This month, Centerparcs want to know about your family picnics; all you have to do is put up some photos of your family picnics on your blog and tweet them a link – full rules etc can be found on the Tots100 blog.

We picnic quite a lot, in one form or another. To be honest, when there are this many of us, we can’t afford to eat out much (and so I am particularly looking forward to the meal for 13 we are being treated to at Elveden! It may not be very picturesque, but grabbing our bikes and some tuna sandwiches in clingfilm, make a day out pretty good – even better if you add some chocolate biscuits and a bottle of water or two.

It has to be said though, for me there is nothing better than a sarnie at the top of a tor that made your legs ache… my favourite picnics are still the Dartmoor ones… and oh, this is such a long time ago now.

Don’t forget to try your hand at entering – you’ll get an amazing mini-break if you win .

Disclosure: we are receiving a Centerparcs Mini Break in return for featuring their competition activities through the year and blogging about our experience.

The post Win a Centerparcs #CPFamilyBreak appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

There was a challenge to swap guest post with an envelope and the post below is a fab one from Louise at My Gorgeous Boys: My quest to be a travel blogger! Considering we were picking out envelopes from a huge pile, it’s fairly funny she is hosting one from the person I have to send one to. It’s a blog-love-triangle!

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This post has been inspired by last weekend’s Blog Summit when I drew the wonderful Patch of Puddles blog in the envelope challenge! Thank you Merry for letting me guest post on your fantastic blog

When our first son arrived we promised him an adventure. At the time we were thinking of all the fun things we would do and cool places we would go to. Little did we know then the kind of adventure parenting really is on its own!

Six years on and another little boy to boot I think we have done him proud. We have had city breaks with them to Barcelona and London, chilled out on the Italian beach in Puglia, met Spiderman at Universal Studios (OK he was one year old but still!), Legoland, Drayton Manor, met Santa in Lapland, got in the festival mood at Harvest At Jimmy’s and had stacks of camping adventures and lots of local day trips exploring the delights of the Midlands, Yorkshire and Cornwall to name a few.

Then again watching Kirstie’s (from the Family Adventure Project) talk at Blog Summit dwarfed all our attempts at adventure to microscope proportions.

Kirstie , her husband and their three children have been reporting with their own unique style on their adventures around the world for the last 10 years. They have amassed a huge amount of fantastic experiences and a wealth of knowledge about travel blogging.

Here are just a few of Kirstie’s travel blogging pointers:

• Find original ways of writing and reporting about places and events.
• It isn’t all about freebies, there are lots of hidden expenses you will have to pay for yourself.
• It is very hard work!
• Look out for events or places you would like to cover on your blog and contact the company or PR directly with your pitch. You have to be as creative as possible as there is lots of competition particularly against single travellers.

Other sources of information

• Attend The World Travel Market event in November
• Sign up to Travel Bloggers Unite
• Register with Travmedia for daily press releases

Blogging has opened up lots of fantastic opportunities and different experiences for us. At the moment I love writing about our experiences as parents, as well as places we go and things we do. However, hearing Kirstie’s talk I cannot deny how awesome it would be to translate this into letting your imagination run wild and experience some amazing travel possibilities.

For now though we will continue on our adventure and enjoy the ride.

Here are my top tips for making a great family day out.

• Plan for the journey – be prepared for lots of games of motorway bingo, eye spy or bring the iPad for emergencies.
• Preparation. Check out the website for maps, pushchair friendliness etc, read reviews or ask friends for recommendations.  I think researching where you are going beforehand helps enormously in planning your day and your enjoyment of it. You know your family and what everyone likes to do so make sure there is something for everyone.
• Look out for any special events or interactive things going on on the day you are there e.g. animal petting or feeding times if a zoo, farm or aquarium and note the times when planning your day.
• Look on the voucher websites (VoucherCloud, MSE etc) for discounted entry to attractions
• Practicalities – check out where to find toilets, baby change, café etc.
• Check out there are picnic facilities are indoor and outdoor and bring your own picnic (otherwise bring plenty of cash!).
• Take your own multipacks of drinks and snacks to keep energetic hungry children happy between meals.
• Set expectations before leaving the house. Everyone in the family will no doubt want to do different things to make sure everyone is aware of the need to take turns and have patience when for example Dad wants to spend hours In the garden centre.
• Decide before hand if children are going to be allowed a treat from the gift shop. If so let them know how much they have to spend and if not try to avoid the gift shop altogether.
• Have fun!

The post Guest Post: My Quest to Be a Travel Blogger appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

So this week Josie has struck out a bit. Firsat of all she has made the decision to go to school, making her the youngest Raymond to ever decide such a thing. I think she felt in need of a new challenge and was worried that, with all the big three off to school permanently in September, home would be a bit lonely. (And I might make her work harder!) Since the school Fran and Amelie have gone to as year 6′s is full, it looks like Josie may well end up going somewhere no one else from our family has been. Wow. No big sisters beating the path for her. Big stuff. (I’ll wibble about this some other time).

And her other show stealer was nobbling the review clothing item from me&i, a Swedish clothing company ‘for cool people’. She was very pleased to get to choose an item and went for the Angel Blouse, a cute khaki number with an angel on the front and a pair of wings on the back.

Excuse the fact I appear to have taken a photo of her with tulips growing out of her ears. I’m sure it didn’t look like that at the time!

Josie took a little while to get used to the sleeve length as it’s 3/4 and elastic and she gets a bit sensory about these things, but she loves the design and the fact that it is pretty and cute but combined with a colour that feels modern and rough and tumble. She decided it is not an under a coat dress but perfect for cool floating about and over jeans or leggings. (I can’t get my girls to wear skirts).

I loved the feel of the fabric, which is a nice t-shirt feel but really cotton-y and it washes well, is fit to wear after without ironing (very important, irons are for Hama Beads) and the logo stayed nice.

Over all, a very cute top and the rest of the range looks quirky and fun too. You can also host me&i adult and child clothing parties, which might be worth looking into if you have local friends (which I don’t think I do but actually these days I probably almost do do!)

Disclosure: we were sent one top from the me&i range for the purpose of this review.

The post Review: Josie reviews the me&i Angel Blouse. appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

And looking at these videos, I can see how very close to being polished they are now. They are like this in nearly ever aspect of their lives; professional, confident, capable, outgoing, talented and full of life. It makes us so proud.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch the videos, even just a little of each. Fran dances beautifully, Maddy sings amazingly (click to the middle for a truly breathtaking rendition of The Wizard and I from Wicked and Amelie… well, lets just say you need to watch it.

Fran.

Maddy. She was a bit too far back to get a good video but she was amazing to listen to. Brought the house down.

Amelie. She had never actually sung to the music before this recording. And frankly, oh my god, we are in so much trouble.

The post An almost finished product. appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

Walkers say: “We understand kids can be cheeky monkeys when it comes to eating what parents put in their lunchboxes. Which is why we’ve created new Walkers Baked Hoops & Crosses – a great-tasting, low-fat and fun way for kids to boost their wholegrain intake.“

I admit I was dubious, since healthy does not equal delicious nearly often enough. Bene was very taken with the hard back book that came in the box and I now have to read it daily to him, pretending it is in fact a story and not a series of facts about why baked crisps are better for you and why having a helping of wholegrain is so important. I even know that 56% of kids don't get enough wholegrain *whispers in the style of a footnote* and some don't get any at all…

Anyway. The crisps are yummy. I liked the flavour and texture and all the kids came back for more. They reminded me a little in texture of a type of snack which is is often pickled onion flavour and you can put on your finger. I like the non-greasy, light puffed corn feel and the flavour was strong but tasty. The shapes are a bit novel – noughts and crosses – but you probably wouldn't play a game with them as your brother would eat your pieces.

All in all, yes, I'd buy them. And healthy. So good

Disclosure: We were sent the above pack for the purposes of this review. Edit: oops. Forgot. And I'm being paid too.

The post Review: Hoops & Crosses by Walkers Crisps appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

Ha.

Wouldn’t that make the best selling book of all time? However, there isn’t even enough for  a good new fangled blog post about it. My, my stats would go through the roof if only I could. I wish.

However.

As I watched these two beautiful, graceful, self assured and articulate young women leave the house last night, en route to the rugby club end of year dinner, I mused a little on what type of a family we are, on how our girls differ from who I was as an emerging young woman, on what elements of nature are different and what elements of nurture are different. Mused a bit on where I think we’ve done an okay job of parenting and what the positives of those things have been. I wouldn’t be so big headed as to call them tips but I think I’m happy enough to give myself a pat on the back for them. Parenting outside of the familiar, what you grew up with, is difficult. My childhood was very different, not worse necessarily, or inadequate but certainly different. Without the influence of my precious friends I don’t think I could have been the parent I am being. I’m indebted to the people who I’ve parented alongside and a little behind because most of what is now our way comes from them.

1. Dinner together. Since the girls were perhaps 5, we’ve sat down for lunch and dinner together every day we are at home. We never miss. It’s time where we talk as a community, as friends and as a family. It’s when we laugh and tease and reflect and chatter (and sometimes do multiplication). It’s probably the single most important part of our family life. Vital.

2. Communication. Talk, talk, talk all the time. Always be available to hear, listen, respond, educate, receive. Always be available. Always have time. Actually I feel like I’m crap at this as I’m always trying to fit in twenty five jobs and some me time and a run and the housework – but then I remember I have not been on my own for more than about 90 minutes at a time for 15 years and think that, well, no wonder

3. Trust. I don’t believe in false praise. I’m my kids biggest advocate (and I take that very seriously) and their biggest critic. I tell them when they are great and I’m relentless about telling them when something isn’t good enough or right. I want them to know I will always tell the truth, always be honest, always tell it like it is. I want them to know they can trust me in that. If your mum can’t say ‘that dress doesn’t work,’ who can?

4. Truth. There is a fine line between telling your kids the things that will worry them “we are running out of money, you might have to give up x,yz” and sharing the realities. We’ve never hidden anything from them, never shielded them from the difficult things. The girls know when the tough stuff happens. But we’ve also tried to do that sensitively, especially when about 6 really crap things happen at once. But we made it a rule that they can ALWAYS ask a question if they are worried and we will always tell them the truth. Even if that’s explaining what a 69 is to a ten year old because some teenager decided to tease them about it. Even if it’s that business is tough. Even if it’s ‘yes, we cremated your brother’. Sometimes truth is crying like your heart will break in front of them. Sometimes it’s saying ‘you hurt me when you did that’. I don’t think any child ever got emotionally battered by knowing they have a parent who has emotions. Learning the tough stuff – money, grief, worry – is family. Life.

5. Fight their battles. I got left to deal with my own school bully on my own. When I decided to home educate everyone said that kids ‘need to be bullied so they learn to cope with it’. I never learned to cope with being bullied by it happening relentlessly for 5 years. I think it comes with trust; I decided that my children would have me on their side, loudly on their side, until they learned to stand alone. It appears to have worked well enough as they all have a strong sense of self worth and their right to be treated decently and respectfully.

6. Community spirit. Our family has a different model to the one I grew up in. First and foremost we are a small community, friends. Everyone matters, we talk things through, the greater good has to be reached. Max and I pull rank as a pretty last resort really. Sometimes it has to happen, there are some things and times where one of us will say “this is the decision and we are making this choice because…” but mostly we’ve tried to build a way of being where the corners get rubbed off, everyone thinks of the others. I haven’t achieved getting them to think how leaving rubbish everywhere makes me feel or that just deciding to load the dishwasher is a good thing – but there is still time

7. Childhood. I’m not sure I did the home ed job I intended to do, but I’m sure as hell I gave my childhood a safe, joyful, contented, play-filled childhood – right up until grim reality came and snatched their innocence away from them. And I think a childhood is so vital; one filled with mess and mudpies and half naked paddling pool days and dolls and sisters to scrabble about with. And a long childhood; I don’t care at all that none of them are obsessed with clothes or make up or music or One Direction or having their ears pierced. They could do any of those things – I don’t ban anything much – but I’m so glad they’ve been in no rush to grow up.

8. Books. Audible – love it. Hundreds of hours of good literature pouring into their ears every bedtime. Reading to them, having books in the house, talking about books, sharing books. Magic. You can’t be a bad teenager if you know about Gwendolyn from Mallory Towers and Joey Bettany of the Chalet School.

9. Sport. Lots of people say it but if you fill a child’s life with hours and hours of sport and physical exercise, there appears to be less time for grumpiness. And if they adore them and they are things you pay for and drive them to, it’s an excellent way of reminding them of their half of the community and respect bargain at times

10. Screw up. I’m a terrible, non right on parent. I have been known to smack and I shout and I’m sarcastic and always busy and I say ‘in a minute’ and I get hormonal and depressed – and I cry and make them worried by being crabby when I cry. And I do have a terrible temper. I also know when to say ‘I’m sorry’. I think the moment when I learned that a good parent needs to know when to say ‘actually, I was the one in the wrong then’ was when I really grew up.

So there you have it. For my #10wks10yrs blog anniversary, a reflection on where I think we went right, learned along the way. Have you got anything you could add? What element of parenting is your best asset?

The post Growing Fabulous Teens. appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

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The internet is full of support blogs about children living with Aspergers and Autism these days. They are great, amazing places to get support and understanding for a condition which defies explanation in so many ways and is still so unsupported in the collective mind of so much of the public. How many Aspergers parents, trying to describe the myriad of symptoms and behaviours their child experiences is met by “by my child does that”. How many, like me, have found themselves up against a medical wall of professionals who believe they can fend off the parents of another inexplicable child who will drain resources. How many, like me, found themselves investigated as a parent inventing symptoms for attention? Those blogs are a wonderful resource for parents who need to understand a bewildering toddlers and preschooler; how I wish I had had those to read, instead of trawling through medical papers and quizzing some of the other home ed parents I knew online who had already trodden the diagnosis path. I know that people often looked at me and thought I was just hunting for trouble, from my parents, my family and certainly friends and people who knew Maddy a little but not quite enough.

It’s nearly ten years since Maddy received her Aspergers diagnosis now. I’ve almost never referred to it on the blog for various reasons. One was that it took some family members a long time to come to terms with it, one was that Maddy didn’t in fact know about the label until recently and one was that I made a considered decision that, since she was home educated, I didn’t want her to live within the label. I didn’t want to be blogging that this had been done by my daughter with Aspergers, or that my Autistic spectrum daughter could sing or act or draw beautifully. I just wanted her to be her, not blaming her struggles on anything that would allow her to opt out of overcoming them or even put down her considerable talents by attributing things like extreme logical thinking or attention to detail to something innate about her being. After all, a good portion of anyone’s talents come due to some particular inbuilt aptitude, so why think less of your own just because they happen to come with a personality type?

This is one of the pictures that defines the time in my memory when we hit the biggest of the Aspergers walls in Maddy’s life. By this time we were well down the path of diagnosis though… so I’ll go back a bit.

Maddy was the perfect baby in many respects. She slept for hours and hours at a time. She hardly ever cried. She took what she needed and then was happy on her own until the next time she got hungry. I remember that at even 3 days old she would wriggle away from body contact in bed and didn’t much like to be held but I wasn’t to know that was anything particularly surprising. As she got older, the differences between her and Fran became more marked; she was incredibly cautious. She would never try to do anything that she didn’t know she could do. She never tried to go down the stairs, she watched people intently and then copied with a meticulous patience. She was walking by ten months and it could not have been clearer that she had studied all of us with a scientific intensity. Perhaps the strongest memory I have is of going to a rented property when she was less than nine months old. I popped her on the floor to look round and when I went back, she had carefully unscrewed every fixture and fitting from the front of a fireplace – and lined them up in a row in front of her. Another memorable moment came at her hearing test. I had to have Fran in the room with us as I had no childcare and she was sat behind us. Maddy resolutely refused to engage in the game and sounds with flashing lights ritual we had for hearing tests back then and the HV’s patiently explained to me they believed she was deaf. I said she definitely wasn’t but that she did not play like this and hated strangers. They didn’t believe me at all – at that moment Fran did a loud pen stroke behind us. Maddy whipped round from her torpid, clinging state to see what her sister was doing.

And then things began to get a little more difficult. Maddy developed a huge resistance to textures of clothing and was almost permanently naked – not so unusual. Hysterical terrified screaming if she saw a t-shirt that hurt her was less normal. She developed a panic reaction to certain foods and screamed with terror if she saw them; her diet narrowed to almost nothing. Again, ‘my child does that…’ everyone said. Well, maybe, but not to the point of only drinking milk and nothing else. At less than 18 months she was obsessively lining up toys and moving things back into the right place in the house – tidy yes? Well no, not when seeing something out of place meant she would fall to the floor screaming, kicking and retching not with anger but quite clearly with terror. She was naked, milk drinking only and withdrawing fast into herself, reduced to lying on the floor and watching only Disney films which must NEVER.EVER. stop before the end. Any change in routine, any difference in circumstance produced tantrums of a sort I had never seen in Fran – they weren’t rage, they were something else. I was pregnant with Amelie and regularly reduced to sitting astride a flailing Maddy to hold her safe and stop her from finding a sharp corner to bang her head on.

Something was very not right. She didn’t speak at all at 2, she was so full of panic and rage that I couldn’t comfort her, she was obsessed with order, familiar and certain sensations. She carried a hair clip in each hand and rubbed them for comfort – stimming, it’s known as – and was obsessed with particular ways of doing things. She spoke a little by 2 1/2, using sentences from Disney film sentences to express herself – it’s known as Echolalia – but no free speech at all. Yet she was clearly able to understand us. One day when a nursery nurse student was with us, we discussed toilet trailing over her head while she watched a film intently. I didn’t think she was ready – but Maddy, without taking eyes off the tv as she moved backwards out of the room, went and got the potty, brought it back, sat on it and did a wee. I was stunned. It was almost another 3 years before we helped her overcome her fear of using the toilet to poo. Toileting in general became an immense strain. She had huge routines involved in it, sometimes with anything up to 27 parts to going, cleaning, wiping, finishing – if the routine went wrong she would need to start again but of course there would be no wee to start with. Much, much screaming.

I sort help several times; the first HV quite literally ran away with a “let’s monitor it’ flung over her shoulder. The second doctor sent out an HV to monitor me for Munchhausen by Proxy. Then finally we began to get help. Some specialist nursery teachers visited who were able to observe her in our house. They saw the toilet routines, they saw that panic would make her resort to wrapping herself tightly in a special blanket or turn on her head till the pressure of blood running to her head made her feel better. We went on a walk and they saw how she struggled to cross roads at a place different to the ‘proper’ place, they listened to me explain how Maddy would scream till she was sick if I turned left instead of right at a roundabout she was used to being a route to a certain place. They saw how at nearly 3 she had no sense of danger about climbing a bookcase so she could ‘hang’ and relieve the need for pressure on her joints and how she would lie in the road and refuse to move if panic overcame her. They saw her lurch suddenly across a road if something appealed to her on the other side and how her strength was too much to battle.

The hardest thing for me is that Maddy is a public performer; while cuddly toys had to be lined up and counted frantically every night at home, a car driving past outside destroying her rhythm so it had to start again, she could go to my parents without those toys at all. So long as she had ‘pirate green’ a small cracker toy, or her hair clips, I could get her to playgroup – but at playgroup she could put them on the table and not use them till home time. In the car park though – I once had to call a playgroup worker back to open up again after we forgot them and I was physically incapable of bending the hysterical Maddy into her car seat to go home. But out with friends, away on a week of holiday, staying away… often all the routines and issues would dissolve, leaving me feeling like a idiot or useless mother. Or someone with Munchausen It seemed to other people we indulged her behaviours but we didn’t. They didn’t see that we always had to schedule in a quiet week after an event while she melted down and rebuilt. I tried everything I could to coax her out of the routines, encourage her to eat food with sauces that couldn’t be divided into separate piles on her plate, or head off the panics. I couldn’t do a thing. My FIL and Max would say “well, Max/I was like this…” and I would think, ‘well, yes, I can indeed believe this of the statistics driven, information organising, maths and engineering wizard man I married who can sit in front of me and not notice I am crying’.

After all, who would believe all this of a little girl who looked so adorable?

Coping manifests in many ways but a clever, relatively socially with it Aspergers  child develops mechanisms. Maddy had the ‘keep it all in’ one plus two others. One was to watch her friends incredibly closely for cues and follow. She made it through games where she didn’t get it like this, just glancing from side to side and copying, half a pace behind. Her other was to develop a ‘game’. Casual observers would tell me she ‘had imaginative play so can’t be Autistic’ but a closer watch would reveal she always played the same game. She would find two similar things, two red things or two round things of different sizes and play the scene where Dot falls out of the sky into Flik’s arms from Bug’s Life – over and over again. Clever girl.

Back to the picture at the top. We risked decorating the house for Xmas that year; Maddy had come on lots at nursery, getting one to one specialist attention and was really opening up. We thought we might be okay to have a tree and change things a little.

Disaster. By the end of the holiday, Maddy had regressed to no words, unable to use the toilet and in fact unable to walk. All she did was sit at the table playing with that gloop, messy stuff she could experiment with that didn’t mess up her hands and didn’t ask anything of her. And it was blue, a colour obsession that was beginning that would last until Bene was born. Since then we have had very short Xmas decoration periods and there is always an undecorated room Maddy can escape to.

So where are we now?

Maddy is 13 now and life is very different. Home educating has been amazing for her and looking back, I think it probably saved her. She finished 2 years at the specialist nursery, which had brought her to being pretty much an average every day child and we were faced with a choice. The nursery said she wouldn’t get a TA at school because she had progressed so much (with a TA) at nursery that they wouldn’t see she needed it. They suggested we sent her to school for routine and order, waited till she crashed (and they agreed she would) and then applied for a statement for her.

We decided not to do that

Having a pace of life uniquely geared to Maddy has been ideal; we’ve approached stressful topics slowly and timed for her to feel ready, we’ve been able to do down time and relaxation and push her in places where her comfort zones had been exceeded but she needed to overcome it. Over the years she has just become AN Other as it were. Yes, her sisters and friends know her well and wouldn’t put her into misery or bully her but she manages very well at gym, Taekwondo, dancing, rugby and so on. The rage disappeared, toileting happened, nakedness vanished into a meticulous dress sense and style. Complicated drawing emerged of factories and processes and gradually a drawing style replaced it she is comfortable with. We’ve overcome a refusal to learn to do anything because she felt it should just come naturally and a refusal to be taught things. We’ve overcome issues about lists of instructions she couldn’t remember and helped her learn to visualise them and taught her to stop and think and slow down when panic sets in. The baby who would wince if I sung a wrong note has morphed into a young woman with an amazing voice and a natural guitar ability.

Maddy only learned about her Aspergers at Christmas, when her thyroid needed dealing with. It hadn’t been our intention to hide it from her particularly but without school to navigate, the label seemed less relevant. We had always talked through her way of being without the name and I’d planned to tell her more when she was ten but then Freddie was born and died and it seemed too much.

There are still lingering things I can attribute to the Aspergers; Maddy struggles to think on her feet or make quick decisions if there is an emergency and unlike her sisters, phonetic spelling still causes her issues. She still worries a lot and struggles to process some elements of what might be going on in someone else’s head. She tends to shut down when sad things happen and I’m not sure there has ever been anything as moving as her tears at Bene’s birth after she closed off her grief about Freddie so totally. But everyone has ‘stuff’ and the sum total of Maddy is so much more than a bundle of quirks you can say ‘that’s perhaps her Aspergers’ about. She is an incredible kid; creative, clever, thoughtful, kind, emotionally competent, artistic in so many ways and ingenious in so many others. We are so proud of her and so pleased to see her gradually making decisions about moving on to things like school. For a long time I didn’t think she would perhaps ever be quite able to stand alone but now I look at her and know that she will.

The post Not just a girl with Aspergers. appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

The name most often said in the house.

Since way back then…

And then….

And oh my goodness, I know this face now.

With a certain amount of this along the way…

I love them big, but these were special days.

Suddenly this.

This.

Eleven.

Almost her whole life has been captured here on the blog. There are thousands of words about her.

Funny. Feisty. Fearsome. Ferocious. Fabulous.

The post And now she is 11 appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

With one blanket under my belt this year and the cardigan of doom finished (I don't think I like it though ) I thought it was time to try something new. I've got another throw on the go but it doesn't need to be ready till autumn and I fancied doing something new.

I'm rather enjoying that book '100 Bright & Colourful Granny Squares' and I've got lots of back issues of Mollie Makes and Simply Crochet to explore too. I think I'm going to spend the summer on small projects, especially now I have my very own shop with cheap and cheerful yarn in it. There is more coming too, especially some yummies, but this will keep me going for a while. Especially as I really do need to make a hole in my own stash first

Have you knitted, crocheted or sewn anything this week? I'd love to look; feel free to stick a link in the comments.

The post Stitched Sunday appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.

One of them is to not give up too easily, to stick at something if it feels hard, or too tough and get to the end of a term, or finish the exam you are on, or complete the show, or achieve some small goal ahead of you. Unless it is making you severely unhappy or hurt or not safe, don’t just walk away.

Another is to do the very best you can at anything that matters to you, get some qualifications under your belt, have some competency documented you can fall back on. From early on the girls have known that we won’t be able to afford to put them through uni and that if they want to go, they are going to need to have some way of supporting themselves. We’ve encouraged them to see their activities as something that is skill building and making them employable.

Lastly, less a rule than a state of mind, we’ve done our best to make them responsible and employable because god knows we’ve had enough utterly unemployable teens come to us for work experience. I’d rather have Josie working in the unit than any one of them. They’ve all got a decent work ethic for their age, they all know how to behave in a trustworthy and sensible manner. They might be lucky girls in terms of things they own, but the rarely get things without working for them and we’re pretty strict on privileges too. All of them know that their activities and our time ferrying them about are earned, not a right.

Watching Fran collect her first wage packet this week, earned by getting a job as a teacher in a dance school, was nearly as proud a moment for me as it was for her I think. Watching her working with her little ones in their show last week, encouraging them on to stage, keeping order, being Miss Fran, being professional and knowing how to behave, was a very proud moment. Our little girl is nearly grown up.

I think perhaps what makes me proudest though is something else; with the arrival of her first wage packet, Fran understands she has to take on the cost of some of her own dancing lessons now. We’ve put money into helping her achieve a step on the ladder of being independent and now she has begun, those funds need to move on to helping her sisters do the same. The way she accepted that, without sulk or strop or feeling hard done by, made me really proud of her.

Love you Fran.

The post Making it. appeared first on Patch Of Puddles.