just another morning here

Steve said he enjoyed reading our roundup of the year, as it made us seem like a happy family who did nice things etc. So, especially for him, here are some of the bits that were left out of the other one …

Alarms: 2009 surely the year of the alarm after Josiah changed schools and has to be there at 8am, having fitted in getting ready, breakfast, and often two music practices to boot. My alarm rings very early. Granted, I am usually awake far before it goes off, but still.

Boring evenings: sitting around watching films and surfing the net because actually we don’t have an interesting life. Watching random films that I add to our LoveFilm list because they seem good at the time, then wondering what on earth they are when they actually arrive in the post!

Yelling: oh I’m sure there was plenty of this. At the kids, to get ready, brush teeth, help lay the table/clear the table, brush teeth, practise their instruments, tidy rooms … and at Steve generally for the same thing. Well, he’s quite good at brushing his teeth actually Arguments probably happened, and I know Steve and I questioned what on earth we were doing together a number of times throughout the year. Glad to be ending a year of what felt like traumatic relationship between the two of us and hoping next year won’t feel so awful.

S111TRB – My first number plate, quickly ditched in favour of S222 TRB, but only after we’d actually bought the darned thing did we realise what it looked like on the car! One of our more expensive mistakes (but probably not the most expensive ).

Junk food: as the kids have got older and started doing more diverse things after school we seem to be existing more on convenience food and less on properly cooked meals, fitting in very snatched mealtimes around various activities. This must change next year (well, the cooking, if not the activities)!

The Badman report and all that followed: while not home educating ourselves at the moment, we still identify strongly with the home ed community, and everything that happened politically following the report was Not Good. Best to read about that elsewhere though, as I haven’t kept as abreast of it as I otherwise might have.

There are probably more, but to be honest I prefer the shiny happy version!

Josiah broke up yesterday, with an apparently wonderful carol service that Steve attended. He even managed to find his coat (missing in action for over 10 days), so brought home *all* his belongings to celebrate. Well actually there’s still the small matter of a rugby sock, but we’ll gloss over that, at least he has two socks, even if one of them isn’t actually his.

Anna had her last day today; her school carol service was last night and was quite diabolical for various reasons that I won’t go into here!

I think the Pinhoe school carol service remains my favourite – despite the fact that this year we were standing out in the cold for half an hour while someone found the key to the church … and then the technical stuff taking a while to set up (no matter, Anna played the first song on the keyboard), or the fact that there’s hardly enough room in the church to seat everyone! There was even the slight smell of electrical burning at the end of the evening which I hope wasn’t anything important! All these things don’t really matter, in fact the very jam-packed nature of the service is one of the things that adds to its charm. I will certainly miss these occasions, although the girls tell me that they are still going to go back to Pinhoe choir even next year when they’re both at high school. We’ll see.

Anyway, Abbie and I finish tomorrow, phew, break out the mulled wine and mince pies! Saturday’s looking fairly manic as we’re in town all day for various busking engagements, as well as a cathedral parents’ car park duty for Steve, but then we really are going to have a couple of days off!