Monthly Archives: May 2016

School

MOT Karma

Now we walk to school every day and on the odd occasion that we don’t, usually because we are dashing off somewhere, I park a couple of minutes walk from the school (somewhere legal that I can park considerately).  I know from observation and the school newsletter that a fair few don’t.  It’s a problem at a lot of schools isn’t it?

This week on our local Facebook page, something unfolded that had me laughing my head off.  Someone parked once too often in front of a women’s dropped kerb drive so they could pick the kids up from school.  To make matters worse they laughed at her when she took them to task.  She took her revenge on Facebook.

Pictures of the car went up and the number plates were there for all to see.  It wasn’t done in a nasty way, but it was done by a lady who had had enough.  Someone who knew the culprit tagged them in and the drama kicked off.  There were demands to take the pictures down and screams about loss of privacy and even talk of ‘what if I was in the witness protection programme (of course, the answer to that is if you were, you wouldn’t have behaved in a way that drew attention to yourself).  You’ll note it was all about what you have done to me and there was no apology to be seen.

Then, and this is the bit that really tickled me, someone else said they’d checked the government website and this vehicle had no MOT.  They posted the screen shot.  I was howling with laughter. There was an indignant post saying that they had a full MOT and that it had gone in that day to be done.  Not many people really believed that, as it seemed unlikely when the MOT had expired in March. It all went quiet then and there was still no apology.

I checked the government site a few days later and the car has an MOT now, but it was tested the day after all this action took place.  Now the cynic in me thinks they have been driving around for about 2 months in a car without an MOT, which presumably means their insurance is invalid and of course the car might have a serious fault (it apparently failed at its first test so there was something).  I know an MOT is only a snapshot and I guess you could forget about it, although my garage does remind me.

I guess there are just some selfish people out there who don’t care if they park in front of people’s drives and don’t care if there car has the legal necessities.  Plus they are happy enough to drive their kids around in said car.  At least in this case I think everyone, who knows this family, will now know how considerate or not they are.

Bedwetting

Dry At Night? Nearly There?

In the past I’ve written about the problems we’ve had with J not being dry at night.  For some time now we have been doing without night-time nappies, unless we are away from home from the night and then we sometimes do just to reduce the chance of an embarrassing accident.

Most of the time we have achieved this largely by lifting J.  Whilst I regard that as cheating really – you can’t say your child is dry at night if you are lifting them as it is you making sure they are dry and not them.  For us it was a useful thing to do though as J felt nappies or pyjama pants were babyish and he preferred to avoid them. Recently, though we have stopped lifting him and he has still been mostly dry.

I think this means that his body is now producing enough vasopressin, the hormone that reduces urine production at night.  So this is a step in the right direction, but he is not waking to signals from his bladder.  The other night he had an accident at 5am and I expect a few more before we are done.   Hopefully those signals from the bladder will start to come through a bit stronger soon, so that we can say goodbye to wet sheets.

It’s been a long haul and at 9 J is still having a few problems.  It has had an impact on his life: he has turned down cub camps because of it.  Thankfully our school doesn’t do a residential until the last year of primary, so I’m really hoping he will be over it completely by then.

I do think there is far too much expectation about being dry at night at an early age.  The problem is though is that J is afraid of being teased by his peers and I’m guessing that parents of kids who don’t have a problem, don’t really address this issue.  Ho hum!