Can You Play Musical Chairs At A Wedding?,

Genuine question because it would honestly make certain things in life, or at least during wedding planning, a lot easier, but it would make things a lot more difficult.

On the plus side, it would take out the need to do a table plan, which is a big thing, because it's not just the display, the ideas of how you do the display, how you put it up (does it go on an easel or a stand or have it's own legs or what?) or about everyone who tries to get involved and say who they will or won't sit with or anything like that, but it is the sitting down and thinking which personalities will mesh well, who is going to clash and who will bring the drama and who will calm the drama. It's about who is going to be shy or feel awkward, who gets nervous and word vomits all over who they are next to (and how the person next to them is going to take that) and all of the other bits that you worry about when you're putting people together for a stretch of at least an hour and a half. If you tell everyone it's a game of musical chairs you take the stress out of it for yourself, but then the problem is you pass it onto your guests and for us that would be horrible for a few people, because a few of them are travelling to the wedding on their own. For people that don't know anyone, it would be really hard.

As if passing the stress on isn't bad enough, and let's face it, it would be bad enough because some people are quite vocal about their disapproval of certain things at weddings, if you've planned a plated meal like we have, it would make it impossible for the venue. I read of a wedding group recently that someone was trying to do a plated meal but without options, so if you could find a dish that worked for everyone then yeah, maybe that works, but we have multiple people with allergies, people with multiple allergies, dietary requirements and sensory food issues, so unless we did something like chips, which let's face it, is not a meal, it wouldn't work. 

I mean, I suppose the answer to all of that is to have a buffet, but I would still worry that it means guests who have come on their own would struggle, and people you would genuinely like to introduce may never meet, and also buffets are, at least to me, somewhat problematic, because it all just feels like snack food and a wedding is a long day (or at least ours feels like it could be) and I need more than snack food to get me through it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

We started on our seating plan weeks ago and honestly found it a struggle, as many people do, but when we sat and looked at it again, pretty much determined that we were going to get it done that evening come hell or high blood pressure, we didn't even argue. We debated a couple of things, looked at it from personalities and also the maths of how many people fit on each table, but then it didn't take too long to come up with something that we thought actually fit the majority of people or was at least the best that we could do. 

And if all else fails, or someone tries to bring the drama, or a couple of people get too into their politics or anything like that, it kind of becomes musical chairs at the evening do anyway, because there are a few more people and the assigned seating kind of idea goes a bit out of the window, doesn't it? In theory people will move around, chat, dance and all that, or at least I would hope that they would... 

Little Library,

No, my library isn't a Little Library like the type people have in their front yard where you can borrow a book, or do a take one leave one kind of idea or anything like that, nor is my library little when it comes to the size of it, but I was struggling with what to call this post and that was the best I could come up with, so sorry and all that.

Today (day of writing, not day of posting) I have been wandering around the house trying to find something. Today is just another episode of an ongoing sequel of me trying to find said thing which is currently missing, and during said frustrating sequel, I have found other things I had stopped looking for because I had solved the problem in a different way. Which is somehow more annoying. Probably about as annoying as me being so vague about the whole thing really. 

The original missing thing was my birth certificate, which generally isn't overly big of a deal because it's not like it's something I need on a regular or even semi regular basis, but I did need it for my and my partner's appointment to give notice ahead of getting married. As I don't have a valid passport, I needed my birth certificate and my mother's birth certificate, and because I had already lost mine and looked everywhere for the damn thing, I had to order another one, so insisted that my mum come with us to the appointment because it was bad enough losing mine, I wasn't going to lose her's as well. That appointment was about three months ago, but I finally found the birth certificate in the loft whilst I was up there looking for my expired passport, because you need the expired one to renew your passport. Who knew?

In the meantime I had also lost the V5 for my car (not my car I actually drive but my first car which has been sat like a large lawn ornament for a few months other than the few weeks my dad needed to borrow it) and I wanted to be able to sell it, and just when I was looking at ordering a new one, but then found someone who wanted to buy it, we found the V5, ordered a new one to update details and then had a nightmare trying to get the tax sorted so the new owner could actually take it home. Oh, and my car keys. For my actual this is the one I drive car. I had the spare, but the spare has a dodgy battery and no keyring loop on it, which means it's smaller and easier to lose (clearly an issue for me). Thankfully that turned up in the pocket of a jacket I barely use, after I had put the spare into a pocket of a bag I always have with me so I knew where it was.

In my head, I can see myself putting the expired passport down the side of a book. It's not into a book, but down the side of a book, with the idea that I don't need it now, won't need it later and it's not something I need to worry about. I wasn't intending to sort out a passport until after the wedding, because it just sounds annoying to have to add it to the already long list of things I need to change my name on, but then we changed our minds a few times about what we want to do as a honeymoon and several of the ideas we are happy with require me to have a passport, so I was looking into doing mine and my son's. Except I can't, because my old one has either crawled away and is laughing to itself (not literally...) or been taken by The Borrowers to be used as a tent for a camping weekend or similar. Seriously, I'm running out of places to keep looking for it.

You might be sat there reading this thinking, there's got to be another way around it and there is, of course, because I'm neither the first, the last nor the only blinking eejit to lose my passport or assume that an expired passport has no value, but having to cancel the old passport and have it replaced takes longer and we're already running into the time of year where passports take longer than usual. Or should I say one of the points of the year, so I want to try and get it to take the least amount of time as possible, though I appreciate that doing so is meaning that I am wasting the amount of time that would have been added on by the cancelling, but it's a bit of a sunken cost fallacy now and trying to convince myself to just abandon the search is annoying me, because I know that the second I have done it, the missing one will turn up and it will bug me.

What does this have to do with the library? Well for one, between my future husband and I we went through the... several hundred... books on the shelves to check that the passport wasn't between any of them, and it wasn't annoyingly, so today I put all of the rest of the books from the boxes in the front room onto the shelves so I could check between the rest of the books, and it was still not there. As I was unpacking everything there was a buzzing through my head about the number of books I have and all of the comments people make about the number of books I own (to which I say, shuddup) but, possibly as a byproduct from having watched The Testaments recently, but my head went Gilead and the fictional worlds of Christine Dalcher and how owning books was prohibited for women, and the world of V for Vendetta where owning certain books was prohibited, most famously the Quran. I remembered a moment of standing in a street in Berlin where a piece of artwork built into the floor depicting empty shelves to represent all of the books that were burnt why the Nazis. All of this is to say that there are times in history and times in fiction where owning books, or at the very least a certain type of books, is considered to be an act of treason or an act of rebellion. Obviously I like the rebellion idea a little better.

Now, I'm not trying to suggest that that's the reason I own them all, because it's not. Even before I was aware of having ADHD there were signs and signals for the right person to pick up on, even if no one did until I was in my thirties... When I started collecting books (to the best of my memory it started with Goosebumps when I was about nine) these ideas were completely alien to me, but it might be part of the reason I continue to own them, even though I have been making efforts to at least slightly slim down my collection. It's also worth noting that although, as I mentioned, some of these worlds are fictional, I wouldn't be the first or only person to draw parallels with certain political figures, parties, ideologies etc to those worlds, so it's really not that out there to think that it's possible that during our lifetimes, owning books, whether specific or any sort, could again be an act of rebellion. Just a thought.

Sht Happens,

I feel like pre-baby, I vastly overestimated the amount of 'blow out' nappies we were going to have, and whilst I appreciate that might sound like a really privileged thing to say, it is not, or at least not in my view.

I do have to wonder if one of the reasons we've not had as many 'blow outs' as the internet and other parents led us to believe we would is because my son has had digestive issues since he was only a few days old, leading to us spending far too many hours in the hospital when he was 4-6 days old (and yes, that was over the Christmas period) so yes, we've gone through difficult periods of constipation, but that normally results in the kind of thing that you would expect to cause a 'blow out' and it very rarely does. In completely honesty, the only real problems we have had have either been when we haven't realised he's pooped immediately and he's been sat in it for a bit of time, or when we've checked if he's pooped by pulling the frilly bit away from his leg, and then there is a leak... There have been more times when he has peed through his nappy, but even that hasn't been overly common. From what I understood in the before times, I thought it would be the sort of thing which happened at least a couple of times a week.

Why does it matter? Surely this is meaning that parenting is easier than you expected it to be? Well, no, not really, because you very quickly learn that cleaning up a dirty nappy or even a very wet nappy is not as complicated as you think it is, even when you accidentally leave the packet of baby wipes on the table when you're repacking the nappy bag. That might be because we carry wet bags (the type from reusable nappies, even though we're not using the reusable nappies at the moment), at least two extra outfits and I recently left the packing cubes of clothes we took on a road trip in the car because they had extra clothes, extra muslins, extra bibs and extra wet bags in the car for a week in case I needed them each time I went out, but I like to think that's just normal preparation... 

So, why does it matter? Because when you are planning how many clothes you are going to need for your baby it is a factor, and if I was being really nerdy (which I can be) I'd say it's the thing that takes you from thinking, how many clothes do I need, the answer is n, and turning n into like 10n (or 10 times n). You over plan, over buy, and then have to store all of these clothes that you just don't need. Some of it you bought, some of it friends and family bought and gifted to you, some of it you inherit from other people who've had babies, and some of it will never come out of the wardrobe, or it will be worn once or twice before the baby that was so tiny in it the first time you put it on is now spilling out of it in all directions, and you probably didn't even get a photo for the person who bought it for you. (I had always planned on getting a photo of the baby in each outfit that was bought for them and sending it to the person who bought it, and I have really tried, but I have also lost track of so many of the gifts, because there were a lot and there was a lot going on, obviously!!) 

Now, I know some people will say prioritise the gifts, but even doing that there was still a lot, or don't have them or let them rewear something that has been stained with food or anything else, but particularly when they get to the age little man is at the moment where they are eating purees, some things go on the outfit no matter how many bibs or wipes or anything you use, and then they never come out. And if you choose not to reuse things because that has happened, you'd just be spreading out the amount of things you were getting stains on, because like I said, it happens. There is a reason that some people keep one outfit, or set of outfits for nursery, and it's not just because kids play with glitter and paint and other messy stuff, but because they are messy when they learn to eat. My son was wearing a vest, t-shirt, shorts and a bib for about ten minutes this morning, because he dribbled his porridge down his bid and his shirt (and a tiny bit onto his vest) and smeared his porridge on his shorts, so everything but the vest had to come off, and that was only because I didn't have the energy or motivation to take him upstairs for a tiny wet patch on the vest which would be dry in no time thanks to the current weather, or would get bigger when he dribbled through or around his next bib. Last night, following a rather successful encounter with a pumpkin puree pocket (try saying that three times fast without tripping over the letters...) I had to put the whole baby in the bath because it was everywhere, and that's just where we're at along the weaning journey at the moment, so unless I stick to foods which won't stain (which sound beige and boring) we're probably more likely to be going for multiple changes a day now, even more so than when he was tiny, and I'm fine with that.

But I'm also still finding and packing up his nought to three month clothes and some of the newborn, first size and tiny baby ones as well, including the pram suits and realising that even though pram suits are generous in size so mostly you can wear them a little longer than some of the baby grows of the same size, they're still not in them for long and you don't need three or four to give you time to wash and dry them because they don't get that dirty on every wear, babies don't sweat like adults do in puffer jackets and, most importantly, most baby clothing is actually tumble dryable, so it can get washed and dried in between uses pretty easily, as long as parents can keep their eyes open long enough to run the machines.

That Wedding Series,

Welcome back to the Charlie moans about wedding planning and wedding things... If you're getting bored, don't worry, it's nearly here, which hopefully means the moaning over it is nearly over. Wouldn't that be good?

What do I want to moan about today? Okay, this is less of a moan, and more of a... I don't know. 

Once upon a tradition, people hadn't lived together before they got married and the vast majority wouldn't have lived out of their parent's house, so the things you got for wedding presents were essentially the things to kit out your kitchen or towels, because you didn't have any. It was like with a baby shower - you've not got any of the things you need yet, so here is everything. As time moved on, people potentially had lived out even if they didn't live together - for example, my mum had lived with her sister in law who is also one of her closest friends, whilst my dad still stayed at home with him parents - so instead of needing everything from scratch, wedding presents were things like a better set of pans, like Le Creuset, or a wedding dinner set which only ever comes out at Christmas or special occasions and never for the kids. (I don't blame my parents for that, because I drop things a lot.)

These days, it's really not that uncommon to have lived together before you marry and it's also not uncommon to already have a child or two, and so when people ask what you want as a wedding present, a lot of people will ask for money for the honeymoon. Mentioning no names but a few of my relatives think that is hideous. I'm passing no judgement because I completely understand why that would be the case, but I also understand why people don't much like the idea of it. Maybe one of the reasons I'm not overly fussed either way is because I don't currently have a passport and neither does my son, so we're probably not going to get the chance to book a honeymoon abroad and we've realised that our son isn't the biggest fan of a road trip which takes out a lot of options where we don't need passports. Maybe if we were booking something I would be saying the same as others because hell, we don't need anything...

We've been living in a house that we share since October, were living together in my house for a few months before that and were living across both houses before that, because from pretty early on we knew that we just wanted to spend time together, but none of that is simple, because we had to try and condense the contents of two houses into one, and at the same time gained a whole bunch of stuff for the baby. We were really, really lucky in that we were giving a lot of things to help us with the baby, but it was more stuff to find places for and there have needed to be a lot of decisions to get rid of some things and there's still a lot where we have duplicates of things. Some of that isn't so bad because it's things like milk frothers, which break when I use them a lot so having a spare is fine, or kettles, which is good because we have a baby who needs bottles making and my kettle is a dumbass smart thing that likes dribbling (but we love being able to yell at the Alexa to turn it off when we've left it on Keep Warm) but other things are less easy because they're things like a fridge freezer (so we have one in the garage to keep Costco packs of drinks in or huge packs of chicken nuggets and the other in the house).

All this is to say that tradition wedding presents aren't really something which we would need at all. Fancy wine glasses? We've got a few, ta. Fancy dinner set? As mentioned before, I drop things. In fact, we both do. Also, whilst I can understand that some people might want to get something personalised, I think it's a difficult one if the couple don't have a registry and ask for something particularly, because unless you know people really, really well, taste is a major factor, and decor is personal. 

You'd think from all this that I would be all over making a registry for the wedding and the truth is that I tried, but the problem is that we really don't want or need anything we can list from stores and if we do want or need it, it's normally because it's out of the budget of what we can spend on a month to month basis and we're trying to get past the wedding before making any major purchases because weddings are expensive enough, and I'm on maternity leave! Statutory pay is absolutely no joke, and we need to be careful about things we need to pay out for - like the photographer for the wedding - and things we don't - like an American style fridge and a carpenter to modify the kitchen cabinets so it fits where we want it, considering we have a working fridge. 

As far as I've researched there isn't something that can create like, pots, essentially, for gifting into, where the money is to be used for something specific, but that people can contribute whatever amount they want to contribute to. Let's face it, I could do a registry and put an American style fridge on there, but there are very few guests coming to my wedding that I think would be spending that kind of money on a gift - nor would I want them to! BUT if were had, for example, a 'pot' for the kitchen which was for the fridge and the work to fit it where it should be going, and people could choose to add whatever they wanted to it as a gift, it takes some of the hassle out for them trying to think of a gift, or the worry we won't need it, use it or like it, and also would help us with actual practical things we need or want to do with the house. Another example could easily be the bathroom. Neither of us is a fan on the tile, the cabinets have seen better days and the general amount of storage in there is abysmal, plus a really stupid part of the shower screen is broken so it's not working perfectly but is not annoying enough to warrant being high on the list for being fixed at present, but have a 'pot' for it where it's assigned to something like Wickes or B&Q or something, something that was specifically bathrooms, that would be really cool, though I appreciate it would be something that would take a whole lot of administration, but it would still be really cool. As it is, when people ask what we need I give the equivalent of a non-comital shrug, because I really don't know... 

And let's face it, a gift registry is only ever suggestions anyway...

There Is Something More Frustrating Than A Blank Page,

I have thought before that the most frustrating thing is a blank page, but that's because I've never been planning something big as far in advance as I have been with the wedding.

The thing about the wedding is it gives me plenty of things I want to write about, but there is a lot of it that I don't want to post until after the wedding because some of the people reading it will be attending the wedding and I'm being a bit River Song over it (Spoilers...) 

And let's be honest, there is a lot of it which would just be moaning, partly because the things I have already posted have been moans. Wedding planning is stressful and there is a lot to it that I never knew about or never thought about and some really stupid bits like, because we already have a child together, his birth needs to be re-registered after the wedding so that he is seen as a child of our marriage, even though he wasn't because he was born over eight months before we were married...

It seems really stupid to me, but it is something that we have to do.

I have even considered posting some of the things I have been writing or wanting to write about the wedding, but blanking out certain details or changing details so that it doesn't have those sort of spoilers, but at the same time it seems weird to do this. For once, it is not a blank page which frustrates me, but pages full of things I want to say that it is not the time to say, so I have to delay it until after the wedding is done.

That Photo,

Let me start this by saying I am a habitual nail biter and have been for a decent chunk of my life. I have used the "trick" of painting my nails clear or nude or with a transparent glitter in order to not bite them for a small period, but my nails are pathetic and not just because of how long I have bitten them for; my mum's nails kind of suck as well (sorry Mum). I was never really bothered by it. And then I got engaged...

When we got engaged, I didn't want a photo of the ring on my hand where my nails were visible, because I just hated that they looked so awful and having a beautiful engagement ring (I think she's gorgeous anyway) only made me feel like they looked worse, but I just didn't take the 'traditional' photo or photos like the photo of just my hand and the ring or one with my hand on him with the ring visible, and I never really thought it bothered me too much that I didn't have it. And then I thought about our wedding photos... 

We've spent a fair amount of money on having a photographer for certain parts of the day, partly with the idea that at least one of those photos will be hanging in our house, and let's face it, both sets of parents are likely to want a photo from it in their homes, as are our grandparents, and I just kept thinking about how it would either be really hard to hide my hands, or they would just look awful, so when we were walking around the village a few weeks back getting errands done, I went into the nail salon and asked if there was anything that they could do to sort them out.

When I was going for the appointment, my partner asked how long I would be so he knew whether to try and keep the baby awake for me or to do bedtime solo, and I told him I had no idea. I even had to Google it on the way there as to what the type of nails I was getting done were since I had no idea. I had never had a manicure before so I had no clue about any of it. I didn't know how often I was going to need to get it done so they're alright for the wedding, or how much it was going to cost, but I knew it was going to be worth it so I didn't have to feel like they were ugly as hell and something I needed to hide on my wedding day, and I was right.

The finished nails are not something ridiculous or obvious, but they are a significant improvement, so much so that I  couldn't stop looking at them and kind of wanted to take the photos we had missed out on when we got engaged, but at the same time I don't want to feel like I'm trying to rewrite history just because I like something about myself now that I didn't like back then, but like this I can keep them looking lovely and have them looking nice on my wedding day for the photos with our rings and actually any of the photos that we have taken for the day. It seems like such a little thing but it's the sort of little thing that means a lot and I'm glad it's another item ticked off of the to do list. And given the number of things we are doing in the next few weeks, including a couple of My Chemical Romance gigs, I'm kind of proud that I didn't go for something crazy like black or red polish that would have been a lot more obvious!! 

The Unfinished Nursery,

Whilst I was still pregnant, I kept seeing photos and videos of people who were due at around the same time as me, or just before, or just after!, having finished their child's nursery. At the time I was naively thinking we would have plenty of time to sort it when we moved, then when we moved and I was basically useless for anything it was thinking that we would have time when he arrived to get the nursery done before he moved in there. Now when I think that the only thing I think  is about the bit in Billy Elliot where the dance teacher says 'The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow. Fat. Chance.'

This isn't to say that nothing in the nursery was done. The cot was put together well in advance and we had an over the cot changing mat in place as well as the obligatory IKEA changing table. There's a slight difference in height which makes a big difference to my back in terms of pain and thankfully the separate table is better for my back, because the over the cot one has had to come off now he's sleeping in there and I'm not picking it up every time he needs a change, because he needs a change a lot...

We got an IKEA cabinet in there as a second wardrobe, sorted out the first wardrobe and have changed it around a few times too depending on where we were up to with different things we were trying (like having to have the wet bags handy when we were still using reusable nappies), but the walls are still white, the wallpaper is still half torn down and the carpet is still full of marks and splashes of things that happened before we bought the house.

Our nursery is far from picture perfect, and it's actually far from functionally perfect. There's a few steps between the nursery and the bathroom, and a long way between the nursery and the sink in our room, so any messy hands take a while to get clean. It's also a long trek through the majority of the house in order to get to the bin with any bags of nappies. Honestly I have told my partner that I would love to put a sink in there, which wouldn't be too hard really, but it's not something we're going to do immediately. The thing I would love to do immediately though is put something of a very small slide tube down from the window... and then park a bin under it. Maybe it's just me and having something against the Tommy Tippee bin that Amazon seem to think every parent wants, but I don't like them and there are some things even scented bin liners can't fix or help. On those days, I wish it was possible to just throw everything straight out of the window into a tube that passed down right into the outside bin.

The problem with this, of course, is a lid, and the fact we live in the country side and near a river so foxes, rats and other rodents... 

I don't think the nursery will ever be 'finished' until we are done having kids, and therefore done having a nursery in our house at which point it won't be the nursery that's done, but our nursery era, partly because of how we both are and our need to reorganise, but also because our son is young and developing and that constant growth and change means what he needs from the room is changing and evolving. We have to change things to keep him safe, move things so he can get to and use them, and move other things because he's either past them or bored of them. Some things are there waiting for him to be ready for them and some things are just stored because we don't need them anymore, but we're planning to, or at least hoping to, have another kid at some point, so we need to keep them somewhere and ideally not forget we have them!!