Saturday like mourning and the elves

Today started as a normal Saturday, the children were all downstairs with daddy when I first woke up.  A little later I was woken again by my son bringing me the telephone.  My mum was on the phone offering to buy us a turkey.  I usually visit my parents on Christmas day and they give me some turkey to take home. This year we can now cook our own, it says for 8 – 9 people, so that should keep us busy.   She has also now bought us some gammon and chipolatas, so that’s our dinner sorted, Christmas day and boxing day.

Morrisons today was quiet at 9.00am but by 10.00am, when I finally left after seeing people that I knew, it was getting busy.  The car park was also filling up, so I am glad that my mother phoned me early.

When I got home I could see that presents had been moved around the tree.  In the times that the children had been left unsupervised, they had been trying to look at them.  I have bravely moved them back under the tree.

I decided today that I would clean and vacuum behind the television.  This then led to dusting my dragons.  I have a small collection that never gets dusted as they are heavy and I do not want to break them.

There are more on the shelf below hiding behind photos.  They are now a lot cleaner and I am no longer looking at cobwebs whilst watching television.

We also tried to have a general tidy up which ended with me cleaning,  dusting and getting stressed.   The children were not helping and daddy had disappeared upstairs annoyed with my bad mood.  This added to my bad mood, the front room is not finished but is better then it was.  I also achieved a load of washing, one load washed and one load put away.

A few days ago  I realised that my Kindle Fire was missing. It normally sits next to my side of the bed.  We have now searched all over the house and can not find it.  As far as I am aware it has not been out, so it must be in the house somewhere, the question is where?  In my mind one of the children must have left it somewhere, I can not remember when I last used it.  My daughter uses it most with Kindle for kids.  My hope was that it would help her with her reading.  Now it has completely vanished, maybe it will turn up one day when I am not looking for it.  I am worried that it is sat broken somewhere. However, I would like to think that if it is broken then the children would have told me.

Today my free blog has become self – hosted,  I am hoping that I have made the right decision.  I have kept the same theme as I like it but there are differences.  My posts can no longer be easily reblogged and I am now sat typing on my laptop as was struggling to write a post on my tablet.  I look through the site and I realise there is so much that I have to learn.  The plugins of Jetpack and whether to enable speeding up my site which in turn might affect my photos. Setting up an email address and whether to have people subscribing.  My head is spinning right now.  

WordPress has been emailed to reinstate my blog stats, now at 12 views today when they were at about 2700 since October 2018.   The worst thing though is that all my likes have now gone.  I was messaged a while back to say I had reached 500 likes and I had my top 10 posts showing.  Without the likes, my blog does not know my top 10 or is this more related to the number of views? I am not sure.   However, I still have all your comments, the likes can be rebuilt but the comments cannot easily be rewritten. 

Time will tell on my decision to go self-hosted, I guess once I know what I am doing then things will get easier.  It will then be a question of affiliate links, Amazon and trying to make enough money to cover the cost of my blog.  It would be nice to think that Christmas next year might be easier financially with the help of my blog.  The main thing though is that I continue to enjoy writing it.

The children were upstairs with daddy whilst I was sorting it out and still tidying the front room.  I was a bit worried because they were all in our bedroom and the Santa presents are in there buried under cushions and teddy bears. Daddy says they have not seen them, hopefully, they will not.

The two elves are still watching the children, but they continue to not help and not do as they are told.  They are obviously not bothered by the thought that the elves might report their bad behaviour back to Santa. They have no fear of the naughty list. I found a broken decoration whilst I was tidying up and typically it was a new one.  The hard work and the battle goes on.  The tree in my featured image is now about 20 years old. and has great sentimental value as purchased from a work friend.  Any baubles missing off it are due to my children messing around with it.  The Angel next to it falls off the main tree hence we have given up putting her back on.

We had dinner late tonight, then my daughter would not just go to bed.  Our son was alright, it was already late and he pulled up his duvet and said goodnight.  Our 5 year old kept returning downstairs with excuse after excuse.  They are exhausting especially when you really need some time to wind down.

I did not make mince pies today, I have decided to do them on Christmas Eve so they are more fresh Christmas day.  The children need to behave whilst I am baking and yes I will be relying on the iPod and iPad.  My two are not great at helping me bake. We will have eggshell with the eggs and flour everywhere. Then arguments and tears over who is doing what, it becomes very stressful.

Tomorrow we plan on seeing Grandma to exchange some presents, another busy day.  I am now going to get some rest, build up my energy ready for the hard work and stress tomorrow of being mum.

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