I had the most delicious weekend. It wasn’t that anything that remarkable in the general scheme of things, but it just worked so nicely. The children were with their grandparents on Friday evening which meant a bit of a sleep in on Saturday morning. Evie had a birthday party from twelve to three and J elected to stay and hang out with Grandad for the afternoon which left Dave and I free to have a wander in Greystones with the dog and then to eat the most delicious lunch together for the first time in years probably. Somehow, the day was a perfect balance of children, Me Time and Us Time. (Us Time is an acknowledged necessity if we are to keep this thing running as sweetly as it seems to be at the moment.)

Yesterday, we threw caution to the winds and went to visit the ISPCA’s National Animal Centre in Co. Longford. Mainly because I caught sight of this little lady on their website and Dave melted a bit we wanted to meet her and her sister, Lola. Initially, I thought Lola was prettier but she’s so bossy and extrovert that she had Honey bamboozled in no time. Lottie, on the other hand, is a lot calmer and less intrusive where our girl is concerned and so we might have accidentally-on-purpose filled out forms for a home check to be done… What have we let ourselves in for? She was born on November 15th so she’s still very young – it’s one way to use up old shoes, I suppose!

Today, I have applied for two jobs – having not got the one I wanted that I interviewed for on Thursday – but I have a good feeling about this week. I don’t know if it’s just the sheer, unadulterated joy of having skin again – and it is a joy, believe me – or the lovely weekend with my family, or if it’s all that in combination with having a great walk this morning with The Hound. Whatever it is, life is feeling more Spring-like and I’m sort of excited about things. Also, my Dad’s coming to stay in a couple for weeks for two nights and I’m sort of looking forward to talking to him about a business idea I had a little while ago…

I surrendered to a power greater than myself yesterday and went to see the doctor. Three months of dire skin, two courses of antibiotics and the last two weeks of a cracked and peeling neck with skin so tight it hurt to turn my head proved to be too strong an incentive in the end. I thought he would give me more (potent) antibiotics but he grimaced and said, “We have no choice; we’ll have to go with steroids.” It’s years since I’ve had to take steroids for my skin. I had forgotten the two most important things about them (excluding the numerous possible side-effects that, frankly, would terrify most sane people.) These are as follows:

1) they’re magic;

2) everything hurts for the first forty-eight hours of taking them.

Dealing with the ‘magic’ part first, I took the first dose yesterday evening at about six o’clock. This morning I woke up with fresh, healing skin. The inflammation has gone down incredibly and my arms no longer glow in the dark. The ‘everything hurts’ part correlates nicely with one of the side effects of the type I’ve been given: insomnia. I got three hours broken sleep last night and I feel as if I’ve been run over by a steam roller. This is exacerbated by the fact that, because of the existing pain, I haven’t slept properly for two nights prior to this. Ugh. Also, because the cream I have to use is a type of immuno-suppressant wotsit to stop my skin freaking out quite so much which also makes it overly sensitive to heat or cold on top of the fact that fresh healing skin is always a little tender anyway, my neck is currently screaming at me.

In the face of all this, I had an interview this morning. I was a bit terrified, to be honest, because I’m not sure I’d hire someone who looks like I do right now! Having said that, I tidied myself up as best I could and I think it went really well. I am hoping that this one really comes through because, even though it’s only a six month contract to cover a maternity leave, it’s local and it’s working for a really interesting company which would keep me in the medical devices field that I liked so much. Moreover, the people working there seem to be intelligent and kind, and the sort of people I’d be dealing with would be end users and hospitals. Actually, I was so involved in all the talking that we did, I completely forgot to ask them about how much the salary would be. Oops. Anyway, fingers crossed that this goes positively. It’s something I’d genuinely like to do.

Sunday was the first anniversary of my move into Thalia. TRM and my mum and I worked like crazy people that day but it was one of those days when I knew I wouldn’t sleep until everything was in some semblance of order. I loved the house then and I love it now. It’s been an incredible lesson in feeling grounded and strong in my on space, despite the ups and downs of the intervening three hundred and sixty-six days. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t stopped to thank all the powers that be that this house is mine and that I have found somewhere to bed down for the long haul with my children and my animals.

For the last few weeks, though, I’ve started getting itchy feet. A friend of mine was talking about the possibility of moving to the States with her husband (who’s from Arizona) and it sparked some part of my brain that really hasn’t been active before.

It’s often been the case that I’ve had a hankering to go back to the UK to live. I miss it desperately by times and, in my heart, I call it home more readily than I do Ireland. Every trip I take over to visit friends or family is a sort of happy torture, or was, I should say, until I had my own house and then, frankly, all I wanted to do was curl up here and never leave.

Still, with the dawning of a new day and a new way of living as a family of four*, my mind has been exploring new possibilities. One of the main reasons (despite the obvious lack of funds) that I stayed in this country was because I wouldn’t and couldn’t take the children away from their father. He wouldn’t let me and I wouldn’t (really) have wanted to. The other thing in my mind was the very real feeling of dislocation I had carried with me after being uprooted at the age of seven when my parents chose to move from Berkshire to Cork. However, the current thinking goes something like this: moving a child is a very big deal but if it’s done at a natural break point in their lives, such as leaving primary school for example, the effects might not be so acute. J is currently in 4th class which means we have two-and-a-bit years until he makes the next jump in his educational career.

The thing is that while Dave was born and raised in Dublin, he’s not overly attached to this country either. His parents are here but they’re still young enough and active enough to consider travel a good thing. My mother is here and, well, that’s a bit of a mixed bag really because in many ways I know that she’s horribly homesick for England. In addition, she’s got ten years on Dave’s mum and it shows nowadays. I don’t know how I’d feel about her being here if I was somewhere else but her age is certainly a slight barrier to packing up and heading off anywhere too remote. Given that D’s parents have a fairly huge family and social circle, it’s not likely that they would feel the lack of us although I know they would miss their grandchildren and vice versa. With Mum, who’s much more of an isolationist, it would be harder to gauge the effect. We don’t see that much of her as it is but at least at the moment we are just around the corner if needed. She still works and it’s not as if she doesn’t have any friends, but she’s not the gregarious type.

I can picture us being happy somewhere else, you see. This house that I love is MY house. And I think that D is always going to feel that. To be fair, he hasn’t decided what he’s going to do in terms of keeping on his apartment or moving in here as yet and, given our history, while I worry about the additional cost to him, I can very much see the sense in him keeping it for a while longer. If his flatmate moves out – as is possible in the next few months – it may spur his decision making but, personally, I don’t suppose there’s really any hurry. Long term, though, if this sticks then keeping two places going is a bit daft. When I bought this house, although it was mine, I bought it with the idea in the back of my mind that it might be a home that TRM might share with me some day. In many ways, it’s more suited to him than it is to Dave. He is better able to cope with its quirks for one thing: the temperamental  boiler that he keeps coming round to fix for me and the slightly mad heating that it produces being one very pertinent example. Whereas I suspect Dave just finds much of the house poky and awkward although it’s fine for now, if you see what I mean.

All of this hypothesising is exactly that and I don’t see me heading off into the sunset any time in the immediate future. But if Thalia has given me anything, it has been to show me that there are places in this world where I will fit and feel good. It may well be serving as a launch pad, though, instead of being the place where I thought I might stay forever. And it feels good to me that to feel that way. Who knows? You may see me here in six months time, in a six years time. And that will be alright too. The point is that the possibility exists and that there’s room to discuss it down the line.

* Well six actually, if you count the animals too, and we usually do.

Yesterday was a bad day. Despite the phone call from Favourite Engineer, everything else conspired against me. Or at least that’s how it felt. The last straw was the lid coming off the rice container when I shook it to mix all the layers together, thereby covering the cooking dinner, the floor, the counter tops, the cooker and the sink with uncooked grains of rice. I almost cried at that point. It was one of those day where you just pray for sleep to take it all away so you can start off half way fresh again in the morning.

This morning, I got the children to school and was home by 9am. It occurred to me at this point that today was going to go in much the same direction as yesterday if I didn’t get some more sleep. Dear Reader, I went back to bed and slept for two hours. When I woke up again, the world was a nicer place. More tellingly, I have managed not to break or drop or scream at anything or anyone all day. I call that a win. It turns out that, when I no longer have small children to keep me awake at night, six hours sleep is just Not Enough, and that all the Facebook and Etsy-ing and distractions that abound on the web are not sufficient to keep me sane if I insist on trying to keep going. Moreover, if I stay awake til all hours during the week, I pay for it at the weekend when my body refuses to let me wake up until I’ve made up the deficit. Thus, it seems that eight hours a night must be my new goal. A routine is needed for the adults of the Lair in much the same way that it’s required by the smaller ones.

Also, I applied for a job in Dun Laoghaire today that looked really do-able and positive. Please keep your fingers crossed for me; it sounds, from the description, as if it were made to be mine.