Author: toughmotheruk

Recently, over the UK summer, we took the kids back to New Zealand, leaving behind the light rain jackets for the winter woollies.

The last time we were home for Christmas, the kids were 4 and 2, so one of my sisters volunteered to host a mid-winter one.

There’s a magic to our get-togethers.

The date and venue is chosen, one that can absorb 40 odd people – seven siblings will do that! Then everyone brings a food contribution for lunch. While some siblings have become responsible for specific contributions (can’t be short on the ham and potatoes), it’s pot luck. Somehow there always seems to be a feast with enough leftovers for the those hanging around for dinner too. 

Given the number of us, it was decided years ago to move to Secret Santa as getting presents for everyone would either result in a lot of pens, notepaper and Moro bars, or penury. But the discovery of the present stealing game (aka white elephant) really upped the ante.

This is a no holds barred kind of game. Ten years on, it was an eye opener for the kids to see the noise, tactics, horse trading and hilarity that ensued. 

You can now tell how comfortable a newcomer is to the family if they’re happy to ‘steal’ from an in-law, or my mum for that matter!

The kids quickly got into the spirit of things, leaving behind any thought of British restraint. So much so that Nana had to add some rules about the number of times a present could be stolen!

And I think they were both quietly happy that their kilogram bags of broken CookieTime Cookies (best biscuits in the world) might have won the award for most purloined presents…

I’m ok with my own company. Growing up on a farm, I spent hours on a tractor, whether it was topping thistles or levelling after the plough.

My Walkman was brilliant – for about the first hour as the batteries always seem to run out. With no back-up batteries, there was a lot of time to sit in your own head… particularly as the only song I could seem to remember was Eurythmics’ Missionary Man, and really there’s only so many times you can sing that.  

As I left the farm behind, time by myself morphed into running (though definitely not for the same amount of time!).

However, my husband has taken the kids to New Zealand to visit my side of the family, and so I have five weeks in the UK by myself.

I realised it’s the longest I have lived on my own. Whether it was flatting or solo travelling, there was usually someone around. And, of course, kids come with their own special frequency that seems to be both constant and cut through any background noise.

Now, there’s silence.

I hadn’t realised how loud it can be. 

Although, funnily enough, I now seem to have my daughter’s voice in my head telling me to tidy up after myself. She prefers order to my chaos and just-in-timeness. I’ve even been refiling the spices in alphabetical order…

I wonder what she’s hearing from me…?

My family recently took off to New Zealand. I think my husband was a bit nervous about solo parenting to two teenagery kids, while catching up with my family.

The kids themselves exhibited two very different styles while preparing.

My daughter found the perfect packing cubes. She had to explain these to me, and apparently they are essential to ensuring a tidy, organised suitcase experience (too much YouTube?!).

Two weeks to go, she had laid out the proposed items to be packed, and continued to refine them.

My son on the other hand… asked by his dad a week before about when he was going to pack might have grunted in response. 

He finally got round to dumping some clothes on his floor a few days beforehand. My husband asked how I managed that and I somewhat flippantly responded I asked…

After highlighting that he was going back into winter, he’d grown a few inches in the last few months, there weren’t many usable hours left to actually check he wouldn’t be either a) embarrassing himself or b) freezing, and his dad was going to have a conniption if he didn’t get his A into G (which my mum used to say a lot and I only belatedly realised it was short for arse into gear – since the worst thing she’d said before that was golly gosh it made me look at her a bit differently…).

A cursory check of my son’s bag even made me suggest he might want to find some packing cubes…. 

Words I never thought I would hear coming out of my mouth!

Remember four square? This was a school yard game that I recently discovered was international – well at least in both NZ and England.

It’s been making a comeback in our road.

We’re lucky enough to live in a cul-de-sac due to a gate at the end of the road. As well as being an excellent net, it has been very successful in deterring traffic. So now that it has mostly stopped raining, it’s been a good opportunity for the neighbourhood kids to get outside. 

Given the range of ages (from 6 to 4-something-ish), we needed a sport that catered for all and reduced the risk of broken windows from stray tennis balls. 

Hence four square. 

Turns out it can quickly turn into the rules game, with more rules than the yellow car game (who knew…?).

We’re also still following the feudal system where I seem to be the peasant more often than not.

Much to my son’s chagrin, my sister-in-law currently holds the crown for most number of serves as ‘supreme emperor’ after a recent international tournament. I’m sure my brother wasn’t expecting to be trooping out for a match on his trip to the UK, but no doubt it was the highlight! 

Frankly, I’m taking anything, that gets the kids off their devices is a win. 

In New Zealand, as a sheep is being shorn, different parts of the fleece need to be sorted into different classifications to get the best price for the quality. So, of course, there are different names for each part. 

The best bit of the fleece is the back and sides, from which you need to remove the crutch area (it can be a bit daggy) and the frib – the really short curly crusty bit of wool between the side and the belly. Also separated are the shanks around the leg (if they’re short and stained) and the top knot, the tufty bit of wool on their head (not to be confused with the jowls which, as you’d expect, are the woolly cheeks but which also don’t make the grade).

Some sheep don’t have it one – a ghost topknot if you will.

That was always a bonus when you’re trying to manage sorting the wool on the board (picture a raised platform) where usually three shearers were each shearing as fast as they can (they’re paid by the sheep and usually motivated by being the quickest in the shed or getting to at least 200, so basically running at least a marathon every day at work).

I haven’t had to sort wool for a very long time. Not a lot of need in London. 

However, I have concluded that my son (almost 14…) is growing a top knot. 

Or, as my husband put it, a front mullet. 

When he was younger, my son wasn’t keen to go to the barbers so I ended up cutting his hair more often than not. Covid continued this out of need, if not choice. Although, now he is not so trusting – either of me, or my husband taking him to the barber, something about dad directing a short back and sides…

He did take himself off a while back to get it cut but I’m not sure he was very happy with the result. So he now seems to be focused on growing the winter coat early. After all, it has been a cold start to the summer…

He’s heading back to New Zealand shortly so perhaps I can just ask one of my siblings to get the handpiece out…

Explainer:

If the number of times I’ve had to correct auto-correct is an indication, some of the terms used may not be very familiar…

• I’m assuming crutch is self-explanatory although a crutcher is someone who is just focused on removing the dags…
• Dag can have a few meanings – rattle your dags means hurry up, or if one is a ‘dag’ they’re funny, here though I’m referring to a crusty piece of poo hanging from the fleece.
• Handpiece is the industrial version of hair clippers although the combs could be confused with lethal weapons.
• Frib – according to Oxford Dictionary there is less than a one in a million (0.01 in fact) chance that you’ve heard this before… 

I recently went on a course with work. This one was actually immediately useful.

Apparently, the emotional part of your brain responds four times faster than the rational part of your brain. For both evolutionary reasons and to capture your attention, this is called our chimp.

Once you see your chimp, it’s very hard to unsee it. 

Although, as we get older, we get better at managing it. Usually.

That was put to the test on returning home.

Both kids had bees in their bonnet and introduced me (again) to their chimps. Explaining my recent learning did distract them momentarily and eased the escalation. Sort of. 

Although I might have heard mutterings of mum being more of a gorilla when they walking away…

We recently went skiing as a family. My husband and kids have been a handful of times, usually in New Zealand in the summer (but winter downunder) holidays. However, it was my first time in twenty years with only a handful of times before that under my belt.

So, it was with a bit (a lot) of trepidation that I hit the slopes with my brother and sister in-law on the afternoon of our arrival (their younger kids were super excited to show off their (superior) skills to their older cousins!).

In the melee of the chairlifts, I ended up on my own, with ample opportunity heading up the mountain to give myself a talking to… Show no fear and all that.

Luckily, the dismount from the chairlift went smoothly so it was a good start!

However, I was re-thinking that a wee while later when I watched my daughter’s ski pole disappear off the side of the mountain, and the boys skiing on unaware. My sister-in-law was on hand to literally talk my daughter back from the edge, and scoop up the pole. While I am usually pretty comfy with my very average height for a woman, I admit to some relief that she is indeed a few inches taller (and a much more proficient skier than I am!).

Thankfully, lessons for the week sorted us out and we managed to complete all the colours, although I freely admit to not needing to do another black any time soon. 

As the kids are now hitting teenage years, it was perhaps the first time that we’ve had a holiday that we’ve all been able to participate in and have fun fairly equally.

The fact that there were four different views to factor into plans remained standard… 

Maybe it won’t take another 20 to strap on skis again…

One of the activities we have done with the kids over the years is bake. It is the ultimate win win – it fills time constructively, you get to lick the bowl (literally when they were younger, now they use a spoon, mostly), and you get to enjoy the product once it’s done.

So, it’s been interesting watching them build their confidence and independence in the kitchen. There’s been a bit of trial and error!

My son recently got the (store-bought) pizzas in the oven to then have to get them out again and remove the cardboard – genuinely a schoolboy error?

So, when we were going out the other night, we took the time to interrupt him and his friend from their devices. That itself took several moments to wrestle their eyeballs (and brains) from the screens. We ran through the steps – turn the oven on, wait for it to heat, insert the pizza minus the wrapper and the cardboard, and stay off a device and in the kitchen while it cooks!

Arriving a few hours later, it was reassuring that the house was still standing. The boys confirmed pizza had been consumed, so we quietly congratulated ourselves til we went into the kitchen to find that the oven was still on…

When challenged, his response was we didn’t tell him that step!

However, he has since made pretty fabulous flapjacks (and switched the oven off) so all is forgiven!

Sometimes as a parent you need to cover big issues. Other times, you really don’t.

This was the case the other day when I had a conversation with my 13 year old son about how to close a door quietly.

This was after several mornings of early awakenings by doors being closed loudly, multiple times. More effectively waking the rest of the household than an alarm clock.

It’s probably particularly acute as I can still very clearly hear my mum’s voice in my head saying “come back and close the door quietly”, said whenever there was even a hint of a slam when I was growing up. She had to use this often with the 20 odd years of teenagers in the house!

So my son and I talked through the options…

1. Not closing the door all the way (although as he pointed out this risked disturbing us anyway),

2. Staying in his room until a reasonable time (I may be regretting this one in a few years),

3. Actually using the handle to quietly close the door (accompanied by a demonstration).

There is a fourth option of taping the snib closed but I’m saving that…

It’s early days, so hard to tell if the lesson has stuck, but my husband reminded me that I’d had to teach him this when we first started living together. So it could be seen as a skill for life …

or it could just be me…

For Christmas this year, the kids got a SodaStream. It was perhaps also a present to self…

We had one when I was growing up – it was orange and white and lived in the “Cake-tin Cupboard”. That might have been the best cupboard in the house as my mother used to bake at least three times a week, so the tins were usually full…. The rule was only three pieces for afternoon tea but it was very loosely policed!

Although this was closely rivalled by the “Lolly Cupboard” (kiwi-ish for sweets), which mum kept well stocked. I suspect this was mainly to keep us kids motivated given the closest dairy (corner shop) was not just around the corner but 20kms (and perhaps so she could enjoy a moment of quiet too).

The SodaStream was reserved for Sunday lunch, which usually consisted of a roast my dad made while us kids went out to do any farmwork after church. Sometimes it also came out after a particularly hot day – provided we had worked hard enough!

Best of all, you had to keep pushing the gas until it burped. Which kid wouldn’t love that?

I never thought my own children would be asking for one circa 30 years later!

It was cool to see it bring similar joy… although the ‘healthy’ flavours weren’t the most popular choice and the burp feature isn’t a thing anymore!