Welcome to the madhouse!!!

Just got an email telling me I'm the winner of a competition on pigsback for which I won 10,000 points - which has a value of £100 !!! (This is after the 1000 points I won in the daily trivia quiz on there last week !!!) I could either cash it in on CD wow vouchers (for free chart CDs) or I could order high street shopping vouchers (1150 points for £10 - so if I cash in both wins, that's £100 exactly). But then I got to thinking (cheeky grin) ... one of the places I can use them is Boots, and if I use my advantage card, I'll get loads of points back that I can then cash in on there as well. So if I run around the shop looking for all the "buy 1 get 1 free" deals going on (like I did last week) , I'll need an articulated lorry to bring all the goodies home !!! I might even make the ferry sink !!!

(When do you cross that dividing line between being "thrifty" and "a tightwad"?!!! )

On a more serious note, I should be off to bed soon as it's a school night - yep, I finally have to go back to work tomorrow morning. I'll be sitting on a chair listening to the headmaster coming up with big plans for the whole term from 9 - 12am and 2 - 4.30pm. (That's a full working day for a teacher in France !!!) If I'm a form teacher, I'll have to go in on Friday morning for a few hours .... but if not, after my exertions tomorrow I'll be off until Monday morning again !!! I never really planned to go into teaching in France, but it certainly has its perks !!! The highlight of tomorrow is finding out which classes I'll have and what my timetable will be for the year... so fingers crossed that I won't have too many of those names on my class lists that make you groan and go "oh nooooo, not him again" !!! (Just to justify my salary, I will actually be spending a chunk of my weekend sorting out marking books and lesson planning and making sheets to photocopy .... or on second thoughts, I might just drag out last year's and use them again !!!)

"Come and see the slide show of my holiday snaps, you know you want to !!!"

I'm not really strangling Sophie, honest !!!

Disco diva at Lizzie & Brad's wedding !

Loves being the centre of attention !

Oh so proud of her "special princess blue plaster" !

Messing about on the water in Oxford.

Messing about IN the water at Boughton on the Water (Cotswolds)

Who needs hair straighteners when a baseball cap does the job nicely? ("Take the picture quick Mum, this water is freezing!!!")

Yes, that is the same scarf that Sophie had on her head on the boat in Oxford!

Sophie's favourite place of all - the Old Town in Hastings

Awww look what you missed in Bodiam, Grangran !!!

Disillusioned by the beautiful Cotswolds because it can't live up to Hastings - "There's no place like home, huh?!"

"That's all folks !!!"

Yep, here I am again, back to being a little blogger. Well, we've been back 2 days ...The laundry is done, the house is half cleaned, the fridge is refilled, I've still got bagloads of freebies/bargain buys cluttering up the hall but it's cheap 5 cents day on ebay today and tomorrow so I'm working on making space in "the ebay cupboard" before I can start filling it up again !!!

Unfortunately, Sophie seems to have forgotten all about being at home in her room because she keeps crying and telling me there are monsters under the bed and that she's sad because "she didn't want to come back to France, she wanted to stay in England and have toast for breakfast and see the fish and the hamster" ... and even singing "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly" doesn't work because she tells me "No, that's GRANDAD's song"!! I even offered to phone home last night and she got all excited ... then said, "Will Nanny and Grandad come here on the phone?" Ummmm ...getting pics and (if I'm lucky but I wouldn't count on it !!!) voice on the webcam is about as close as I can get to that, I'm afraid.... and Sophie will have to learn to read before she can understand all the little bits of paper Grandad holds up to the screen instead of typing!!!

Ah well, Mike's back to work tomorrow, I'm back on Thursday (I think, but I haven't got the letter from schoo yet telling when the meeting is!!!) and Sophie will be back to school on Friday so the routine will kick back in then if not before. I wonder if the sun will finally show up once the summer holidays are over!

The theme of the week seems to be .... toilets! On Tuesday, we went to Le Conquet and the lighthouse at La Pointe St Mathieu where Sophie had her first encounter with Turkish toilets, or for those (lucky) uninitiated, a hole in the ground with two porcelain footplates to show you where to stand and squat !!! She was suitably unimpressed and said they were stinky and why wasn't there a seat and no, she didn't need a wee after all (until we said she could go behind a bush instead !!!)

And yesterday was Kijouparc or softplay, as Sophie calls it, because that's where they went on Balamory ! The boys' toilets were totally blocked and overflowing and judging by the number of soggy sock-prints on the foam mats, it was a more popular attraction than the bouncy castles and ball ponds ! (Sophie came and grabbed my hand to show me !)

I wonder what stinky delights today has in store for us !!!