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The Gallery 176 – Morning

This weeks theme is “Morning”.

Last year, we paid a small fortune to hire a static at Grannies Heilan Hame, and one that was overlooking the beach.  It was lovely, and when the tide went out, there were some lovely mornings where middler could go and dig on the beach, even on his own as we were so close to him.    The view was absolutely gorgeous and is still the best view I’ve seen in the past year.  Even France just didn’t have anything like the same views where we were.

It’s fast coming up to April again and the fabulous time of year when new things grow and baby animals are born.  It’s a great time of year to be out and about with kids, and sunny mornings are something to be thankful for. I’m looking for ward to them coming around again very soon.

Grannies Heilan Hame 1

If you’re not sure what the gallery is, pop over to Tara’s at Sticky Fingers and see.   Just click the blog badge.

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The Gallery 175 – Guilty Pleasures

I’ve not done the gallery for a few years, and I think it’s about time I joined back up again and got back to talking to other bloggers a bit more again.

This weeks topic is guilty pleasure and that one is actually quite easy as our house favourite has to be the beetroot brownies we were challenged to make a year ago.

brownie

They have some of the good beetrooty stuff in them as well as the other fully guilty pleasure ingredients so I try not to make them too often….  Did  say that I try?

Beetroot Brownies 1

If you’re not sure what the gallery is, pop over to Tara’s at Sticky Fingers and see.   Just click the blog badge.

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The Gallery – Frightfully Over

(Sadly I had to remove the image from this blog post as it was being hotlinked to from a Chinese website where the man said they were his kids).

I’m actually quite sad that my kids are not really wanting to do much of the Halloween type things this year.  I can probably safely say that they won’t go Trick or Treating – or Guising as we call it up here for too much longer.

Yes, eldest and littler might go their own ways, and yes, middler is probably going to want to do it until he’s 25, but other people wouldn’t understand a big kid knocking on their door and enthusiastically reciting a joke like:

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Because it’s Christmas next week.

Eldests costume had middler in tears for about half an hour before we ventured out, and there were very few people going from door to door.   A few doors asked us to take as many sweets as they could carry as they’d not seen any guisers.

It was absolutely freezing, so I can totally understand why.

Needless to say, we didn’t stay out long, and only managed two streets before littlest and I put our feet down and made the other two join us in heading home.  Entrepreneurial eldest and middler were all for cashing in on the lack of door knockers and would have stayed out much much longer…..

Here they are, my Frightful Kids.

 

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The Gallery – Books

I thought I’d join in the Gallery Blog Link Up this week.  It’s been a long week and a half off school with the kids, and they’re going a bit stir crazy as they’re grounded.  One thing that can always help to diffuse things with the special needs middler is to sit and read a book to him, but not the bread makers bible, obviously.  That’s me putting a book out of sight in a hurry I’d guess.  I can’ really remember.

It’s all his own choice.  Sometimes he’ll let you, and other times he won’t.   Our books are more than dog-eared, they’re often trashed and ripped.   I grew up to respect and revere books as something special, so accepting damage to books is something I have had to learn to live with.

My kids books don’t get packed away, or sent onto anyone else after my kids are finished with them.  They are so well used here, that they end up in the bin if they last.  This book has an awful lot to answer for with pre-teen behaviour, I can tell ya.

I think the one advantage of an 11-year-old who can’t read is that the books are read again and again and again and again, and then some more.

I always have a stack of books, even when my Kindle is still full.  My mum has a pile of mine that I am waiting to get back, and this is the stack that I am planning on reading next.  I’ve managed to have the house bookcase full of work things so now books have nowhere to go. They are in cupboards, drawers and in the bottoms of wardrobes.  I am much better at giving my books away and my neighbour always has a stack of ones I’ve not read.

I love my kindle apps, but there are times I just want a good old-fashioned paper book to read.

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Tomorrow

This is an easy gallery posting for me to write about.  I have not joined the gallery before, so this is a new one for me.  I am writing this, and keeping it as short as I can.

It has the ability to end up as a rant, but I really want it to act as an education.

On twitter today, I had a discussion with a few people who had differing views on spelling and grammatical errors.   It was a pleasant chat and we discussed some opinions on this.  I hope this post is taken in the same vein.

I have come across the spelling / grammer issues many times, and without being dictatorial about it, The Gallery gives this the perfect platform.  I waded in with both feet on twitter as it is a theme that I have been aware of a lot more recently.

More and more tweets flash past in my timeline, and they are complaining about  spelling and grammar.  I am doing my little bit to stop that going any further than it already has as social media houses a very large proportion of fanatical readers and writers (myself included).  It took me a long time to learn what I am going to say, and I wish I had realised it earlier in my life.  It really did take having special needs children for this to sink in.

Lets just stop and think for a moment.

  • What if your opinion today is that people with bad spelling and grammatical errors are lazy, or just can’t be bothered?
  • What if you are offended by those people who get their words mixed up and use them in the wrong context?
  • How do you react when people whose commas, full stops, and question marks are in the wrong place?

Lets look at this from a different angle.

  • What if you came from an abusive background and you had little schooling.  You struggled to read and write, and  you couldn’t attend classes as you have three young children to look after.  There is no-one to help you with childcare, and social media is your sole way of communicating and talking to other adults?
  • What if you have grown up with a learning difficulty, but you have fought to be able to learn to communicate, and your brain won’t always let you remember the correct order, work formation and structure to sentences.
  • What if you had an aptitude so fantastic that you could receive a Nobel Peace Prize for the value of your work in Mathematics, but you just couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind why some words mean completely different things in different sentences.
  • What if you have a brilliant business brain, and people better than you at english do your promotional literature, but you want to meet your public through social media.  Would you prefer they saw you, or someone pretending to be you because their spelling is better.
  • Imagine you are a small business start up who can’t afford to employ someone to do your social media for you.  How are you going to connect with people if you can’t enter the modern age because people will judge your business by how well you can write?

If a company has promotional material to make themselves look professional, then they pay for that to be error free.  Large companies can afford to have eloquent people run their social media for them.

Perhaps the person at the other end of the spelling mistakes is ill.  Perhaps they could be the best friend that you ever made.  Perhaps you need some help and they are the one that steps up to the plate for you.

All I have to say to those who struggle to accept people who do not manage to meet your own standards of writing in the English language is:

Tomorrow – “Step away from the dictionary.”

ps I have not spell checked this post.