Lilt and Jellytots most excellent adventure...

killerpeaty

Oh lilt, I'm so sorry you had a rough time of it. With regards to the threat, have you taken it to any authority? A ratty note is one thing but threatening a young family is well out of order and this person needs to be reported.

I'm not sure what to suggest about your work colleague. Do you have an HR department? They might have some suggestions? Perhaps you could look for another job? Linkedin automatically gives you information on jobs available with your job title (not useful for me, but might be for you).

I hope you are happy regardless of Him or not. Just remember that you are magnificent and jellytot is very lucky to have you.

HeadAboveWater

killerpeaty wrote: »

I hope you are happy regardless of Him or not. Just remember that you are magnificent and jellytot is very lucky to have you.

Amen to that!

apple_muncher

How are you Lilt? You are missed. Hope all is ok. x

liltdiddylilt

Oooof!

I am a bad bad naughty terrible lilt. Where have I been? I abandoned you all, abandoned my diary and abandoned my MSE head. The outcome of that is that my emergency fund has been whittled down to NOTHING and last month I struggled hard to make ends meet. A bit of leakage onto the credit card (£15 for jellytots new vests) was enough to snap my head back on my shoulders. Shopping last week was split between Lidl and Iceland. Creative and inventive are just two of the words for meals I have been concocting. Shame that jellytot is at that 'fussy' stage of eating where if it is not shaped like marmite on toast or sweetcorn/raisins/oranges then it is not going into her mouth. Have you ever been given 'the look' by an all seeing oracle of a two year old? She knows where I sneak in puree'd broccoli. She magically eats around the hidden bits of pepper or minced beef smothered in tomato ketchup. I have given up and bought all manner of probiotic pills and vitamin syrups. These she is perfectly content to eat. 'MEDSINNNNNNNNN!!!' :A Go figure. I have been employing the method whereby she gets three strikes at eating a meal, and if she doesn't eat after the third strike she goes hungry. Snacks are banned. I was hoping this would encourage her to eat what she is given or starve (no fear of that!) but nope, she would actually prefer to go to bed hungry every night of the week rather than eat my painstakingly cooked meals.

So, whats been going on in my world? I am good! I ditched facebook although I confess to un-deactivating it every couple of months and having a peep. What I find mostly depresses me though and I seem to have an extra 4 hours a day or so since deleting it, so I am sticking to it! My bad back is currently an exceptionally bad back and I am taking 60mg codeine wayyyyyy too often in the day just to complete normal tasks like putting on my socks without bursting into tears. I blame hauling my 2 stone elephant child around all of the time.

Work has been totally pants recently; after sacking my colleague, bosses took my job and made me train a colleague on it, then sent out an email to everyone in the office including me and the trainee saying she was doing that job now, and to see her in future for all parts of it. A surprise to both of us as she was just supposed to cover my holidays. Meanwhile I got stuck with filing, paperwork and general dogsbodying. I try not to let it get to me, as frankly I work to pay for Jellytot to have a decent life, but it seems they don't approve of my three days per week after initially telling me it would be fine well over a year ago now. Things have settled somewhat recently and I have a set 'job-role' again, but it is not even vaguely as challenging as my old role and to be honest I am highly overpaid and overqualified to do it. Again, I try to see the good side of that but I have never been one to not work my hardest and now I find myself cutting and sticking on a far too regular basis!

Jellytot is great (apart from aforementioned eating disasters); enjoying nursery, causing chaos and mayhem, and generally rocking the terrible twos. She has all of my best/worst traits. Stubbornness by the bucketload and a temper to rival most wild animals. Luckily I have 26 years more practice at it than her!!

My moneysaving has gone down the pan totally. I am saving £300 per month, which considering nursery is costing me £300 per month, and my other 'direct debits' come to just under £800 each month, I don't think is all that bad. In about a weeks time my 'regular' savings will be £1800. All is not great though. I had £1100 in another far too easily accessible account and burnt through it buying new rugs for my bedroom after a jellytot vomiting bug left the one I had swimming, and paying for two birthdays in April, plus a bunch of other unexpected expenditure and some stupid stupid play shopping where I would go to the supermarket each night pretty much and spend £30 on rubbish. SOOOO I am back on the wagon. I switched energy suppliers last week and got cashback, and I filled out mammoth forms, jumped through hoops and cajoled free bank statements from each of my three bank accounts to get some housing benefit I am supposedly entitled to each week. It will work out at around £40 per week apparently, but thats a good percentage of Jellytots nursery fees paid for - sometimes I despair of this system of benefits. I did a test on the money advice service website. It is to check whether you would be better off working full time or not. I plugged in all hours facts and figures, and it told me that without including the £60 a week childcare fees which would at least double if I went back to work full time, I would be BETTER OFF working, to the tune of £79.12 approximately per month. So, take away the £60 I already spend each WEEK on childcare, and there is already a big deficit. Plug in the extra childcare and suddenly it is utterly pointless working extra, seeing jellytot less, and generally giving up my life. My colleague works full time, as does her husband. Her take home pay is just under £200 more per month more than she pays out on childcare. Would you go to work 37.5 hours a week for £200 a month? I've no idea why she does it.

Anyways, I have to shower and get my little old self to bed on time. I keep waking up late in the mornings and rushing like a headless chicken to get to work. This results in me eating bizarre lunches of packet mixes and buttered bread with tins of rice pudding for lunch at work instead of todays boiled egg and rainbow salad! Not to mention being a red sweaty pig by the time I have practically run the 2 miles to work in my nice suit.

Night all. Sorry for not being around and thanks for all your messages and lovely messages about jellytot, and the neighbour.

He got rid of his bed the week after my bin banging tantrum, and a letter from the council noise squad. He has been pretty much silent ever since

xxx

please-let-me-be-lucky

Glad to read all is pretty much well with you and good to have you back.

No mention of HIM? Hope all is ok Xx

HeadAboveWater

megga *hugs* to you lilt

Have to lol at Jellys picky eating! Well, when it suits! She's a character and a half!! Can't believe she'd rather go to bed hungry! :eek: That's the total opposite of me!! :rotfl:

Ref work, the fact you're overqualified is pants, however, the fact you're being overpaid is great!! Just do what you have to do, and leave it all at the door at 5pm No stress. No hassle. No pressure. Perfect!!!

The benefits system is bonkers!! When my hours were cut in my main job we rang HMRC hoping that the extra would help until I got something else sorted. No suck luck. They cut our credits too!! When I finally got my part time job too, they upped the credits again coz I was working full time hours! !!!!!!??? Seriously?!? I don't get it at all!

Boiled egg and rainbow salad sounds yummy! Any left?!

Look after yourself and Jelly please!!

killerpeaty

Naughty Lilt! But it is understandable, you haven't gone too off the beaten trail. You've used the money in a sensible way and you know about where it's gone! This is good!

I'm sorry to hear about the pants way you're being treated at work. It seems a bit strange to me, have you considered looking elsewhere?

Good to hear about jellytot.

(I'm watching don't tell the bride- they be cray cray)

liltdiddylilt

Well, I had a lovely big reply written for you all and then forgot to do my usual and copy it before sending, thus I lost it all and was too depressed to write it all again last night... So here I am. Sunburned in the extreme and so keeping myself lovely and warm

Lets start at the beginning...

Thank you NSK, Peaty, applemuncher, HAW, PLMBL & Elfy for replying to my thread. Nice to know someone other than the voices in my head are listening :rotfl:

applemuncher I am sorry I was away. I find that when I don't have much good to report I kind of avoid the forums because writing it all down depresses me! So when I am here you know things are pretty swimming in my world, and when I am not, I am probably just telling myself off somewhere because I spent my pennies on something naughty! :eek:

elfy I am so glad you popped in, thank you! I am sorry to hear about your mum. It sounds a horrible situation. I have one of those myself, with an ex from 5 years ago. I still have a mortgage with him on a house I technically co-own but really have no say in. He pays the mortgage since I left, and I should have been bought out of the house years ago but he just ignores my requests for that and removing me from the mortgage. When I had jellytot I explained to him I really needed the money he owed me and he basically said it was my own fault for getting pregnant. This was 3 years after we split up and he still thought I should be alone. Haha. Hope your mum is strong enough to fight her corner! And she should definitely not pay any attention to whether he thinks she is living her life right or not!

Lucky I know I have avoided mention of Him. He is still around, still not living here, and we still have big problems which we continue to ignore, skirt around, then he blows up. I tell myself that it is good for jellytot to have her life ordered like this, but if it ever gets too much for me or starts to compromise her in any way, he will be out of the picture faster than anything. And I don't mean he won't see jelly. I mean he won't control me, and have everything he wants from me without giving very much at all in return.

Soooo... what is new in our world?

I stupidly went into my overdraft on my Halifax reward account... for 10 days. Costing myself my £5 reward, and a £1 a day in overdraft fees. The account has 2 set DD's coming out, and my credit card balance. The balance was £30. Until I took my tablet back and got a refund, kicking it a couple of hundred into CREDIT. I assumed this would stop any DD coming out. I was wrong. I should have put the £30 in anyway, just in case. I had the money. So it is my fault. But now I need to make the money back.

I then got a bill from NPower, explaining that they were dropping my DD from £86pm down to £63pm. :j Yay right?! Nope. :rotfl: I called them and put it right back up. After grilling the chap about my usage for the last 2 years, and telling him that this time last year they put my DD UP to £108pm - we checked my estimated reads against my actuals, and they were within a couple of units, and I have £130 credit on the account. So they are technically right, it could go down. I just don't trust them. So I asked him to raise it to £75. £11 saving a month but still supposedly over what I am using and therefore making me feel a bit safer!

Next the awesome thing happened. I saw something reading back through 527 replies on Lucky's thread that I had missed... about the warm homes payment. Boom. I checked, called NPower & I am eligible for £140 next March. Woop. I am ALSO eligible for a new free boiler for my landlord, thus dropping my gas down to a more reasonable level by removing the cronking 15 year old boiler I currently have! There is an engineer coming out soon hopefully

We have had a good few weeks. Weather has been lovely. I have spent a lot of time outdoors in local private gardens and on the beach/cliffs etc with Jellytot. We had a picnic out yesterday with Him and it was fun. We messed about playing football together and it was nice and easy. He still spends way too much time online when he is here, but 2 can play that game eh

I shall try and pop back in soon so that my updates don't encompass a month and are not so epic.

Hugs!! x

liltdiddylilt

I forgot to show you this little monkeysocks!

apple_muncher

Beauuuuuuuuutiful!