July came out of nowhere! How is it July already?

I had a saga this month once again with my ridiculous eyes/vision.

It’s far too long and boring to recount it here so I will try my best to summarise it in the funniest and briefest way possible.

Optician: You need new glasses again, your vision is worse, also you should totally get these really expensive glass lenses with reduced glare and are super thin etc. You need them cos your eyes are awful. That’ll be £300 (minus your laughably pathetic NHS discount of £14.50) and it will take about 6 weeks to special-order them in. Also you have a huge shadow on your retina where a giant clump of cells is slowly detaching and will peel your retina off with it, so watch out for that, as you might go blind if they don’t laser your retina back on fast enough when it detaches.

Me: Um, ok. Thanks? Here is all my money.

Approximately 5 weeks later: Come get your new glasses!

Me: Um, Why are they a weird yellow colour? And is there meant to be a giant chip in this lens? And why are they so thick and heavy? They weigh about 20 kilos and have to balance on my nose.

Ifram from the Lab: Yeah, glass is rubbish. Don’t know why you ordered those. Total waste of money. We’ll have to send those back. What YOU need is this awesome specialist coating on top of the other coating on THESE specialist lenses, which are plastic but awesome. They will also cost you £300 and take ages to arrive as they are specially made.

Me: Sigh. Call me when they are ready. Can’t wait to see in focus again soon….

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In July some fun stuff started to happen! I went to Wimbledon with a friend (thanks to my mum who won tickets in this year’s ballot and gifted them to me as a birthday present!). It was somewhat hectic to organise childcare in amongst school strikes but we made it eventually. It was a lovely day out and my 3rd time at Wimbledon, which I can’t quite believe but I loved it! A fun and child-free day out! Pimms and Tennis! Woohoo!

We also had a lovely trip to Portugal to see the whole family clan on holiday near Lisbon for a long weekend. It was slightly cheeky to take the girls out of school yet again for a holiday, as we already took them out to go to Australia but we couldn’t do anything about the dates and it was a wonderful trip. We got to connect with family en masse and swim in the pool and see some lovely sights.

Here is the eclectic and strange Pena Palace in Sintra.

July also saw S and I have a bit of a crisis in terms of our relationship. S has been spiralling a little bit out of control for a number of reasons, mostly related to her trauma. She has been starting to feel like she should be moved along, as it’s usually after about a year or so that she has to go and live somewhere else, so she is antsy and anxious and started some pretty self-destructive behaviour that is hard to manage. She’s never STAYED anywhere long-term and never had friends this long (usually she moves to a new home, new people, new school, new friends) so she doesn’t really understand the long term consequences of her actions. At home and at school she started burning bridges with her friends and got into a difficult shame spiral of stealing and lying and escalating fights (both with me and her friends at school), and we had a really, REALLY tough time. From her perspective, it didn’t matter who she hurt or upset along the way as she wouldn’t be here long enough for it to matter, and if she was going to have to go and start all over again, she’d go out on HER terms. One particular weekend was genuinely the worst day of my life. Parenting a traumatised child is HARD and sometimes it’s scary and overwhelming.

We are slowly working through it and I have reached out yet again to ask for help and support. My amazing village of friends really came through for me when I needed them and several amazing people were there for me in the crisis when I needed help. I am in emergency talks with Social Services to try and build a supporting structure around us to make sure we are properly supported, but these things take time and resources that aren’t available in a broken and under-funded system. So we struggle along.

The school term ended, and we settled into holiday camps and various routines. S and I had some very frank talks about managing her behaviour and we came up with a very complex system to manage it. S suggested we have a punishment system like they have at her school (C1, warning, C2 2nd warning, C3 short detention, C4 long detention etc). S got really into it when I asked her to help me decide what the punishments should be and what the system ought to look like. She was initially VERY punitive and had things like “C1 – take my phone away for a week” which I felt was a bit harsh and unreasonable, so we settled on a wide range of warnings and smaller punishments before we got to the bigger ones. I also reminded S that just like school, we could have REWARDS as well as punishments, similar to their housepoint system.

This led to some very exciting brainstorming on what the rewards might look like and how many points we would need to get to each one. We decided to call them “Helpful points” instead of housepoints because they can be earned by being kind to each other, and helping me out around the house (mainly things like putting clean laundry away BEFORE I’ve had to ask 6 times….) S has full ownership of this behaviour management system, and although it’s way more complex than it needs to be, she likes it, she loves a structure and rules to follow, and if it gets me a few days of peace I will TAKE IT! She is DESPERATE to get to the big prize (a £25 Amazon voucher). I am hoping we can keep it going long enough for a reasonably ok-summer holiday….

S hilariously said I ought to be able to earn points too and she made me my own chart, but I pointed out I don’t need to have rewards like an ice cream or extra pocket money because having two kids being kind and helpful and nice to me was reward enough!

In other news we did our annual de-lousing as everyone’s heads suddenly got itchy (JUST as I was thinking we’d got away with it for an entire school year too!!). S has also been going through a complicated phase of “injuries”. She realised after her broken elbow that she gets lots of love and attention and sympathy when she is injured and her teacher flagged to me towards the end of term that she seemed to be “twisting her ankle” and falling over and getting cuts and bruises and needing plasters and ice packs almost daily all of a sudden. At holiday camp I had several phone calls about falls, bumps, ice packs and headaches, and then one day a football to the side which hurt a lot. She was still able to eat, sleep, and do fun things, but after 3 days of complaining about pain in her side I decided we ought to check it out in case something really was wrong.

It was a tough call – I knew in my bones nothing was likely to be wrong, and I hate the idea of wasting doctor’s time, but on the other hand she only has one kidney, and was complaining about being in pain for 3 days, and she had also started asking lots of questions about her brother’s illness when they were taken into care, so I think she really needed to know that I would take her seriously and not leave her in pain as there is a trauma history there around illness and injury etc. So off to A&E we went on a Saturday morning, it was long and slow and boring but the doctors were lovely and everything was fine much as we thought. As soon as the doctor’s declared her to be fine, the pain magically disappeared and she went about her business as normal. Sometimes it’s a fine line knowing when to ignore a child who just wants attention and when to lean into it therapeutically etc. Lots of cuddles and reassurance were given.

Work started to really suck in July – my manager has become very difficult to work with and I am feeling very undervalued in general. I dusted off my CV to update it a bit and put some gentle feelers out around new jobs, but it’s tricky, the financial climate is such that I can’t leave until I have something concrete to go to and it would need to be both flexible in terms of working hours and location, and also pay me ideally more than I’m on now, so I am thinking hard about what kind of career moves I can feasibly make within those parameters. Mind you updating my CV helped to remind me how massively over-qualified and awesome I am and how LUCKY anyone would be to have me, so that was nice and affirming. I have a applied for a few jobs that I highly doubt I would get but I figured, if I were a man I’d be aiming much higher so decided to put my big girl pants on and aim for the stars, cos you never know!

As I write this we are packing up ready to go camping (every time we go I feel like we somehow take MORE stuff than last year) and this year I am borrowing a small trailer so we can fit an extra child in (we are bringing one of S’s friends with us which means more children, more stuff and less space). My first time driving with a trailer on, yikes! Wish me luck!

It is due to be cold, wet and rainy, and there is no reception where we are camping so if you don’t hear from us just go ahead and assume we are cold, damp and having a terrible time…. I’m currently trying to convince S that she and her friend REALLY want to see the new Barbie movie because I REALLY want to see it! Also a warm, dry cinema with popcorn is pretty appealing if the weather forecast is to be believed…