How is it that kids can go for a week on broken nights and still have bags of energy whereas after a few pretty-much sleepless nights, I feel like a pile of poo?!!! Probably the result of the parent-teacher evenings too, but it's time to recover now anyway, it's the holidays - yippeeee!!!
Despite having a few teething pains, Juliette's certainly full of beans anyway. I'll have to dig out the stair gates soon ! ...
Tears was on Monday night - Juliette had her next lot of jabs - two in her chubby little thighs. The first one, she just looked at me as if to say "that hurt, I don't like that" but the second one was a definite "why are you letting him do this to me mummmmmm???" Oh well, it's for her own good and that's the last ones for a while
She's back to being smiley again now anyway, here she is earlier eating her rusk (the soggy crumbs could easily double up as superglue and they get absolutely everywhere !!!)
Juliette's now mastered the art of crawling ... but only backwards !!!
I've got her well trained !!!
What a week ! Tuesday was a national strike day (again!) which meant no buses were running. I originally toyed with the idea of going on strike myself - not for any political reasons whatsoever, but purely because Sophie's teacher didn't know if she was going on strike or not, so without school, I'd have had to pay 20 hours childcare (10 hours each for Juliette and Sophie - it's my long day with 7 hours of class, plus a 2 hour lunch-break!!!) . At €3 an hour, plus €3,11 for a meal for Sophie, plus €2,65 daily flat-rate charge each, that worked out at almost €70 (£45) just for the pleasure of going to work. "I don't think so", as one of Sophie's toys used to say !!!
But in the end, Sophie's teacher didn't go on strike so muggins here decided to go in too. Which meant a 45-minute walk each way at 8am and at 6pm. I wasn't actually that tired but the next day my shins ached like mad (I've never had achey shins before!!! But I was walking pretty fast!!!) How dedicated am I ?!!!
To give me a rest while I recovered from the early morning exertions, I started watching the film "Twister" with the kids in "immersion" because we've been working on severe weather in the States (hurricanes, tornadoes and soon moving on to volcanoes). I remembered it as being a nice family movie so didn't bother viewing it beforehand and the kids were all overjoyed to hear all the insults during the fast driving scenes and the unforgettable line "I didn't marry a penis" !!! (I had no recollection of that line whatesoever, but I'll never forget it now!!!) When I give the worksheets out at the end of the film next week, I'll see if they actually absorbed anything else other than the four letter words !!! They seemed to like the flying cow scenes too ! Oh and one kid on the way out of class declared he never ever wants to go to America if the weather is like that all the time !!!
That's always been my mentality anyway but even more so this week. I saw the headline on the local paper from the bus on Monday, "baby hit by lorry in Dunkirk", which immediately made my blood run cold because you put yourself in the parents' place. Found a bit more out about the story later on in the day .... a dustcart was reversing or turning and ploughed straight into a woman and her pushchair on a zebra crossing. The baby had severe head injuries and later died in hospital. The woman was OK, just in severe shock, and must have felt even worse (if that's possible) because she was just looking after the baby (not clear if it was a friend or the granny - the newspaper kept changing the story).
This was all bad enough but it gets worse. For the last few years, once a week there's been a group of us who go to a local pub for lunch and it turns out that it's the 18-month-old kid of the pub owner. I was in there with Mike on Tuesday and he wasn't there, but we didn't think anything of it. He's a really nice guy, we saw his wife when she was heavily pregnant and he had drawings on the wall and stuff. As if that hasn't already destroyed enough lives, the driver of the dustcart was just a kid too ... 19-years-old and he's only had his driving licence for 2 months. I don't know how you'd ever manage to come to terms with doing something like that, even if it was an accident.
It certainly makes you look at your own kids, however naughty they're being, and think, just make the most of it, don't waste time on all the silly arguments and stress, let's have some fun and some cuddles and live each second like it's the last. I've still got to work out what to say to the dad the next time we see him too ... but I doubt if he'll be back at work for a while yet.