Tag: bad

Maybe being a perfect parent isn’t such a good idea….

Do I take my daughter to see her daddy in hospital?

This was a question I struggled with recently.  As many of you are aware my husband was involved in a road traffic accident and sustained substantial head injuries; not a phone call any loved one ever wants to receive late on a Friday night.  However, he is expected to make a full recovery after giving us all quite a fright.

Perfect childhood to blame?

Coincidentally, as I was whiling away time in the hospital, reading yet another trashy newspaper, I came across an article, but for the life of me I can’t remember the woman’s name.  However, she grew up in the 70s in the perfect house on a perfect street with perfect parents.  Growing up she didn’t know a single person with divorced parents!

She was never exposed to any of life’s challenges and now as an adult she’s unable to cope with further education, relationships, work and now being a parent.     Ironically, in a time when people wear a bad upbringing as a badge of honour, she blames her ‘perfect upbringing’.

Life’s lessons

As an adult, I feel I’m quite good at dealing with difficult situations as I was given the opportunity as a child/young adult.  My life hasn’t been anymore difficult than anyone else’s, I’ve experienced death, divorce, disappointment and disease, but my mother never sheltered us from these situations when they happened.  However, she was always careful with the amount she did share, telling us just enough to put us at ease.

The Conundrum

From the beginning, I was honest with my 4 year old and told her that ‘daddy had fallen off his bike and bumped his head and would need to stay in the hospital for awhile’.  After a couple of days they both started asking to see each other and I was really torn.  Do I take her or don’t I take her?  On the outside she seemed okay, but I could tell that she was worrying as she was a bit quieter than usual, which may be because the last two people she visited in hospital died.

In the end, I decided to take her.  A friend suggested that the best thing to do was to prepare her first.  My friend kindly sent me a photo of her own son; one with a black eye and another a few weeks later with it healed.  I showed these to her on the train,  explaining that Daddy looked different but in time he would be heal.

When we arrived she was very quiet and I slightly panicked that I made the wrong decision, but within minutes she climbed into bed with him, they shared a much needed cuddle and quickly began arsing around with the bed controls laughing and carrying on as usual.  Phew!

When we got home she did say that she ‘was scared when she first saw him’ but I could tell that a giant weight had been lifted off her little shoulders.

What would you have done?

 

 

 

 

 

Minority Influence

I don’t know what I found more distasteful last night the bare knuckle fighting on Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or the behaviour on Blogger.ed. They both left me with the same sick feeling.

I’m not going to into the finer details or discuss who was right or wrong or what was going on, as this is the side of blogging that I despise and really doesn’t deserve anymore attention. In the end, the rest of us were punished. It may be coincidental, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the forum was taken down in an effort to diffuse the situation and I fully understand why the administrators may have decided to do this.  However, it may have been the web monkey’s misbehaving again.

However, it reminded me of when we were teenagers. My mom received a rather large phone bill to a female sex chat line, one of those 0900 numbers. At the time there were three teens in the house; me, my sister and my step brother. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who it was. The one thing my mother always demanded was honesty. As long as you owned up to what you did and quickly, the consequences were a lot less and trust me you didn’t want to suffer the wrath of my mother.

So, she gave the culprit the opportunity to come forward. We were all grounded (couldn’t go out) until someone owned up to it, even though she knew damn well that my sister and I hadn’t done it. For a couple of teenage girls this was hell. If I remember correctly we ended up spending the whole weekend in and I don’t think he ever owned up to it.

So, I felt a bit narked tonight when I wanted to go onto Blogger.ed and it was down. I know the administrators abhor censoring content or banning people but in this case I think it may have been an idea to remove the threads and temporarily muzzle the perpetrators and let the rest of use get on with it. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will be up and running again soon.

Stairway to Hell!

I’m fairly confident we’re not the only family that does this; whilst tidying up downstairs we use the stairs as a dumping ground for everything in hope that someone will pick it up next time they’re passing and put them away. Who am I kidding?

In reality, we all walk by it without a sideways glance on an average of 10 times a day.  The only time it gets taken upstairs is when I’m running around like a loon on Wednesday mornings, tidying before the cleaner arrives and 9 times out of 10 it then just gets deposited on our bed. Yes, I do this every week and I know it’s ridiculous.  I wouldn’t want her to think we are pigs!

However, a couple of days ago, I was walking down the stairs carrying Madame and didn’t spot the underlying danger.  I slipped on one of the items and fell down the last 5 stairs.  Luckily, I landed on my ass so no one was hurt.  Once the initial shock passed we did have a right good giggle.

Can you spot the culprit?  It looks sweet and innocent but is a death trap in disguise!

Bad Parenting Club

I’m guessing that this is probably not an original idea but I was inspired by @chickenruby’s recent blog about her accident prone boys and my neighbour’s drama last week when she accidentally locked herself out of the house when her 18 month old was asleep inside.  I need to stress that I don’t think these two are bad parents in any way.

As parents we are not perfect, even though some parents purport that they are, which exacerbates the societal pressures on us parents.  I’m not looking for stories that border on abuse but those that horrified you at the time but you can look back and laugh on them now.

To get the ball rolling I’ll share a few stories.

  • We were at one of Madame’s pals 1st birthday.  I had a couple of glasses of wine but was in no way intoxicated.  We were all sitting out back.  She was in a Handysit on the patio.  To this date I still don’t know exactly what happened but at some point I turned, unfastened her and then I must have been distracted.  The next think I know she is lying face down on the concrete, screaming.  She had the biggest goose egg on her forehead.  I didn’t sleep for days beating myself up over it.
  • At that birthday, a friend of mine shared a bad parenting moment of one of his mates.  He was running with their child on his shoulders, great fun.  But wasn’t thinking and ran into the house through the patio doors and didn’t calculate the clearance!  I’m sure you can work out what happened.
  • Last summer, when I was home in Canada my cousin was telling us about when his daughter was a new born.  They had a menagerie of cats and dogs.  He was in bed, felt what he thought was one of the cats on the end of the bed and kicked it off.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the cat but his daughter.  Eeek!

To join the club, just post/share one of these stories and take the badge.  As usual, this is open to everyone so please feel free to pass it on.

PhotobucketPhoto Credit

However, I would love to hear tales from:

@notefromlapland

@chickenruby

@tattooed_mummy

@vegemitevix

@tiddlyompompom

@mysevenkids

@zooarchaeologis

@muddlingalong

@pennynash

As I’m sure they have goodies!  Do let me know if you do one so I can link back to you.

It’s Official! I’m turning into a Grumpy Old Woman!

I won’t be 40 for a bit but I’ve found myself complaining more and more lately.  This is something I’ve never been good at.  Some joke that I have been in the UK too long and have lost the ability to complain but, honestly, it’s a skill I never really had.  If I do complain I tend to be incredibly polite and get nowhere.

In the last week I’ve complained at least 3 times.  On Mother’s Day we went to Loch Fyne at 5pm, the restaurant was completely empty but we were told that they did not have any room.  I do appreciate that it was probably fully booked from 7pm but we had a toddler with us so would have been in and out very quickly.  We didn’t complain and skulked out.

A couple of weeks later we decided to give it another chance.  The service was excellent but the food was inedible.  We were sitting by the pass and saw our food sitting for ages and when the waitress passed me my plate I burnt my hand on it.  She didn’t even apologize.  Again we didn’t complain, we just paid and quietly decided that we would never return.

On Tuesday night, my hubby wanted a Chinese Take-away, he quickly ordered without consulting me so I had no idea of what we were having.  I was really hoping for Sweet and Sour Chicken Balls.  So when the food arrived without the balls, I assumed it was my husbands fault.  We tucked into our meals and when we were about half way through we received a phone call from the delivery guy saying he had delivered the wrong meals.  We explained that we had already started.  I decided that that wasn’t acceptable and rang to complain. As I said earlier, I’m rubbish at complaining, my husband was lying on the sofa listening and cringing and in the end all I ended up with was a free portion of rice next time!

After that I was fuelled and decided to write to Loch Fyne about our shoddy meals.  I have received an email response promising they will speak to the Senior Manager and get back to me.  Not sure why I bothered though as I really don’t want to go back!

Photo Credit

And finally, yesterday, I came home to find that our neighbours had cut down all of the trees at the bottom of their garden.  The problem with this is that we back onto a Train line and Sainsbury’s.  Now can see and hear the train and the back of Sainsbury’s is covered in graffiti.  It now looks like I live in the hood!  I can’t complain to the neighbours as it’s their garden and they can do what they like. So, I rang Sainsbury’s instead and got straight through to Senior Management who has promised me that they will get a contractor in within a month to sort it out.  I’m not holding my breath but will ring back in a month’s time if nothing is done about it.

I’m slowly getting better at this and by the time I hit 40 look out!

I would love any hints and tips on how to successfully complain .

Update: I have received a response from Loch Fyne

I can also only apologise that the quality of the food that you and the members of your party received was not to the standard you expect from us at Loch Fyne. I have spoken at length to both my Head Chef and the company Executive Chef about this and we are currently looking into the issues you raised. The fact that you burnt your hand on the dish is also unacceptable and I have spoken to our front of house staff about this, to ensure it does not occur again.

I would like to invite you back to the restaurant as my guests, for a meal to the value of £100.00 so that we can try to rebuild your confidence in us. When you would like to take us up on this offer, if you call and make a reservation and print this out and bring it with you, we would be grateful.

Yours truly,

Gary Meharg

General Manager