Happy Halloween and end of Blogtoberfest

Wow! I can't believe I managed to stick to my post a day for Blogtoberfest, but here we are on October 31st! I thought it appropriate to post a photo that I took on my new iphone while we were in Cambridge yesterday. Cambridge is such an atmospheric city and the old town is full of alleyways and cobbled streets and there were a group of students down by the river who were selling tickets for a Spooky Halloween walk through the city at night. They had decorated a part of the riverside with a fake graveyard with ghosts and skeletons and lots of carved pumpkins.
Cambridge university is so famous that the town is always full of tourists, not to mention students and it was hard to get a photo without people in it!
I feel sure that there are some wonderful Halloween blogposts to view, and we waved goodbye to British Summertime in the early hours of this morning so we have all had to put our clocks forward an hour, and I have an hour's less blogwatching to do so I had better get going ....

Curry night

I've scheduled this post in advance because I think I'll be a bit pushed for time to do it on the day! But with only 2 days left of Blogtoberfest, I can't fall at the last fence!
We have a group of friends coming over for a curry night tonight. Each couple takes it in turns to host it, and instead of cooking we order a take away and share the cost of the meal. It's a good way of getting together without someone having to slave over a hot stove all day! We have so many Indian restaurants actually in our town - most of which deliver - but there is one a bit further away that is worth getting in the car to collect the food! So the food will be courtesy of The Mountbatten . It used to be a pub but it changed hands a couple of years ago and it's a really nice Indian restaurant. So I've spent all Friday cleaning up the house and tidying up so that me and the husband can have a nice day out tomorrow before our friends arrive. I've polished and hoovered and put the extra leaf in the table so it extends to fit everyone comfortably (that's not so easy to do singlehandedly I can tell you!). I've even set the table! I love different napkins that fit the theme of the food that I'm serving and I was thrilled to find these Indian inspired ones recently:
So hopefully by the time you read this I will be enjoying some Autumn sunshine in Cambridge. It's a really lovely place to wander around and only half an hour up the motorway. The poor old husband has had a stressy week at work, he could do with a nice day chilling, followed by a few beers and a takeaway with friends in the evening!

Dear Deb

It's hard to write a letter to yourself but that's the only way we are going to get through the prompt from Shimelle, so sit down, relax and listen. Do as you are told for once!
You have a tendency to think that it is still your responsibility to sort out all that needs sorting in your children's lives. It really isn't! They are grown up now and are more than capable of dealing with things. If they ask for help, then they know you will only be too willing to give it, but you really do need to wait for that request before acting! You know already that J is possibly more capable than you are at dealing with anything that fate throws his way, and you often don't hear about things until he has them sorted but you need to take a step back when R needs something so she can learn that her first reaction should be to deal with it rather than yell for Mum.
You worry too much. But you know that already don't you? How much time have you wasted worrying about things that may not happen, and in fact didn't happen. Stop with the 'what if ...?'s. Learn to deal with things as and when they are needed.
You really ought to learn how to say 'no' more often. There is only so much work you can fit into the hours you are contracted to do and you will only run yourself ragged if you take on too many extras.
You are possibly the most untidiest mother in the county. You have good intentions to be tidier but get carried away with some project or the other and the lounge becomes full of knitting paraphernalia and the dining table has the sewing machine left on it for days on end and the sight of the kitchen after a cooking marathon looks like an explosion in a flour and currant factory. It's no wonder the kids bedrooms are untidy, they are genetically programmed to leave things on every possible surface. You can't moan at them if you aren't setting a good example.

I don't want you to think I am having a go at you Deb, because all these bad things evolve from good points in your nature. You take your role as a Mum seriously, and have done since those first hours in the maternity ward. It was your job to keep them safe and well and now it is time to give them the responsibility for doing that for themselves. Teaching them independence is just another part of helping them learn. You worry because your family is so very precious to you and you feel like you have to have a plan ready for if bad things happen. You just need to get some perspective on this! You take on more things because you feel that if someone asks for help, it is only right and proper that you should shoulder some of their burden. You hate to let people down. But it isn't a help if you have so much to do, you can't do it all properly or it makes you stressed. You are a real home-body and love to be creative and make and do things for those you love. Maybe you need to tackle one project at a time rather than take over the whole house! You believe that it is more important to have good food than a tidy kitchen and so long as everything is clean, what does it matter that the saucepans haven't all been put away and the surface is full of bottles of spices and herbs.
And so what if the hoovering and ironing hasn't been done, this Shimelle prompt had to be finished. Get your priorities right!
Dx

Advice - but will they take it?

I found it hard to think of FAQ about me, I'm a bit of an open book and I don't think I leave much for people to wonder about! But I liked the idea of advice for the kids. Not sure how much longer I can refer to them as 'kids' .....



So anyway, my list of advice is probably a bit different to how it would have been if I had done this while they were young as they have now had over 20 years of me giving advice verbally! Some of the comments are particular to our household and may refer back to incidents that have happened in the past! Like 'don't keep your phone on silent'. How annoying is it when you are trying to contact them and they don't hear their phone? OK, if they are in the cinema or somewhere like that but when they have fallen asleep on the train and missed getting off at the right station and you are waiting for them there in a freezing cold car on a snowy night at nearly midnight - if the phone had been on 'noise', it may have woken them up and stopped the need for a 30 minute dash up the motorway as it was the last train home and the next stop after ours was 30 miles away. Grrrr......
I'm hoping that when you click on the photo you will be able to read the journalling, if not I will have to edit this post and add the words at the bottom. Sometimes Blogger plays the game and sometimes it doesn't so I never assume that the photo will enlarge when you click on it!

Numbers

The prompt for using numbers was too good an opportunity to do what will be the last layout from our trip to Bath for our 30th Anniversary. Being such a big number, it was obvious to me that I had to use that for the basis of the layout! I thought of quite a few numbers I could have used but I didn't want to clutter up the page so have used the basics. I liked this idea for making a page where it is hard to think of journalling though and I can see that it would be a good layout to use in the future.

I appreciate that I have done this out of sequence and that the alphabet one should have come first but I was 'tweaking' the wording and then realised I had missed a letter out - doh!

Fun food

Fancy a ham sandwich?

Or maybe donuts are more your thing

I'm a bit of a chocolate cake kind of girl myself.

How much fun is this jewellry? All found on the Punky Allsorts webpage. I think I can see me buying a few fun Christmas presents from here!

I have a plan

I loved all the ideas in Shimelle's second prompt today. I never use up the numbers in a page of alphabets except maybe to use in a date format so counting up things and making that the focus of the page is such a good idea and may be something I use in a layout to show more of our trip to Bath for our 30th anniversary.

But I also like the idea of using the alphabet within the block of journalling, and I think that this will work really well with the ideas I jotted down yesterday re advice for my children. I will have to re-write it a bit so that it fits in well but that doesn't matter because my writing was so illegible in places that it really needs a bit of work done on it before I even think of putting it on a page!

I shall leave you with a photo of something that I bought in town this morning. Look how shiny and new it is .... And compare it to the phone I spent most of my teenage years chatting on - how times change eh?