I’ve been a little busy, you see. Got caught up in a major national news story, and it’s been kind of all-consuming. If you’ve read anything about the hoo-hah over Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood, you won’t envy my position as PR consultant for one of the Komen affiliates.

Not only has it been all-consuming, it’s been bruising, too. We’ve fielded (and are still) many many emails and phone calls - angry ones, upset ones. Promises to never give us another cent. Words like “disgusting” and “babykillers”. Passages quoted from the Bible. I even got hissed at last week during a public speaking engagement. Wow. Americans may be the friendliest people on the Planet, but they certainly don’t hold back with their opinions.

So I’m following the Queen’s advice and trying to keep calm and carry on. But how does one keep calm when, in the midst of this, your kids decide to get the flu – and one after the other, so that you lose six days whole days of office time, and instead have to snatch time at the laptop during a Star Wars movie, or at night when the kiddos are in bed? And then off went Hubby to the U.K., so single motherhood and sickness and big national news story all blended together. It was crisis management on all fronts.

Ms Fix-It’s visits were cancelled. Doors to bedrooms stood forlorn and forgotten on the back patio. My life became something of a sitcom: hanging on the telephone giving a reporter an interview whilst Munchkin bounced around pretending the sofa was a ship; pretending to swim in the ocean that is our living room rug, dodging make-believe sharks and doing a bit o’ fishing off the armrest, whilst keeping one eye on that phone in case of a call (at its peak my phone logged 40 calls in just one day).

Now the kids are back in school and the hate emails are dying down a little. And I thought I should give my blog some T.L.C. Sorry if you’ve missed me. Thank you for checking in again. Bear with me while I get my groove back.

2. Get your mum/dad/parental guardian to cut a hole where the handle is, leaving a suitable lip at the bottom for holding bird food.

(Ooh, bad photo Mummy. I think she blamed the bright Tucson sunlight but really??)

3. find a long twig or other thin piece of wood. Put two holes in the bottom of the container, where the lip extends round, and insert twig/piece of wood. This will serve as a perch for the birdies.

4. (Optional). Find some more twigs and/or pieces of wood and attach them randomly to the outside of the milk carton as decoration.

5. Ooooh, the fun bit: painting! Make sure you get your mum/dad/guardian to put newspaper down first as this could get messy. Me, I daubed the paint on with spongy things. It was awesome, leaving big orange streaks down my arms!

Oh yeah, and the long green thing coming out the top is a bit of ribbon my mum put on. She poked holes in the neck with scissors. She says to tell you not to try this yourself, and that if parents are doing it they should be careful they haven’t started their evening Happy Hour yet.

(Cool colors though, huh?)

6. Lastly, load it with bird seed and hang it somewhere the birdies will be inclined to visit. My dad said the higher the better. We hung it from a bit of our patio roof.

OK, Mum here. I have a confssion to make. Lest you think we are creative geniuses when it comes to bird feeding, let it be known that this idea was stolen, lock, stock and barrell-looking feeder, from Munchkin’s preschool, where there is an identikit one hanging from a tree in the playground. Thank you preschool teachers! We hope you don’t mind. XOXO

We all agreed that we didn’t, although we tried our best. Bohemia was not a shop but a gallery of local artists. The stuff was wild, intriguing, one-of-a-kind, inimitable. It was my first choice for girlfriend presents, and it’s where I went just before Christmas to buy the coolest mirror – its frame fashioned in twirling metal like the curls of someone’s hair, hence its name “Wiggy Mirror” – for my friend C.

Bohemia and its owner Tana supported these artists vehemently. She put on shows and parties, got local bands to play, handed out sangria.

I was jazzed when the store moved from Tucson’s Lost Barrio to near me. I could walk there. I could even take The Mutt (Tana loved dogs).

Her parting email to her shoppers was gracious and so positive it made you want to cry. She thanked us for our support – no bitterness at all about the lack of it, which inevitably led to the store’s demise – and urged us to continue to shop local. I will Tana. Thank your for nine fabulous years.

And farewell to Gabrielle Giffords too. The announcement that she is standing down from Congress isn’t surprising (if anything it came way too late). But it’s heartbreaking all the same. In seconds, Jared Loughner changed the lives of many and tugged at the hearts of many more. The ripple effect of that day in a place like Tucson, where there aren’t six degrees of separation but about two, is wide. But then that’s why I love living here. It may be a city of a million-plus people but in terms of community and closeness and support it’s not unlike the 8,000-inhabitant town in Scotland I come from.

Forty-four is a strange age. I’m known for dressing a wee bit younger then I am (graphic T-shirts on the weekend, par example, or pigtails when my hair is long enough) but after so many viewings of What Not To Wear I feel I need to grow up a little. And then there’s the issue of my 10-year-old daughter now giving me fashion advice. (I mean, really? She who wears neon green leggings and ra-ra skirts as tops?) One minute she tells me the dress I’m wearing “makes you look like a Granny… like, no offence but it does”. The next she’s scowling as her friends declare my Converses to be cool. Can’t win.

Sweetpea and her friend E want to launch a website in which they will dispense tween fash advice and diss celebrities with silly outfits. Which I thought was all well and good until they talked about modeling some of the clothes themselves. I said no. I do not want my child on the web or on YouTube. E said her parents were “cool” with it (“I just texted them to tell them, and they’re cool”) but I am not. Yet again, the uncool mother.

Sweetpea wants a Facebook page and a blog and now a website, and she thinks I’m stuffy because I won’t let her tape herself in one of her own plays and put it on YouTube like some of her pals do. (Parents of these pals… what are you thinking?)

And so now I am just living in hope that the website fails before it starts, that they get bored of it and move onto something else. (What though? Starting their own TV network, for God’s sake? iCarly is a great show but I blame it for all of this fanciful celebrity-wannabe-ism.)

It would appear that not much impresses our dear tweens of the 21st century, because they really do have everything at their fingertips, and stardom is but a YouTube appearance away. Sweetpea tells me that one of her actor friends is going to L.A. very soon to discuss a show with Nickleodeon. She was ‘noticed’ by some exec or other. They only do the tiniest bit of eyelid-batting when they talk about it, her and her friends, like it’s just par for the course, and inevitable for all of them. She, Sweetpea, is so confident that she will head straight to super-stardom and a huge mansion with 45 rooms that even I’m starting to believe it. (I knew there was a reason we hadn’t started a college fund yet.)

We are heading to New York in two months, my gift to her as I have been promising her a trip to see some Broadway shows for some time now. When I booked the flights I was beside myself, couldn’t wait to pick her up from school and tell her. Her? She shrugged at the news and said, “Cool.” What excites tweens nowadays? Apparently, very little.

Meantime, she has declared that the trip will be v. busy as not only does she have to pack in these Broadway shows, but, to quote: “I have to shop till I drop and get discovered and plus E wants me to have some meetings with editors and try and sell them on the magazine idea.”

Oh good grief. There’s nothing to say to that without really sounding (and looking) like a granny.

I still miss him. I look for him every time I go into our bedroom, and I miss the way (annoying at the time but sweet now I look back) that he drooled whenever he purred.

We have gone from three pets to one in less than a year, so it’s a relatively quiet household.

Munchkin is more than making up with it, however, with his growing vocabulary of battlefield sounds: guns, explosives, and the yelps of the wounded. And I am bemused to witness that the same phonetic array – exactly the same – is shown by each of his male friends too.

Munchkin is now five. (I blinked and I’m sure I missed a few of these last years.) His desire to constantly be in battle and constantly be leaping either from or towards a ship or spacecraft or fantasy island has led to some discussions  in our house lately. We know we need to replace our sofas, and it’s partly Munchkin’s fault. He found a thinned-out area of leather on one of them, worked at it until it ripped, then worked at that rip until it got bigger and a load of stuffing came out. The other sofa, meanwhile, with four back cushions and a few more scatter ones, is lucky to actually hold its cushions for more than five seconds in a day. They are usually to be found on the floor, either because Munchkin wants more space on the sofa to jump, or because he is constructing a bridge to the coffee table, or a series of stepping stones on a make-believe river that is the rug.

And so after discussing our ideal, perfect sofa, we agreed that that was a daft idea, that with a kid so bouncy he makes Tigger look like a sloth, we needed something mid-priced: hard-wearing but something we’ll want to throw away in ten years when Munchkin has (please God) stopped bouncing.

.

I have to wait a whole eight weeks for it to arrive though, this ‘Sinclair’ sofa from La-Z-Boy.

Meanwhile, take a look at these, the latest things checked off of my DIY to-do list thanks to the wonderful, unmatchable, invincible Ms Fix-It.

Last week we turned this:

into this:    

Yeh, ugly ceiling fan in our bedroom that we have lived with for six whole years got replaced with the famed one that travelled from here to northern Arizona and back via Phoenix. Remember that story?

We did the same thing in Munchkin’s bedroom too. I say ‘we’ but really all I did was put the blades together and unscrew a few screws in the old fan. It was Ms Fix-It work (for which read ‘my brain doesn’t stretch that far’.) Ceiling fans are a complicated business (for instructions see the instructions booklet, definitely not me). Electricity is. This fact was reinforce to me today when an electrician came to do a few jobs in the house. He blinded me with science. I think it was deliberate. There was a slight smirk on his face when he uttered phrases like:

“We’ll have to convert to a GFI on that one.”

and: “We’ll have to run conduit. Is that OK”

Hnnnnh? Blowed if I know, mate. Just do whatever the hell you have to do. Make it work. Don’t blow the house up. And no, you can’t take the dog as payment. (Seriously, he did offer to, so sold was he on The Mutt.)

And so, some more things checked off my list, like a plug whose wiring was set too far in for an outlet cover to go on. It finally got it cover. Yahoo!

The major job today, though, was removing this old cupboard in my now office.

In typical bitsy fashion I had repainted the whole room several years ago, painted over some wood panelling along one wall, and neglected to remove this cupboard, still with its 1950s tongue-and-groove wood. Nice, hardy workmanship (Ms Fix-It and I found out during demo) but godawful to look at, and very darkening.

Here is the space a couple of hours later:

Yeh, of course not perfect. Still have to paint the walls and get rid of that big bit of black cable that our TV company so kindly put there. But I feel like the room is already a mile wider. Ah, you say, but what about the contents of the cupboard? It held a multitude of light bulbs, a hoover and a mop and bucket. There had to be an upside to the death of our cat, and it is this: the removal of his food, treats etc made space in a kitchen cupboard (for the bulbs), and the removal of his litter tray from the hall cupboard turned it back into a storage closet.

Still would rather have my cat back though. :/

You may surmise that Hubby and I suddenly found ourselves homeless, and that I was recruited as the runaway driver in a theft of some very heavy goods.

What really happened takes a bit of backtracking. There were these ceiling fans, you see. I ordered them new on LampsPlus.com for Munchkin’s bedroom and ours as well. Stainless steel finish, 42″ blade: cute, and just perfect for smallish rooms and 8-foot ceilings. Then along came Hubby and argued with me. He tends to do that. Likes a good “debate”, as he calls it. I call it arguing.

His argument/debate was that the 42″ blades were not long enough, especially during the cruel Tucson summers when one is brave to even put a sheet over oneself in bed. So I agreed that on a trip out of town for New Year that happened to see us bypassing a Lamps Plus store, we would exchange them.

And so our ceiling lamps travelled some 500 miles: up to Williams, AZ and the Grand Canyon, then back down to Phoenix where we celebrated New Year, and thence to a Lamps Plus. Because of the size of the boxes, we decided to drive not my nippy, reliable wee car but Hubby’s old and far less reliable, but roomy, SUV. He’d done some work on it all of last week and so I was confident of its roadworthiness. And it did good, until we were about 200 yards from the Lamps Plus store. Then it gave up the ghost, blowing a rather important fuse. A few changed fuses and more blown ones later, I declared that lunch was needed.

Happily, we broke down at a strip of shops and restaurants, so we could walk over for lunch to a restaurant, where Hubby negotiated with the AAA and also a truck rental firm (because AAA will charge you if you’re being towed from outside of 100 miles of your home). No matter. It was a beautiful day, and a new year at that. We kept smiling through it and, knowing we had to wait a while for a tow truck or rental anyway, decided to walk to Lamps Plus. Hence the stolen trolley, to transport our fans.

I told Sweetpea and Munchkin to put on their best homeless face. Sweetpea instead looked mortified. And off we trudged through a car park, along a street, across a crossing, along another street, and to the store. All for nothing, as it turned out. We were told these coolio fans don’t come in anything more than 42″ blades and I didn’t want any others. So back went the ceiling fans in the trolley, we did our trudging homeless act again, and were back where we started.

It took six hours from when the truck broke down to finally leaving. So there was nothing for it but to go shopping. Two handbags, a makeup bag (remember Hubby throwing up in mine after that party at Hallowe’en?), activity books for kiddos and some dog food (?) later, we got our U-Haul. This is what we then set off in, highly illegally:

The AAA truck wouldn’t have taken us anyway, since there were four of us. By hiring a truck we were able to circumvent any rules on passenger numbers. But it wasn’t pretty. This thing only had two seats. So there was Sweetpea in the passenger seat, Munchkin in his booster seat on the floor between her and Hubby – no seatbelt at all – and me, meanwhile, lying along the back seat of our truck that was being towed.

It was hideous. Not only really uncomfortable because my legs are too long to stretch out along the back seat, but wholly frightening. You’re bumping along a busy Interstate, staring at the sky, with no control at all over your situation. I kept thinking that people had had to endure worse things in vehicles, like being smuggled across the border with fifty other people and no water, or clinging on to the underside of a car whilst crossing the border from the old East to West Germany. You know, happy thoughts. And also: “WTF? If this is a sign of my year to come, I don’t like it. Please time-travel me back to 2011 immediately.”

Forty miles later we were within our 100 miles and felt a whole lot happier (and less criminal-like) phoning AAA and asking them to tow the truck, Hubby and Sweetpea from there. I, meanwhile, had to drive that sodding great U-Haul back to Tucson. And just to put a cherry on top of it all, when I pulled up here I realized I didn’t have my house keys.

We had gaily left the place two days before, me saying: “Should I take my keys?”

Hubby: “Well it’s not as if we’ll be travelling back separately is it? Ha ha!”

Me: “Ha ha! You’re right!”

Ha bloody ha indeed. And thank goodness for leaving spare keys with the neighbours.

It hadn’t started off badly. Well, the 6am wakeup was none too pleasant, I admit, but Hubby and I put on brave parental smiles and tried to be jolly. It was Christmas Day after all.

There was disappointment when Munchkin didn’t get the Nerf gun that was on his list. But as I pointed out to him later, maybe it’s just that Santa shares Mummy’s feelings about toy guns.

And there was most certainly too much sugar consumption. The first thing to hit both the kids’ stomachs wasn’t Hubby’s lovely scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, but chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. Which in my mind is fine for just one day a year.

They even walked the dog with me, Sweetpea and Munchkin. That was major. I remember watching my dad walk the dog on Christmas Days as a child and feeling pity. Imagine doing something so mundane on Christmas Day! I would think. Sweetpea tried playing the “But it’s Christmas Day!” card a few times, but we weren’t having it. The dog still needed walked. The pine needles from the driest, brittlest real tree on earth still needed swept up.

Then came the miserable bit. Thing 1, our old cat, has been showing signs of distress and illness for a while now, and things got worse in the few days before Christmas. I wanted the deed over with before Christmas was upon us, but before I knew it it was Friday night. I made sure Sweetpea knew the score, not wanting to spring it on her unexpectedly. And then the next day the cat rallied and seemed much better. He got worse again on Christmas Day, until it was evening and I couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. We said our goodbyes to him and I loaded him into the car ready for the trip to the emergency vet. Cue Sweetpea’s wail. We were all crying by then, apart from Munchkin who, at almost-five, apparently couldn’t care less. Had Santa brought him his beloved Nerf gun and had we then taken it away from him, there would have been much more distress.

I wasn’t present at our other cat’s actual injection, and wanted to be there with Thing 1. It was quick, for sure, but the sight of his knees buckling and him rolling over dead haunts me.

“On Christmas night???” the few people I’ve shared the news with ask incredulously, like I’m a monster mother/pet owner with not a kind feeling in my body. But what were the options? Take him on Christmas Eve and feel guilty, because he really looked like he was getting better? Or take him the day after Christmas and make that day miserable as well? But I realise that whatever way we look at it, Christmas 2011 will always be “the one when the cat died.”

So while Sweetpea seems back to her normal self today, I am not. I took a sleeping pill and slept, on and off, for 13 hours. I miss my cat. He was the coolest ever. Nothing fazed him, not even being flown transatlantically from his home in South London, or being settled in the Sonoran desert, or moved homes twice, not even having a dog for company the last 18 months of his life. He took it all in his stride, and an ambling, confident, don’t-mess-with-me stride it was at that.

I know the pleas from the kids will start soon: Can we get another cat? Can we get another dog? I’m giving it about 24 hours. Kids are resilient, they say. Middle-aged adults, apparently not so much.

More specifically: using your best crockery all the time, because why not?; enjoying real, sitdown meals instead of eating pizza from a box; and being happy with a modest amount of space, like one loo for a family of many.

Whaaaat? I hear all you lovers of cavernous spa-like bathrooms shriek. But really, why have a lot? And why have huge bathrooms that you could swing ten cats in at the same time? (Ouch). Isn’t that what luxury hotels are for? I know someone with five bathrooms in her house and am I jealous? Am I hell. That’s just a great big pain to have to clean and keep filled up with toilet roll.

Admittedly, I think two is a good number of loos. One might be one too few. That’s because I believe it should be written into marriage vows that spouses keep separate bathrooms. I think that keeping one’s toileting secret is one (of many – and I haven’t worked out most of the rest) prescriptions for a long, happy partnership.

Sweetpea and Munchkin are currently moaning like hell about the three bathrooms we have in our house, and that’s because they have been tasked with keeping them clean. Exasperated by their untidiness (clothes on the floor, towels on the floor), I laid down a rule that for every clothing garment I find on their bedroom floor – and one sock counts as a garment -  they will get a chore. That was at the weekend. Sweetpea had 15 chores by Monday morning and Munchkin five.

Their faces screw up when I say it’s time for some toilet-wiping. But it does only consist of them grabbing a Clorox disposable wipe and giving the toilet seat a once-over, so don’t think I’m being overly cruel.

And the dishware (back to the French again). Why do people have special china? Why do they have Christmas china, or Easter china or any fill-in-the-blank-with-special-occasion china? Kids are dying because they haven’t got clean water, women are getting raped in the Congo, people right here in America are being refused medical treatment because they can’t pay for it. So how can anybody justify special-occasion plates, or hand towels that only come out once a year?

Right, that’s my rant for the day. My hope for the future is that instead of expanding, we reduce and keep on reducing. Vive la reduction!

Now that the kids’ lists are winging their way to you (copied carefully by me first, natch), I thought I’d send you mine.

1. The first on my wish list isn’t really a wish for something, it’s a wish for something to be taken away, and that is (or, rather, these are) my ever-widening hips and sizeable bottom. You’ve known me a long time now, Santa, and so you’ve known that while I’ve struggled with my weight since childhood, I was always blessed with a small, flat bum and boyishly nonexistent hips. And now here I am looking like I could bear about twelve children. It’s not like I didn’t notice I had developed hips, but when I sat on a swing last week at the park it hit me hard. Or, rather, the sides of the swing did because I struggled to sit in it. That wasn’t a problem before. So before I suffer from a Zumba and/or Lean Cuisine overdose, please please can you just take the extra girth away, magically, on Christmas Eve night?

2. I would like a new bike please. Not withstanding the complaints listed in #1, I am quite missing cycling. That’s because Lil’ Miss Sweetpea has hijacked it. And that’s because the kid is sprouting fast. She has legs almost as long as mine and is only two shoe sizes away from me. And she’s still only 10! (Lucky for her she has a small bum and no hips. Wonder where she got that from?)

3. Now this is a tough one. I would like to inherently know about good new music. That may sound a bit unrealistic, because how do you just inherently know? And yet I used to. When Hubby and I met, we knew the good bands, what to buy, what gigs not to miss out on. Now, I’m flummoxed. It doesn’t help that I tune to NPR instead of some hip music-based station (although NPR did introduce me to Belle and Sebastian so for that I am thankful). It also doesn’t help that when Sweetpea tries to blast something ‘new’ and, she claims, hip, I shout “Turn off that noise!” like my own mother used to do. Ugh. When I locked myself in my room 30 years ago and drowned blissfully in Bowie, and then 20 years ago when I stepped out to gigs in London, and when I hit a couple of rock festivals (only a couple, mind, as I never was great with all the mud and the portaloos),  I never ever thought I’d become an un-hip mother, stuck musically in the 1990s. Now I rely on my brother – two years older! – to send me a new CD each Christmas that will assure that I’m not a total saddo. But if you could pop a few more into my stocking and inject some music hipness knowledge into my brain while you’re at it, that’d be grand.

4. I would like to be able to pluck my eyebrows. I know, I’m kind of straying out of Santa territory here, aren’t I? But honestly, at age 44 I think I should have the courage to do it by now, and I don’t. I have had them waxed exactly twice and in the summer I got that string treatment where they just about kill you by shaping them with what looks like dental floss (and nearly die I did, it was horrendous). It would be so much easier to be able to use some tweazers. Maybe Sweetpea will teach me soon, since she is apparently taking me over with so much else: music hipness, shoe size (nearly), to name a couple.

5. Time. Ah yes, you must get that a lot from us mums, eh? Time to do my Zumba every day. Time to work on my fiction projects a couple of times a week. Time to see at least one movie per week. Time to read the New York Times on Sunday and not have it lying around on the coffee table all week as well. Time to re-tile the bathroom and stain the new pine doors and re-vamp the front and back gardens. And just to garden generally. But wait. This reads like a retired person’s life. No, not ready to retire yet. In fact, thoroughly enjoying my work right now, so scratch all that. I’ll make some more time for myself in years to come.

Well, talking of time, it’s getting on a bit and the New York Times is calling my name. So nighty night, say hiya to the reindeer, and don’t eat too many cookies (if you do I have a Zumba game I can highly recommend.)

Gillian xxx