Saturday 24 January 2009

Saturday 24th January 09

A reasonable day. Gill still feeling very poorly so I did all the shopping we needed... went to Thomas The Baker and the Co-op before lunch, and Country Fresh after, to get veggies and fruit, and then Scummerfield with my eldest (shock horror!) to get goats' milk. This was really nice.

I did a bit of chainsawing, splitting and stacking AND compost heap adding.

But the antibiotics seemed to kick in and Gill felt well enough to make a pizza which was delicious. I did a big tidy up of my piles of paper, finding multitudinous envelopes and sorting them into re-usable, compostable and 'have to tear out the window-able'. I then spent some time tearing out plastic windows and crumpling the rest of the envelope into a ball for composting... Envelopes are not suitable for putting with the paper recycling as the gum clogs up the recycling process and the windows are best put in the rubbish. I could just crumple up the envelopes with the plastic window.... and then remove the window out of the finished compost. But although I've put some complete envelopes with windows into various compost bins, I'm happy to spend a bit of time removing windows first.

During one of today's outbursts, our coat stand in the hall got broken which caused tears of guilt and regret. I didn't react or say anything, I just ignored the situation, as if I'd said or done anything, it would have caused things to get even worse. Therefore within a few minutes, everything had calmed down..... a good thing! I think I'm slowly learning to be a slightly better parent. Maybe. But in my day, pushing the coat stand over so it snapped would have earned some kind of punishment. Thus I feel as if I am partly neglecting my 'duties' as a parent, to instruct between right and wrong, to encourage good behaviour and discourage bad... parenting does give rise to so many dilemmas.

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