This photo was taken a year ago, in May half term last year. You know, at the start of summer. Summer in the wettest year on record.

All this talk of jetstreams and another cold, wet summer and rubbish weather until at least June reminded me of this photo and others like it - I have them of all of my kids taken on that day.

I love the photo, even though it's not technically brilliant. You can just see how hard it's raining and how wet we are all getting. You can see from the look on my daughter's face that she is hating it!

I snapped the picture on my phone and, needless to say, I was getting soaked too and trying to move backwards quickly, taking the photo.

Can you caption my soaking wet little lady?



And once you're done, why not hop on over to Mammasaurus and check out some more photos dying to be captioned.



Also linking with Social Pix over at OneDad3Girls Pop over to see people's pics from all over the the blogospohere, twittersphere and instagramashphere (I definitely just made that word up).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the difficulties of getting reasonably priced prescription sunglasses for my 9 year old son. Apparently you can get free prescription sunglasses. But we're not eligible for them and we were being quoted huge amounts of money for glasses which he will certainly need, but only for brief periods of time. Which I am therefore not willing to pay £94 for. Yes, £94. Have you seen adverts for prescription sunglasses for kids? And adults? Yep, so have I. So why isn't my 9 year old son entitled?

Anyway, lots of other bloggers agreed with me that this is pretty disgraceful and came up with some suggestions, with varying degrees of honesty involved, on how we should get my son some free prescription sunglasses. Thank you to all of you for your suggestions, they were much appreciated.

Now dishonesty, even if it's something I am morally entitled to, doesn't sit well with me. I am a hopeless liar. I can't negotiate prices of things. My husband is brilliant at it and I have to walk away, because it makes me squirm. I would be the one saying 'Well, shall I just pay you an extra £20?' rather than knocking a couple of hundred quid of something. So the thought of going into an optician and telling them my son was having headaches and needed his eyes testing, or he'd sat on his glasses and broken them, didn't make me comfortable.

I am very grateful to bloggers Mummy Barrow with her Ranty Friday and Victoria at Verily Victoria Vocalises who helped me get my message out to a wider audience. I'm especially grateful to Victoria who had the balls to copy Specsavers in on a tweet - something I would never be brave enough to do. Yes, I am a wuss. We got a tweet back explaining their position and I also got a long comment on my post from an optician explaining their difficulties, which I do appreciate.

I do understand their position re the NHS and funding and I realise that with every offer terms and conditions apply BUT if the terms and conditions are that you must be one of the approximately 1 in 12 kids who is lucky enough to have their eye test in April maybe they should spell this out a bit better for the benefit of the 11 in 12 who aren't and will never be eligible. Ironically, my son used to have his eye test in April. But it was at his October test when the powers that be decided he was old enough and his prescription was stable enough to move from six monthly tests to annual tests. So his test will always be in October and he will never be eligible for free sunglasses.

And then, through the power of social media, I struck gold. Blogger Chelsea Mamma remembered a post she'd read some time ago by a blogger I wasn't familiar with. Annie QPR had written about her positive experience with an online optician One Stop Glasses She'd used One Stop Glasses to buy an identical pair of glasses to her favourite pair for a fraction of the price.


So I checked it out. It was amazing! There were 10 pairs of prescription sunglasses available (I only looked at adults' glasses because my son has a big head!). Not all of them were suitable for a 9 year old boy, some were clearly too big. But I found a pair that he liked which came in a small size. All I needed was the details of his prescription. And they cost £25! Not £94!

Just a week after I'd blogged about it, his new sunglasses arrived. That's the power of social media! My son was so pleased with them - he was even excited about the case! The sunglasses fit well and they look good.

Now all we need is the one thing not even social media can sort out for us. Some sun.

Damn you, British weather.

My husband and I both have a milestone birthday coming up later this year. It doesn't start with 3 unfortunately, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't start with 5 either.

Yes, we're heading for the big 4-0. And we can't decide how to celebrate. We always celebrate all of our birthdays in our family. We don't have big, wild parties. Or any parties at all. But we do make sure we mark the occassion with a day off work, a day (or half day) out, a birthday cake and a meal out in the evening.


So how to mark a milestone birthday? And how to mark two milestone birthdays three months apart? Together? Separately? A bit of each?

When it was just a distant glimmer on the birthday horizon, back when we were about 35, my husband had big ideas for his. He wanted a box at Man Utd with corporate hospitality and friends and family (only a small number, of course, even in dreamland where money is no object). Or maybe a family holiday to New York? Great idea with a bunch of kids that won't travel. And a wife who isn't too keen either. I'd like to go to New York. I just wouldn't want to actually TRAVEL to get there.

As the birthdays got nearer we started being more realistic.

We liked the idea of a joint party between the birthdays - a family-friendly one the kids and select other kids could come to. We knew where we would have it too. But then my husband started thinking he might like another sort of party at another venue. Maybe without kids. And I wasn't keen on that idea.

Maybe a weekend away? Edinburgh to see the pandas (I'm so desperate to see the pandas). You try fitting a weekend in Edinburgh into an actual weekend, so you don't have to take the kids out of school. Easier said than done.

A trip to London for the weekend. But I don't want to travel home on my birthday (a Sunday). And it seems pointless paying for a Friday night in a hotel if you're only going to sleep there and not spend the day there.

A family weekend in Center Parcs - take my mum and dad and maybe my sister and her family. We're back to the can't take the kids out of school problem.

A trip to Snowdon - we could all climb it! Even our 7 year old daughter. My husband and eldest really loved their trip to Snowdon and are desperate to go back.

Or what about Alton Towers? Or Disneyland Paris?

We could celebrate our birthdays in the summer holidays or October half-term and just do something more low-key on the day?

We have NO IDEA. We just can't decide. We want our birthdays to be memorable and enjoyable for the whole family. If only we could decide what to do.

And what about presents? Don't get me started. For myself, I'd like the sort of presents that mean something - those necklaces with the kids' fingerprints or a family portrait session (or both - you only turn 40 once!). These are not the sort of thing my husband would think of himself, so I will have to ask, which slightly takes the magic away.

What to buy him? He's not exactly the man who has everything, but he doesn't want for much. And it would be nice to get him something special rather than an ordinary present. So far, my daughter has painted this mug for him, but its not really enough. I just don't know what else to get. And time is running out...

This is part 2 of my son's short story, set in Tudor times. You can read part 1 here I really would recommend it if you haven't, otherwise this won't make much sense! 

I thought the story was so brilliant, I had to share it with you. I haven't changed a single thing - not a spelling, a piece of grammar or a typo, it is all as he wrote it.

My son is 9 and in year 4. He wrote his story a couple of months ago.

Your name is with you all your life. As parents, you owe it to your kids to get it right. Names are special and unique. People grow to fit their names, or their names mould to fit them. Choosing a baby's name is one of the most exciting things you can do. I never understand those people who have babies then wait a week or more to name them. They've had nine months to prepare! But then again, it's a big decision. You want to make sure you get it right.

How did you name your kids? Family names? Fashionable names? Something unusual? Something traditional?

This is how we named ours...

I had a girl's name planned in 1996, when I saw a little girl on Le Shuttle, of all places, with it on her jumper. It seemed such a beautiful name. Traditional, but a little bit unusual too.

We planned to try for a baby as soon as we got married in 2000, so we did. We hadn't thought about boys' names before this, but we started to think. We'd watched a particular programme obsessively in the run-up to our wedding. It was on TV every day. We set two videos (remember those?!) to make sure it recorded while we were away on honeymoon (and it worked!). In the programme there was one child character. He was a little bit quirky. His name seemed a bit quirky too, but, again, quite traditional. That was our boy's name.

I knew all along I would have a boy (although we didn't find out). The bump had the name off the TV and so did the baby when he was born in June 2001. As it turned out, the name wasn't particularly quirky. You don't really realise which kids' names are fashionable until you actually have kids.

I named my second son within days of my eldest being born. The name was in a book I read probably less than two weeks later. Again, it seemed a bit quirky. In the couple of years between the boys, the name grew in popularity. After I'd had my son, its popularity exploded. It is now a very popular name. Popular, not common, I like to tell myself.

As it happens, the name was also my Grandad's name, but he wasn't really named after my Grandad. They used different parts of the name, so it never felt the same. But I'm sure my Grandad who was lucky enough to know both of my boys, but not my daughter, was pleased. My younger son has grown up into just the sort of boy my Grandad would have adored - fun-loving and always laughing.

When I was having my younger son, our future daughter's name changed temporarily. My husband had gone off the special name from the girl's jumper, so we were going for a very similar name. I'm so glad he was a boy, because by the time we had my girl, we were back to my favourite name.

And so my daughter got the name I'd loved for the 10 years before she was born. It suits her so well - beautiful, traditional and just a little bit unusual.

All of our kids have two middle names, so they could have one from each side of the family, but also because I always thought having two middle names was the height of cool. Both boys have their long-dead grandfather's name as part of their middle name - the father-in-law I never knew. Both their cousins and a second cousin have it too. He was a popular man, gone way before his time.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one by over40andamumtoone who wrote about names recently. After leaving a very long comment on her post, it occurred to me this was a subject I'd never written about myself. So I decided to rectify that situation!

I love my kids' gappy mouths. I love the way you can measure time through the changes in their teeth. I love how quickly they go from a double gap, to a bit of tooth showing, to a full tooth showing with a partial tooth next to it... Then those teeth are big and another gap or two appears. Each photo of their rapidly changing mouths is a moment in time. When they are changing quickly, it really captures them for just a week or two before they start to look different again.

I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to photograph and remember this unique time. Yet a while ago, a colleague, whose two daughters are exactly the same age as my younger two, said: 'I haven't got any recent photos of the girls because they've lost their teeth'. I didn't get that at all. To me, my children are unique and beautiful with their gappy mouths. To her, they were ugly. She didn't want any photos of them until they looked 'normal' again - proper fully grown teeth and no gaps. I suspect she had rather a long wait.

Currently my younger two, despite there being nearly two and a half years between them, are in exactly the same place. They have both lost eight teeth. They have four fully grown big teeth at the bottom, two fully grown teeth in the middle at the top, with gaps either side. The new teeth are starting to grow in the gaps.

My younger son knocked his top teeth out when he was nearly 6. His teeth were destined to come out late, so he had a really long time with a double gap at the top.



My eldest is spitting teeth out like there's no tomorrow at the moment. He'd lost 10 teeth, then nothing for a couple of years until recently. The teeth don't seem to wobble, but suddenly they just fall out in his hand and the new tooth is already growing. He's lost SEVEN so far in 2013, including two in one day - one of which fell out in his sleep!

They're molars of course, so he's passed the gappy stage and just looks normal. It's usual for kids to lose all their teeth by the time they're 12, so he's clearly playing catch-up at the moment as he heads for his 12th birthday.

What do you think about gappy smiles? Love them or hate them? Do you photograph them or do you want to wait until they've gone away?



I'm linking this post with Magic Moments at The Olivers Madhouse Why not pop over read about some other Magic Moments?