Worried (by sarah)

Today mum is in for another lot of radiotherapy and within fifteen minutes of her appointment starting dad has to go in for an emergancy colonoscopy.

I am concerned as his father died when he was about five months older than dad is now - of stomache cancer. Dads been suffering stomache cramps and problems for about 9 months now. His family are prowne to having weak stomaches and he kept saying it was food poisoning and stuff. Plus stress tends to have them doubled up but this has just gone on and on.

He told the doctors when we finially got him to go a few months ago that he had only been sick for a few weeks and so they gave him antibiotics but didn't even take any samples which I felt was remiss. Some food poisioning can lurk and needs special treatment. I can only think he was playing it down.

He hasn't lost drastic amounts of weight but he's got that grey look to him he had just before the heart attack and he is really run down to the point of catching colds and stuff which have been developing inot chest infections. This is not good as a) it is weakening him and b) mum is supposed to be avoiding contagious people 🙁

Mums energy levels were also not good over christmas when we saw her.

On top of that mum and dad are relient on the wages we pay dad but we are up against a wall and the person I have been working for has pretty much stabbed me in the back so once again we are trying to muddle through 🙁

There are other medical issues as well which aren't helping the situation leading us to feel we have more than one child to look after and not enough resources to go round.

I was hoping 2009 was going to be better, I was hoping we'd get out of debt and the like but the noose seems to keep tightening.

All I can do is work away and hope some new work comes up until then I am going to continue on my own projects in the hope that google ad revinue will keep us afloat. I'm not hopeful but never mind.

Sammy Snowman (by sarah)

We are currently snowed in so Jean didn't get to go to Pre-School today. Instead we have been building a snowman - his name is Sammy. Here are the pictures of Barbara and Jean - I'm not sure who was having the most fun!

We then all went inside for hot chocolate with special chocolate cream on top! Barbara brought the sledge round but Jean said she didn't want to go on it so they are currently off building Barbaras fire etc...

Here are some other picks of the water fall - from these you can see that down in our valley here in Gloucestershire we haven't actually thawed out for weeks now!

I'm loving my new camera - though at the mo I only have its memory which is about 10 pictures which is frustrating as is the need to use the Kodak software when uploading the photos onto the laptop :/

Post Christmas Dinner (by sarah)

Today we went to my brother David and his girlfriend Michelles house for a post christmas/new year lunch. There was lots of chopped peppers which Jean woofed down, homous and pizza!!! We were in hevean.

Then there were gifts, we handed over Jeans tea towel with her drawing on plus some bits I'd made. They did something similar and we got an old copy of one of their films as it was in a box set one of them had got for Christmas - this seems a sensible way of doing things to me. They've been having a few issues due to the credit crunch in that David lost his nice manager job just after they had sighned on the morgage. He is now temping at just about anything.

We had a lovely time, mum and dad had got them stuff for the new house which included a gravey boat - most of the pictures I took seem to contain it or David playing with it :/ Oh and yay!!!! I have a camera again!!!! Mum and Dad bought it as a joint birthday and christmas presant and it is twice the resolution of the old one though I am currently running on its internal memory which is a whole 10 pictures :/

But yay!!!! and here are the picks including lots of cute Jean ones and yes she's in her chinese outfit again. Unfortunatly last night we watched KungFu Panda so she now keeps hitting people 🙁

I had to take arty shots I just couldn't resist - sorry!

Ivan and Sam’s New Year Party (by sarah)

For this New Year we headed down to my cousins house for a party, as always we got lost on the very last bit of the journey and Ivan had to come out and find us - I was navigating but the map didn't go down to a fine enough detial ok!

There was lots of food and lots of kids! Jean had a great time as there was basically a room full of children throwing balls and things at each other and there was a mirade of pepper pig videos and the like. Ivan and Sam also have a fish tank 🙂 Jean loves fish we take to the garden centres locally just to look at 'Nemo's' (Becca and Olly have a lot to answer for!).

At mid night there was the the popping of party poppers and as always I ended up with a wig of the paper strings - this time Jean put it on my head 🙂 We all had an attempt at Auld Langs ey and by the end Jean was the only on of the 'babies' still running about full of energy but then she had had a nice long sleep all the way from Gloucestershire to Essex!

Jean was shy at first but cheered up when we changed her into her satin pink party dress - all the other kiddies were dressed up and she felt abit out of place I think - she had her sparkly silver shoes and all would have been well if she hadn't tried to walk away from me whilst I was trying to tie the bow around the waste - I stepped after her and trod on the belt and she kept going and there was an ominous ripping noise and so she ended up with her belt ribbon tied as a braclet around her wrist instead.

'Mummy you broke my dress!'

'Yes well if you won't keep still when I say things like that will happen.'

It was a good party and we even got warm mugs of tea as we stayed to help tidy up - they offered for us to stay the night but Al wanted to get back to Highgate.

(hopefully at some point I'll get the photos on here:/)

Happy New Year 2009 (by sarah)

This year sees lots of exciting things - its the International Year of Astronomy and so I have set up a specific Astronomy blog - the spellings all need sorting and alot of the stuff on there is from things I've written up on here.

I know its another blog but other wise I have too much to go on here and its nice to have a specific theme and things. Plus I now have a specific career goal which is to be a popular science writer - I want to bring science to the front, so kids find it interesting, explain it to the lay person etc...

I want to rekindle the flame that the victorians lit - a flame that is in the danger of blowing out leaving our culture with just recipies for current technology but no inovation or advancement.

I wanted to do alot of Astronomy stuff last year but with everything that happened it just got swept aside 🙁

Other goals for this year are to carry on with the Prince's Trust and MRes both of which are giving me valuable skills. Get Web-Empire fully up and running but more on that later 🙂 Enter the Young Science Writer of the Year compatition and just generally get our lives back on track.

Jeany will also be starting school in September! She'll be the youngest in her year - I feel this will be a good thing.

I hope you all have good New Years and lets hope this one will be better than the last!