Making your mind up

I'll catch up with comments and everyone else's blog shortly, I promise.

It has been almost comically busy in our lives, thanks not to individual fertility, childbearing or mad parent issues, but a big national issue that's dominating the whole country; whether to vote Yes or to vote No to independence.

Women have been particularly targeted by both campaigns. Here are two of the main adverts that each side has put out:

The woman who made up her mind:

Yes means...

What do you guys think? Which one works best?

And, for bonus points, which one has been absolutely slated?

The killer in our midst

I woke up this morning, went downstairs, pottered about the living room and then saw something that made me leap backwards.

There is a dead mouse in our living room.

After we moved here eight months ago, the  cat initially refused to go outside. Then she started hanging around the door, watching us sitting in the garden.

I tried to pick her up a couple of times and put her outside, but she ran straight back in.

Then she started tentatively going outside herself, then I looked up from the kitchen window one day and realised she was boldly strolling around the garden.

Now she gets annoyed if she can't go out.

We had thought that she was going to be - if we're completely honest - a bit too crap to hunt. After all, she was eight years old by the time she got access to the outside world. She never shows any inclination to do anything other than sit on my husband's knee.As far as we knew, her hunting instinct had been replaced by her routine of sleeping in our bed, eating nice cat food and watching telly.

But now, not only has she managed to sneak outside when we thought she was inside, she's made her first kill.

Anyway, I am hiding upstairs from the dead mouse, rather pathetically. The cat is sitting on the chair next to me, looking nonchalant. Perhaps she expects my husband will eat the mouse for breakfast.

Point scoring

The Boy has a development check soon. To assist the health visitor with this, I have a form to fill in ahead of time.

It feels like sitting my masters exams again.

Some of it is easy.

"Does your child correctly name at least six body parts?"

"If you point to a picture of a ball or other similar object, can your child correctly name them?"

Well, that's alright.

But then we get to the following:

"If you give a simple instruction to the child, like "put the ball on the table" do they respond?"

Well, yes, but only if there's nothing else more interesting to do at the time

"If you draw a straight line will your child copy you?" 

I don't know. This question made me worry that I don't do enough drawing straight lines with the Boy, until I realised this was ludicrous.

"Can your child thread beads on a string?"

Well, generally we've discouraged any playing with beads in case he eats them.

One of the questions has a lump with what looks like one arm, one leg, and a face with two eyes but no other features. Your child is meant to identify this as "daddy", "man", "spaceman", or "monkey".

I tried this with the Boy. He looked baffled. He said "Eyes", and when I pushed him, "Peppa". I think he is as confused as I am as to why the NHS needs me to do this (must start reading Weber at bedtime, for both our sakes).

Does your child put objects back in the place where they're meant to be?

Well, sometimes. I struggle with this and I am 32. And define 'meant to be'. We recently found 3 DVDs wedged into the DVD player...

What sentences can your child say?

"No" is a complete sentence.

More parental and HD stress

I'd put off seeing the genetic specialist who'd already seen my sisters. I just couldn't face another appointment, got sucked into other things, kept telling myself it'd be ok.

But my thoughts have been turning to another IVF round and I thought I better find out what exactly the score was with being a donor, recieving eggs, embryo testing and so on.

A lot of what I'd been considering was - and I realise this is going to sound stupid - based on what my parents told me. That although my sisters and I were at risk of carrying HD, it'd only manifest itself in our late 70s, and take another 20 years to kill us. And that, if we were carriers, and our children also inherited the gene, they would get it at the same age we did.

Except, that turns out to be only half right. While my Dad has a mild form of HD, HD is more likely to become stronger if you inherit it from your father than your mother. So if one of us does carry it, it could appear in our 40s.

Which obviously means doing an egg share is a complete non starter.

Things then got a bit frustrating with the genetics man, who I think already thought I was weird; admittedly, years of infertility does change your boundaries when it comes to fertility treatment.

I asked if we could get pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (ie, the embryos get scanned for HD before being transferred).

He said we couldn't in the UK as we already had a child. He said we couldn't. I thought he meant on the NHS, as it is very rare for health boards here to fund someone who already had a child.

I thought this was kind of bizarre, and so asked if we could get PGD privately. He said no, "they" thought it would be unfair if one child had been cleared but not the other.

I then asked about getting it abroad. The guy looked a bit weirded out and waved his arms, saying it would be very expensive and difficult to get (which, frankly, seemed a bit odd; I've read enough about IVF to realise that some countries have very liberal laws about donations and screening).

I can do a test that, if I don't have HD, would clear me to go down the original egg sharing route.

If I do have HD I can find out, practically to the year, when it will onset. Which means I'll roughly find out when I will die, too.

I'm not really sure what to do. In some ways, if I was going to have it at 40, then I'd rather know now so I could get around to writing my novel, stop spending on a pension and try to enjoy life more. I could practically advance book my ticket to Switzerland to be euthanised (if I do have it, I'm fucked if I'm hanging around until the bitter end, choking on cranberry juice in a home somewhere, smelling of wee).

But then, I'm not sure how I'd cope with having the certainty of  HD. Depending on how strong the gene is, it becomes problematic to buy a house as nobody wants to lend money to someone who isn't going to be around in 25 years.

Perhaps most importantly, if I get the test and know, then the Boy will know he has a 50:50 chance. At the moment he has a 25% chance of having HD, and I feel those odds are more comforting.

Having thought about it and done some light research, it appears that the genetics man wasn't entirely familiar with IVF abroad; I've found clinics where IVF with PGD can be done for less than a regular cycle here.

 I think I'm inclined to want to do a PGD cycle abroad, which would eliminate HD, although I don't think I'd want to know if I was a carrier.

I think my husband thinks it would make sense for me to get tested before we do that, which could bring the egg sharing option back into play.

I might need to try and get some expert advice from somewhere - I think the genetics people probably aren't too familiar with IVF, but my normal sources of infertility information don't have much on genetics.

Misogyny

I was doing some voluntary work in my hometown. Pausing outside one of the doors in the very ordinary road I was on, I heard shouting:

"I want to rip your arse!"
"I want to sniff your fanny!"
"I want to fuck your cunt!"

And so, a group of lads, in their 20s, came towards me. I took a step back and started studying my clipboard.

One came up to me and said:

"Awright! Do you want to come with us?" and gestured further along the road, bottle in hand.

I don't know if the normal chat up tactics there revolve around having your mates hurl abuse and then think you'll be - what? have your self esteem so destroyed you'll shag anything? - enamoured enough to swap bodily fluids with them.

I declined, to much laughter from the guy's mates.

I called the police, and suggested they might want to send a squad car around to check on the party of 8 loud, drunk men wandering aroun a small, quiet town. They called me back later, and weren't terribly interested. It is my right to give a statement, but they're not going to follow it up, realistically.

I've been angry about misogyny this week. Elsewhere in the world, a pregnant woman has been stoned to death in an 'honor' killing, another woman has been sentenced to death on trumped up charges for denying a religion she was not brought up in (hopefully she will be freed). Two teenagers have been gang raped and hung in India; after the police refused to investigate, people from the girls' village refused to let the bodies be cut down until suspects had been arrested.

And let's not forget the missing girls in Nigeria. Whatever they're going through now, it is unlikely to be pleasant.

And that's just the ones we know about. All over the world, countless women and girls have been abused, raped and tortured this week. Just for being female.

Me being shouted at is in no way the same as some of the horrendous abuses perpetuated against women elsewhere in the world. But the motivation of a small subsection of inadequate, small dicked, badly educated, easily threatened men is the same the world over. Men whose hate is ignored by a disinterested state, or who actually, terrifyingly, are in charge.

I don't hate men. I am, after all, happily married to one an the mother of a very small one. But there's just no excuse for the men who hate women, however that hatred manifests itself.

Update

I've been badly neglecting my blog, sorry about that.

Things that have been happening are:

The cat has gone outside! Tonight, for the first time ever. I looked through the kitchen window and realised she was in the garden. She back around and in looking like she was expecting a row, so I fed her cat treats outside. She's not very keen on standing on grass, just like she wasn't very keen on standing on anything that wasn't carpeted before we moved. It's a start.

The Boy is well and we are about to start potty training, and move him into a bed that he can escape from (although I'm not sure if I'm ready for either). He can recognise his numbers but won't say four, five or six for some reason.

The garden is coming along well. When we've got actual flowers and stuff I'll post photos, but we have peas, sweetcorn, potatoes, sunflowers and nasturtiums.

Other than that, we're more or less ticking along ok.

It is not a very exciting blog update, but then, I'm quietly enjoying having an uneventful time at the moment!

Gone fishing

Spring is here, and much has been happening...

The garden is going well - some potatoes have surfaced, the peas are growing, and we hopefully have some seedlings in the herb garden. Either that or they are weeds. Better still, a thrush has appeared a few times, and we have had bumble bees visit too. I will post photos of the plants soon, although it's not a lot to look at as the garden was covered in either gravel or grass when we moved in. But it's less barren than it was.

The Boy had his first camping trip. He enjoyed it until evening time, when he kept trying to put his coat on and get in the car. He was also clearly having withdrawal symptons from electronic equipment. His favourite part of the trip was finding a book with numbers in a bookshop, along with feeding the ducks.

I am monumentally busy, partly with work, partly with the Boy, and partly with that thing that's happening here later on in the year, which you may have read about and which I will not mention by name on here, but will blog about shortly.

The cat is getting a bit grumpy. When we came home from camping, she'd clawed loads of the carpet off the stairs; she's never done anything like this before. When we sat outside in the garden, she stood inside and scolded us, and refused to join in. She didn't sleep with us either. She seems back to normal now, but she's definitely getting more set in her ways.

I went to see my parents at the weekend. They are on their best behaviour. For now.

All in all, it's not been a bad spring.