Quick Update

OK so I’ve been in hiding. No I have not had a run in with the Law or the Mafia. I have been hiding from procrastination.

Life has been kind of manic in the Geek household, particularly for Mr Geek. Along with all the “run of the mill” stuff that comes from having three kids, I am also trying build a photography business around my day job.

Now I am certainly not going to complain about having success, particularly in the current financial climate, I have started to have more work on than is achievable with any degree of comfort.

This has meant burning the candle at both ends, and a bit in the middle for good measure. I have thus had to be somewhat disciplined in the things I have allowed to cause distraction.

Alas, as much as I truly enjoy it when I am in the swing of things, blogging is both time consuming and very much a me thing. Thus it is a luxury that is hard to justify.

But I’m here now, so I’ll update you on some of the things that have happened in the Geek household lately.

The biggest thing since last time is probably Maggie’s first birthday.
She really had a good time. Her birthday was spread across a week with a party for her and her cousins on the Saturday before, a party on the day and a party the following weekend when my parents came up to visit … What can I say she is a party girl!

Bart and Lisa finished school for the summer on Wednesday, but more on that later.

Today Bart and Lisa have gone off with my parents for a week in a caravan. So once again we are back down to one child. When we had only one, we felt it was hectic/manic/our lives revolved around him, now to go back down to one child seems opulently luxurious. It is just like the story A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson.
I love my kids with all my heart, but it is quite nice to be given the opportunity to miss them once in a while

However this week is due to be quite a busy one. We are clearing a stretch of garden, for the trampoline that hopefully arrives Wednesday as well as getting everything ready to go camping. Oh how I long for some time relaxing in the sun. In my head the days will be lounging by the pool reading books, but I strongly suspect it is more likely to be filled with playing with the kids in some body of water.

Ok so I rambled a bit, but there you have it, I have posted again for the first time in 2 moths and 19 days (According to Wolfram Alpha)

Miscellaneous Update

This weekend was rather full. It started for me with a BBQ with the Shipmates from The kids club that my children had been attending at my friend’s church. I longed to take pictures of some of the antics, but I was forced to fall back on my iPhone camera, which unless it has buckets of light, I would be better off drawing you a picture! I do have a perfectly acceptable point-and-shoot camera; however the charger has decided to give up, so it is currently acting as a paper-weight on my desk

At the BBQ Lisa got her face painted which is lovely until it is time for bed. War broke out between Mrs Geek and Lisa over the removal, and peace was finally declared when I offered to take a photo of it … I’m glad I did.

Saturday morning we took kites to the park [1][2] (who knew parks had webpages?), and fought with the fact that there was little to no wind. (No photos )

When we got back we let the kids play out for a bit, when Lisa fell and hit her bottom on a concrete flower basin. After being given chocolate for being brave (she is a total chocoholic!) all was forgotten, or so we thought.

At lunch Mrs Geek put the kids in charge, so Bart decided he was going to have a Scooby-Doo Sandwich.

While Maggie failed to locate where she was meant to be putting the food.

Much to Mrs Geek’s delight, my rugby match was cancelled, so we all headed off to another of the local parks [1][2] to make the most of the rare sunshine that we have been experiencing. Mrs Geek’s Gran had given the kids some money to get themselves something for Easter, so we allowed them to get scooters to take to the park, Again I am frustrated that I have no photos of these, but I do have Lisa on the train!

That evening Mrs Geek and I took an all too rare opportunity to get a baby-sitter and went to friends’ for dinner. Good food, good company … It was all rather civilised

Sunday we went to the church service that rounded off the kids club, and then went to the beach to see if we could get more luck with the kites (we didn’t )

But whist we were out, Lisa again repeatedly needed to go to the bathroom. Initially we just put it down to her being fussy and silly, but when I took her there was a large bruise and a little blood in the bowl.

NHS Direct told us to take her to A&E (English for ER). 4 hours of waiting, one movie on the iPhone (Beethoven), numerous games of the ABC game, a bottle of Diet Coke (I needed to get her to give a sample) and 3 waiting room story books later, we were told that it was she had a minor infection and given a course of antibiotics and that it was “likely to be coincidental”. How reassuring.

However it seems like she seems to be ok again and it gave us her another experience of going to the doctor without having the inflict any pain, so her fear of the medical profession seems to be subsiding.

Pat

Over the Christmas holidays Mrs Geek’s Gran (Joyce) lost her husband, known to the kids simply as Pat. It was not entirely unexpected, but it was not exactly a drawn out affair either.

It does however introduce the conundrum of where Joyce should now live. She is currently living in Scotland, where Pat’s family are, but none of her children are there and while she is she not exactly incapable of looking after herself, she does require a certain amount of care, and while Pat’s daughter has historically taken much of the load, it seems unreasonable to expect her to continue to do so now that Pat is gone. So on top of loosing her husband, Joyce is now looking at having to up sticks and move back to England.

Now while he was not exactly Mrs Geek’s grandfather as such, to my children he was.

It is hard to describe Pat. I don’t really feel I knew him myself all that well because he was a quiet man that kept himself to himself. For the first 5 years of knowing Mrs Geek, I bet I had only ever got 10 words out of him. Couple this with the fact that they lived in Scotland it was hard to know exactly how the kids would take the news. We actually found out on boxing day, but held off telling them until last weekend as we saw no benefit to spoiling their Christmas.

To be honest they took it as well as could be expected. They were both fairly stoic. I explained that he had been very poorly. But you could see that there were a lot of questions bouncing around in their heads, waiting to be answered.

Bart asked about specifics, what was wrong with him, what had caused it etc.

Lisa even asked if mummy was going to die because she was poorly (Mrs Geek, like almost everyone else I seem to have spoken to, had the bug that was going around this Christmas).

I hate having to break bad news to my kids, but to some extent they seem better emotionally balanced to deal with these things than I am.

I promise to be more up beat on my next post

Back To Work

Yesterday was not the beginning of a renewed absence. Yesterday I got to enjoy the madness that is fulltime parenting two out of my three offspring.

Yesterday being the 1st of December was the notional date we set for Mrs Geek’s return to work. It also happened to be the day that our children’s school designated as a “Governor’s Day”. What a Governor’s Day exactly is and how it relates to the children not going in to school I don’t know (my suspicions are that it is an opportunity for the teachers to catch-up on their Christmas shopping). We it would make most sense not to change the arrangements and I would look after the oldest two.

It sounded so reasonable to have 6 months maternity leave before Maggie arrived… But the idea of having to return to work and leave her still tiny baby hit Mrs Geek a while back and it has been hanging over her ever since. It is mitigated by the fact that baby Maggie is going to be cared for by Mrs Geeks mum.

I wish it were not the case that money is the reason for the decision, but it really is financially crippling for Mrs Geek to be off work. I know she takes no pleasure in realising that she is a victim of her own success.

I have said this before, but I really am overwhelmingly proud of Mrs Geek’s achievements, but we have now settled into a lifestyle that really does require both of our wages. Especially seeing as she significantly out earns me. I came to terms with this a long time ago, but it was much easier when we were all happy with the arrangement. Now however I am left with the dent in my machismo that smarts every time I think about the fact that I am failing in my societally expected duty of providing for my family.

Thankfully the day went well. Pupils came to her and said how much they had missed her, I had a good time with the oldest two (who were fun and frustrating in nearly equal measures), and as much as it may have been a dent to Mrs Geek’s ego, Maggie seemed perfectly happy with the new arrangement.

That said… We are all making adjustments at the moment to make this work so it is a trying time in our household. Wish us luck

On The Subject Of Being Busy

Over the past few months as I mentioned, I have been horrendously busy. Now I have made all my best efforts to ensure that I don’t neglect seeing my children as much as is possible, but it is impossible to put in the hours and be there for the children as much as I would have liked. However at the moment, we need the money, and when needs must…

This is not a credit crunch thing… to be honest I don’t think that has hit us at all yet (other than a slight increase in mortgage).

Last year through a rather long winded process Mrs Geek and I decided that we were not getting on with Bart’s local school. The specifics result in a long story that we can skip, but the long and the short of it was that we decided that we should look elsewhere and we came to the conclusion that for Bart, the best option was to go private.

And I will go on record now that for us it was totally the right decision. He has gone from being really turned off of school to really being enthused again (in the summer he was counting down the days until he went back). His results are good. All is well.

Lisa is now at the same school, and after a brief settling in period, she seems to be really loving it too (don’t as about her parents evening or I will really get all gushy).

It is however a rather expensive luxury. And with Mrs Geek still being on maternity leave, it means that we have to watch the pennies. I have therefore taken as much work as I can get, which has left me not getting to see as much of the people I keep telling myself I am doing it for.

I can live with this. I just convince myself that it is all for the best, and that I am doing what is right for them, and it really is what I believe, but at this time of year where every which way you look there is some story telling us that “Christmas Presence is more important than Christmas Presents!”.

To this I will say … Bah Humbug!

Third Baby Syndrome

I think we may have a touch of TBS (Third Baby Syndrome) … let me explain

With Bart everything was new, so we tried to take everyone’s advice. Even mutually contradictory advice. Even though he was breastfed we sterilised everything. We used non-bio washing powder, no wet-wipes just cotton wool and water. They don’t tell you of the paranoia a new baby induces.

And then there is the single worst piece of advice that we were given by anyone. “Breast fed babies don’t need winding” … now in retrospect that seems ludicrous … but we were young and stupid, so we believed what we had been told, and this by a mid-wife too.

They say that dogs can “Smell fear”, well I think babies can too. Hence Bart was a somewhat unsettled baby.

Having learnt from the mistakes we made at Bart’s expense, Lisa had a far smoother ride, and maybe unsurprisingly she was a far more contented baby. She still got to have all new things, being that she was a girl and you can’t put blue on a girl!?!

Now we are at baby number 3. We have almost everything from before (not to mention the things Mrs Geeks sister has now accumulated for us), so she gets some of the luxuries that we couldn’t afford for the other two (It sound so unfair when you put it like that).

The theory was that we are now experts in this field, still making mistakes, but they are far less frequent (although I am booked on a course away for 4 days this week … That was seriously unwise, I’ll get to that in another post). But all in all Maggie seems the most calm and happy of our babies so far.

We were discussing this and other musings this morning, in a moment of mutual self satisfaction and “Aren’t we such good parents” refection, when it occurred to Mrs Geek that we have been so relaxed about the whole thing, that we had not registered the birth! We are not quiet at the stage where this is criminal, but it was close.

So she might not have wind or a sore bottom, but legally so far she does not even exist!

That good parenting halo might need a little polish

The names have been changed to protect the innocent(ish)

You may or may not have noticed that I have attempted to keep my blog semi-anonymous. Don’t go thinking that I am some privacy junkie or that I am paranoid (because we all know it is not paranoia if they REALLY ARE OUT TO GET YOU … right?

It is simply that this is my blog, and I want to be able to say what I want to say without it reflecting on either Mrs Geek or my children. For example, I have very different views on many things to those of my wife who teaches in a Catholic Highschool. Now I don’t believe that I have said anything particularly controversial, but I reserve the right to do so in the future, without the fear of it being used against her. I therefore do not want my blog to show up when someone types either my name or indeed Mrs Geek’s or any of our children’s names into google.

So until now I have used the generic terms “My Son” and “My Daughter” to distinguish between them, but as you know I now have another little one to add to the mix! It would not take many lines of typing before I got fed-up of typing “My Eldest Daughter” or “My Baby Girl” (Not to mention the jealousy that it would cause my Eldest Daughter to think that she no longer fit that role).

So I have been racking my brains for a suitable set of pseudonyms. I read other blogs with children with pseudonyms Tendrils’ has Punky (On reflection I am only guessing that is a pseudonym as it would be somewhat unusual in this country, but who knows what you yanks are like (Tendrils – Please for give me if I am wrong)), RC has her Little Dude, Book Mama had Book Boy (formerly known as Big Brother and Little Sister, Alias Mother has the Buddha Baby and Twisted Cinderella has her Princess… but I did not feel that any of these fit for our specific mix of personalities. After much head scratching on my part, my son unwittingly (and probably much to the chagrin of Mrs Geek) gave me the inspiration for the rechristening of our little cast of characters.

As I may have pointed out, my son was really hoping that our youngest would be a boy, so we were worried that he may be a little disappointed if (as was the case) the baby turned out to be a little girl, to which he informed us that it would be “ok because that would make us the same as the Simpsons!”.

And much to our amazement it fits all too well.

My son henceforth to be known as Bart is high energy, quite rebellious, not exactly adverse to breaking the odd rule and he has developed skateboarding skills that I can only dream of.

My eldest daughter is obviously Lisa. While being far less in your face than her brother, she still seems to have a well formed sense of quite self belief. Hopefully she will grow up with a better self image than her fictional counterpart, and stay away from all the Millhouse’s of the world.

As for my youngest, she has yet to shoot anyone, but she has the dummy (Pacifier) thing sorted.

Not Mr Geek!

That is as far as this analogy goes! Despite my ever expanding waistline I am certainly not to be likened to Homer! I do not have a dead end job, I do not have an eating problem, I have not been into space and I am currently not going bald (but the genetics are not in my favour)

I do however have a wife that is way too good for me so I will leave any other comparisons to Marge lest that ceases to be the case!

Sunny Sundays = River Days

First things first … still no news on Baby #3 … still being limited to Braxton Hicks.

The plan on Sunday was gardening. I will declare now that I defiantly do not have “Green Fingers”. My approach to gardening is for Mrs Geek to point at which bush or hedge she wants me to attack cut back and let the battle commence.

And digging. I am good at digging (having removed silly amounts of soil from both of my last to houses, it was one of the requirements of this house that I did not need to do so again)

However, after about 5 minutes of battle, I decided that it was way to hot to be working in the garden and that we should high tail it to go play in a river.

Over the past few weeks, any hint of sun has found us trekking down to one river or another. Thankfully we live about 5 minutes from the Ribble Valley and the Forest of Bowland. So we made our way to Dinckley and we spent the day swimming in the River Ribble. Well, me and the kids did, Mrs Geek sat on the river bank holding the fort and looking radiant.

I don’t know how we would while away the sunny Sundays if it were not for my children’s obsession with water.

We ended up leaving at 4pm in order to get them to their swimming lessons. I’m sure the logic to that is in there somewhere

Alas, Mrs Geek did not forget about the garden, so that is how I ended up spending Sunday evening digging up bushes and trimming hedges (I must be a real hit with the neighbours).

Growing Up

On Wednesday my sweet little girl went for a taster day at her new school. Mrs Geek and I were concerned that she would be daunted by going in to a class where she was the new girl, but far from it. She excitedly got the uniform on and was keen to be just like her brother.

I was so proud of her I almost burst.

However I know that she has been going to nursery, but I can not seem to shake the feeling that it is another step on the path to her deciding that Daddy is no longer the greatest person on earth, and as much as I know she has to grow up at some stage … but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

And the thing is she is in such a hurry to grow up. The problem is that she is always following in the footsteps of her big brother, and she is trying to catch up, where as I want her to slow down and just enjoy being 4.

I really love the boy that my son has become (certain lapses in behaviour aside), but I already see the changes, the loss of youth mourn it for him. I no longer catch him just randomly singing like I used to, his TV programs are Ben 10 and Turtles instead of Bob the Builder and Andy Pandy.

Again, I know that this is all inevitable and that I need to let them grow up to be what they are going to be, and I am sure that I will love the people they turn into … However, just a little note to my babies … I’ll miss you.

Here are a few more pictures of my little princess waiting to be let loose on the world

Don’t Panic … I’m Back

OK, So I went off to Spain and forgot to tell you. Did the internet seem empty without me?

I am assuming that I have so far not been blocked by China as although I have not received the anticipated number of comments (I am currently around 2 Billion short on my last count) it appears it is because I have got people so worked up they have chosen direct action. Granted it may just be a coincidence, but what are the chances of that? Ban me you swine! If you can ban reincarnation without a license you can ban my blog!

So where have I been? Ah yes.

A long time back in the mists of time, my father-in-law stated that when he retired he would like to take us (his children, and their families) on holiday, his treat! Well as much as we may have smiled and made nice words, I am not sure that any of us actually expected it to happen, but happen it did, and it took place last week.

Mrs Geek, the children and I, were accompanied by her 2 sisters, brother-in-law, 2 nephews and mum and dad. Off to sunny Spain!

The location was Nerja, on the Costa del Sol. The Coast of the Sun? Not for the first 4 days. Sure we left the UK in a blanket of snow, but it was an awful long way just to upgrade snow to rain.

Now it may not work quite so well for Eliza Doolittle, but I have decided to update the famous phrase to read…

The rain in Spain falls mainly on … Mr Geek!

My Son was determined that being the first time he had ever had his own pool, he was going to use it regardless of the weather, and to be honest everyone pitched in and made the best of what we had. We had a number of lovely meals from some of the local restaurants, went to the local Donkey Sanctuary which was great, we walked along the beach, which while not exactly being golden sands was still fun for the kids. Also it had numerous little parks for the kids to play in, where I proved myself to be King Of The Monkeybars. I also got to watch the Mighty Reds defeat the Evil Gunners in what was one of the best matches I have seen since the 2005 final.

However after four days of rain, in what were admittedly very luxurious accommodation, nerves were beginning to fray. Good company or not, 11 people, including 4 under 8s, hiding from the rain on what everyone had anticipated being an oasis of relaxation, the irony begins to wear a bit thin. People seemed to be a little fed up of looking at the “Bright Side”, and my quite hilarious comment about how much money they were all saving on sun cream seemed to get lost in translation as I don’t think anyone fully appreciated my genius for lightening the tone.

But then the clouds parted, the sky brightened and the sun came out! And it came out with a vengeance! It was as if it were trying to make up for lost time. Cue the sun beds, cue the ice-cream, cue the pool, OK so that was still a bit cold. Everything was good again as the Sol had returned to the Costa del Sol.

So on the Sunday when our time was up, it was with a heavy heart that we left our temporary home in Nerja to return to the cold air of Manchester. On reflection I have to admit it was both a memorable and actually genuinely rather enjoyable week.