Urghhhhhhhh!!!!

Hi guys, sorry I've not updated my blog for a while now. My mum had asked me and my sister to strip her walls for her. A big oops moment occurred when we tore off a load of paper ..... Only for half the wall to come down >.< *note- 140 year old houses aren't always sturdy!!!! It's now had to all be knocked back to bare brick so that it can be re-build before its redecorated !!

 Said wall .... Oh dear !!

Unfortunately, during all this, I have managed to set my back and hip into spasm OH MY WORD it's bloody painful !!! Just been back to the dr now and he's given me an injection plus tablets so hopefully it will ease off soon!! This week is too busy for me to be poorly !!!

In other news, we have an emergency appointment with the community paediatrician on Friday !! Kaydens behaviour is going worse and worse. He's hardly sleeping, he's constantly in self destruct mode and I think Friday is going to end up with us looking at medication for him. We didn't really want to take that route, but I'm not sure what options are available. He's going to end up really hurting himself or someone else. 

 Seriously you can not take your eyes off him, his favourite tricks ATM are walking along the banister (big drop!!) holding his own head under the water in the bath, swinging off door frames etc etc :( his extreme behaviour is very worrying. I will keep you updated on that !! For now I'm going to get something to eat, take my painkillers (which will apparently turn my pee pink) and hopefully have a snooze ..... Wish me luck on that one !!!!!!

Unhealthy dependencies !!

Some people are dependant on drugs...,others on alcohol....many on nicotine .....my major addiction is my mobile phone! I am seriously one of these people who can not live without their phone!!! I get panicky and sweat and worry....yet here I find myself totally phone less ...I really could cry... I was walking down the street today and it slipped out of my hand and bounced off the kerb... My screen has smashed but the LCD is also damaged so I can't get any sort of picture...omg I feel lost. Utterly gutted.

I've rang round a few places today and its gonna be £50 to get fixed :'( wondering considering iv not even got 50p at the min!  I REALLY want a job, but with my health issues, no body will employ me :( people think it must be so great to not have to go to work..but it SUCKS!! Especially coz I want to but can't :( tonight I'm feeling very miserable and sorry for myself :( fingers crossed tomorrow maybe better but I'm having the shittest luck lately :(

reviews...whose opinion??

Right, so after deciding I was gonna try my hand at blogging, I also decided I was gonna start doing reviews on places I go or things I read ect... As part of my new little hobby, I have registered to be a agent on BzzAgent (www.bzzagent.co.uk) Their mission is to connect people with leading brands across the world (www.bzzagent.com for our friends over the big pond)

Basically its very simple....you join, you take part in short surveys ...then they contact you and invite you to join in with campaigns... they then send you 'bzzkits' If you agree, you try the product then review it on line for them !!! genius !!!! when you review and do surveys they give you a bzzscore on how well your doing, the higher score you get the more campaigns they send !! Fabby !! This all works on a word of mouth scale (how good is the internet!!!!)

But how much does a review really matter? How much attention do people actually pay to reviews?  After all....a review is only one persons opinion..

The answer seems to be, rather a lot really...I've spent a couple of days casually browsing different sites on line and paying attention to what people have said about different things, practically everywhere has review pages for everything you can possibly imagine !!!

I sat thinking, 'how would this affect my opinion, would I pay a great deal of notice or would I ignore it and go ahead and make my purchase anyway??? To be frank, if I read just one opinion saying something was rubbish, the likelihood is I would ignore it.....if however....there was 9 negative review and lets say 1 positive,,,NO WAY would I buy it!...I would continue to search until I had found a similar product with good reviews !! So yes ! humans are sheep and reviews are VERY important!!!

I am currently awaiting my very 1st bzzkit, which is a john Freda salon perfect colour foam (I even got to choice my own colour)  !! I must admit I am actually very excited !! ....Its almost like waiting for Santa to come !! I've never used john Freda before as
when I have seen it in shops, I have always decided it to be out of my budget, I tend to go for other brands that are known, but on offer in the shops!  As I have long hair, I am very interested to see what sort of coverage it provides, and yes If I do take to it, I am highly likely to pay the extra cost and purchase it again... proving the point that reviews are a major factor in helping people decide what to buy....

Watch this space ....

What would you do?

 Today we went to Morrisons supermarket, We parked in the parent child spots as I currently have my cousins baby who is 7 month.  As a rule we use a normal space as I tend to leave mark and the kids in the car (Kayd doesnt 'do' shopping!!!) Why its warm today though, we was all going to go in to the store.

 As I took off my seatbelt I saw something that made my heart stop!!! " kiddies in the next car....Alone with no adult in sight !! One was a little girl who couldnt have been much older than 8 and a baby in a seat who was maybe 18 months old if that. We waited a good 5 or so minutes and then decided to phone the police and report it to them.

My question is, do you think we did the right thing? What would you have done in the same situation....And do you think its acceptable in ANY situation to leave children unattended in a car whilst you run an errand? If so, what would be your your view on why? what would you do?

Underwater street, Liverpool!!

Maaan what a day !! It's 11.23pm and i've finally founda minute to sit down and update my blog!!

Today we visited Underwater street in Liverpool for the 1st time, The kids had both been on school trips there at various points and had been begging to go back, so we figured whilst we're in the last few days of the half term holiday we would go for a 'cheap' day out !!.....My 1st mistake was thinking ANY day out with 2 children would be cheap!! My 2nd was allowing them to pesuade us to take them there!!!

Finding the place was FAIRLY straight forward, though be warned....liverpools roads are like many rabbit warrens of one way systems and your typical city traffic congestion !! Head for the docks though and you wont struggle too much to find it....though I was expecting some sort of big centre...the place is actually hid in the basement of huge building!!!)
 I had had a quick look on the website for underwater street and it had looked half decent. It's £8.95 per child and adults are free....so here was me thinking that we could have a half decent day out for under 20 quid!!!

1stly !!....city parking is never gonna be too cheap !!! Its actually pretty straight forward to get a parking space just outside the poor for the place.....but its £5 for 4 hours or £1 per 30 minutes (!!!)  the other option is to take a 5 or 10 minute walk to a privately run car park, but even then your looking at £5.50 for 5 hours or £7.50 for the full day (not TOO bad if your planning on having the full day in the city for visit the docks/museums/or go shopping etc !!)

So, we get parking, only to discover that the parking machine only takes coins !! luckily the nice man behind the till in the center changed my £5 note into pound coins for me !!!
 Rounded up the kids, crossed the road and went into the centre...down some steps and then paid our £17.90 to go in....then sort of stopped dead !!! the center is actually 1 long room on one level thats split into 6 zones- construction, imagination, science lab, physical area, art area and sensory area..
 Looking around, I regretted our decision to visit pretty much with in minutes of going in the place and we spent a few minutes scratching our headswondering what we do next !!!....So we went over to the physical area..which consisted of a beam to walk along, a miniture climbing wall, an air canon in the shape of a tank that fired out balls and one of those buzz wire things that test how steady a hand you have !!!

Am gonna quickly run through the rest of the zones now as you can tell already that this hasnt been the best day out we've ever had!!! in the middle of all the zones was a large cafe (that took up nearly half of the place!!...i'll get back to this further down though!) The imagination zone was basically 4 or 5 'cubicals' that had stuff like a dress up secion, a post office/shop, a pizzeria (pretend obvioulsy!!) a pooch parlor oh and a tunnel thing!! this zone entertained Erin for a few minutes but kayden didnt really pay it any real attention!!
 So off went over to the construction area...it had 2 toy metal diggers that you could pick to balls with the diggers, a sand pit that you were ment to dig for fossils in.....but actually had no fossils in there to dig for, then a frame constructed out of scafholding that you could build with foam bricks and hoist them up the frame to a higher ledge via a pully system. The diggers actally got sone attention from my 2!
 The art section was exactly what its discribed as !!! a few tables where you could do arts and crafts and a car that you could paint on!
 The sensory zone was a water trough to 'pan gold' in, a water bit to play with in, a table with a few puzzels on (half of which were missing) and a story wigwam tent!
 Finally the science lab bit, there was various tables with mini experiments on like water bottles showing  how water drains in a whirlwind, magnet experiments and optical illusions etc....unfortuantly again there was a fair few of the bits missing !!

I must point out that every 15-20 mins or so the workers there announce various activities that are taking place such as making slime, bracelets, paper aeorplanes etc etc !

That sums up what there is to do really!! An hour or so in, we decided that we had grumbly tums and it was time to test drive the cafe !!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Why oh why oh why didnt we take packed lunches !!!!
!stly, despite the size of the cafe, we had to wait a while for a table as there was numerous filled with bored looking parents sat browsing facebook on their mobile phones wishing they had gone to the museum instead !!!
 we ordered 2 jacket potatos, 2 plates of chips, a coffee and 3 small bottles of apple juice or and 3 mini muffins....this came to nearly £23 ....yes you read that right.... TWENTY THREE POUNDS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yah I still havent gotten over the shock of  that nearly 12 hours later !!!
 Anyways, food came...and my kids looked distinctly unimpressed with their plate of half burnt half pale chips !, we had to ask for the cheese for our spuds and had to wait for the colslaw....which arrived a few minutes after we had finished eating !!! We has chilli (and cheese when it came)on our spuds and a little side salad....the best bit was the salad !! the spud was oily and mushy and teh chilli was the only vinegary chilli I have ever had in my life !!!!!!!! :o/ not very impressive but for £23 quid it was getting ate !!!!!!

This is a very negative reveiw but I must say, for the bulk of the 3 mind numbing hours we were there, the kids enjoyed it...they are 5 and 7 (a very 'young' 7 I may add)...and if they had been ANY older it would have been utterly pants for them too ! the highlights of their day was getting a sticker for tidying up in the craft bit!!...That says everything really!!

So the long and short of it is...unless your kids are under 5, I probably wouldnt bother going...if you DO go (which ok it could pass a couple hours on a rainy day) .....TAKE A PACKED LUNCH !!!!

Cheers for reading and hope this helps as a review for you !!!!

here we go

So, after spending the last 12 hours, laptop in hand, creating my brand spanking new blog, here goes my very 1st post EVER !!

I've always wanted to join the blogging community, but always thought my life was a bit too boring to write about...but then I figured, if I expanded my social circles then I would have more to write about...logic YES!!...so why didn't I see that before! ....That's really a prime example of me!! Unless something is staring me in the face I often miss the point !! So, before I go much further I'm going to give a big thanks to the wonderful Sarah Lee (mummyof3) She really does have the patience of a saint and has spent several hours patiently talking me through the hows and whys, and  pointing me in the right direction on how exactly to make a decent blog!!

But what exactly does make a good blog? Well, I guess thats all down to who your reader is...what target audience you stretch out to...hopefully over the coming months I will reach out in many directions and become more familiar with the wonderful world of blogging.
 See my main problem is, unless I know someone well, I am a painfully shy person...I never used to be. I was always the outgoing funny one, the one with the lightly warped and dirty mind that enjoyed making people laugh!!!....So what happened there...how come the older I got the shyer I got?...one word...KIDS !!!
My gorgeous little offspring that entered my life unexpectedly and tore though like two tiny little tornados!!
 Now my general audidience had changed dramatically...and I never quite got into the swing of knowing how to act around other parents....I was in deep water here!!! conversations had changed from rumpy pumpy...to colicky poos, dribbles, teething and toddler tantrums !!....But instead of embracing it, stupidly I withdrawn into my own shell and became a social recluse...It wasnt intentional...I just didnt really know how to communicate in the way I had prior to starting my family...I didnt really 'fit' into any of the parenting groups,,drawn deeper into post natal depression after the traumatic birth of my son ...I withdrew into my own little world and unfortuantly, over 7 years later...and so much more in life changing...i'm still stuck here, still avoiding the school run so I dont have to make a fumbley attempt at talking to the other mums.

Right, so why after all this time do I feel im missing out on something,  I think the older and more independant my little people are getting, the more i'm feeling like I should set them an example and broaden my own social horizons. As i've already mentioned, my son is being assessed for high functioning autism and also has adhd, and it's suddenly hit me that I really cant help his social issues..if I cant recognise and face my own social issues....So this blog is my starting point...the new and hopefully improved Kim !!!

Wish me luck, buckle up tight and enjoy the ride !!!!