best thing to bring two kids to. A really massive hall (it can seat 600 people) full of toys with over 100 toddlers. It's hard enough keeping track of one, but two is impossible. 16 months is a difficult age, they are very mobile and very quick, but they also fall over a lot and grab things off other children and get frustrated when they can't get in the big toy cars, etc.

Imagine playing "Where's Wally?" but instead of finding an imaginary man on a picture for fun, you're trying to find two real people who are moving in a sea of other moving people because you're responsible for them. And it's not just like "Wahoo! you've found them" you have to continually keep your eye on both of them for two hours, while also seeing to their needs, such as for food and nappy changes etc. it's exhausting. So I stood kind of in the middle of the big hall looking at one for a few seconds and then the other who was the other end of the hall and then back like one of those CCTV cameras. But then I realised Elodie needed her nose wiping which meant having to go to my bag by the pram thus taking my eyes off both of them for a bit which is long enough for them to have moved to a totally different area of the hall. Then I noticed Percy's shoe had come off so I had to go and sort that out which made me lose Elodie. 

They were meant to take their shoes off for the soft play slide but I wasn't going to stick too much to that rule, I do normally with just Percy, but too much risk of loosing a shoe with two.

They are briefly contained and contented with toast.

Then came nappy change time. Luckily I didn't have to deal with a poo whilst I had both of them. Percy quickly put that right though with two poos in quick succession after Elodie returned home. (Spoiler alert: she did make it home in one piece.) Anyway I did both of their nappies at sticky fingers while I was doing Elodie's I couldn't see PJ but I trusted he was ok. Until a woman I know a tiny bit shouted "Is this your child? He was climbing up something and he fell off." She was holding Percy's hand and he was crying. Sorry Percy. I have to confess I've been before and a kid has pushed Percy over or something and I was always thinking "where is the mum?" now I realise "maybe they have two kids!"

Anyway it was time to leave and at this point they were meant to both fall asleep in the double buggy, hmm. After another back breaking journey we arrive home and Elodie is nicely asleep in the pram, phew one down, one to go. Now for some reason Percy always has his lunch time nap in his pram even if we're in and it's raining I still have to take him for a walk to get him to sleep. Yes he goes down in the cot at night but for some reason it is a totally different thing at nap time. I tried to trick him into thinking it was night time: dark room, milk and a bed time story. 

"night night percy" 

"bye bye" he said happily, as I put him down in the cot next to his favourite bear. Then I left the room and he cryed. I ended up rocking him to sleep and putting him down in our bed.

So after half an hour both were asleep. Whoop whoop. The rest of the day went well. Elodie woke first and had lunch before Percy woke which worked well as we only have one high chair. Then Percy ate while Elodie mainly played with a ballon, and then well all went to see Lola the rabbit.

I often give Percy old carrot ends to give to the rabbit. I forgot that Elodie doesn't know this custom and therefore tried to eat it herself.

Look a rabbit!

She's so funny

Big up to parents of two or more. x