Right now baby Ben is asleep in bed, which is a good thing as last night I somehow put my back out and, despite costly trip to the osteopath this morning, I can barely move at all.

Maddy is sat behind me doing cubed and squared numbers in a maths book she likes. Josie, who has worked on spelling, reading, fractions, music and french all on her own this morning, is curled up with a DS game reading enough of it to get by. Not bad, given she’s pretty much been self taught there.

Amelie has done spelling, geography (pronounced pants and she’s right, so she’s moving on to the next section), music and reading and is reading for England.

In the last couple of weeks Fran added Lord of the Flies to her list of challenging classics to read and got through it. She’d been reading The Hunger Games too and said that while her friends had found the middle one boring, she felt that lord of the Flies and Animal Farm had really opened her eyes to the political side of the books and encouraged her to look more deeply at them. (Check!)

Maddy is reading her way through the Lemony Snicket books (now on book 11) and has read two of The Hunger Games. Amelie has finally found the ability to get through a book thanks to the Wimpy Kid. Josie is reading her way through Reading Eggs. Fran came home from school having got an A in a GCSE progress mock.

And I’m feeling a bit of a failure at the whole thing. More and more I see the buzz Fran is getting at school and how tired and weary of home educating life I am now and I think they’d all be better off getting an acceptable education elsewhere and leaving me free to just be a reasonably fun mum instead. I think perhaps they are beginning to feel the same too. If I’m really brutally honest, I’m only doing an adequate job and its not what I wanted.

That isn’t the same as them not getting more than an adequate education – they read, write, sew, make, create, learn ,do, find out. They are equipping themselves with all the skills they need and I wanted for them. They love learning. But I just don’t know if it makes me feel good enough.

And then I look back through my photos of the last couple of weeks when it has been cold and wet and we couldn’t go out and wonder if, on top of ordinary every day work, it is enough to just be living life without a constant stream of days out, museums, lectures and excitement?

Amelie cooked quiche Lorraine on her own.

We had fun yesterday with a microscope, looking at slides and light apertures and trying to see how the mirrors and lenses worked and seeing how best to focus it and observe different things under it.

Maddy turned a cross stitch pattern into a Hama Bead Hufflepuff crest. Josie and Amelie made the cakes on their own. Josie knows the alphabet and was readying what was on the backs of the cards. And we spent ages, apropos of nothing much, discussing PR and advertising thanks to a parcel that came through the post of Soreen. God I love that stuff. Yum (And yes, it was sent for free and yes, I love it really and used to eat it as a huge treat at my Nana’s and it spells and smells of childhood to me).

This week’s Lego challenge is ‘something in the street’. We had recycling bins and lamp posts Maddy loves micro models though and I loved her bridge.

Ben is still growing.

He quite likes Super Smash Bros.

I dunno. Is it enough? The summer is coming, we can probably do better now (assuming my back fixes). I just wanted more for them.

Right now, I’d like a little peace in my head for me.

I think I’d feel I had let the side down.

But I mind about letting them down more. Fran has had a world open at her feet. She spent all last night telling me about atoms. She never liked atoms when I taught her. I’m worried I’ve ended up giving them one freedom but limiting them some other way.

I think maybe it’s time.

Home ed can be brilliant. But we’ve had a rough 6 years.

I’m not sure it’s brilliant here any more. I’m not sure adequate is good enough.

The wanting brought a foolish mistake and a serious error of judgement.

The error of judgement brought our world crashing down.

That crashed ended in a room and £30 a week and arguments and learning to talk, learning to forgive, learning to be grown ups.

Learning to be grown ups meant a new choice and some compromises (not mine mostly, I was very selfish) and a new baby.

And the baby -  the baby supposed to be the new start, the proof that we had made it better – died in our arms.

If I could have overcome the wanting, that baby would have not been born, so he would not have died.

If that baby had not been born, he would not have died and we would not have discovered that we were far more than just two people who lived in a house.

If that baby had not died then the proof of solidarity, strength, love, maturity and forgiveness would not be there.

I wish he was here, but I cannot be sorry he was born. It’s a lot to lose in a life lesson though.

If he had not lived – and died – another baby would not have been born. With or without him, we would not have the other.

That baby has made us happy. What we know now is just how lucky we are, not only to have so much, but to live inside so much love.

Because of all that, I am happy. I am content. I know I am loved. I love loving.

I’m happy.

It was rather a long path.

Was it worth it?

Can I justify it?

Is happy okay?

When I should have been happy, I was so often sad.

Now I should be mostly sad, but I’m nearly always happy.

That’s a bit of a strange thing.

It’s a wonder I have any brain left at all.

Mostly I try to stick to simple thoughts now. Like what’s for tea. It’s easier that way.

It was not the insular and unfriendly city I remembered. It was happier than where I live. It was cleaned than where I live. Hell, it had more sunshine than where I live! And despite huge worries about coping on the tube with my precious baby, I was happy, I got where I needed to (if you ignore being baffled by the apparent alteration of the Jubilee line…when did that happen?!) I met up with friends and all was good.

But on the way home, I realised I had somehow, through a busy day with a baby on my front, lost my ticket. So I walked the longer way back over land to the main Charing Cross station, because all the smaller, closer entrances said ticket holders only. There was a concert in Trafalgar Square and I had 3 bags and a Baby to carry and actually when I got there, I could have gone into any of the other entrances, because there weren’t barriers to stop me. But I met a couple of other Cybher ladies, identified by our bags and travelled the one stop to Leicester Square with them so it being busy and hot didn’t seem to matter. My original tube ticket was part of the lost ticket, so I had to buy another one but at least I was on my way.

But when we got off the train, it all went wrong. It was so busy and so hot and I got disorientated. I had lots of bags and I got shoved too close to the edge of the platform and panicked. Disorientated, I whirled round to try and get near a wall till it passed and I think one of the Cybher ladies spoke to me but I couldn’t remember her face or see which tube I had got off and which one I was aiming for and somehow I ended up going up and back down and on to the same platform, arriving there just in time for another train full of people. So we went round again and my head was pounding because I honestly couldn’t remember where I was trying to get to and by that time it was so busy that people had come to a stop in the tunnels and we were pinned in a crush of people with nowhere to go.

I’m not very good at small places, being underground or crowds. So this was not a very good feeling.

I felt so vulnerable. I suddenly realised that I had no one to help me, was feeling irrationally abandoned and if anything went more wrong at that point, I couldn’t do anything to protect us. Ben, no doubt sensing my anxiety levels rocketing, started to cry; by the time we got on to another hot and crowded train, he was screaming. Full on, head back, arms shaking rage and despair that I couldn’t do anything to comfort. I couldn’t feed him, I couldn’t explain it would all be okay, I couldn’t do anything.

So we both stood in the middle of the tube and sobbed, tears running down both our faces.

I never used to be like this. I used to be super capable in London. I used to be super competent at hustling my children through tricky moments and rising above it all to get us to a better place. I’m a mum. That’s what we do.

Apparently not any more.

The funny thing was though, people were kind. Someone reached out and touched my shoulder. Someone else moved so I could rest against a standing seat, another person offered me her seat. A little boy tried to calm Ben and his mum murmured ‘it’s okay, it’s okay’ while I pitifully failed to stop crying. If I’d been remotely capable of process anything at all, I would have marvelled. These were the Londoners of stories, not my recollections. Kind people. A fractional moment of humanity among fellow travellers.

I got to Kings Cross. My whole journey I had thought I would just go and buy the cheapest ticket for the slower First Capital Connect trains, having bought a fast ticket with East Coast that morning so we would have a quick journey home. Once I got to the terminal though, my head just fell to bits again. I couldn’t make sense of the departure board, the ticket offices had all moved and spying an attendant, I walked over to her and whispered

‘You have to help me.’

I really was that pathetic.

And she did. I’d managed to also lose my receipt by that point, but she took me to the ticket office and they wrote me a ticket out without any quibbling or jobs worth niggling. I can only assume I looked way too pathetic to be a fare dodger. Then she took me to a train, which was fully booked and standing room only, spoke to the guard and settled me in a free seat in first class where, after a few cups of tea and a chat with a family and a chat with a chap who, bizarrely works as a toy buyer for a large chain, life felt good enough to smile again.

Thank you East Coast for saving my sanity with fabulous customer service when you didn’t have to. People complain far more than they express gratitude but you saved my day today and your staff did you really proud.

Thank you London for being a kinder place than I remember and not taking advantage of me when I was vulnerable.

Thank you Peterborough, for still being here when I got back. I’ve never been so glad to see you.

But this has been an awesome (to quote Josie) week.

I was included in a round up of educational posts, proving beyond doubt that cakes on plates is the way forward and I should be Minister for Maths. (There is no point telling me you have to be good at maths for such a job, look at the chancellors we’ve had.

I have been included in a political round up (ha…ha…ah… falls off chair!) for my post on smacking and the realities of slightly failed parenting. A post I expected to get pilloried by the way and have been remarkably cheered to discover I’m not the only crap parent in town

I got to guest post at the Tots100 on not taking blogging too seriously ( present post excepted )and it’s possible if you visit them at 10am tomorrow you might find yourself in my Ten at 10 picks of the week too

PoP reached the dizzy heights of NUMBER THIRTEEN on the ebuzzing parenting rankings.

But best of all, so exciting that I may actually pop and call myself a small exploded splodge of excitement…..

Patch of Puddles made it to the final 5 in no less than THREE categories of the Mad Blog Awards – Blog of the Year, Blog Post of the Year and Most Inspirational.

Obviously I’m gutted not to be in Thrifty or Fashion

And I have cute new little cloud SOcial Media button – thank you Tim

Thank you so much if you nominated me and.. ahem, could you go and vote for me now too? It’ll only take a moment. The form has drop down boxes and everything.

I’m chuffed to pieces. Thank you again.

(Now go vote… I’m up against flipping Northern Mum again and she wiped the floor with me last year )

She drives us mad, our Amelie. She’s a bundle of so many things, so many infuriating things.

I can sum her up in a list of words: funny, feisty, fabulous, fearsome, ferocious, flawed, focused.

You can guarantee to find her slap in the middle of any fight in the house.

You can guarantee it is her making the noise, her causing the fury.

Yet if the chips were down, if you needed a wing man, if you were on your own and had your back to the wall and no weapon in your hand, I can guarantee every one of them would pick Amelie to have by their side.

She might drive them loopy but she is terrifyingly loyal and she’d fight to the death for any one of them.

And they know it.

That is why Fran and Josie slaved without help over a rocky road cake from a tricky recipe to give her for her birthday tea.

Her face says it all. She laps up love, does Amelie and nothing means more to her than knowing she is loved.

She might drive Maddy to distraction most days, but Maddy spent hours locked in her room making this tiger for her. He’s called Sag Bag. He’s brilliant.

Happy birthday Amelie darling. We love you.

It’s a good job I do to be honest because while I can just about keep my own bedroom tidy (there isn’t much margin for yelling about girl bedrooms if your own looks like a pit of Hades), I’m utterly hopeless about housework. I can’t blame anyone else for this. I’m just rubbish. I don’t see grime at all until it is actually at the ‘tide of dried peas washing round my knees’ stage. I’m oblivious to piles of stuff for the most part, within acceptable limits and utterly unable to see crud in showers, corners, sink edges or the bottom of the fridge. My pain barrier may be low, but my ‘likely to give botulism’ one is particularly high. I credit my kids general good health to the abundance of germs the encounter on a daily basis. So E, who comes for 2 hours a fortnight, keeps things to within a limit that mostly means social services would not remove the children if they popped by.

I honestly have no idea why. My sister cleans her bathroom perfectly adequately and I’m prepared to bet my brother lives in something as clean and trim as a hospital place where people think hygiene is important. I can’t check because he ran away to Australia and I think my house was the last one he stayed in here, but I don’t think that was related to my domestic goddess skills.  But somehow I can always find better things to do. I’d like to tell you that while my house is lacking in the finer touches of cleanliness, my hard drive is a paragon of military filing perfection, but it’s not true either. In general, I’m just a person who likes to do things all in one go – housework in a large lump when pregnant (could be a problem going forward), tax return and all the associated books on the 27th January , blog posts in a heap. I’m an all or nothing kind of girl – and when it’s housework, I prefer nothing.

My children will tell you that I sadly don’t extend my slovenliness to my expectations for their room. In fact, I’ve heard my mothers voice a number of times recently as I beg them to tidy up enough that I can see the edges of things. Honestly, I swore I never would…. but I did.

The trouble with living in a predominantly beige house though, as I do thanks to the decorative skills of Eggbox Homes Incorporated, is that grime does build up. The carpet downstairs is looking distinctly muddy these days, having had 6 years of 6 pairs of feet treading all over it.  And as we stagger into the dawn of an era where a small boy will want to crawl on said carpet and I will want to bore delight you all with lots of photos of his achievements down there, it has occurred to me that pictures of my carpet are not going to be pretty. I’m not entirely sure that floor cleaner is going to cut the mustard though. I have a horrible feeling that neither my lovely lady with the mop, nor my trusty water emitting vacuum-y thing (known to my friends as an Ady machine, but that’s another story) is going to do the job.

Image credit: uglyhousephotos.com

This is not my carpet. To be honest though, it nearly could be

So what’s a girl to do? Will Ben love me or hate me if I pull up the carpet and start thinking about laminate floor? Is this just asking for trouble as he turns into a small boy who likes to ‘skid’? Or shall I just attach scrubby pads to his knees, squirt some bubbly stuff on the floor and hope he whips up a lather as he learns to crawl?

Answers on a postcard please….