end of old beginning of new

Ok, woke up this morning and decided to try and make things change for me and to be more positive. So have come up with a list of practical things that need to be done. I have made the list up of jobs of things that I know that I would be able to achieve in a relative short space of time. Things like finishing of stripping the stair case and getting carpet for the stairs, I'm just putting out of my mind for now, they are just not achievable in the near future.

On my practical list at the moment are:

Hanging pictures on walls to make the place look more homely,

Finish off painting the bathroom door and skirting's,

Find / buy some small shelves to put up in said bathroom, somewhere for the toothbrushes and soap dish to sit and a towel hook / rail.

To find, buy or borrow a garden spade and fork, so that I can turn part of the garden in to a vegetable patch. Ensuring that I leave enough space for Lily and patch the puppy to play in.

To find some sort of curtain, blinds for the windows in the kitchen, bathroom and toilet.

And also to arrange some kind of party for Lily's 7Th birthday at the of January.


Hopefully this is a small achievable list that I can do within the next couple of weeks / months. I'm not going to give my self a time limit as I don't want to feel defeated and despondent by them.

My emotional list may be a bit harder to obtain and not sure what is going on that list;

Learn to nourish and feed my soul, Find the path that I'm meant to be travelling, and who I'm meant to be travelling with, if indeed anyone at all.

To find peace within myself

To have a better or clearer understanding of friends and their limitations and to be at peace with them.

To be able to understand my family and not to allow them to control my life, my thoughts and well being. To get them to understand my life choices and if they can't then at least respect me and allow me to continue to make my choices with out criticising or putting me down.

To build on my relationship with Lily in order for her to grow up happy and respectful of other peoples needs.

There are countless others that I could list, but may be another time.

Importantly I need to learn to be happy with myself and life instead of being the miserable old bat I have become at the moment.

Happy New Year to everyone .

Haven't been here for a while, not quite got used to the idea of blogging yet, I have a friend who does it practically every day.

I suppose one of the reasons I haven't blogged, is that at the moment (couple of months or so) I've been suffereing bouts of depression and I have hit the blackest hole ever, for me .

And yet I feel that I really have nothing to be depressed about.

I know one thing for certain though and that is I am at risk of losing the closet adult friend I've ever had through it.

Can't help feeling being let down by friends and family and the more I feel this, the worse I seem to behave. Where in actualality they are probably being supportive and trying to help and I just can't see it.

I refuse to take medication for the risk of becoming dependent up on them.

I do see a counsellor, but at the moment because of the christmas season, by the time I see her again, it will have been 3 weeks. Seeing her really helps, but have been seeing her weekly therefore feel this break has been too long.

I am also trying to meditate more, not really used to doing this, so not really sure what to do. But it does try to make me lookin with my self to find the answers and to see what kind of person I am. Don't like what I'm seeing at the moment. I can see that I have become trapped in a cycle of, bitterness, anger and self loathing and I can is that it is very destructive to myself and those around me. This cycle that I have become caught up in, is hopefully, not me. I am normally a very forgiving person, I would normally have time for people and if anyone needed help I would normally be very willing to help people ....... this is the person I want back. At the moment I feel the jar is empty, with nothing to give, I want to be able to fill it back up and be the person I once was.

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

I have been trying to think of positive affirmations to help .. but am stuck as to what to say, so again any thoughts would be welcome.

Woke up this morning, to discover that there is a problem with the gas meter, therefore no Central heating and no hot water ..... other than boiling the Kettle :-( would take a lot of kettles to fill my bath. Fortunately I have an electric fire so was able to at least warm the lounge through. Contacted the gas company, who was very nice on the phone, but still said it could take up to 4 hours for an engineer to call. Mucks up my plans for the day slightly.

Thought I would go Christmas shopping today, a task that must be done. Once over I used to really enjoy the excitement of Christmas, thinking of and choosing presents for people and wrapping them up, but I really don't know what's happened over the past few years to change that, I just find that I get more and more depressed about it as each year goes by. Never mind, must get my self pulled together and throw myself in to the throngs of the masses. :-)

Right we have decided to get into the festive spirit, especially for Lily's sake. Me, I can take Christmas or leave it. It' s a time of year for some reason or other makes me quite depressed. But never mind. We decided to get a Christmas tree today and we have spent the evening decorating it. It's not your normal run of the mill baubles and tinsel thing, we have lots of animals, berries, little bird houses, chains of little gold stars etc. In my opinion it is very paganish in style, but that is just my opinion. Lily really enjoyed doing the tree, we had Christmas songs blasting out in the back ground.

We had a busy day yesterday, Nature's World in Teesvalley, first thing. We meet with other Home Educating families there on alternate Wednesdays. Lots of craft tables set up with lots of glitter and glue to do dangly stars, angels, little treasure boxes and jars to decorate and turn in to t-lights. At times all the children wanted to do was run round and have fun and some of the adults ended up at the craft tables, but after a while the children joined in and fun was had by all. Then in the afternoon Lily went to rainbows. In between nature's world and Rainbow's we popped home to feed the puppy and give him some exercise in the garden.

We have trying to do a five in a row book called 'Grandfather's Journey' by Allen Say, which Lily has enjoyed, but in truth we haven't been able to read it five days in a row this week, what with all the Christmas activities that has been happening. The most that we have been able to do is to compare and name the different modes of transport, resulting in Lily drawing her representation of a scooter. Also there has been in depth chats about moving from one country to another and how people are sad when people they know die and how we try to keep their memory alive. Think we need to carry on with this book for another week and explore more.

I've had somewhat of a mind nourishing, but body weary day.

Up at 6.30 today, that's what time the alarm clock went of today ( namely patch the puppy), he wanted his breakfast. So fed him , packed him off in to the garden whilst I swept and mopped the kitchen floor and then had a cup of tea.

Popped along to a friends as I promised I would dig up and replant four Ash saplings from the back garden to the front garden, and whilst I was on doing it decided to tidy up the boarders. It's been a lovely day to do it, fresh but not to cold. This is where the mind nourishing bit comes in, i don't know about any one else , but this is where I think about life and it's little problems issues etc and I often feel relaxed, recharged etc to cope on a physical level, don't know if this is making sense or not. But the physical aspect of my body was starting to become weary by the end of it.

Later on when I was home, I decided to put some tiles down in my toilet room. I've not long just moved in to this house and it still needs loads doing to it. My parents had stashed away in their shed packets and packets of sticky floor tiles, think they bought them cheap from some where. Anyway they gave some to me, so in my infinite wisdom I decided to put my weary body through yet another task today and tried laying the tiles. I've never done it before, lay tiles, but it's done now, not perfect by along way , but will do for now till I can afford something different. It beats walking on a concrete floor, but now I have a very sore back and knees, but I do feel I have achieved something today, stimulated the and the body. Time to have a cup of tea and relax for a while.

Oh I' over the moon this morning, another lie in. that is 2 in a row, 6.30 yesterday and 7am today as opposed to 5 and 5.30 starts that we have been having recently. If anyone knows us personally they will know that we have been getting a puppy. Must be mad but we have had him a week, he is 11 weeks old now.

If I was broody for another baby I'm certainly not any more. Sleep deprivation doesn't sit well with me any more, too old. Had years of it when Ben my eldest was a baby and small child and working nights for a lot of years. Over the last year we have been able to stay in bed till 7am until last week, where I made the wise / unwise decision to get a puppy for Lily. She of course is well impressed and happy about the new addition to the family.

Patch is his name, Jack Russell cross with Springer Spaniel, He cried all night the first couple of nights but has been gradually getting better and now settling down. Some times I feel like a stuck record when talking to him, but some people would say that would be a normal state of affairs for me , now feels like I have 1 child and 1 dog to teach how to listen, can be exsasperating on occasions, but in my opinion both are adorable and have fun with each other. T

just joined

After lots of deliberating and small comments from a friend, ( think she would call it gentle persuasion) I finally got up the courage to create a blog, Don't know how well or frequently I will blog .... see how it goes.