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I found this on Youtube, and I really couldn’t resist sharing it. I once had to introduce a teensy kitten to two adult cats and the process was pretty similar. We had our cats eye each other up through glass doors for a few days, but the steps seem to be pretty common and I still get asked how to introduce cats.
The cats protection league has a section titled : How can I introduce my new cat to my existing cat? which gives us good pointers on how to make the introductions slowly and with care to make sure that they accept each other.
The general steps for introducing cats to each other seems to be.
1. Allow the animals to smell and see each other through a door for a few days, each cat with plenty food, water and comfort.
2. Slowly introduce them to each other by scent on your clothes, and on hands until they get used to the scent of each other.
3. Allow them to be in the same room in your presence where you can supervise and ensure that a vulnerable cat is safe.
4. Take your time as some cats will take longer to get used to new cats than others.
I challenge you not to say awwwww at the end of this video introducing a kitten to a cat …
This post isn’t one for bleating or winging about what some of us can’t get, or miss out on for our disabled or elder care families. This one I am actually very pleased with and at the same time, massively surprised about as it seems to be UK wide, but at what levels I am not quite sure.
It started at parents night at middlers special school. The alarm system man was there to show off the systems that can be used to help families who need to know what is happening through the night.
Imagine waking up by hearing a crying child who’d been kicked out of their bed. Imagine hearing a noise downstairs and then investigating to find a child with front and back doors open and four burners of the gas turned on !!!!! The potential is enormous for many parents of special needs children. Our solution was to have one adult sleep downstairs permanently.
I had asked doctors, consultants, social workers and more for solutions to it, and the only answers I could get were to lock the doors so he couldn’t get downstairs, or put new doors on so that they could be locked. I had visions of horror in the event of fire, or if something happened and the kids couldn’t get downstairs or out of the front door as the key is under my pillow.
Cutting a long story short, coming across these alarms is kind of bitter-sweet. We’ve struggled for years, when there was a solution on our doorsteps, and one that the council also provides for free here. The only charge is for things like elder care fall alerts at £1.80 a week to link up to a call centre.
The equipment is free for us in Aberdeen, and it looks free from a lot of the local authorities I’ve had a look at. I think Aberdeenshire is £4 month, but I think most people could stretch to that for peace of mind.
After persuading my mother that she needed an alert too after falling downstairs and making this mess of herself, she finally gave in to the fact that there needs to be some way of raising an alarm when I’m here as well as when I’m away. I was two rooms away and had no idea she had fallen face first from the top to the bottom of the stairs.
The picture was 2 days after falling. By 5 days, the bruising had joined up under her eyes and cheekbones. The kids said that her bruises were “growing”. Although she looks nowhere near her 77 years, she has arthritis which makes falling actually quite easy. There were no broken bones which amazed me.
She has two pendants and a wrist watch style fall alert. If she falls with the watch on, it automatically sends an alert to my wrist watch and to the care centre, just in case I don’t hear it. She can use the pendants to either just get my attention, or to go to a call centre for help if I am not here.
We have a door alarm on middlers door which is actually quite small (wandering alert). It goes to a unit which I keep beside my bed and wakes me up if his door is opened. He doesn’t know how I know that he has left his room and I can usher him back to his bedroom and safety.
Alert Handset
In Aberdeen, they are raising awareness of the systems as too few people seem to know about them. My first question was “how much will it cost”. Sceptical as usual…. The equipment was installed within 2 weeks of my initial self referral. An assessor came out to do an assessment of what would be needed, and two fitters came a mere few days later to install all the equipment.
The service was absolutely amazing, and I don’t say that lightly.
If you know someone who could benefit from peace of mind, let them know to look for it in their area. They really are worth having and I have to say it again, I have been enormously impressed by the Aberdeen Telecare Information Service.
We’re sleeping easier and the wrecked lounge come bedroom is getting a makeover to celebrate it’s return to being solely a lounge.
To put it simply, we all know that Google Page Rank counts for some things, whether we want to admit it or not. It’s google for heavens sake, and they are the law of he who must be obeyed for good search engine results. It’s easy to check google page rank, but we need to know roughly where we are so that it actually means something.
An increase of page rank seems to factor as a multiplier, ie it is 10 times more difficult to get move up each step of the ladder from Page Rank 0 to Page Rank 10. Rumour has it that there are now into the trillions of websites out there, so a little perspective when looking at the numbers helps make us feel a bit better about where we sit in the great Google empire.
We don’t know exactly how Google works it, but going by the guesstimate that it seems to work to, this is a simple way of explaining it. The even harder thing is that we have no way of knowing at which end of the scale our sites are at. I’m a 3, so I could be anywhere between ten million and a hundred million. My next goal is just to slog along to get to that Page Rank of 4.
Google Page Rank 10 – THE top 10 websites in the world.
Google Page Rank 9 – The top 100 websites.
Google Page Rank 8 – The top 1000 websites.
Google Page Rank 7 – The top 10,000 websites
Google Page Rank 6 – The top 100,000 websites
Google Page Rank 5 – The top 1,000,000
Google Page Rank 4 – The top 10,000,000
Google Page Rank 3 – The top 100,000,000
Google Page Rank 2 – Low, going by the factor of 10 means within the top 1000,000,000
Google Page Rank 1 – Low, multiplier added means within the top 10,000,000,000
Google Page Rank 0 – Very new, or penalised for breaching google webmaster guidelines.
Find out what yours is with a google page rank checker.
Update 27/6/12 – Olivia has flown back to the UK from Mexico.
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Update: Over £140,000 has been raised so far and the plane is on it’s way to get her. Hopefully she is released from hospital in Tijuana and can come home with her family.
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This is Olivia. She is 7 years old and she has neuroblastoma, which is a form of cancer. She lives in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, so it is my neck of the woods.
SHE NEEDS OUR HELP TO GET HOME – Her parents are only allowed to spend 45 minutes a day with her in Mexico.
Could you imagine being in the position of having a very sick child who is stuck in a foreign country after taking a turn for the worse? It might never happen to us, but it has happened to Olivia and her family.
She is now so gravely ill that she cannot be flown home on a chartered flight, and needs specialist help to get back as she is dying. Her family can’t afford to get her home again, and there is a just giving page set up to enable them to raise enough cash to take Olivia home.
As at 4pm tonight, the fund is sitting at £79,000 and it needs to get to £110,000 to get her home.
If you have a few pounds to spare, please visit her just giving page at Olivia Downie Appeal.
You can donate by text. Text OLIV95 and your amount £1 – £10 to 70070.
Head on over to the Appeal page and leave what you can and pass it on using one of the two twitter hashtags on the go #getoliviahome #bringoliviahome
Olivia hasn’t got long, I am hoping everyone can get her home.
If you don’t have the money to donate to the appeal, please tweet, facebook, digg, stumbleupon, reddit and more.
Don’t comment here, go and visit the just giving page. Olivia Downie Appeal.
Forget that it’s summer now as the weather has been atrocious. I had the kids with me last week when we went out and about to get some cheapie new curtains for the lounge I am decorating. Ok, the curtains didn’t end up as cheap as I was hoping to get them, but they’re certainly a bargain compared to the old faded drapes they are replacing.
Popping in to the Staples at Berryden, which is pretty close by, we really just went for a browse. We came out with a basket full of cheap goodies and new school bags for August. The kids were most excited about their find of some cheap artists canvas boxes, and the prospect of painting with acrylics.
Fab tracing by littlest.
A whole afternoon was spent dabbing, dotting and drawing and my kids were engrossed until their canvas masterpieces were finished.
Middler wasn’t interested so I tried my best to get some sort of semblance of some kind of abstract flower. Am completely ok with how amateur it is, but we all had a fabulous afternoon and are now eagerly awaiting some more blank canvases arriving from Amazon.
My “cough” masterpiece.
The kids bedrooms will be full of their own pictures soon. We’re planning on possibly painting a larger canvas sheet with dots and dabs to match the new lounge when I eventually get it completely finished. It’s a tempting blank canvas at the moment.
Littlest creation. He regrets adding the dark black line around his figure.Eldest gave his dad this for fathers day, saying that it was a picture of his dad when he gets old.
I half wish I knew someone who was a street artist to do something fancy, but you can’t win them all can you.
Who says bloggers don’t get anything done? Well not us, that’s for sure, we do have blogger power.
Parent bloggers have raised enough for 6 children so far, and are on the way to 7 children in Niger for the next year. Help us do more and expand the network willing to help. Lots of us can’t justify the whole price at over £20 a month each, so the sponsorships are being gathered in a way that almost everyone can afford to join in with.
A subscription for anything from £1 gives us some to add to the pot, or even just a one of donation of whatever you can afford gives enough to sponsor a child for a year when it is added into the pot. Some bloggers are doing a child share and for £6 a month, they are committing to 1/4 a child each. Two children have just donated for 1/4 of a child. How fabulous is that.
#ShareNiger came about when blogger Sian To went to West Africa and the Niger region with World Vision. The trip was shared among our community by blogging and tweeting, and the media picked up on the stories.
How could anyone fail to be moved by the plight of this lady trying to keep her whole family alive on the pack of baby food she is given to feed just one child.
I know you need to know more. I have pledged and paid for my 1/4, if you can pledge anything, a family will live a little easier in the Niger region. Supported by World Vision, and with promises from the Government to pledge £1 for every £1 we raise, Sian and Merry Raymond are gathering bloggers together to sponsor children in the deprived area Sian visited.
If you can’t afford to give money towards sponsoring a child, you could help to do your bit by retweeting or blogging and helping raise awareness among your own online community. For anyone who read this far, thank you for reading, and lets see us get to 10 children with the support of social media.
These beef olives were from @aberdeenbutcher on Twitter, or Andrew Gordon Butchery in Chattan Place Aberdeen. It has to be the best meat I’ve ever tasted.
A friends husband gave us these sapling plants and we have no idea what they are so if you know, please let us know. We’ve got a fair few of them sitting in the plastic greenhouse at the moment so grow your own vegetables should be interesting.
Summer Sun – we go to a club every week that we help run. For my special needs child it really is his lifeline out of school. With other children that he can relate, he doesn’t have to worry about what is said or done. If another special needs child says something out of turn, it really is because they just don’t like each other, and nothing to do with their disabilities. It is lovely to see these kids acting like kids, and the mums get to have a coffee and a chat with other mums that “get it”. Friendship is fabulous.
It’s nice to see kids making the most of the sun, even it if it is just to laze about on the grass.
Can I put cooked garlic mushrooms in the fridge for a couple of days
Neeps is just short for turnips.
Made this last night and it as perfect , i never made bread before and its the first time i…