There is currently a post on Datingish about a 16 year old girl confessing that she has knowingly gone after guys who have girlfriends and that to an extent she enjoys this. This is quite shocking, when I was 16 I had very little experience of men and wouldn’t have even imagined doing this.

But what is more shocking is the tone of about a third of the comments made to her and the fact that a lot of those were made by grown, married (and some Christian) women and men. She was called a slut and a whore and dismissed as that. So few actually made any attempt to show any kind of compassion or understanding. And yes, I do understand. It doesn’t take a genius to see why she feels the need to do what she does, even if it is not a stage you ever went through yourself. In fact, if you didn’t go through it yourself then you should make even more effort at compassion. So what if you were ‘never a homewrecker’. Good for you, I’m thrilled. Now why not take that important moral you hold and try to help a 16 year old who for some reason does not. Or is that too much like hard work?

She is 16 for Christ’s sake. She is not an adult. She is not grownup. She is not a slut and she is not a whore. She is a misguided 16 year old. I find it impossible to comprehend how you can see such a misguided teenager and think that the appropriate course of action is to call her a slut, whore and a bitch. Because thats going to put her on the right path. Which leads me to suspect that these people do not in fact want her on the right path. They want to dismiss her as an eternal whore so that they can take their anger out on her and feel self-righteous about it.

She needs to know love, what it is like to love and be loved. She needs someone to guide her. And yes, maybe it isn’t your job to do that. You can’t help everyone. But the least you can do is choose not to throw insults at her. The least you can do is pray for her, or tell her that you hope she finds someone who can help her. And if you can’t do that, say nothing. It is better then further destructing an already partially destructed soul.

In September I am finally removing myself from my parent’s household. Up until this point it has been impossible for me to do so. Unlike my two brothers I did not go away to university which made them getting out of the house a lot easier. I instead began volunteering at the nursery around the corner from me (Interesting Fact: Myself and all my siblings went to that nursery when we were younger and my mother later worked there). This was brilliant for me, I was suffering from mild depression and a huge lack of self confidence and self esteem. I was able to build up a skill, and career, develop my confidence, without the pressure of it being a ‘real job’. So I began a childcare qualification while I volunteered there. Then I was given the job of Childcare Assistant, and not long after promoted to Deputy Manager which is what I still am.

I am now earning enough to make moving out possible. Not enough to buy, only to rent, and only if I do so with friends. I had always planned on moving out with my best friend, who I also work with, but even with the two of us it was too expensive. But then fate looked kindly on us, and it sent another girl of a similar age to work with us. She lives just down the road from the nursery and is renting her house from her parents, on her own. With two spare bedrooms. So me and the other friend are moving there! It is actually even closer to work (it currently takes just under a minute to get there depending on how long it takes to cross the road…. in the new house I won’t have to cross any roads so it will take approximately 30 seconds.)

I must admit that I was never hugely desperate to move out. I have a huge room. And I have no issues with my parents. If I want to go out, I go out and come back whenever I feel like it. If I want alone time I stay in my room and am left to myself. If I want to talk about stuff they are right there for me to talk to. (and my mum does all my washing and cooks for me if she isn’t working)

But now that it is happening I am actually very excited. I am excited to be able to buy all my own food and cook whatever I want. I have decided that I actually enjoy cooking so I am looking forward to it. The other two girls don’t really cook much so I will be making them very jealous with all the things I cook right in front of them and refuse to share. (I am a great friend). I am excited that if I am feeling in an untalkative mood I can just walk in and not have to worry about my mother trying to engage me in conversation. I am excited that I wont have to remember to tell anyone that I wont be in for dinner or that I am going to be back late. I am excited that I can have friends round and not have to squeeze them in my room because I will be able to use the living room (thats my parents space currently). I am excited that I will be in charge of all my day to day and weekly routines and that it will be up to me to do everything.

And because of how near the house is I am glad that I can still see my parents regularly. That if I need help with university work (my father is a university lecturer) or just life in general I can just pop round and ask. I am glad that during family times (birthdays and christmas) I wont have to worry about leaving early so that I don’t have to walk home in the dark because I just have to run round the corner!

I think that this is going to be great for me. I don’t intend on living there forever, but it will do for a few years before I find something more permanent.

When did you move out of your parents home? Any interesting stories?
Are you going to see Harry Potter? If not, why not?

I am forever doing new or different things that prompt me to say ‘it made me feel like a real grownup’. I am 23 on Friday but I still don’t really feel like an adult. I don’t feel like I have a real job. I feel like its just one big game, that I am just ‘playing’. Despite the fact that I work 45 hours a week, which doesn’t include all the work I do for it in my own time and I get paid a reasonable rate. It still doesn’t feel like I am a professional, someone with a career. And I am. I am actually gaining some sort of reputation in my area. There are Early Years people that go round different settings and advise them on varying things, and the lady that comes to see me and one of my keychildren actually tells other people in other settings about me and the work that I do. She suggests that they talk to me about writing an effective playplan. A teacher from a local school came in to see the children who will be leaving us to go there in September, and as she was leaving she said that she had heard good things about me. But it still doesn’t feel real. It feels pretend.

I am wondering if that will ever change. Despite going through all the motions of adulthood will I ever feel like I imagine all those ‘other’ adults feel? Or do they feel it at all?

My Gran was 84 yesterday and she was saying how mentally she doesn’t feel any older then when she was young. She can’t physically do nearly as much as she used to but her brain hasn’t aged. So perhaps I really will feel like this for the rest of my life. Not that it’s a bad thing. I am doing all the things adults should do, my brain just still feels young.

Does anyone else feel this way?

My lovely father, as part of his christmas present to me, bought me a Tomato Growing Set. I work with children so therefore all his presents for me are things aimed at children. Which is ok with me because I enjoy them.

Shortly after Christmas I planted several seeds in little pots. They grew and they grew and they grew. And when they were about 4 inches tall I transplanted one into a big pot and threw the rest away. (I am wasteful like that).

And I watered it. And it grew and grew and grew. It reached about 30 cms high!

(It actually wasn’t quite at its peak when this photo was taken, but I have no other photo, so deal with it)

The question here is, why in the weeks that it grew (and grew) did I suddenly change from imperial measurements to metric measurements? The answer is that I am slightly confused when it comes to measuring things. I grew up in the metric world (10 is the magic number!), but my (beloved) parents grew up in the imperial world. Therefore they are constantly referring to things as being something ‘inches’, ‘feet’, or ‘yards’ long. Whereas in school everything was in mm, cm and metres. I am consequently a bit random in which one I choose to measure things in. I can safely say I have no idea what a yard is though.

Shortly after it reached this height it began growing pretty little flowers. Some of these flowers died. But some began to bear fruit. At first appeared some little green balls. They gradually grew (and grew!), and then they turned orange and then they turned red. And lo! They were tomatoes!

However at this point I began to get majorly stressed out with work and life in general. And I did not water the plant at all for several weeks.

And lo! The plant did die.

The tomatoes are still OK. But unfortunately, I don’t really like tomatoes…….

I cannot stand conflict. It doesn’t matter how I feel about anyone involved, I could strongly dislike them and still be unable to cope with a conflict with them. And I don’t even just hate conflict between myself and others, I hate conflict between any two (or more) people. I hate being involved in conflict and I hate observing conflict. I especially hate being pulled into the middle of other people’s conflict.

I do my best to avoid it, and I do my best to make sure it never happens between two other people. I know people so well that I can predict what things someone may say or do and how the other person will react. So I do my best to either make sure the first person never says or does those things or that I get in there to help the other person to react in a different way. In some ways it is great. It means people rarely dislike me, they come to me for advice, for a calm reasonable opinion and for support.

So it’s great for them.

Not so great for me.

You have no idea how mentally exhausting it is. I can’t just go to work (or wherever else) and do my thing and let everyone else deal with their own problems. I am constantly aware of friction, before it even arrives. I absorb the feelings of everyone else around me. So I am never just thinking and feeling my own thoughts and emotions, I also have that of everyone else around me going round my head. I don’t know how, I think that I am just a very good reader of body language, tones of voices etc. And I am not just being vain, because I have never been wrong.

Sometimes I want to just tell people to get over it, to stop being so damn argumentative. To realise why it is that the other person is acting in whatever way they are. I can, so why can’t they? Why do they only see their own side when I see both sides? It isn’t just because I’m an outsider. It’s the same when I am involved. Do you know how hard it is to have an argument with someone when you can see why you are thinking what you are thinking but also why the other person is thinking their side?

I am just so tired of it. I want to tell everyone to shut up and go away. But I can’t because that would shock and upset them and then I would have to deal with feeling all their shock and upset. Or it would make them angry, and then I would have to deal with feeling all their anger.

I just wish that everyone would stop being so bloody selfish.

Note: There has been a lot of conflict, anger and upset around this week, so I am currently feeling very conflicted, angry and upset. As soon as everyone gets over it I am sure I will go back to being my normal lovely self.

On Saturday my grandparents moved to Chichester to be nearer us. Helping them unpack and get settled has made me realise just how old they are. It is heartbreaking. I know aging is a part of life, and I know they have had a good long life. But they are both in their mid 80′s, there is a good chance that they don’t have that many years left.
My Gran especially seems to have aged about 10 years all of a sudden. She moves so slowly and carefully and her mind is getting muddled. Her mother had alzehimers and it scares me that what is at the moment simply old age might well progress into alzehimers. It scares me that in a few years she might no longer know who I am.
She has always been small and petite, but now she looks so frail, like the slightest gust of wind could knock her over. I keep finding myself telling her to sit down. Which I shouldn’t, because she is independent, she wants to at least try and do all the things she would normally do. She wants to cook, do the housework and gardening and go shopping for herself. And she can still do all of this, but at some point she is going to fall and she is going to hurt herself. What if she doesn’t get back up again?
I’m glad she isn’t alone, I’m glad she is living round the corner from us and living with Grandan. But he is getting old too. It is terrifying. But they could never go into a home or sheltered accommodation, they need their own home. It is who they are, and I will always respect that. As much as I would love to wrap them both up in cotton wool and have someone keep an eye on them 24-7. They need their independence to be happy, and they need to be happy for however many years it is that they have left.
I am scared though. When my Gangan died, I was a lot younger and hadn’t got to know him as an adult. But it is different with my mums parents, I have built up a stronger relationship with them and I think that I will be devastated when they die.

I can’t stop it though. They are going to get older. At least with them living nearer now, I can see a lot more of them then I have been. I can spend more time with them, make sure they are surrounded by love and hope that the last years of their lives are happy ones.

I am now a re-newed fully fledged First Aider. Give me a First Aid emergancy and I will scream and run away I will rush in (calmly) and execute the appropriate procedures in a highly effective manner.

Except for CPR, I have a problem with that. I am supposed to do 30 pumps at the correct beat, but I can only do one or the other. They taught us to do it to the tune of Nellie the Elephant. Apparantly that gives you the right number of pumps at the right pace. But I get distracted and wander off in my head only to return back to reality and realise I have been pumping for a lot longer then is entirely necassary. I am hoping that given a situation where it was a real person requiring CPR and not a dummy, that I would be able to concentrate. However, I would strongly recommend that if you are going to collapse that you do so around someone other then myself.

I have also learnt a have a new… fear… except not a fear. Whatever the word is for something that makes you go squeamish. I have no problem with blood, blood pouring from a cut… thats fine. It’s blood still in the veins, the pumping, watching that just makes me go…. aaarrgh!! So I cannot take my pulse, I just cannot hold my finger to the vein for long enough to find out what my pulse is.

I also don’t like joints that are bent in the wrong way.

And breathing that isn’t normal. You know when your stomach sucks in rather then out? I can’t stand that.

And that’s all you are getting from me. I am going to bed now.

One of my favourite things that my parent’s have given me is my joy of reading, and of books in general. I find it sad how many children there are who hardly ever read, who never have storytime with their parents and have never been to a library. TV is great, I have many TV show boxsets and I watch them over and over again. But reading is something more. Even though I may not always have the energy to do it, when I do, it is an amazing experience.
Though I had a ‘happy childhood’ and great parents, there are very few memories of my life between the ages of about 7 and 18 that I can comfortably recall. But a large proportion of the ones that I do can be associated with books.

Some of my happy book memories:

1) (this could be perceived as slightly disgusting, but to me, at the time, it was highly enjoyable) Sitting on the potty, or toilet, with a huge pile of picture books in front of me. I wouldn’t remove myself from the toilet until I had finished all the books so I would be sitting there for quite some time. The potty used to be stuck to my bottom by the time I finished.

2) Going to the library with my mother. Every week all 4 of us and our mum would walk there. My mum would leave us in the children’s section and go to find books for herself. And we would choose the books we wanted to borrow and then just sit around for half an hour reading all the other books. At that time we were only allowed to borrow 4 at one time, but I remember with great joy when it became that you could borrow as many as you liked. For me this usually meant borrowing 10+, all of which would be read by the time I returned the next week. And by this time they weren’t just picture books, they were proper children’s novels.

3) Storytime with my parents. We had two storytimes every day. One downstairs with my mum who would read a couple of chapters of a novel every night, then one upstairs with my dad who would usually read picture books.

4) Winnie the Pooh, and my father reading it to us… see this post

5) Making my mum choose me a novel from my parents huge collection that she thought I might enjoy. I read many slightly obscure books because of this.

6) The three times in school that reading a book as a class actually didn’t ruin the book.
    – Goodnight Mister Tom… this is a beautiful story about a London child with an abusive mother during WWII  who is evacuated to live in a country village with a grumpy old man who becomes his saviour and teaches him what a real childhood should be like. We read this in my Year 6 Class (ages 10-11), but we didn’t do any work about it, we would simply sit with our books for 15 minutes each day while the teacher read it outloud. I have since read it over 10 times.
   – Pride and Prejudice…. I read this in my year 8 class (12-13), and again we didn’t do any work on it. We read it outloud as a class, taking it in turns to read, and then we watched the BBC (Colin Firth) version of it. This is to date the only Jane Austen book that I have successfully read all the way through, despite loving the film/tv versions of all of them. I have read it several times and watched the BBC TV series about 100 times.
    – Rebecca…. We actually did do written work on this, but I for once I enjoyed it and was able to read the book a few more times afterwards.

7) The moment I realised the power of Harry Potter. I had gone to see the first film with my family, and was so enraptured with it that I almost immediately went out and bought the first 4 books. I then proceeded to read them one after the other. This consisted of  almost constant reading for several days… I would wake up and almost immediately begin reading. It was cold at the time so I took my quilt around the house, carrying my book as I moved between rooms. I rarely even stopped reading while I was walking, and barely stopped for meals. At that time I wasn’t in the habit of eating 3 meals a day, and when I did eat, I would continue reading while I ate if I could. Consequently I had finished all 4 books in just under 5 days.

8) When the last Harry Potter book was released. I had already pre-ordered a copy from Amazon, but my friend decided we should queue at midnight for it. So I pre-ordered another one at a local shop. This was an amazing (though slightly fanatical) experience. Our town centre is divided into 4 streets in a cross shape. There is north, south, west and east streets. One book shop is half way down west street and one is halfway down north street. We had pre-ordered ours at the smaller one which turned out to be a good idea. By the time the two shops opened at midnight, the queue for the larger shop went all the way down west street, round the corner, half way down west street where it only stopped when it bumped into our queue. And it was about 5 people wide. Ours was about a tenth of the size. Once I got home I only managed one chapter before I went to sleep. I then woke up to find the other book I had pre-ordered had arrived. So I had two!

One of the children at my daycare has a very nervous mother, she is always worrying about this, that or the other. She hates her son getting even a speck of mess on him, tells him off if he does and immediately cleans him up. He is therefore learning that being messy is bad. If a bit of his lunch falls off his fork he says ‘oh no, mummy won’t be happy’. If his hands get even slightly dirty while he is outside he immediately goes inside to wash them. At first look people see that and they think that that’s good, they think how great it is that a child is happy to independently wash his hands when they get dirty. But in reality it means he has no time to play, he has no time to explore the outside world and find out what mud does. He has no time to enjoy himself because he is so busy worrying about keeping clean. What kind of life is that for a 2 year old?

I understand that some parents don’t like their child to get themselves and their clothes messy. It takes time to clean them and it takes time to wash their clothes. But you have to let them. It is such an important part of early learning. Exploring what different things do, what they feel like, smell like, look like and sometimes taste like. Exploring how you can combine things to make different things happen. And just generally enjoying your play. Because that is what childhood is (or should be) about. Play. Having Fun. Yes, they should also learn to wash their hands when they are dirty. But they should learn to do this at the end of their play, or before they eat, not right in the middle of their game.

It always surprises me how shocked some parents get when their child comes home with their clothes covered in paint. They had fun! They took the paint and they painted themselves instead of their paper. That’s good. And guess what? Paint washes off! As does mud. The worst that is going to happen is that their clothes get stained, but the answer to that is don’t send your child in expensive clothing to a place where you know they are going to get messy. I am not going to tell a 2 year old that no, they can’t have fun because mummy is too silly to realise what clothing is appropriate for daycare.

And if your child comes up to you with a painting they spent ages creating, asking you to look at it. Don’t respond with ‘You are really messy, why have you got paint over you? Now I have to wash those clothes’. Respond with ‘wow, that’s a wonderful painting, and it looks like you painted yourself too!’. It isn’t rocket science. Imagine for a second how it feels to be that child, so happy with what they have done, so excited to show you, and all you do is point out that they are messy. That is going to hurt.

On men I find dark hair most attractive. Short Dark hair. I don’t care much for long hair on men.

Someone like this….

Or this…

However there are some exceptions to the rule. For example…..