Imagination is the source of all bonkersness...

Ben, now that he is that little bit older and able to turn thoughts over in his head and remember stuff, has started developing some weird habits and obsessions and doing some generally quite oddball stuff. I suppose it's all to do with a burgeoning imagination which I think is fantastic in principle. Just weird, that's all.

Take last night for instance.

He was going to go to bed in our bed from the off because I was still feeling poorly and couldn't be bothered with the faff of settling him in his bed. We walked past his bedroom door and he says "night night spider".  Now, he already has a habit of saying hiya to every spider he sees, so in theory saying night-night isn't that far removed. But it did weird me out a little bit because I was sure there weren't any spiders visible, and I was pretty certain there weren't any in his room either.

The mystery was solved when I went in to fetch his pillow. There, tucked up in bed (and no doubt given a night-night kiss as well) was the spider he made at nursery this week.

I can understand tucking teddy up in bed, and even the giant elephant to some extent, but the spider? At least he's being fair and giving everything a chance... Even his drumkit was put to bed yesterday, a blue blanket draped over the top. Sadly though drumkit didn't actually get a chance to go to sleep as Ben just bash it through the blanket.

This morning Ben woke up and decided that spider needed breakfast. So insistent was he that he dragged Steve out of bed because he couldn't quite manage to open his bedroom door to get to the spider. At least I managed to dissuade him that spider needed mummy-milk...

Who knows where his imagination is going to take us in the coming years.

A Parental Rite of Passage...

... is making a birthday cake for your child.

Ben didn't miss out technically on his first birthday but, as we'd only just moved in to a renovation project and had not yet got an oven, I made him a cake-in-a-cup in the microwave. But I only had olive oil rather than regular sunflower oil, and I think I overcooked it, and the result really could have been used as a (rather large) rubber bullet, to be quite frank. We didn't eat much of it. It didn't even fry very well in copious amounts of butter the next day (that treatment normally makes any kind of stale cake quite eatable, with a lot of double cream, that is).

Still, he had a birthday cake. And all the family were round so it was ok really.

I made him a oneandahalfday cake to make up for my failings as the mother of a one-year-old - it was rather more successful, and took a little more effort.

So this year, I promised myself that I would be a Proper Mummy and make a Proper Birthday Cake.

Which I have done, and am rather proud of it, even if I do say so myself.

It feels like a bit of a parental rite of passage.

Balance

How do you create a workable work-life balance?

Part of my job (yes, the one that is one morning a month in an office, and any spare hours at home) is doing the wages for a small company. I created our own spreadsheet to record hours and create payslips. I have learnt about HMRC's NI and PAYE calculator. I have learnt about year-end tasks and now know what to record to make my life easier next March/April.

But I don't know how to do databases. I mean, I'm competent enough to be able to find my way around the software, but the actual logic of relationships and what needs to be in what tables and linked to which other tables, just flummoxes me. Totally. I just can't figure out the best way to do it. At all. But on the other hand, now I've got my filemaker trial, I'm at least learning how to create the things, even if the logic is still beyond me at the moment.

And therein lies the problem. I'm enjoying this challenge so much, that when I have to stop what I'm doing, I get irritated, annoyed. It's like an addiction. I am addicted to whatever chemical is produced in my brain when I am challenged in learning something, figuring something out. And poor little Ben, he gets the sharp end of my tongue, for no fault of his own. Just me being irritated that I have to stop what I am doing, or can't go and do what I want to do, because he needs me to be mummy. So I am being challenged in a different way. Where do I need to make that divide, between work and motherhood?

I don't feel like I can live in both worlds, with the divide as it is at the moment. I'm not able to put the hours in to really be able to give my boss the results that he needs and wants; and I'm not being fair to Ben either. So what do I do? What can I do? I feel like I either need to find a better balance (which I'm not sure how to do, given yesterday's real-ness about hours in the day and lack thereof etc), or I need to stop trying to split myself in two and give myself 100% to one or the other. Either way, I need to do something because life as it is at the moment isn't fair on me, Ben, Steve, or my boss. Although my boss doesn't notice really because whatever I manage to pull out of the hat, it'll be better than anything we have at the moment!

Must find Balance. It must be achievable. It must be.