The one and only Tearoom, to be sure , it is.

[UniS]

To pinch an intro from the very first one and only tea room thread. in 2009.

The tea room is now officially open, serving hot chocolate, tea, freshly-squeezed orange juice and a range of home-baked muffins. Tablecloths and crockery are charmingly mismatched antiques (no Cath Kidston here). We overlook an attractive although somewhat overgrown garden, with a distant view of rolling countryside.

Everyone is welcome but house rules dictate that anyone indulging in fisticuffs will be ejected.

Please come in.

2011
We seem to have fetched up in Ireland, this place looks remarkably like a pub,There is even a guiness barrel over there. The NMBs are all sporting shamrocks. The mirror ball is here, but I leave teh rest of the unpacking to someone else.

That's great news Scout - well done! And good for TS at the cooking night - it made me smile picturing him trying to help!

When you are finished with Mellors please send him this way for manly jobs - I am also on my own for a few nights (miss DH dreadfully but also enjoy the peace and quiet...)

Thanks for all of the present ideas - very, very helpful as I am useless at these things.

amber, how are you feeling? And how are you bean?

TS was born to a Scouter father and a Guider mother (we met at an international jamboree) the poor kid is doomed-- destined to love fires and camping. His enthusiasm this evening, not wailing at the fires/smoke, etc., makes me very hopeful for camp next month (though he enjoyed camp last summer, this year he's on his feet).

Ah. I have heard of Oyster cards.

Scouting/guiding is a closed world to me, but, who knows, that could all change. Was rather impressed by the owl pellets brought into my class by the brownie class members. Or they might have been rainbows. A serious number of owl pellets came into class, as every girl seemed to have one.

I think I may have the best 'Don't you think it is wrong to have an only child?' story. I was talking to a mother while watching our children play. (Key fact: Wriggle is shy and takes about an hour to warm up and start to play, even when she knows the children, if they have been apart for more than a few days. )

Mother: Of course she is going to find school very difficult.
Me:
Mother: Well, she is an only child. That is going to make it very hard for her.
Me: (I am a primary school teacher.)
Mother: Yes. I only know one other mother with an only child and she found that he couldn't get on in school because of course he had never learnt to interact with other children. She had to send him to boarding school as it was the only way he could learn .... Have you ever met another family with an only child? I've never heard of any.
(This is obviously because they have been incarcerated in suitable institutions at an early age.)

She then spent the rest of the afternoon encouraging her children to fetch Wriggle to play with them on the swings and the slides when Wriggle was desesperate to get on with digging her hole in the sandpit to find treasure ... on her own although she was perfectly happy for them to join in with her.

Hello Rabbit!

Congrats Scout. :) DD is between Rainbows and Brownies at the mo - she got kicked out of the former shortly after turning 7 (they generously allowed her to stay until the end of the Easter term, but that was it) and the Brownie pack has no space for her. :( It's okay at the moment, but I hope a space comes up soonish in the autumn.

Meanwhile my friend helps with a Brownie pack that looks like it will close due to lack of Brownies - also :(

Hello?

Unserp - there was a thread yesterday that effectively implied that the OP's daughter was quiet and shy because she was an only. Decided to put paide to that stereotype immediately

Am sure I'm now marked down as being a paranoid mother - went to see the class teacher MC will have next year - because he's found it so difficult settling at th ebeginning of each year. Out of th corner of my eye saw that there were a couple of people at the computer - ignored them - and tey were behind me as I was speaking to the teacher. As I left, one of MC's class teachers came in to talk to the teacher I was speaking to - and I turned around and there was the other one, working with someone on the compmuter (two teachers share his class and deputy head duties).

s all round? And I hope that Amber's feeling a little less zonked by the chemicals today.

And appologies about spelling and typing - still have terrible lag when posting at home and the type is several words behind what I'm actually typing.

Unserp what a load of proverbial! Sorry you had to subject your earlobes to such a load of nonsense. My dd is the first one in to play and get others joining in, best friend's dd finds it very difficult and can deal with no more than an hour or so with other children. But hang on, mine is the only! Although that may just be a freak incident as we all know that a child's personality is only a product of how Manu children you have and absolutely nothing else

Morning all

Yes please for (I'm feeling a little better than yesterday and intend to get into work, thanks.)

Hi CheerfulYank - want some breakfast? As ever, Mellors is slaving away at a hot stove for us. So hot that apparently he's forgotten to wear a lot of clothes again. Tsk.

Unserp, arrgh re attitude of said mother.
MT, my laptop keeps doing that too - very confusing.

Morning all

?

I forgot to tell y'all that I made a complaint to Tesco Corporate after one of their checkout staff once again insisted, over and over, that it was time for me to have a second child. She says something to that affect every time I use her line and had been avoiding her but had not choice yesterday. And she started in 'oh how old is he? 2! Time for your next one. Yup, gotta have another one' with my looks and noes getting more and more forceful. I complained at their website and we'll see what happens.

Congratulations Scout!

Hi Yank! Me a Yank too!

Off to look at a flat today that Mr Tee and I are 99% sure we looked at 4 years ago before we moved here. So we've been trying to remember what we didn't like about it!

It's only 2:45 here, but sure, breakfast it is :)

Tee how rude of the checkout staff! My DS is almost 4 and I get that all the time. We do plan to have more, but who knows how it will all work out?

Grr at that mum unserp. I took 3 only children out on Saturday, and none of them is shy/unable to get on with others etc. They do argue about whose game to play (oh the joy of someone else pretending to be a fish/puppy/pony), but sort it out together

Hello Cheerful Yank ! Have a [cuppa]

ohh Mellors, I'll have a coffee, Large, with multiple sugars.
Have a bad case of builders in the house!!! Worse still they are taking off part of the roof and its tipping down with rain :-( Why did I ever thing solar hot water was going to work in soggy devon.

Hi Cheerful yank. come on in and park yourself on a sofa. Coffee? , Tea? or something stronger required?

Tactless mum may not know many families with one child as they all avoid her after a tactless comment like that. DS is generally a " will go and play with any one" kind of child, but does have attacks of teh shys meeting new adults IF i'm there to hide behind. He's very happy that lots of big boys in Year 5 & 6 know his name. Some of them will even let him play football with them.

I actually thought it was quite funny. But I don't think that insensitive and insistant Tesco worker is funny. There are some days when you can laugh it off and some days when you can't.

UniS - I have wondered whether solar power can really work here, but am assured that it can.

Cheerful Yank, tell us about yourself.

I have, before now, and having then just recently had a mc, told someone that asked about No2 that I'd just miscarried and that, due to the number of mc together with the bad health the first one resulted in and resultant black shadow over each subsequent mc - it wasn't exactly easy. Hopefully it shocked them sufficiently for them to think before they said something equally insensitive to someone else.

That's the thing, mistle. Forget the fact that it's none of her business to begin with, how about the fact that I could be unable to conceive again/just had a miscarriage/something else? She's a stranger (granted one I see about once a week when I shop) who is poking her nose in where it doesn't belong.

My reasons for only having one are just that, my reasons. Of course I think a big part of it is that I don't look 42, if I do say so myself, so most people assume we must be trying for a second because 'everyone does'.

I do sometimes wonder if my miscarriage 4 years ago had resulted in a baby instead if we'd have had another one. I then would have been 38 when that baby was born instead of the 40 I was when I had LCT. But it's just idle wondering, I'm happy with my only and so is Mr Tee.

I have gotten one 'sorry to hear about this, we'll be in touch' email from Tesco but nothing further.

Interesting stats from the papers at the weekend that said half of all women of our sorts of ages don't have children at all and have no intention of having any. They are career-women first and foremost, it seems. So I wonder if she spends her time telling people with no obvious children present that they should crack on and have some?!

Hello Cheerful Yank! Take a chair, have a jar and put your feet up!

I think maybe that criticising other people's lives for not being the same as yours -or worse, not being the same as some ideal of yours- is a favourite passtime of too many people.
Why is being different so threatening I wonder?

Cheerful!! You made it!! Whoo hoo!
You all might know her already, she's an MN regular and just lovely.

I'm frantically running around packing etc. JB and I are heading off to Cali to visit DH for a few days. I decided 3 weeks without my hubby are too much.
I will have internet access so will pop in.

If you could answer that question Cat, you'd end most of the strife in the world.

Hi! Um...about myself. I work at a school part-time as a 1:1 aide to a little girl who has ASD. I live in a small town in Minnesota and have one DS. He'll be four next month. I think we'll have more, but it just hasn't seemed like the right time yet. I think as far as having an only goes, pros are that the three of us are very close and it's lovely, cons are that it's summer vacation right now and it's just me and him until September, all day every day at home, and tbh he's driving me the teeniest bit batshit up a wall. :o

Cat I'm with you there. I don't understand why everyone needs to be so judgy about other people's choices all the time. If it's not actively harming anyone, why would you care? I think a lot of the time people feel like "oh, they're not doing it the way I do it, so that must be a criticism of me," and get defensive.

Hugs Jacksmania back. :) Thanks for the Tearoom invite!

CheerfulYank, you'll feel right at home with some us tearoomers in your line of work

I've hoovered, dusted, tidied and cooked. This is of course instead of resting, relaxing and putting my feet up. Hmm....

welll the rain seemed to focus teh builders attention on working! they appear to have done it all in one day rather than teh planned 2. There are a few drips i'm not sure shuld be there around teh new hot water tank but I shall bring those to teh attention of teh commissioning engineer tomorrow afternoon.
So now what do I do tomorrow.
Plan A was go on a school trip in teh morning.
That got changed to Plan b - school trip became a full day event.
I got cold feet about leaving builders on own and pulled out of going ( yesterday) So offered Plan C- work school lunch duty
Commissioning chap isn't due till after school... so do I go for
Plan B and tell school I can't do lunch duty after all or stick with plan C.

I think I stillhave a seat on teh school bus for this trip and its only 6 miles or so If I had to cycle, would take me about as long as teh bus will take to load, drive and unload.

Next worry- I intend to send Boys booster seat in with him to use on teh bus ( 3 point seat belt) Wonder if he will be teh only one? BUT I think he should use a booster if he can to reduce severity of any potential injury IF bus has to ( very) rapidly stop.

Someone tell me to stop worrying and get on with cleaning up after builders.. PLEASE.

UniS - stop worrying and get on with cleaning up after the builders!

Hi there and welcome Cheerful Yank! I'm a SAHM to our one boy aged 3.8 and am probably much too old to have another but I haven't got to the stage where I can chuck out the baby stuff yet.

Re insensitive souls - god yes. I don't get it as badly now as I did when we were ttc for all those years, endless questions about whether we wanted children (yes, desperately), and even the queries about whether I was pregnant (upsetting on so many levels, especially when just after a post-IVF m/c, and accompanied by patting my belly and saying "anything in there then?" from a woman I barely knew....)

Actually I still get people asking me if I'm pg sometimes now and I clearly need to cut down on the kit-kats. And learn how to deliver a swift right hook. How stupid do people have to be to not be aware of all the ways that question could cause offence/upset, and therefore how downright rude it is?

Your tesco woman, Tee, does sound incredibly stupid, and perhaps a little bored. I used to get it from the woman in our corner shop until I just told her how old I am, in desperation. But it pisses me off that I have to tell someone I do not have a personal relationship with something that personal just to get her to stop being upsetting me. Hope you get some decent comeback from Tesco later anyway, Tee, and good for you for raising it.

Bah. Fie on them all.

Hi CheerfulYank! I lived in Minnesota for almost four years, just before moving to England (MrScout is English). Are you in the Twin Cities or Up North? I have ToddlerScout (TS for short) who is 19 months old. He's lovely.

Hi JM!!! Enjoy CA!

MrScout's still in the States. Very envious. But it sounds like he bought ALL of the goodies on my wishlist. Too bad I thought of one or two more things after I sent the list. I don't think he'll have time for another Target run before his flight on Friday. I am grateful for the treats he's picked up for me. And really, only a few more months until Thanksgiving and I'm home.

I really should go to bed. Took my third-from-last injection about seven minutes ago. Way too late to feel right at 6 a.m. but oh well. Only two more left!