My daughter has had a wobbly lower front tooth for over a week now. She’s been complaining about it for much longer, but I didn’t believe her enough to test it out (Yes, guilty mother alert) until my hubbie decided to be magnanimous and touch it. Since then, we’ve had to put up with a blow by blow account of her day, as seen from the central point of view of how “okay” her tooth has been during the day.

We’ve got some Bonjela jelly to alleviate any pain, and I’ve been cooking mostly soft foods to at least stop her from using some legitimate-sounding excuses for not eating (she’s also become a little picky). But I am now thoroughly sick of the whole thing, and just want to get in there with the pliers or something and be rid of it. (I’m kidding - for all of those who are thinking about shopping me into social welfare or something!).

At five and a half, I considered her far too young for all of this. We’ve had a Tooth Fairy book with purse ready for six months now, but I figured we’d have at least two years to get her prepared for the event. Instead, it appears that she is about to become the first hero in her 50-kid classes, and have a story to tell - if only she hasn’t already bored them all with the pain stories beforehand.

I don’t think she will bore them though. At that age, bruises, grazes, injuries, whacks on the head, and a little piece of paper called an accident register informing their parents they’d fallen over during the day, are badges of honour. When introducing my daughter to her new ballet group of seven girls, I was surprised to find the ballet teacher sat down to witness each and every girl get out a limb, unclothe it when needed, and expound the teacher with horrific tales of how a blemish which was more probably a freckle, came about by some misadventure in the playground (often involving the so-called best friend who is currently not their friend anymore - for a day).  Heads somehow get shut in doors (yes, I don’t know how that could happen, either - but it apparently did - with my own daughter no less, and I have the accident register to prove it), girls have running races - after boys who don’t want to be run after, heavy-weapon machinery like a crayon somehow falls off a craft table and deviates into their calves with the brute-force of a sharpened pair of zig-zag scissors, and bruises appear simply by looking hard enough at their arms. The more colourful the bruise, the more kudos and attention expected from the adults on the peripheral of this deadly world of learning.

Just now, I looked up on the internet some information on adult permanent teeth. For some reason, as a new mother with no one  to train me up, I took things like initial teething, nappy changing, first walks, first (and thankfully only) tumble down the stairs headfirst and first inoculation jabs in my and her stride. Now, when faced with this whole growing-of-12-additional-teeth thing, I find myself completely clueless and not a little scared, especially as everyone I know at school who has kids older than my daughter is yet to go through this.

The internet informed me that her first adult molars should come through at around age 6, then the front incisors will be lost and replaced from 7 years. [All approximately]. Obviously her first molars are already through, and her wails about hurting during tooth brushing times last month were not (again!) picked up by me at all. I thought she wasn’t spending enough time brushing in there, so made her do more (second guilty mother alert, but I’m getting nonchalant now). So, now we’re officially into the front incisors, and gapey-grin photographs, and actually losing teeth in all the blood and glory I vaguely recall from my own childhood.

Okay, so we’re a little ahead of the game of most of her school mates - and their older brothers too. But don’t ever let it be said The Thompsons are developmentally challenged. I figured I’d better prepare myself by working out what the going rate for tooth fairy visits might be.

I could ask some relatives, who have eight year old cousins of my daughter. Some of them have recently started losing their teeth (I understand now that it can go on until they’re at least twelve!). But they live elsewhere in the county, and I risk taking on false monetary units compared to what is accepted locally here in the village. I did another search only to find the following from a newspaper published early last year -

British Tooth Fairy Payouts Climb at 3x Inflation to £20 Million
	Britain: Payouts by the tooth fairy have soared by 500 percent in 25 years to £20 million. The figure is three times the inflation rate and is approaching the rate of climb for housing prices which have jumped 600 percent in the same period. In 1982 the tooth fairy paid around 17p for a tooth. This has climbed to £1.05 in 2007 with payments ranging from an average of 95p in Wales to an average of £1.14 in London and the South-east. “The generosity of the tooth fairy has accelerated rapidly and shows no signs of abating. Teaching the value of money is often difficult but the tooth fairy is on hand to help…” said David White from the Children’s Mutual.
	Source: www.express.co.uk

 

This all seems not right. For some reason (rumours from my daughter’s aunt and uncles?) I thought at least £2 was the rate for one tooth - but perhaps that is just for the first one? Like some kind of incentive scheme. The rest will be paid with an inflationary scale in line with the mortgage rates, and higher cost of living.

Then again, why on earth would the tooth fairy be bothered with interest and inflation rates?  She’s a fairy afterall - all she needs to worry about is what to do with all those teeth she’s collecting. As an additional side, I must add that the tooth fairy has some almighty power with my daughter lately. Previously I was hard-pushed to convince her that fairies actually existed (sacrilege for this fairy-loving mother, who wishes there really were little dancing creatures at the bottom of her garden). Even as a two year old, she refused to go looking for them. Fairies were like monsters - they only appeared in cartoons (or Monsters Inc). Somehow, however, she remained convinced of the reality of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Suddenly, with the power of the almighty “money” thing jangling into the future, my daughter seems to now believe in fairies. Afterall, she informs me, the tooth fairy really does exist, so other fairies must do too. I questioned more into this, of course. What does the tooth fairy look like, then? Well, she’s obviously big enough to carry money around, and that’s basically it, was the response. The rest, it appears, is superfluous. The tooth fairy could be green haired, with one eye (like Mike from Monsters Inc) as far as my daughter is concerned. My daughter thinks a penny might be big enough to swap out for her tooth. That’s very generous of her, but she would likely become the laughing stock of the neighbourhood if satisfied with a simple penny per tooth, and I just can’t do that to her, no matter how confined the tooth fairie’s wallet may be of late.  

Obviously  not wanting to set a precedent which will have me become the arch enemy of the entire schoolground parent posse (particularly as my hubbie is now a school governor) I know now that I must conduct some very thorough on-the-job journalistic research, and interview anyone with a child locally who may have a view on how much the tooth fairy is willing to heave over for a piece of enamel.

Did you know that the main difference between milk teeth and adult teeth (aside from there being more of the later, of course) is that permanent teeth have roots, whereas baby teeth do not?

Does that give me carte blanche to lever out that front tooth of hers, then?  No, I thought not.

An Introduction to the Juicy Journals & Wild Words Series

Ohhh, this looks interesting. Molly J. Anderson-Childers is commencing a bi-monthly series at the Creativity Portal to create (and fill) some journals. This one might well be worth a regular bookmark - sign up to the Creativity Portal's newsletter to receive regular updates and links to the best bits published also.

She promises -

I have some exquisite projects in store for you — a dream journal, a writer’s notebook, tiny travel-sized journals that fit in your pocket, journals to give away and journals just for you.

J.K.Rowling Official Site - Harry Potter and more

J.K. Rowling's got a new website. Previously, this was just a very bland set of pages, but the official site is now all java-ed up, with animated front page to select from (dancing butterflies and spiders also). The official site still contains her biography, and news but also an interesting Wizard of the Month archive, featuring brief bios and images of some random wizards from the Harry Potter world.

Even the links section (click on the homepage glasses) goes to a big bookshelf which I would be glad to won. There's a Wombat exam id card also - but don't ask me what the id code to get in is, because I couldn't break it.

Fun, for any Harry Potter fans.

In my study / creative den / writing room / computer room / studio (we haven’t really got a proper name for it, agreed by all) sits my big desk with two computers on it (and peripheral equipment aplenty) and two chairs for the desk. Alongside this, across two walls are two very large cubed bookshelves from Ikea. The shelves hold everything from scrapbooking papers, zig writers, ribbons, embellishments idea books, tape, and old non-working glue tubes - which really must be thrown out.

In front of my own computer sits a very comfortable blue lazyboy chair. It doesn’t fit in our living room (we must be one of the few families I know who have three large sofas plus two squashy chairs in there) so it sits in the studio instead. Opposite the chair is a 48 inch TV set, again a spare from the living room. The T.V. is there for the purposes of my husband’s Playstation game. If ever we get a Nintendo Wii, that will go into the living room where there is more room to manoeuvre, but for the purposes of Karoke singing (our latest family infatuation) and using some normal game controllers, the chair and TV combination work well.

Until the dog chewed the Playstation controller this last weekend. He loves plastic, and the controller had been left there on the floor, afterall. My worried hubbie tested his precious controller out this weekend, to find it still operates (mostly). Unfortunately, he always leaves the Playstation plugged in after using it.

During the week days, I use the television, piped through with a wireless receiver, to pick up television from our Sky box upstairs. It’s a bit static-ey, with some noise blips periodically, but I’m not really aiming for any great sound quality. I am of the generation that swotted for my high school exams with a radio on, or a Sony walkman in my ears. Television for me is pure background noise. In fact, I can’t just sit in front of a television without doing something else. I can’t eat on the sofa, off my lap either, without both watching T.V. (let’s face it - most television programmes only need you to look up every ten minutes to get the gist of the plot) and reading a newspaper as well. I need to be ambidextrous to get anything done.

I realised this a week or so ago, when writing up my re-draft of my writer’s manifesto.

In the manifesto I gave myself permission to have that television on, as the white noise I need. I never watch the shows - I just need the noise. If someone asked me what the latest daytime chat show put across my screen was about today, I’d never be able to answer.

Most writers advise against having television or radios on. Complete silence for the muse, please - they say. But then, many scrapbookers have their favourite music on in the background. Is this a female thing then? I wouldn’t at all suggest it. But at least I know in myself that I can’t create much in silence.

I have further proof of this today. My husband, whenever he uses the playstation, is a bit thoughtless concerning the power outlets. Normally I can work out - with a lot of cursing mind you - what appliance plug to pull out and which one to switch on, to make the wireless doodadee work. But this morning, I couldn’t do this. So I’ve sat here without the television on for far too long.

I even have just tried opening up my non-generic music playing software (ITunes) and listening to my digi-dusty music collection off the tinny sounding P.C. At this point in time, Apple has decided my software needs updating, and the download includes reinstalling Quicktime, which annoys me no end. So now I’m forced into downloading, and re-organising all my icons on the desktop, plus my start-programs menu items before ever hearing that music.

Too late, my day has gone by, and has resulted in a couple of blogs of no consequence (including this one), and intentions to write out the character  family tree of my novel. Intentions only, because when I came to the PC just now to do the later, I found the buzzing of the PC itself, plus the huffing of a sleeping dog beside me, just too much of a distraction. How do you make a computer without a noise, then? Easy for me, normally. I turn the T.V. on.

Firstup, I’m still not sure what’s going on with The Artist’s Way online book club I’m in - it still seems a little eased at Week 6. Statistically, I should be on Week 8 today, but I’ll commence with Week 7 this week, on my own.

I had a shocking ephinany this morning - or over the weekend to be exact. Yesterday was Mothers Day here in the U.K., and it was a very pleasant day indeed. My entire family has been suffering from a bad case of the flu the last two weeks, with me being the last one to go down with it last week. The flu’s repercussions meant that any plans for Mother’s Day, including shopping for presents, was flung out the door for the last two precious weekends. Despite this, the day was pleasant and easy, and I spent a lot of it sitting on a sun-blessed sofa just reading a novel.

Perhaps it’s these thoughts towards motherhood that caused the ephiphany of late. I’ve been working at an afterschool Kid’s Club the last two weeks also - and although I thought it would be the children I might have problems with getting to grips with (I’m not that experienced, afterall) it has turned out to be the opposite. I’m more ill-at-ease with the actual adults there - they are very very cliquey, and being the newbie on the block, I’m finding it difficult to feel at peace with the newbie jobs I appear to be ordered around. I seem to be volunteering myself for all kinds of dirty jobs,or being volunteered while the rest chat about their past shared experiences etc.

My social worker for the adoption has also put a concern into my mind. She’s made it quite apparent she doesn’t think much of me working in the Kids Club, and there is a risk if any child should accuse me of anything. I appear to have jeoporadised everything I’ve lately been trying to accomplish, and I have had many doubts over the last few days as to whether that Kids Club is the best place for me to be.

Last week, although working on Wednesday afternoon I had a heavy cold, but one of the other staff members went home sick also, so I stayed on. As a new person, you have so much to prove, don’t you. And then I ended up being called to work on the Thursday also, as she was still sick. To do so meant trying to find emergency help with getting my daughter to and fro ballet that afternoon, and also meant she went without doing her reading homework with me which she was taking to school the next day.

And I felt that my choice had been incorrect - that the whole point of being home for my daughter was to allow me to take her to ballet, and ensure she gets adequate time and attention towards her homework . All mixed up.

Saturday morning I managed, out of my own sickness, to get to the supermarket with the family. But walking around the shop, I came across a specials stand, with Bailey’s Creme on discount. Now, I’m not a huge alcohol drinker - certainly not after pregnancy - I can’t seem to stomach much of a drink at all. It’s enough to ask me to drink a small glass of wine if we happen to be out for dinner (very rare moon, that one) and a good harsh brandy drop goes well for sore throats and chesty coughs, in the evening. All up, when questioned on surveys, I would be hard pushed to even admit to having one unit per fortnight, let alone per day.

But here I was, in front of a Bailey’s Creme display - and I’m sure we’ve got some parked away in a dark cupboard somewhere anyway - and I thought - “Yes, I could drink that during the day, couldn’t I?”

I was absolutely shocked by the vision in front of me, of a slowly inebriated stay at home mother, finally found secretly drinking by her husband, and with a alcoholism problem. I saw it, I saw that. And for the first time in my life I suddenly knew that I had the potential of becoming an alcholic secretly.

Where did that thought at all come from - to drink during the school days? And why? I’d never ever contemplated it before, but now, even as I write this, the thought tempts me. What the heck is going on?

Quickly I moved on from the Baileys and the supermarket shop went well, as did the rest of the weekend and my Mother’s Day. It was a hiccup, surely, some anomoly thrown down to me accidentally, and belonging to somebody else?

This morning being Monday, we followed our normal morning routine, shared with our daughter. We put on the morning newshour programme to catch up with the latest news and importantly - local weather and driving conditions. GMTV had on a family today. The interview was meant to be about a depressive mother, who is on prescription anti-depressants. It was obviously meant as a follow-up towards the shock news of one research study last week, suggesting anti-depressants like Prozac don’t work.

The mother featured had three boys at home - two teenagers, and an eight year old. She was so depressed, she claimed, that she couldn’t go out of the home. So she relied on her older mother and father to take the kids to school (never mind the fact that the teenagers should have been old enough to get themselves to school). Her husband who firstly said he worked long hours, and left early in the morning, then said he got home at 6 pm to find his wife often asleep on the sofa, and he would do all the evening chores. The kids were asked what they did in the situation, and said that they just helped her to the sofa when they found her in a state. The mother said something a little telling in that her depression came on more in the winter. Why her doctor  didn’t look into SAD syndrome is something I’m sure many are emailing GMTV as we speak.

What got me was that she didn’t appear to want to do anything about it. There was no guilt or even attempts to rectify things, other than stating she was now reliant on calling up her own parents all the time, to basically do her things - while she spent time on the sofa. This had been going on for years. The TV presenter asked her husband how he felt about it, considering he too must have bad days sometimes, and want to go home and just discuss it, or sit on the sofa. He replied that initially he had tried to do that, but now he had learnt that it was best to really make sure that it was all about his wife and getting her better slowly. He looked haunted and lost himself. He looked like he could easily have been the one crying on the sofa.

I don’t doubt the wife has depression at all, that’s not in dispute. Nor is the sheer impact of having someone suffer through depression like that. And in many ways I recognised parts of myself within this woman. How easier would my life be if I could just lie down and sleep on the sofa if so many other people were willing to help me out? Chronic depressives don’t get out of bed, can’t face the day. Yet she managed to get to the T.V. studios to discuss it. So she is making progress at least.  And perhaps there is hope now for that family.

She developed the depression a few years ago, once her youngest son went to school and she was faced with the few hours per day with herself.

I understand her feelings a little too scarily. I am a person who can suffer through some very low times, when I can’t explain the tears at all. I often put it down to the tides of some drastic hormones. Things that wouldn’t normally irk me at all can seem like the end of the world on some days, and despite recognising my emotions, no attempts at changing my thinking appear to work. I just need to swim out of it, and try to laugh off those tears, and knuckle in and do something, anything. If I don’t, you can very easily find me lying on that sofa, not wanting to cook dinner or speak with anyone. But something within me knows that it’s a transient thing, and will go away with time. I feel for that woman in that family, for she doesn’t appear to have found the movements, and has stuck with herself for quite some time.  

And that’s the similarity I see between us. Those hours during the school day are long, waiting for others to fill the silence. There are domestic duties to do, but many of us try to fill that silence with other work. I admitted my Bailey’s thoughts to my hubbie this morning, after that GMTV interview. He nodded, and seemed to understand - that’s why I scrapbook, he said. That’s why I blog, and write and create. To fill the days in a more productive way while I await the family to arrive home. 

It has become a little like that. As my life did alter last year, with leaving work, I now find the pattern of my weeks to have altered also. Weekends and evenings are spent solely with the family now. I used to use evenings and weekends to create, and browse and create some more. Now I don’t even boot up the computer on the weekends at all. My tempo has altered considerably, and I spend so much less time online, although more time on the computer doing things.  

I remember finding it odd in a discussion the other day with my Kid’s Club manager. She was considering other work during the lunchtime, but pointed out she wanted Mondays kept aside, as those were the days she went shopping. It seemed very very important to her that she used her Mondays like that. I couldn’t understand it at all, as supermarket shopping has always been a necessity, and not really something to look forward to. In the school playground that morning, I’d overheard two women discussing what they were doing that morning - one had the day off part-time work, and the other was going shopping - like it was some big announcement.

Whereas I considered shopping a chore to be shared quickly and efficiently with the rest of my family, many others were holding onto it like some good thing, and I couldn’t understand it. To discuss shopping like that? Like a hobby?

No, not like a hobby - like an escape from the house. Like something that is appreciated by others, and is needed, something productive. There are other things like that which many housewifes are turning to also - things which are much less fortunate perhaps. We even have celebrities glamourising them on TV with adverts for the online bingo communities, enticing us to spend our spare cash on gambling games and chatrooms.

On Saturday, I made plans to close down this blog - just like that. Gone. I could write to myself via other means - even the morning pages if you will. The blog seemed less important in my life than some time ago. There is a sense of leaving it, and moving on with different aspects of my life. It wasn’t just a threat, it was a certainty that this time around, I would just close it and be done with it. Maybe I would open up a free one, or move onto some websites I own, and re-develop them as a writer’s site, maybe not. But I needed to see an end to the public digital scrapbooking side of me, to make way. I needed the blog to close.

After the ephiphany of this last weekend, and witnessing the GMTV interview which put everything in place for myself, I’ve decided to carry on with the blog for a little while longer anyway. Because it’s part of my own mundane days, and therefore part of my sanity - for the moment.  

So, maybe I’m not so depressed afterall, and I am certainly lucky in that I have long developed an outlet which is productive and interesting. I blog, I browse, I create, I write, and sometimes I even clean. I am. During those spare six hours per week day, I am. I am a worker, even if  not paid. I am a creator, even if it might be a little mundane sometimes. But mundane is much more definable now as being a necessity in all of this.

Erk, Creativity shouldn’t be mundane, right? That kind of goes against the whole inspirational, artistic thing - to suggest that creating can be mundane. You can’t see someone like Picaso or Einstein ever being mundane can you - you can’t see Einstein’s hectic hairstyle ever being flattened out? I can’t be right in that feeling that a lot of my hours are mundane, surely?

But even Picaso and Einstein spent many many thousands of hours being mundane in their creativity, being who they were, and doing things to occupy their hours - before and after those recognised inspirational flashes that the world was gifted with. My world is much smaller than that, but I feel it right now to suggest that many hours of it can feel quite mundane, even ineffective, certainly inconsequential to most.

Perhaps I can bear with the Kids Club for a few more weeks to enjoy at least, the different world I trample into on those days. Perhaps also I can create something in my mundane hours which will be all worth it.  But you know what - this whole 6 hours per day of mundane facing myself is truley a gift from somewhere. I have never felt quite so changeable and never discovered quite so much about myself as I am currently journeying through. And yes, that was a blatantly rubbish sentence which probably needs a rewrite - but I’ve got better things to do, like go sit in the sun before it goes away.