Miss Comic Relief lost her second tooth this week. She is now sporting a big gap on the bottom of her mouth and she loves pushing her tongue through it. It's going to take me some time to get used to it. The next two teeth are the ones that make the most difference to the face. I am so used to how Miss Trouble Pants looks with her massive beaver teeth (poor child!) that it's always a surprise to look at old photographs.

Miss Comic Relief has picture perfect symmetrical teeth. She always has. They are small and perfectly formed, even at top and bottom. Miss Trouble Pants on the other hand started off with an extra baby tooth that made her teeth look misaligned, and they seemed larger to begin with. Now that her adult teeth are coming in (she has 7 of them) they are already fighting for space. In fact - at the age of 8 she's already seen an orthodontist, as referred by the dentist. They are planning to realign her bottom jaw when she's 10, as her overbite is 10mm.

But this isn't about her, it's about that magical creature who - for some unfathomable reason - wants to collect those little chunks of enamel with fragments of dried blood still caught in the stem of the tooth.

All I remember from my own childhood was that the tooth fairy would come during the night and switch the tooth for a coin. I can't even remember the going rate. I figured that this would be acceptable for my own children.

But apparently not.

My mother-in-law and various other sources had already furnished my girls with books about the tooth fairy. For one thing - these books contradict each other. Is there one tooth fairy, or many? And for a second - one of the books (which also came with its own little velvet bag for holding the tooth) tells the story of a relationship by letters between the child and fairy.

That book mentions that the fairies use the teeth to build their cities - which grosses me out in some ways. I know that they'd make nice white stones, but still - they are teeth! Or perhaps it's something like this -->

The idea of the tooth fairy brigade getting around with tooth encrusted jewellery really opens up a new fear - is there a black market for teeth? Are we likely to be mugged in an inky dark alley at some point?

A fairy with a baseball bat could be a very scary proposition.

Or am I projecting totally irrational and human characteristics on a mythical creature?

Back to the story. Miss Trouble Pants was 2 years old when she was given that book. So wisely - I took the small velvet bag and put it somewhere safe. I return it to that safe place after each use.

Do you think I could find the damn thing when Miss Comic Relief's first tooth fell out? Not a chance.

I found an alternate bag for her to use - a small bag that some earrings had come in. In fact, it's a far better bag than the velvet one, since that lasted precisely 3 teeth before it completely fell apart anyway.

And then came the next big task. The letter to the tooth fairy.

Because of the book, Miss Trouble Pants likes to write letters to the tooth fairy and she receive them in return. Tiny weeny little letters that I print out and cut to size. One day she asked for a photo, and that was an extra challenge. I googled high and low to find an image of  the tooth fairy that wasn't comical or sexual (amazingly, that was incredibly difficult!). Finally I found one and printed it out, covered it in contact, and popped it in with the letter.

Miss Comic Relief went straight in at the jugular. She wanted a photo of the tooth fairy too.

Now here is the difficult part. Do we make it the same tooth fairy? Or do they have their own unique tooth fairies? I wasn't sure I could come up with a second image that matched the first one.

In the end, I didn't try and match it. I found a photo that looked sweet and used that. We decided that the tooth fairies would be different ones so that this would be a totally new experience, new territory.

So here, without further ado, is the photo of our newest tooth fairy (lifted from somewhere on the internet).

She was very well received by Miss Comic Relief. 

But what is she wearing around her neck? God I hope it's not teeth!

It's been a long hard winter, but it seems like there is now a light at the end of this long damp tunnel. We've now had several days where that large bright orb has appeared in the sky.

I really felt like we were all groping our way around the surface of the earth with our eyes blinded from glare - hands out pumping the air - exclaiming "too bright! too bright! what is it?" as we emerged from our caves of darkness.

Yes, I do hate winter in England THAT much. And as we've not had a good summer in - is it 3 years now? - I think we are owed one this year. 

So it's now march, and it's time to clear the dead tomato plants out of my greenhouse, reshelve the grow box and plant my seedlings along the conservatory window sill.

I didn't do a seed order at the end of last year. That was a combination of not having time, and not needing too many new varieties. I had a lot of left over seeds, and I also had a lot of my own harvested and dried seeds. 

I was particularly proud of my runner beans. I don't like them... I don't like to eat them - and yet I grew them. So I let them all dry on the supports, then I harvested them and popped out the gorgeous seeds. Black and purple seeds - really pretty. I took a photo of how beautiful they were, and decided I'd probably give them away.

Then I foolishly packed them away and forgot about them.

Fast forward a few months. I took out my seeds and inspected them.

My beautiful purple seeds are infested with bean weevils. They've made horrible little holes in each one of the shiny and opulent beans. I sadly divided them up and separated the good seeds from the bad ones. Then I put the good ones away again.

God, I am so stupid!

I've just looked at them again, and they are totally ruined. There must have been a few undetected bean weevils in the pile of good beans. What I have now is utter desolation!

So. No runner beans from THAT batch! Well - maybe just one. For some reason there has been a runner bean sitting on my bedside table for 3 months. It's now beankinds last great hope!

But we move on!

At the end of last growing season, I sowed green manures on several of my plots. I used winter tares, field beans and hungarian rye. Then I didn't go back down to the allotement for - oh - 3 months? Whoops!

My Father-in-law opted to do some digging a few weeks ago while the rest of us went to Bluewater to go shopping. I took him down to see the lay of the land and tell him what he could dig. I was very worried about what I might find!

Luckily, everything was pretty tickity boo. The field beans had been the least successful, but the other green manure had nicely covered the area. He was able to start digging them in for me.

He only got one row done, because the ground was SO sodden that each forkful he tried to turn came up clinging to the tines. The claying ground was so heavy that it was far too hard for him to dig it over. But it was a great start.

I really need now to get off my behind, and get the rest of it going. We've had clear weather for over a week now, and with any luck the ground will have dried out enough for digging.

So, next task - adjust my plot rotation grid and print out this year's fun filled vege fiesta!

I had the immeasurably pleasurable experience today of accompanying 32 seven and eight year olds on a school excursion to examine rocks and soil.

I say immeasurable, because there really is no scale that can accurately rate the level of enjoyment versus panic that a trip like this can induce.

Miss Trouble Pants always wants me to go on the school trip with her. She's still young enough to think I am cool. I know that won't always be the case, but I revel in it while it's offered.

The instructions for the day were to wear old jeans or trousers that can get dirty, with the school shirt and jumper on top. Wellington boots were to be brought along too.

As a parent helper, I presumed that the same requirements were going to prevail (with the exclusion of the school uniform part, that might be a bit kinky) so I dressed down accordingly, and turned up at the school gate. There were three classes going to the same place, and the parents for each class gathered in the staff room to wait for the buses. 

Our bus arrived nice and early - first one on the scene, and promptly broke down outside the school. With one bus in front of the school, there was now no room for any other buses to get through and so the other classes had to walk down to the main road to get onto theirs.

We waited for ours to get started. Then we waited for it to get fixed. And then we waited for a new one to come. From Millwall. 

The staffroom was stifling - we'd all dressed for outside in the freezing drizzle, so eventually we all had to strip down to the lowest layer with our piles of outer swathing on the floor. In all, we ended up waiting an hour. But an hour in a boiling staffroom was heaven compared to a room with 32 stir crazy children who were expecting fun and excitement.

Eventually we were on the bus and on our way.

As the mother of two girls, I am very naive in the way of boys. To me, normal boy behaviour seems to be misbehaving. I never quite know whether a game is normal boy fun, or a fight. Like that game where boys try and kick another boy's legs out from under him. Now to me - that's being naughty! But apparently to boy mothers it's perfectly acceptable.

So I am the tyrant mother who is always bossing the kids about. The nagging one. I think they hate me. They also ignore me, so there isn't too much harm done. I get the feeling that I am not supposed to slap them about either. How unfair is that? There are some kids that could really do with a good slap up the backside of the head!

Luckily buses these days have seatbelts, because that limits the scope of misbehaviour! It doesn't do anything for the noise though.

Because we were an hour late, we had to rush through the first few things, which was analysing rocks for their qualities. As there wasn't a huge amount of scope for getting dirty, some of the boys under my care had to resort to rubbing the rocks on their faces to try and get some filth on. This is something my girls would never think of! It's almost as if they had a reputation of dirt to protect!

The centre had a good playground to let the kids burn a few engery bars down. The boys ran off in the direction of a football, and the girls played some intricate game of it in the corner.

I hid in the opposite corner, sucking down coffee from my flask. It was blissful for about 5 minutes - until the first casualty of the day. And guess who - of course, my daughter is face down in the woodchips, having fallen off a log face first.

She's spitting out dirt - must be taking the topic of the trip very seriously! But underneath the muck there are no grazes and no blood, so the only real injury is to pride.

The next part of the day is painting with dirt. Yep - dirt mixed up with water to make mud. They all drew three trees with pencil, then use brushes to paint the dirt over the top. They painted with chalky, sandy, and loamy dirts, which make three distinctly different shades of brown. I was quite impressed with the results. 

Then came the muddy part of the day - a walk up to the local church with is built from flint and sandstone. It wasn't as muddy as I feared it might be fortunately! Because we were so late we had to skip a few other mucky activities, including "mud rolling" in order to leave in time to make it back to school.

Just before we board the bus to come back to school the kids run around like crazy for 5 minutes. That's all it takes for the second casualty of the day to occur. And it's my daughter again. I was washing my hands when someone came to tell me she'd fallen over, and I laughed and casually finished drying before I went out to check on her. But then I looked out the open door and saw then entire class including all the adults crowding around her as she lay prone on the ashphalt. Shit! I abandoned the drying and ran out feeling guilty.

She was fine though, she had a graze and probably a bruise on her butt, but it was probably mostly shock at the time. Her legs slipped out from under her and she'd hit the ground hard just below her hip. Her pride however was ever further dented, and she just wanted to sit with me on the bus on the way home. She was crying as we got on because her teacher pairs them off rather than letting them choose their own seat mates.

He's a very smart man though - he manipulated the kids in front so that she had no partner, and then apologised that to her that she'd have to sit with an adult. Which was me. 

So we got to sit together and chat all the way home without her being embarrassed.

There won't be too many more moments where I can take an active part in her school life - let alone her want me to be there, so I love the chances I get.

And I am glad we missed out on the mud rolling.

* Picture credit: It's the cover of a book called "The School Trip" by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen, both of whom have been perennial favourites of my girls!

Tonight was the Sunday night bath, which is a weekly ritual that the girls love. Having grown up with a brother, I am relieved for the sake of the general household aroma that mine are both girls, and therefore likely to continue to enjoy cleanliness even as they reach the teen years.

But baths tend to take up a lot of time because the girls love to play. They still have bath toys. Or more correctly - toys that happen to now live in the bath. They'd squeal and laugh and spell out words for hours if I let them. They get out looking like a pair of little pink prunes, and the bathroom is soaked. 

During the week there are days where we can safely skip a bath, especially when we're coming in late from drama or ballet or any of the other myriad of extra curricular activities we stack our afternoons with.

Sunday on the other hand, is the night before the week begins again. So there is no skipping to be done. Everything needs to be squeaky clean and ready for school. It's the night I stack all the skivvies in the drawer, line up the grey tights, fold the trousers, hang the blouses, iron the tunics and polish the shoes.

And of so course it's also hair wash night, which makes the whole bath thing that bit more involved.

Miss Comic Relief has long thin fine hair. It's not a problem to wash and comb, although keeping it tidy is another thing altogether. But Miss Trouble Pants has long thick wavy hair. It takes ages to work all the shampoo through in the first place, and three times longer to get it out again. It has to be conditioned after shampooing if I'm going to have even one hope in hades of getting a comb through it afterwards.

So the way it works is like this - I wash and rinse their hair first, then smother it in conditioner and pin it up so that it really soaks through. Then I let them play in the bath for a while.

But this week I am not really very on the ball. I've had a cold since monday, when the gods of snot decreed that I should runneth over, and I've been battling the sore throat, cough and sinus headaches all week. It's not actually a bad cold. I just feel crappy. I feel crabby. And I act it too.

I am so crabby that the joyous sounds of my happy children playing and laughing grate on my nerves, and I hide out in my office while they bathe. I'm only in the next room, but the sound is somewhat muted and more bearable. All that pleasure and delight. Ergh. 

I wait until they've reached perfect prune density, then I go back to rinse off the conditioner and get them out of the bath.

I am greeted by a strange sight. As Miss Trouble Pants stands up - a foam "t" sticking to her backside - I notice a strange red rash. It's like a red blob made up of tiny dots just above her bum cheeks. Like dots of blood under the skin. 

I am going in for a closer look, my eyebrows narrowing as I squint at it. I can see that it's a concentrated patch of dark spots.

"What have you done to your back?" I ask, although I already fear that the rash is one of those terrifying varieties that doesn't go away when you press a glass against it, and I am visualising the sodden trip to the A&E in our crappy that had broken down earlier that day.

I don't expect giggling from both girls, and a small blue hippo to be presented as exhibit A.

It's the suction cap that holds the netting bag of bath toys to the tiled wall. Comprehension dawns in a rush, and I realise that what my daughter has on her back.

It's a hickie.

A hickie from the sucking kisses of a plastic hippo!

There are more on Miss Comic Relief's back, although they were not as successfully done, so don't have the really scary look of meningitis. They still stand out on her very pale skin.

Still, at least the hippo didn't invite her up for coffee!

I've always hated the foxes that call our back access passage their home, as they are - for the most part - a mangy pack of degenerate creatures who are also responsible for the theft and mutliation of 3 sneakers. Also suspects in the theft of one thong (the footwear variety).

There are so many of them in this area that they've become quite brazen. They wander about during the early afternoon sometimes, and don't take flight until you get quite near them.

In summer they take over the night with their mating screams and howls.

The very first time I ever heard a vixen on heat, I nearly called the police.

But I heard something recently that made me favour them slightly more than I had. At an allotment talk not too long ago, the "work with nature" guy told us that if we didn't have our fox population on the allotment, then we'd as likely have 5 times the number of rats.

That stopped me in my tracks slightly, as that concept was so much worse than a few mangy and noisy foxes. It didn't make me like them any more, just tolerate them somewhat.

And then my fox moved in.

He's a young fox, and on closer inspection I can see that his leg has been injured in a fight - maybe bitten - but seems to be healing ok. 

He's taken to sleeping on my shed roof, and I keep trying to take photos of him. Already I've put a few up in this blog.

The difficulty is snapping him while he sleeps, as I can't get out of the house to get closer to him at all, so I have to shoot from our bedroom window with my largest lens - which isn't. Then I have problems getting the focus perfect as he's so far away. 

Plus he tends to sleep behind the upright slide or the tree at the end of the shed, so I can't get him without details being obliterated by dangling leaves or a massive orange rectangle.

His hearing is excellent - I see his ears prick up as I first open the window fully wide, then he's looking straight at me when he hears the camera whirr.

I have actually tried a few times to get out near him, but nearly always fail. To start with, it's winter, so the door is always closed at the back of the house - and it squeaks to open! I got all the way to the swings one day and climbed up to snap off a photo. I got one - and the noise of the camera had him in flight within seconds.

I got to the swing another day, but as I snuck my camera around the upright slide he was already taking his leave.

I haven't given him a name yet, but I am sure I will think of one. 

Because he's my mate now.

---

In this photo you can see his injured leg - the skin is pink, but seems to be healing. He just needs to regrow his fur now.

The sun was out, but the roof was covered in frost. And yet he was still there.

This is the view of him from the swing set, but by the time I climbed onto it to get a more level view, he was gone.

I've just spent 2 days without the internet, because BT broke some fancy bit of equipment in a deep dark hole somewhere in Croydon. Or Chichester. Or maybe in Siberia, who cares. The point is, that despite there being several hundred of us on different ISPs without the internet, it took BT over a day to admit that it was their fault.

So I had find things to do that were not internet related. For TWO DAYS. This ranks high up on the horrible chart. In fact, it's right up there with going without coffee. Almost. There is nothing that really ranks as high as coffee. But it was pretty painful overall.

You probably think this post is going to be all about how rewarding I found that time. How I reconnected with nature, found my inner self, discovered the joy of just being me, caught up with reading, wrote my novel or just enjoyed the peace of sitting in the sun and doing nothing.

Not a pinch.

For a start, we haven't seen sun here since 1967. I am not going outside because it's either wet or freezing or both and the back yard is a quagmire of dirt with the occasional lottery win of fox poo.

I don't knit. Not even a teacosy.

I have a tendancy to fart and ruin the moment while meditating, so there is no peace to be had.

I have a cold and feel grumpy, and besides - I need to use IMDB.com in order to look up who on earth that young man in Glee is, and what's the ditzy red haired actress's name who was also in Ugly Betty.

I might even need to look up what I can do with fennel.

I have pressing needs.

And more importantly - I work for a living. My working day revolves around my kids school hours. I drop them off at school. I work. I stop work. I pick them up from school.

I have 6 hours in which to fit in my work, and lets face it - as a web designer there's going to be a high percentage of work that relies on the internet connection being up. Up as in functional. Up as in "hello internet, are you there?" "Why yes, I am. I live to serve."

What I got was "hello internet... hello?" "The internet is not available. Please leave a message after the beep. Beeeeeeeeeep... no, just joking. You can frick right off."

I rang my ISP. 400 other customers rang my ISP. My ISP looked into it and lay the blame at BT's door. BT on the other hand refused to open the door. I guess they expected that the flaming bag was really full of dogshit. Yes it really was. But it was BTs dogshit in the first place.

My ISP very kindly raised a fault report for me. And they very kindly sent me a message about it.

Via email.

And in that email they gave me a very handy link to a webpage where all updates to my fault would be posted.

That would be on the internet, access to which would be necessary in order to see the updates.

Now I'm lucky, I have a way to access the internet that doesn't involve my computer. But the more I use my iPhone to access the internet without my wifi connection, the bigger my phone bill is going to end up. So I don't want to do that too often. I used it solely to send and receive emails to my clients. I avoided all other apps that might try and access the internet.

And yet... can you even guess what one app I did use in my isolation?

Yes, gentle reader. Despite posting about how pointless twitter is, I used it to give myself the illusion I was still in touch with unreality.

And here's the strange thing.

I twittered about my internet outage, uttered the mere acronym of BT, and moments later @btcare was asking if they could help.

How weird is that?

They told me to email them and they'd look into it.

So I did.

But they didn't.

I have a theory about this. I think that some companies think that it's good PR to have lovely little helpful messages out in public showing how "hip" and "with it" they are.

See that little juxtaposition there? They are "with it" and I am "without". I slay myself.

Here is how my twitter conversation with @btcare started:

I won't bore you with the rest, suffice to say that I emailed bt as instructed and received no reply. The next morning I tweeted about it and up popped @btcare again - telling me to email him.

Erm... nope. Not again!

He also pointed out that I could get all my updates from the BT status webpage. Again with the webpages. Isn't there some vital flaw in the idea of keeping people updated about their lack of internet access with messages posted on the internet??

It's like telling people that the ferry times and service alerts are posted at their destination. Um - useful much?

According to my ISP (who I rang on the telly phone) BT finally admitted it was their fault at 1pm today. And at 2pm it was fixed. I spent a glorious hour sending emails and catching up with work, then I had to pick up the kids from school.

When I got home, the internet was gone again. It's kind of like snuffaluffagus isn't it. When he was still an invisible friend that is. Maybe not quite as hairy.

This time my ISP helpline was swamped. I was in a queue for a long time, and when I got through I found out why. This time 3000 of their customers were without internet. It was a different fault, but it was still BT's fault.

Numbers maketh the man however - with 3000 customers from one single ISP, BT fixed this one in two hours. Funny that. They must have felt like they got a shot up the rear from Oscar the Grouch.

And I'm back. It's a kind of special internet present to all of you.

Like digital herpes.