PS

...and as proof of my New Start I baked for the first time in ages yesterday.  Parkin - nom.  It's currently getting all sticky in its tin but I shall report back on how successful (or otherwise) it turns to be in a few days...

Onwards and Upwards - who's with me?

The Autumn alwys makes me feel excited - it must be memories of the new school year with new shoes, new pens, new books which gets me far more keyed up than New Year ever does.  It was this time last year (or thereabouts) that I decided to give blogging a go, and crashed and burned pretty spectacularly after only a few posts.  In mitigation, the death of my mum and the subsequent lingering demise of my career threw me off course somewhat, but a recent post by kateonthinice (http://kateonthinice.wordpress.com) has prompted me to get my shit together and start doing instead of merely thinking of doing.
Kate's post is about the losing of one's sense of self, which resonates hugely with me at the moment.  With no paid job (and a bit of a crisis in terms of whether my career of the last 10 years is till the one for me - and if not, what the hell is?), one child and another on the way I feel like I am constantly fighting the desire for a life less ordinary with absolutely no idea of how to even take the first step towards making it happen.  Oh the ideas keep flowing - everything from teaching children's yoga to selling homemade cakes, retraining in NLP, teacher training, setting up a radio station - but the sheer directionless of them is overwhelming and consequently I do little (or nothing) about any of them. 
With 6 months to go until life is put on hold (again) for No.2, I feel like the clock is really ticking - or perhaps it's the New Term feeling that's nagging me to take positive steps towards something - anything!  Whatever it is posting this blog will, I hope, mark a bit of a turning point.  Out of the fog and towards the clear blue skies...

Bugger.

Well, my resolution to post at least weekly fell by the wayside pretty quickly, but it's not every week that your mother dies.  It's funny, I really didn't think I'd want to write about this on the blog, but it feels quite liberating to put it down in print, although now that I have it's difficult to know what else to write.  Maybe being able to tell the ether all about mum, and how much I'll miss her is something that will come later.  For now it's like being in a very surreal dream punctuated with crippling physical pain when reality bites, and hysterical laughter when my daughter - the most wonderful thing in my life EVER - punches the air shouting "rock 'n' roll" before giving me a choking cuddle and snotty kiss on the lips.  Right at the time when I thought I'd be plunged back into the black fog of the depression that has tracked my footsteps for about 20 years, I feel so blessed and thankful, and strangely peaceful.  Like I've grown up and have to take responsibility for myself.  I just wish she was still here, so much. 

White Lies and Whoppers

So I thought maybe the best place to start was to explain how the title of my blog came about and to invite others to share their own tales of parental dishonesty!

One of my family's running jokes (which are, by definition, crashingly boring to anyone outside the four of us) is that any soup is called "ordinary soup", for the benefit of my brother who as a child pretty much refused to eat anything else.  As you have probably guessed, "ordinary soup" happened to be whatever soup my mother set down in front of him, but if it was "ordinary soup" it was eaten. Anything else was dismissed out of hand...and onto the floor.

Other little gems which I took as gospel, as only a child can, were that if I had a bath every day my fingernails would grow to be long and beautiful, and that the hugely overweight girl around the corner became so from eating cheese in precisely the same manner as I had taken to doing when I came in from school.

My daughter is too young at the moment to be subjected to any such blatent fibbing on my part, and I'm sure there are others out there whose mum's and dad's "truths" trounce my own mother's efforts, so please do share.  I may pick up some tips...

Here goes!!

Isn't it always the way: you spend forever procrastinating about doing something and then when you actually kick the family out of the house, avoid the wine bottle and get around to doing it, it is SO EASY!  I'm sure there will be a host of little niggles and technophobically motivated errors along the way, and so if there is anyone actually following this anytime, then my apologies in advance.

Right, I'm off to try and make this page look a little less like a hastily set-up blogspot template....

Ta ta for now xx