They choose vanity, we choose life

This picture appeared on my facebook timeline this week....

I get a lot of medical pictures and information coming through my timeline, it's inevitable when you consider how medicalised our life has become.  But on closer inspection I discovered this is not a picture of two people on IVs in hospital.  No, this is the actor Ryan Phillipe and his girlfriend relaxing while having intravenous infusions of vitamins and fluids in order to give them an energy boost.

Just keep swimming........

Those readers who have followed my blog for a while know that sometimes I drop off the blogging radar, mainly because of workload at home or sometimes because I have lost my blogging mojo.  I guess the last few weeks has been a combination of the two.  Poor Andy still has his arm in plaster following a (non-alcohol related) fall the day after his 50th birthday, and this has meant my workload has gone sky high as a broken

Back to school blues...

I took a little blog holiday over the summer as you can tell, mainly because having all four children at home means there are less hours in the day to indulge myself in writing than normal.  Well the children have been back to school for a week now and I have taken up my usual Sunday evening position at the kitchen table, clean school uniform waiting to be taken upstairs and homework (allegedly) finished.

I think I have the back to school blues though, despite the little bit of daytime respite having the children in school gives me.  Back to school means back to meetings, appointments, form filling and in a couple of weeks another hospital admission for Daisy.  Back to school means back to the reality of my life, reality which was temporarily suspended over our glorious summer break.

Take time to smell the roses

When I walk home with Jules, my 9 year old son, from school we pass a house which has roses in the front garden.  These are not the weedy, insipid offerings you see on garage forecourts, these are big, blousy, fragrant roses - the old fashioned ones I remember from my childhood.  And more often than not I stop to smell them. Just have that moment, breathing in their heady scent, before the chaos of the evening descends.