Baby Season...

Just a quick note to wish my mate Vicki and her husband Scott and daughter Ella many many congratulations on the birth of their son (and brother for Ella!!) Harry Thomas who was born at 5am this morning and weighed 7lbs and 12 oz.


Harry is the first of 3 babies we're 'expecting' at the moment and he's a little early as he was due on the 31st but Mum and baby are doing well and Auntie Jen can't wait to visit!! I feel a spot of shopping coming on...lol

Next up is Catie who's son is due in late September and then Jessica who's baby girl is due in early October...

Ooohhh!!! I'm soooooooooooooo excited... I LOVE baby season and the best thing about it is that none of them are mine!!!! They can all be handed back when stinky!!! YAY!

Anyway, congrats to Vic and fam and good luck to everyone else!

Ring..ring.. why dont you give me a call??

Only don't bother... cos I wont answer.


see this ----->

that's my phone... see how shiny and pretty it is? Yeah yeah well we all know that mine's not that shiny and clean but thats not the point, look closely.. see how the handset is portable!! It's amazing...a modern miracle of sorts!! You carry the handset around the house whilst you're speaking to your friend and then when you're done you PUT IT BACK IN THE CRADLE!!!!!

As you can probably gather, this does not happen at my house... it's not a hard thing to do.. its only a few teeny steps to where the phone goes back to its lil space... I'm not asking for much am I?

The phone often doesn't make it back to where it belongs, this is fine as I always put it back at night before I go to bed.. I would do it more regularly than that but there is little point for as soon as I put it away someone has got it back out again to use and then chucked it on the table or sofa. This is fine too.. until I come to use it and the battery is flat... (thank God for Orange and mobiles with free talk time minutes otherwise Rich would never be able to phone his taxi for work!) yes... thats mildly infuriating and usually results in me slamming the phone back into phone socket/cradle thingy (what are they called?!?!?) and huffing n puffing for a while.

Now though we have a new dilemma... see said lovely shiny almost as clean as above picture phone is lost somewhere in the abyss also known as "the living room" and I cannot find it.

I know I had it before the weekend..but I do not remember seeing it since...

As infuriating as I am finding this the kids love it. Everytime the phone rings they sit and giggle as Mummy (or Daddy) tear the room apart to find the handset in the time it takes to ring before it clicks over to the answerphone.. yes they find it hilarious, I am beginning to tire of it...

I wonder where it is though... or when it will turn up.. I am beginning to suspect that the children are having so much fun with this that they've already found it and hidden it again somewhere else to continue the game... I'll bloody kill them if they have...lol

xx

Jennie 1 point..

Skip Scavengers nil points!!!

So this morning the broken microwave is missing from my skip and not only that but we put the metal frames for 2 old ikea chairs in there too (we'd even taken them apart and lost some screws etc) and had forgotten to put the chair covers in the skip (they were in the conservatory..oops) and the buggers have nicked the frames too... completely useless.. cant sit down on em without the covers.. take anything they will.

So this morning in the skip there was some bits of old wood, a cardboard box and some broken toys... thats it, now dont get me wrong.. I dont mind anyone helping themselves to anything that's useful but do you have to rifle through and leave all the other shit you don't want all over my driveway?? No you dont, you can pick it all up and put it back in the skip instead of leaving it for me to do it...I've already chucked it in the skip once, I dont really feel like getting up and coming downstairs to a front garden full of crap.. but this seems to be too much trouble for some people and so I devised me a cunning plan...

Mum and John came down to help... some bags of old tat - that I'd kept in the house for fear that my old pants or worse...Richards (eek!!) might end up strewn across the street (can you believe I paid for a skip to get rid of the rubbish which I then kept inside?? it's ridiculous!!) - went in (including seat covers for old ikea chairs HAHA), the broken old door etc..

and theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen we emptied a load of garden rubbish over everything, worms, woodlice, garden snails, spiders and the lot.

HA! go rifle through my skip now if you dare...

enjoy.

mwahahahaha I'm totally going to hell...

gypsies, tramps n thieves...

I paid for a man to put a skip on my driveway yesterday.

Then I made Richard fill it with crap I don't require anymore...

I woke up this morning and the thing is virtually piggin empty...so that was a waste of money, I should have just filled the garden with my junk and a big sign saying "Free to good home.." although knowig my luck someone wold have taken a kid or my garden wall or something..lol

It always amazes me how people will take anything as long as its in the skip. There was a tv in that skip... perfectly fine, works great, we'd just bought a better one... I tried for WEEKS to get rid of this tv to a good home and no one wanted it. Stick it in a skip outside the house and every tramp for miles and miles walked past my house yesterday.... is it an inner 'bag lady' radar type thing? "Oooh Skip...quick what can I take out of that?"... eventually someone knocked on the door to see if they could have it and then asked me if I could have a look around for the remote!!! He was sweet though, so I did and I found it too... winner, he has a nice new toshiba tv in his lil pad now.

The last time we had a skip we filled it with broken old toys and some old furniture, broken lamp or two... some bags of old clothes that weren't even suitable for the charity shop and every morning I'd get up and come outside to find people had been rifling through it in the middle of the night and there'd be broken toys on the driveway etc... it was quite scary really to think that someone was hanging around in the dark outside my house stealing my trash...

Anyway..there's any empty skip at my house... anyone have anything they want to get rid of?? Come and dump it... it'll be gone by tea time. lol

who?

I am confused.

I have this little clock counter on this here blog... and it tells me that there have been 503 visits which is 24 more than the day before yesterday when there was only 479 visits been "clocked".

Yet here I sit... still confoozled... for there are no comments on my posts (except a few from a certain other 'blogger' I know ;) Hi Lou!) and no one I know admits to being a closet reader.. well, except Richard anyhoo (Hi Rich!) and Nicola (who I think should write her own blog cos she's easily as equally puddled as me..lol Hi Nick!!!) but even adding all those in that only 3.

So I figure you all liked it sooooooooo much that you come here many times a day cos you either a) are waiting for new posts, b) are bored, c) need to remind yourself that no matter what else happens in your life you can always come here are laugh at poor me...lol or d) all of the above..

Well anyway, this one's for all of you...whoever you may be..dont be shy!! Say Hello! LOL



except Richard... this one's for you babe...



Sorry..LOL couldnt resist. ;) xx

Put wood int'ole child!!!!

How many times have you heard that one? Or one similar anyway, maybe it was one of these in your house...

"Were you born in a field? no? then shut bloody door!!"

"Shut bloody door.. I'm not paying to heat the whole street!"

"Doooooooooooooooooooooooor!!!!!"

yes.. we had them all in our house when we were little... we even had

Dad: "JenJen, go up stairs and tell your brother to come down and shut the bloody door."
Me: "Why?"
Dad: "Cos he left it open."
Me: "Can't I just shut the door?"
Dad: "is tha summert wrong with yer bloody legs child?!?!?! Get up stairs and get yer brother to come and shut bloody door!!"

Dad logic... love it.

anyway, its passed down from generation to generation.. "Put wood int'hole", "So it's raining.. tha's not made o'sugar, yer wont melt.","when ya fall off and break both yer legs, don't come running to me.." etc. its the stuff of childhood memories..

Well my lot made a knew memory this morning... one of them put wood int'hole for good. Whoever it was (and there are no takers for the title of 'best door closer of 2009') shut the door so well it wouldn't open again!!!

I woke this morning to Heather in her nightie and trainers excited telling me we were stuck upstairs and she'd had to put her shoes on and go OUTSIDE IN HER NIGHTIE (she was thrilled by this) to walk around the side of the house to come in the front door and go up the stairs to have a wee.

She then proceeded to tell me that she must get back cos Daddy had sent her for the screwdriver from the bathroom (don't ask... Rich's last project was to put a new toilet seat on - it's been a difficult task thats not complete yet...but this is why the screwdriver was in the bathroom) and take it to him for he was struggling to get the handle off without it!

You know that sinking feeling you get sometimes? its part premonition and part dejavu? yeah... I got that... tell you what though, I flew out of bed...lol

I get downstairs to find a troop of kids in pyjamas and trainers most amused by all this running around the house to go for a wee.. and Rich trying to take a handle off a door that wont open... and proceeding to get nowhere fast either. Bless him, he doesnt DO DIY. He got the handle off but door still stuck.

I sat on the loo and texted my Mum.. it said "Get up. living room door stuck, cant get in. Bring John and tools!"

bless em both they came down and the men managed to get the door out of the hole (by brute force I think) whilst the women sat in the sunshine outside totting up the cost of a new door and drinking tea and the kids continued to enjoy the new route to the bathroom!

A very entertaining (if costly) and different start to a Sunday. I know I like to experience new things each day but come on... even I couldnt have dreamt up this one... and all before I'd had my coffee too!! It could so easily have been a disaster...lol

Families... who'd have em?

I decided recently in my infinite wisdom to trace my family tree. My Mum started hers a while ago so figuring there's not much point tracing her side again, I decided to trace my Dad's instead.

This is no easy feat... my maiden name is "Smith".

I don't like to make things easy for myself do I? lol

So armed with some old family tales and my trusty debit card I started my hunt for the previous generations of Smiths.

How hard can it be? Think I, safe in the knowledge that my particular Smith family owned a wool mill in Bradford in the late 1800's/early 1900's... surely this will make them fairly easy to find.

No... not really, I quickly find that there was a Montserrat Mill in roughly the place I was told it had been and indeed it's a stones throw from the address listed as my Grandfathers home on his wedding certificate to my Grandma (of which I have a copy), infact there is a Montserrat Road not too far either, but I cant find much else about the mill at all, least of all who owned the damn thing.

So I start to look for people's names instead. Did I tell you that EVERYONE in the history of my Dad's family appears to have been called either 'John George', 'Sam', 'Fred' or 'Mary'?

My Dad was called Peter, his Dad (my grandpa) was officially named John George but was affectionately known as 'Jack' he was married to Mary, my Grandmother (who's father was called George coincidentally). Anyway, Jack's siblings were called 'Mary', Frederick William (Uncle Billy - he was a bad 'un, allegedly) and 'Sam'... not too difficult you would think right??

Yeah well..check this out. Jack's Dad was called 'Sam' too and he had a load of brothers... they were called 'John George', 'Fred', 'Victor' and a sister called...yes you guessed it 'Mary'.

and wait!!! Guess what Great Grandad Sam's Dad was called.... 'Fred'.

can it get more complicated?

do I infact.. actually need to go any further back or shall I just assume that as far back as the doomsday book there will be a 'Fred', 'John George', 'Sam' & 'Mary' Smith in Tong, Bradford?

maybe I should give up now....lol

am I going to? nah.... since when have you ever known me to do anything by half?

xx