I need your help

Two weeks from today my little girl will start school.


I mean look at her, she's such a tiny little thing. The thing is though, she just can't wait to get to school. She talks of nothing else, every day "Am I going to school today mummy?". The same question every single morning.

We already have her uniform.


And her shoes...



With the little kitties on the outside of the shoes requested by the school so that she can tell easily which shoe goes with which foot. Well hey didn't have to be kitties, but you get the idea.

So now my little girl has a drawer in her room filled with green polo shirts, royal blue jumpers, grey trousers, skirts and pinafores, not to mention tiny little white socks which amazing reach all the way past her knees, grey tights, new pants and vests and little white airtex t-shirts for PE and toffee soled plimsoles so they don't leave marks on the games hall floor. We have her school bag and her PE bag and I'm in the middle of labeling everything with her name.

We don't' have shorts for PE yet, but it's still quite strange looking into that drawer.

This is my first year doing the school supplies thing, but tell me this. Is it perfectly normally to get annoyed over silly little things when you're trying to get every bought and organised.

Case in point, regarding the PE shorts. I've had a look in a few shops now and I'm just not coming across anything suitable. Just to see if I could get lucky and find a pair I went in to Tesco yesterday. I walked along the aisles of clothes. Passing by the boys clothes I noticed perfect little shorts for a boy's PE kit, nice little navy ones with pale blue stripes up each side and the reverse, pale blue with navy stripes, just the right length and with a bit of room in them for running.

Then I walked around to the girl's side and saw the offerings. One lonely design, a pack of two pairs of shorts. And I mean shorts. One pair white, the other baby pink and they actually had that cutaway scallop at the side which took the sides of the shorts even closer to the child's hips, if such a thing is even possible.

I took one look at them and all I could here in my head was "Hi, Welcome to Hooters. My name is Candi and I'll be your waitress." No daughter of mine will ever be seen dead wearing shorts like that!

Speaking of which, I think my friends and I were the only ones to go to Hooters when it opened in Belfast. From memory they were read the riot act on false advertising and closed shortly thereafter:)

Anyway, back to the point. Is it silly to get annoyed about the fact that shops seem perfectly capable of providing suitable shorts for boys but at the same time they thing that I should be willing to dress my daughter like a cheap slapper? I think not!

So we're nearly ready, bar the shorts.

Toots can't wait and the husband is so proud of her. I mean really proud, you should see the look he gets in his eyes and the little secret smile on his face when she talks about school. Toots just doesn't have any fear about school whatsoever and she looks so grown up now. She's just ready to go and the husband is really happy to see her like that. Ready to take on the world!

I think when we brought her out of daycare way back at the start of the year we were a bit worried that she would get so used to being at home with me by this time that the very thought of school would freak her out a bit, but that just hasn't been the case. I love her so much and I'm so proud of her myself.

Now, the title of this post suggests that I need your help and here's where you come in.

You see everyone thinks this is fantastic, my mum, dad, brother, the husband and I do too. But there's still this tiny little part of me. And I do mean a tiny, little insignificant part of me that needs to freeeeeaaaaak out.

And I mean bouncing off the walls fah-reak-ing out and someone has to come along for the ride.

She's just so.....small!

Seriously, I remember bringing her home from the hospital like a week and a half ago and she would lie with her little face buried in the side of my neck and her legs curled up so that her feet only reached as far as my chest and I would sit with her like that for hours, rubbing my thumbs along the soles of her feet while she slept and rolling her little toes back and forward between my thumb and forefinger while she smiled up at me.

And now I'm supposed to just send her off to school in two weeks when she'll be, what does that work out at, like three and a half weeks old. Really?

I pretty sure I'm entitled to have a mini panic attack of sorts.

So who's in?

Its funny the things you just realise

My mum had Toots on Wednesday afternoon and when she dropped her back home again, Toots went straight upstairs for her bath and my mum and I sat chatting for a while as we often do.

Ten minutes later while desperately trying to catch my breath from laughing so hard I realised that most of my memories of my mum are like this.

She's one of those people. I think everybody knows at least one and the world would be a much more dismal, dreary place without them, but she is just one of those people that can have you in a complete wrinkle, creasing yourself laughing just by telling you about her trip to get a carton of milk.

My mum seriously missed her calling, she should have been a stand up comedienne. Nobody I know spins a yarn or tells a tale quite like my mum.

She's such a bright, cheerful woman and manages to inject humour into even the most humdrum days.

She's always full of life and laughter and I'm so grateful for that. I can't understand why I didn't really notice it before. I guess we just get used to the friends and family who surround us and sometimes take their best attributes and the finest elements of their personality for granted.

I've been crafting away tonight since she went home again, but I've been remembering some of the things she got up to when we were kids.

I remember her bobbing for apples and practically emptying the entire contents of the basin of water all over the kitchen floor, because dammit she was getting that apple if it was the last thing she did.

Or smiling unashamedly to anyone she met for he full week it took to get a dentist appointment after she broke one of her front teeth eating a candy bracelet. She didn't care that she looked like something out of Dumb and Dumber.

I remember a guy calling door to door selling indoor fireworks before Halloween. Maybe these were only a UK thing but if you remember them let me know. Anyway, she lit one of them on the drop down oven door and then proceeded to beat the dung out of the thing with a wet dishcloth because the smoke alarm was going off and she thought the house was going to burn down. Just the thought of her screaming at that firework to "go out, why won't you go out" as though it might reply "oh alright then" has me in stitches.

She could be very creative with the punishments too. I remember the first time I ever had a drink. Not the worst thing I ever did, but it was bad enough (it gets worse, wait for it). I was 14 at the time and went a tad overboard shall we say. I was convinced I'd made it. I managed to let myself into the house and into the downstairs loo to freshen up. I called goodnight to her and thought I was free and clear as she called goodnight back and I headed up the stairs.

I was almost there too when I tripped and fell over a pair of my dumb ass brother's trainers that were lying on the second to last stair. I tried to keep as quiet as possible and shrug it off and as I was picking myself back up again I heard this snort from behind. I turned around and there was my mum standing at the bottom of the stairs trying to look angry and trying to stop from killing herself laughing at the same time.

Well apparently I was thoroughly smished because I immediately burst into tears, told her I was drunk and tried my best to apologise.

She bundled me off to bed, telling me I was in for it in the morning. I woke the next morning, feeling like someone had stolen my head and left a bag of hammers in its place and I could hear my mum on the phone downstairs telling the school secretary that I wouldn't be in that day (told you) because I had a bug.

Well, I lay in bed like Little Miss Smuggy McSmuggerson thinking my mum was the coolest mum in the whole wide world and I drifted back off to sleep....

Until a soaking wet, freezing cold wash cloth landed squarely on my face and I scrambled out of bed to face the sight of a bucket of cleaning supplies and a smiling face and pointing finger aimed directly at the bathroom.

Ever scrubbed a bathroom at 8am after a night on the sauce? No, well I don't recommend it and let me tell you it was a very very long time before I dared touch another drop of drink.

Honestly, every beer smelt just like bleach and that awful floral disinfectant until I was in my early 20s. She never used that disinfectant before and she's never used it since. I think she may have went out at the scrake of dawn to get a bottle on purpose.

So thank you mum, for always smiling and giving everyone around you no other option but to do likewise.