Well June was a busy one! Strap in!

At the start of June we saw the dreaded cast come off S’s broken elbow and a couple more follow-ups for x-rays and so on. But thankfully she has healed incredibly quickly and incredibly well. S was FINALLY allowed to go back to doing sports and PE and football etc by the end of the month, which was a relief to both of us!

S decided she would like to join me doing the ration challenge and help support refugees so we agreed she could do it on the weekend with me for the last 2 days. It would be hard for her to manage at school and also she’s a bit young to do it for a whole week, but I am so proud of her for setting herself such a difficult challenge!

You’ll have seen my daily diaries of the ration challenge by now no doubt, and she didn’t quite manage the full 2 days but it was a really valiant effort! I enjoyed my challenge again this year though my stomach and digestive system were struggling by the end! There’s not a lot of fibre in rice! But between us we raised $2,822 AUD for charity and to support refugees so we are both very pleased!

June has been a very busy month at work, I have several projects reaching crunch point all at once so I’ve been juggling a lot and managing lots of consultants simultaneously and trying to keep everything on-track and on-budget. So far so good, but I’ve had to do a few extra hours in the evenings to keep on top of everything. And then one project completely fell apart and went disastrously wrong so there was a lot of extra work trying to fix it! But we did manage to launch a new training course I have been working on for over a year so I’m pleased it’s finally out there in the world in 4 languages! Doing all the last minute editing in Arabic, Spanish and French was HARD WORK considering I don’t speak any of those langauges.

I’ve also started an exciting new quilting project! Love getting stuck into some serious crafting! This one is a special memory quilt for my best friends, using their son’s baby clothes, so I am taking it very slow to make sure I get it right! Measure twice and cut once!

The kids have been pretty up and down lately – just when S relaxes a bit, A will decide to be a total nightmare for a few days. Swings and roundabouts. They have both had some exciting school trips this month, S went to Thorpe Park with her school for a fun day of rollercoasters and A went to the local Science center, so lots of fun things are happening now that we are in the final summer term! Also soon we will be in full sports day/summer fete/summer dancing/plays mode as well!

We are enjoying the lovely weather we’ve had lately and been getting out in the sunshine and having fun, and our strawberry patch is growing well! Lots of lovely home-grown berries to eat! We’ve had a lovely BBQ at a friend’s house and saw my mum for a weekend. My mum watched the kids for a night so I could sneak off and see my friends again and have a fun night out, which was lovely. I had the best time having tapas and cocktails with two brilliant friends and even managed a child-free swim which was amazing.

As the weather has heated up again, we’ve had some hotter nights, and just like last year S has started to struggle to sleep a bit. She finds it hard to sleep when it’s hot, but doesn’t like to sleep with the window open, so we have cycled through some options like a fan, a lighter sheet instead of a duvet, etc. We have got some melatonin gummies that sometimes help, and she has a sleepy-time app (Moshi) that tells quiet stories as she’s drifting to sleep that sometimes help, or that she can listen to when she is lying awake at night.

However, things took a slightly more complicated turn thanks to S’s eejit of an English teacher!

One random Tuesday night, S came down in tears saying she was too scared to sleep because her English teacher had told some horrible stories in class about when the kids were murdered in their sleep while the babysitter was downstairs, or a man with a hook for a hand broke down the door and killed everyone.

I’m afraid I was having a bad day myself so didn’t handle it brilliantly well – not my finest parenting moment! I ended up losing my temper and shouting which wasn’t helpful. Suffice to say that not a lot of sleep happened that night!

I wrote to the English teacher to clarify what exactly the fuck they were doing in class and what text might have been used… Her very mortified teacher wrote back in the morning (AND also called me to apologise). It turns out that they were talking about 19th century grizzly stories and pamphlets with ghost stories in that people believed were true (like urban legends) and were going to write a modern version of an urban legend so they had given examples like the hook-handed murderer and various horror-stories told around campfires.

So he was terribly terribly sorry about it all, but suffice to say we spent a few difficult nights checking under beds for murderers and making sure all the doors and windows were locked over and over again at 2am. I really could have done without that shit if I’m honest!

We had an incident towards the end of June where S got into a bit of trouble with some kids at the local park. We live in a slightly rough part of town, with a lot more knife crime and nasty incidents like murders in our local park than I would like, but we can’t afford to live anywhere nicer at the moment so there’s not much to be done about it.

She and her friends were playing football at the park, then some boys asked to play, then more boys came and they took the ball and wouldn’t give it back. The ball got thrown in the road, someone shoved someone, then S threw some water over a kid, and a phone got wet etc. The girls came running back home chased by the boys and 10 minutes later a very angry mob appeared on my driveway. There were about 10-15 angry shouting people, a mum, a dad, lots of kids and teens yelling and a very irate grandma pacing up and down like a tiger ready to pounce. I think they had come down ready for battle assuming I’d get up in their faces (cos that’s the kind of area we live it) and the granny was fully ready to get involved if someone hurt her grandson etc.

They may as well have had pitchforks, it was really frightening!

There was a lot of yelling and accusing along the lines of “Your kid hurt my kid” and an expensive phone has been damaged etc. They claimed that S had poured water deliberately down the phone’s charging point to break it on purpose. I apologised my arse off and pulled S out to apologise too. She didn’t want to and had to be dragged outside (and frankly it was genuinely quite scary being faced with an angry mob right on our front doorstep) but I told S no matter who’s fault it was, the way to diffuse the situation is to own up and apologise as much as possible and not start accusing them of anything.

Thankfully they calmed down and eventually left, and later on when we had both calmed down, S and I were able to talk about how powerful a genuine apology can be. She didn’t feel like saying sorry as they had done stuff too and they didn’t say sorry to her, but I showed her how far a really heartfelt apology can go. Afterwards I was quite shaken up and I still can’t believe I faced down an angry mob all on my own!

S and I were both a little worried that some of the teenagers might come back later to slash my tyres or ambush her on her way to school, so I informed her school, but actually it was all fine, and the next morning I saw the parents on the school run so I apologised properly again (they were very nice and said it was all forgotten about). S was also keen to apologise and make amends so I think we have avoided starting a massive feud on our street thank god! I think the parents were a bit embarassed that we kept apologising to them and had perhaps also realised later on that their own kids aren’t perfect and may have been partially at fault, and that the angry mob was fairly intimidating for us!

Then 2 days after facing down an angry mob the universe decided to reward me by sending an incredibly hot fireman to my front door! Everything was fine, my elderly neighbour’s alarm had triggered a response and I let them in – they did lots of checking and it was all ok, but I got to spend the evening talking to the most gorgeous and lovely hot fireman, so I think the karmic balance has been restored!

Then, right at the end of June, I had a very important meeting – I had a face to face meeting with my daughter A’s birth mother.

I’ll write a separate post about that, but it was intense and emotional and wonderful and a lot to process but I’m so very glad I got to meet her.