You learn something new every day!

There are many occasions when I wish I could put a smile on the faces of my children but I rarely succeed.  Teenagers seem to turn drama and disapproval into an art form and even when they are no longer teenagers old habits die hard, so it is very unusual to see all three of them smiling at once. 

Tonight was an exception, all three of them were helpless with laughter. I guess on balance I would rather have them laughing at me than sitting there looking miserable. The cause of the hilarity King Richard III, or to be more accurate it was a joke about him that led to the laughter. It was confirmed today that a body found buried beneath a car park in Leicester was Richard III the last Plantagenet king, and the last king of England to die in battle. Having warned me that it was in slightly bad taste my daughter shared a joke from Twitter 'What was Richard III doing in the car park - dogging'

My other daughter was crying with laughter at my reaction and she made this comment on Facebook
That awkward moment when your stepdad has to explain what dogging is to your mother.. 'You are joking arent you...? What are they, double jointed?!'

Oh well, it was nice to see them happy, and it led to a nice family evening, with everyone chatting and laughing. They helped me to choose a ringtone for my new phone, it is 'Me and Mrs Jones' - it was the obvious choice really!

A Very Special Day

Yesterday was Emily's graduation, it was a very special day and we all felt very proud of her as she received her degree. She wasn't impress with what she had to wear, the gown was OK, but Emily doesn't do head-wear and she really struggled with the cap, it sat on top of her head like a pimple and looked as if it would fall off with the slightest movement.

As always with important events it is always the trivial things that take on a greater significance than they should. I took a spare blouse because I have a bit of a reputation for spilling things and when we went for lunch I was extra careful. I really shouldn't have been tempted by the cheese and tomato panini, especially one containing red Leicester cheese. I kept my blouse spotless but a small blob of orange coloured cheese escaped onto my skirt right in the middle at the front where it would be obvious to everyone. Desperate times call for desperate measures, the only thing I had available was hand sanitiser, thankfully it worked well enough to leave hardly any trace of the stain and I was able to enjoy the ceremony without worrying about my skirt.

It was lovely that Robbie was able to be there to share in the day, an added bonus for him was a sighting of a particular kind of bus, it looked like any old bus to me, but Robbie went into a state of rapture when he saw it. As if trains weren't bad enough we have to cope with bus spotting as well!!

Fitting A Quart Into A Pint Pot

Robbie abandoned me in favour of a Deltic at the weekend so it was very quiet, but I had no time to relax. On Saturday morning I was up bright and early and before 9am Sam and I were heading for Leicester to perform 'mission impossible'. We had to transport three years worth of Emily's accumulated belongings back to Northampton. I may have a seven seater but a Pickfords lorry would have struggled to cope with that lot. Finally everything was crammed in somehow and we headed home. We are still facing the problem of how to fit all the stuff from the car into the house. Emily was very sorry to leave uni and say goodbye to all her friends, it is the end of an era, it really does seem as if those three years have gone past in the blink of an eye.

Bad Planning 28.11.07

Well, once again it seems I can't win! Sam occasionally tells me off for embarrassing him by writing about him on the blog, but Emily was grumbling at the weekend because I haven't written about her for ages! Hopefully today's entry will put that right.

Emily seems to have settled into university life fairly happily, she is working very hard and always seems to have a deadline to meet. Her English course demands a lot of reading, she has always been an avid reader but I think she finds it hard to muster much enthusiasm about one or two of the set books. When I saw her at the weekend she was struggling with 'Mrs Dalloway' and she gave me a very complicated explanation about the style of writing and why she finds it hard to get into. It made me very grateful that I am free to read whatever I like these days. I'm a bit like Sam in some ways because I often prefer to read non fiction books, but I enjoy crime fiction of various kinds, Kathy Reichs is my favourite these days.

Emily is doing French as her second subject, and that requires a lot of reading too. Some of the French reading material looks really grim, but I'm probably being unfair, I hated French when I was at school but it was a compulsory subject up to 'O' Level so I just had to grin and bear it. I don't know where Emily got her flair for languages from, but it certainly wasn't me!

We are lucky because we see Emily most weekends. I think she misses Oreo more than the rest of us, but it is always nice to see her and to catch up with her news. On the subject of missing things, Oreo will be missing his manhood very soon, I rang the vet today to make an appointment for the 'deed to be done'. He will be six months old on 20th December but it doesn't seem long since he first came to live with us, he was such a cute little kitten. 20th December is also Sam's birthday (a bit of bad planning on my part!) and he will be a teenager at last. He has been telling me that he is almost a teenager for so long that is has almost become his theme tune. I have always felt sorry for Sam because his birthday and Christmas are so close together, but we try to make it special for him. I feel a bit sorry for myself too, because I have 5 family birthdays very close to Christmas, including Sam's and Emily's, it is a very expensive time of year!

University At Last 01.10.07

Yesterday we made an early start. First there was the challenge of packing all of Emily's belongings in the car, we got it all in somehow (and we only forgot a couple of minor things). The journey to Leicester was relatively uneventful despite the inadequacy of the directions provided on the internet by one of the big motoring companies. It would be fair to say that we arrived at our destination in spite of the directions rather than because of them!

Emily's flat is lovely - I would happily have stayed there in her place! She has her own room with en-suite bathroom and she shares a really nice kitchen with 3 others. The accommodation is fairly new, it very well designed and it is in a nice area. She will have to travel by bus to the university campus, but she can buy a bus pass so it should work out well. Unloading the car proved a bit of a challenge and it put Robbie in a bad mood, but we got it all done and we left Emily surrounded by crates and packing cases with hours of unpacking ahead of her.

I expect she will be back as soon as she has a big enough load of washing, but it felt very odd to know that she wouldn't be at home full time anymore. I left her with a little box of things to remind her of home and I indulged my scrapbooking skills to make her a little tag style scrapbook with a few photos of friends and family inside. It always takes longer than I plan to make scrapbook layouts, but I was quite pleased with the finished result.

Results

Results Thursday 16th August 2007

There were two reasons for waking early this morning, Robbie had chosen today for his day off 'playing trains' on the North Norfolk Railway but more importantly this was the day Emily had awaited and dreaded in almost equal measure. A Level results are due this morning and depending on those all important grades she her conditional place at Leicester University would either be confirmed or denied. Every parent wants their child to do well and I am no exception, but whatever her ultimate grades I knew that Emily had worked very hard and if she had done her best that was good enough for me. I knew that Emily was feeling anxious and I was glad that she would be going into school with friends to get the results.

We needed to leave the bungalow no later than 9.30 at the latest in order to drop Robbie at North Walsham on time to catch his train. As usual he turned the luxury of time into a last minute rush and I left him still getting ready while Sam and I got the car out ready to go. As I put my mobile into hands free thingy a text popped up to tell me that I had a voice message, it was too early for the results and I retrieved the message anxiously. Emily's voice sounding young and tired informed me that she didn't have her results yet, but she had been on to the UCAS website and it showed that her place at Leicester University had been confirmed. I was startled to find tears of relief (and perhaps pride) running down my cheeks. The last few years have been hard for us all but despite the loss of their dad the girls have made the most of their educational opportunities and they have enjoyed their friends and lots of other out of school activities too. I knew that Eric would have been proud of them both. It has been a little different for Sam as he was so much younger, but despite his Aspergers he is also getting on well.

At about 10am I dropped Robbie at the Station and the phone rang, Emily's excited voice told me that she had got her longed for grades and despite her fears, that longed for A in English had not eluded her. I was so pleased for her, now she could look forward to a celebration with her friends. Sam and I headed off to Wroxham Barns for a day without trains. We began with a visit to the farm, it has been a favourite with Sam since he was tiny. He loves being able to feed and touch the animals, the goats are my favourite but Sam loves them all. This time a ferret called Jet seemed to fascinate him and a litter of 15 piglets with their mum attracted a lot of attention too. A large and hungry goat was not satisfied with several handfuls of food, he decided to have a go at my Animal handbag as well, but I managed to pull it away just in time. Two donkey's had perfected the art of illusion and by moving further along the fence while the other donkey was being fed the one who had already been feed managed to look as if he was a different donkey who was still waiting for something to eat. This was obviously a well practised routine and it had Sam in fits of laughter.

After the farm we visited the shops and Sam bought a couple of stones for his collection. We also enjoyed a visit to the amusement area where Sam had several goes at the rifle shooting and his old favourite the remote controlled cars. Finally we went back to the farm as Sam hoped to catch one of the hensin the act of laying an egg! They have constructed the coups with little peepholes and the children find it fascinating. It was nice to have a few hours back to the bungalow and Sam spent some time on the beach picking up interesting stones. Robbie eventually arrived back in the evening having spent the day travelling backwards and forwards on the North Norfolk Railway. I sat in the car waiting for him and all the other passengers walked round from the train, got into their cars and disappeared into the night, but still there was no sign of Robbie. I waited in the deserted car park wondering where he was when a familiar figure with a back pack plodded into view with all the urgency of a turkey approaching Christmas. He was a little evasive about his lateness at first but he grudgingly admitted that he had been jotting down numbers again! He was exhausted after his busy day - but not too tired to talk non stop - about trains!

Mistaken Identity? 14.02.07

We are off to Leicester bright and early in the morning. We are accompanying Emily on a visit to Leicester University, another of those occasions when I have to have to be on my best behaviour but Robbie will no doubt get away with being his usual (rather noticeable) self. Robbie announced he intended to wear what he calls a tie-less shirt, but I just think of it as a rather dodgy shirt. I don't like check patterns and I always think they make him look like a used car salesman. I vetoed the idea and he quite reasonably pointed out that he doesn't tell me what to wear, true, but that is mainly due to cowardice on his part. Anyway my two least favourite shirts seem to be temporarily missing - I can't think where they can be!

Emily wants to do Linguistics or English Language. It's odd that Leicester has a very good reputation for these courses when many people in the town (or is it a city) don't seem to speak English at all. Emily has had a number of other offers, so we will be repeating this process at Aston, Nottingham, Reading and Sheffield in the next few weeks. I would choose Sheffield, but I think Emily's favourites are Leicester and Nottingham.

By the way, thanks for the comments. I can't believe that Robbie is quieter at work, how do you achieve that? As for not telling people much about himself ....... are you sure you have the right person? The Robbie I know is just the opposite, he shares all sorts of intimate information with anyone who will listen. Have you met any other man who would treat his mother in law to an in depth account of his vasectomy including NWR. Even I didn't need that much information! Come to think of it, that was one of the few times I can recall my mum being lost for words!