funny Archives : Me, Annie Bee.

What kind of Mum are you?

Anna — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 07:00:16 +0000

As a blogging sort I spend a lot of time procrastinating writing. With deadlines looming there’s absolutely only one thing to do – a quick ‘Which DC character are you?’ quiz (Batman of course). Obviously, in the spirit of equality I must then do a ‘Which Marvel character are you?’ quiz (Thor – URGH, No one wants to be Thor) and then a ‘Which female superhero/villain are you?’ (Harley Quinn). As you can tell, I love a good quiz, I always have. It started with the Just Seventeen ‘What kind of friend are you?’ and spiralled from there. In homage to my love of quizzes, I decided to create my very own. So *drum roll* here it is, the one, the only, totally legit… WHAT KIND OF MUMMY ARE YOU? You hear your child shout “Mummy” for the 73rd time that morning, you: A) Reply “Yes darling?” B) Mutter “FFS” under your breath then “yes?” C) Shout “I’m changing my name and not telling you what it is” and stick a beer in the fridge to chill. It’s a rainy, Saturday afternoon, the kids are climbing the walls, you: A) Do some crafting? You always have glitter, glue and pompoms in case of emergency. B) Go to the park? It may be raining but there’ll be no queue for the swings and no OPC. C) Put them in front of the TV? They can enjoy Cbeebies while you drink gin in the kitchen and remember when Saturdays were about shopping for clothes. You finally get a babysitter so you can enjoy date night, you: A) Stay at home? You’re a family, you only do things as a unit now. B) Go for a meal? You spend the whole evening talking about the kids and call the babysitter to check they settled. C) Hammer the shots? You’re free! You’ll deal with the fall out tomorrow when the kids are climbing all over you. Your child wants a friend round for a play date, you: A) Spend time planning a themed play date? Creating games, outfits and even themed food, all homemade of course. B) Make a floor picnic? Maybe play some sedate party games too. C) Buy a couple of pizzas? Drink wine downstairs whilst trying to ignore the banging and crashing upstairs as they clearly trash your house. Your child’s school PTA needs helpers, you: A) Sign up for a variety of stalls? You’ll sell all your raffle tickets AND make enough cakes to single-handedly stock the cake stall. B) Start with the best of intentions? You’ll plan to be parent A but in reality you’ll reluctantly sign up to help at the 11th hour after the third, desperate, email has been sent from the PTA. C) Employ avoidance tactics? You spend a fortnight dropping your child off with the stealth of a ninja – avoiding all eye contact with PTA members and hiding behind trees. You’ll spend the school fayre having a pub lunch. Answers: If you answered mostly A – Congratulations, you’re a fantastic mum, you have your child’s best interests at heart. You love them with every breathe you take and they know that. If you answered mostly B – Congratulations, you’re a fantastic mum, you have your child’s best interests at heart. You love them with every breathe you take and they know that. If you answered mostly C – Congratulations, you’re a fantastic mum, you have your child’s best interests at heart. You love them with every breathe you take and they know that. You maybe drink a little too much though… We should meet up sometime! Cheers.

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The hardest thing about being a parent..IMO

Anna — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 21:29:49 +0000

Order is restored! Or at least something resembling order is restored. Aoife is back at school, Rory is back at work and Seth is watching Toy Story 2 back to back whilst dressed as Buzz Lightyear. Standard. Having been a lazy bum and taking a couple of weeks away from blogging and shameless self promotion I’m a bit tired so I decided to ease myself back into it gently and go for a Top Ten. Here’s the Top Ten things I found hardest about becoming a parent, or more specifically a Mummy for that’s what I am. Child Birth Yes, I know this is obvious but I didn’t read past week 33 in my ‘How to be pregnant’ book. It wasn’t all “oh my gosh, I peed myself…no wait my waters broke”…*scream like a banshee*….baby after 30 mins. It took days, neither child was in a hurry. It was painful, I sparkled, I cried, I was rude to the midwife, it was undignified, it was exhausting! Shitty Nappies Again yes, I’d HEARD about them but nothing. NOTHING can prepare you for an explosive, up the back, out the sides shitty nappy. The one where you have to hold legs in the air, cut baby out of the vest and wipe all at the same time.It’s on their hands, it’s on their feet, at least it’s not on….no way, how did it get there? IT’S ON THEIR HEAD. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. Not laughing at ‘not good’ behaviour Obviously the biting and wall drawing isn’t a laughing matter, but the sass. Well, as much as I don’t admit it to Aoife, it’s HILARIOUS. Like the time Rory asked her to pick something up, she replied “Give me a minute woman”. Or the time I put her on the naughty step and took away her treats. “Will I still have food & water?” “Yes” “Oh I’ll be fine then”. Sometimes you just have to walk away and laugh. Without them knowing of course. Sneezing Coughing, laughing, crying, sparkling, running, dancing, jumping. All not just hard, almost impossible! Appreciating the things that are important to them Instead of being a destroyer of dreams and imagination, you have to appreciate every leaf/pine cone/stone/receipt placed into your bag because it’s “really beautiful” or “magic” or “stone”. It’s so hard to not point out your dismay at your handbag or pocket being full of snotty tissues and detritus. Being a parent ALL THE TIME. It’s nonstop! Even if you get some time away you think about them and talk about them. If you don’t think about them then you think how you should take it easy as you’re going to have to go home and be up with them in the night. If you have the kind of children that sleep through then you’re still thinking about looking after them with a hangover. The parenting just doesn’t stop! Finding a babysitter. When you announce you’re pregnant with your first child all your friends will tell you how excited they are and how they’ll babysit. LIES. As soon as baby arrives it becomes “I’ll babysit when they sleep through” then “I’ll take them to the pub at 18”. It’s not like the Babysitter Club books I read as a child!! Guilt Mummy Guilt/Daddy Guilt, call it what you want. It’s intense! Before children I didn’t do guilt but childbirth brings this whole new emotion. Every decision you make leads to a feeling of guilt. Everything you say leads to a feeling of guilt. Every time you leave them, every time you don’t. Every time you tell them off, every time you don’t. “I am too hard on them, I’m too soft on them, I’m abandoning them , I mollycoddle them” OH MY GOSH. I will also put crying in here. I have cried so much more in the last 6 years than I ever did in my previous 32! I have even cried at Four Weddings and CSI. Dealing with your body and mind It changes so much, at first it feels like it’s not your own. It gets big, it starts to behave differently. If you’re breast feeding it can feel like it’s completely someone else’s. It gets fatter due to ‘baby weight’, loneliness, sadness, boredom, habit. Your mind can be vicious, making you question everything. Making you paranoid. Making you feel bad about you and your parenting. Mix the two together and it’s a pretty rough time. I’d love to say you deal with it like this….but I still don’t have an answer. Baby groups/School playgrounds URGH. All these other Mummy’s just being amazing, looking fantastic and coping. They breastfeed so well, they look amazing, their children behave, some of them have actual jobs as well as being a mum. Their children love Baby Einstein and only listen to Beethoven, in fact, give Sebastian a toy piano and he can compose a tune, HE’S ONLY 8 MONTHS OLD! They never look harassed and have never dropped the F-Bomb in front of their children. When you’re tired, feeling fat and lonely THIS is one of the hardest things, this leads me to Pretending OK, I know I said Top Ten but I don’t like to conform. Being a parent is pretending all the time. We pretend we’re coping, we pretend we know what we’re doing, we pretend we’re happy with our smock dress, we pretend we’re not comparing ourselves to every other parent we see, we pretend every single minute of parenting is a breeze. It’s a tough act to keep up. We should all probably drop the pretending and then my Top Ten would be a legit Top Ten. Aside from all that, this parenting lark is a piece of cake.

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Lessons I have learned. Well, some of them.

Anna — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Six years ago I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of our first-born (she was late already) and the start of a new and exciting chapter to my life. The chapter where I become a stay at home mummy (or SAHM as we call it in the business). I’ve mentioned before I didn’t have a career and had I gone back to work I would have literally just been paying for childcare so it made sense to stay home. I couldn’t wait, it was going to be a piece of cake after all. Six years down the line I still love that I am home with my babies but I’ll admit being a SAHM is like finally getting invited to that party you really wanted to go to only to discover previous attendees embellished the truth and it wasn’t always as cool as suggested. Here is what I have learned. It’s not all lattes, croissants and lunch dates. All your friends work so you’ve no one to meet up with besides, with not working comes not earning. You accept yourself as a SAHM and deal with it but you consider yourself the exception, other SAHMs are terribly boring and talk about their children and dull stuff like that. People don’t really like to ask too many questions about how you are as you actually are a SAHM and your answers will be about your children and other terribly boring things like that. You feel you have to justify yourself a lot. “I’m lucky enough to be able to stay home with my children” or “I don’t work but I’m not claiming benefits paid for by you”. Firstly It’s not luck that I don’t have to work, Rory has worked bloody hard over the years to be able to make this happen and secondly there’s nothing wrong with claiming benefits anyway, I contributed for years before I stopped working. It’s not all baking cakes. It can be but that just leads to huge weight gain, type 2 diabetes and your taxes covering my healthcare. People forget you have other interests than children and so forget to talk to you like an educated individual with opinions outside of poo and Cbeebies. You forget yourself that your brain once did other stuff and forget that you’re an educated individual with opinions that some might consider valid or at the very least interesting. If someone asks what you’ve done with your day you struggle to come up with important sounding tasks. Somehow watching Masha and the Bear and keeping a small human alive doesn’t seem like a good enough answer. It’s really hard to exercise with a small person around, they hang off your leg and get in the way. It’s pretty lonely, your friends have jobs, their work wardrobe isn’t covered in snot or food and knowing they’re being treated as actual people makes you positively green with envy. People think that because you don’t work you’ve got nothing to do and so can help out at everything. You don’t get a day off, life is like a portable office. ‘Crafting’ is so much messier than you ever imagined it could be. You stop caring that the floor needs hoovering. Your five-year old is probably your best friend and you start to act like them. The idea of going back to work when littlest is at school is both exciting and really bloody scary. You realise you have absolutely no transferable skills, the knowledge you do have is well out of date and you probably SHOULD have got a career rather than a job before children. Even the shittest days are actually pretty fabulous when you have a glass of wine and think about it. You are one of the luckiest people you know because a lot of people would love to be in your position. The Tale of Mummyhood

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All good things must come to an end

Anna — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:06:13 +0000

And so, it is with a heavy heart that I have to announce the end of my 10 year relationship. It had it’s ups and downs. We had good times and bad. We’ve made dates, we’ve broken dates. We’ve shared good news with others and bad news too. We’ve been through so much together. We’d stopped making an effort. I wasn’t offered the same wonderful promises newer, younger, people were offered. It was my longest relationship and now it’s over…. I have broken up with my mobile phone company. So that’s it. Done. I know I instigated it but that doesn’t make it any less sad. Tonight I will drink the wine of sadness…. Tomorrow my newer, younger model will arrive 🙂

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Things their mother said…

Anna — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 18:02:00 +0000

“Please can I leave the table?” “Well you can’t take it with you” I was about eleven when I finally got what this meant! More and more recently I’ve caught myself sounding like my mum. Now don’t get me wrong, my mum is fantastic but I’m sure we can all think back to our childhood and remember things our grown ups said that made no sense at all and resulted in us rolling our tiny eyes or just thinking “what are you chatting about woman? I always told myself I wouldn’t say those weird, nonsensical kinds of things. Ever….. “I don’t care if X’s parents let them do that, if X jumped off a bridge would you want to?” Why would I even ask that? It’s not like Aoife is going to turn around and say “actually Mummy, I would.” Unless she meant she’d bungy jump. In which case I’d reply with a swift “Over my dead body”. “I’ve spent ages slaving over a hot stove cooking this meal just for you” What the actual heck? For starters, who in the 21st century calls it a stove? It’s an oven. I’m pretty sure that all over the world it’s called an oven. I don’t think it’s been called a stove since the early 1900s. Secondly, I’ve not ‘slaved’ by any stretch of the imagination. I cooked a while. It probably took maybe half an hour. I was not forced. I did it by choice. There was no slavery of any sorts involved in cooking the meal which, to be fair, I probably wouldn’t eat either as I have tried to cunningly hide about seven different vegetables in it. “We look with our eyes, not with our hands!” Obviously we look with our eyes. We FEEL with our hands. Could I be more patronising? I also don’t know why I always say ‘we’. I have absolutely no problem with touching stuff that isn’t mine. “If you don’t tidy those toys away I’ll just throw them all in the bin” No I actually won’t, for two reasons. 1) I spent money on those toys and I’m not just throwing them away. Worst case scenario for the children is I’ll send them to a refuge. The toys not the children. 2) I really can’t be bothered to gather the toys and put them anywhere. If I could be bothered I’d tidy them away myself. “I spent good money on that and you don’t even appreciate it” This makes the least sense, what is ‘good’ money? How does it differ from ‘bad’ money? I don’t have a secret stash of ‘bad’ money lying around to buy things that shouldn’t be appreciated. And of course my children don’t appreciate stuff, they are 2 & 5. They don’t know what it means to appreciate so they can’t appreciate. Besides, they’re at a time in life where shit just appears whenever they want it, and sometimes when they don’t. “Why do I waste my breath?” Well, mainly so that I feel like I have a bit of a grip on this rollercoaster ride called parenting and probably to also reassure myself of my own existence every now and then. There’s nothing like the sound of your own voice to remind you you’re alive in the midst of an existential crisis. “Why would you do that?” Generally used when something has been drawn on or broken, the answer is obvious. Curiosity! ‘Would red look good on this wall?’ ‘What does this do?’ ‘How does this work?’ THAT’S why they would do that. “I am so disappointed” I don’t have the energy to let you know how very fucking cross I am when I know that you really couldn’t care less and will likely go do that VERY same thing again in a minute. “Why do I bother?” Well. And this one is the most obvious. It’s because I love you so much and would move heaven and earth for you. That’s why I bother.

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Off up a mountain, BRB

Anna — Sat, 30 Jul 2016 18:20:00 +0000

After a lengthy trip from North Yorkshire we have arrived in Wales! From the minute we crossed the border I’ve pointed to pretty much every hill and said to Rory “Is that it?” None of them have been it yet but they’ve all been pretty frickin’ big, apparently it’s bigger. EEEEEK I know I’ve gone on about it a fair bit but this is my blog and I can do what I want, also this going up a mountain lark IS a big deal to me. Some people have implied I won’t make it up, others have implied it’s a piece of piss and not that big a deal. But to me it’s massive. Not just literally. I’ve admitted before, I’m fat. I’m fine with that. Well I’m not, I hate it but that’s what I am right now and I’ve got to live with it until I can change it. I’ve always been fat, for as long as I can remember, even when I got down to a size 12 I thought I was really fat. I don’t think there’s any pleasing me. Anyway, as much as I know folk have so many better things to concern themselves than me, I’ve always had this weird kind of hang up. I don’t like to eat in public. A restaurant isn’t so bad but I’d never pick up a sandwich or cake from a bakery and eat it in a public place. Why? Because I honestly think that people will look and think “she’s so fat she doesn’t need to be eating that” In the same way I’ve always pretended I’m absolutely not interested in running or doing active stuff. It’s ‘not my thing’ but in reality I’d really quite like to. I often think it’d be nice to run or play a sport or frolic in a meadow, the problem is I go a shade of red when I exercise. Not just red,more a maroon colour! Not only am I fat and wobbly but I’m bright red too, like a beacon. Not a good look. Now I know, I KNOW other people aren’t looking at me but my brain tells me otherwise and I am so scared that someone will say something mean and I’ll feel so ashamed of myself and so I avoid this scenario. A few weeks back, I went paintballing for my brothers birthday, I wanted to go but I also really didn’t. I thought I’d end up sat in the middle of a forest being shot as I was the easy target. It was actually brilliant fun. I loved it, (to my surprise). I had to draw the line at Go Ape for my best friends birthday though. Ropes can break with too much weight, I’m not a fan of heights either. Anyway, I digress. Paintballing was so much fun I opened my mind to doing other active stuff and that’s how I’m sat here in Snowdonia, drinking wine, putting glittery laces in my ugly shoes (thank you Lilpot) and preparing to climb Snowdon tomorrow. We will be heading up that bad boy at 7 am in hope that it will be pretty quiet. I will wear a face full of make up, not because I’m vain, but because I feel so shockingly fat and uncomfortable in the walking ‘gear’ that I need to at least feel like my face is it’s normal self. I will struggle to do it because I am unfit. I will moan and whinge all the way because that’s how I roll. It will be a massive challenge for me, psychologically more than physically. I know fitter people than me will trot up like mountain goats like it’s a mere blip on the horizon. But I WILL do it and I will try so hard not to listen to my brain telling me that folk are looking at me a judging me when they’re not. And if anyone DOES have the lack of manners to say something mean, I’m going to push them down the mountain and pretend it wasn’t me…..

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