I have about 2 more days before being submerged again into work and I thought about changing the look of my social media presence online.

Since its inception I have fondly used a profile image of one of my cats on pretty much everything that I do online. The YouTube account, this blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook have all got this old cat of mine. But as I am witnessing a change in how I interact online I felt as though it was also time to update my profile image to something a little more serious (which is a tad difficult for me at the best of times).

Given that my intros for my video tutorials consist of an acronym for Showshannah’s Little Space, I have been tinkering around with GIMP to produce something that will tie each product I make together.

My first version looks like this:

Whilst I don’t mind how it looks overall my next task is to test it on my twitter account to see how it looks on the various devices that I use.

If it works, then this will unfortunately be the end of 5 years of using my cherished cowardly Tom Cat as my web presence. Over the next few days I shall test out the image on the various websites. So far I will need to adjust the logo for the instagram account and so will need to check the other accounts out over time.

This is just a very quick blog entry today on my day off. The school that I am currently contracted to is still reeling from having their OFSTED inspection. Until it is announced officially I won’t say what the school got but the end result has been staff members who are fully exhausted and demotivated.

I have never liked OFSTED even back in the 1990’s when I first qualified. If it was the kind of organisation that worked with the profession to flag up training needs and petition the government for funds to improve education, then I wouldn’t mind the pressure of their inspections. However I have yet to see this system work this way. It doesn’t serve to flag up any training needs and to recognise the outstanding work that this profession does at creating the future work force. Instead it has been a political whipping stick to keep a government in power and it has also served a culture where we can no longer teach life skills but instead are forced to ‘teach to test’ so that teachers can stay in work. It is very sad to witness the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit professionals for the role of teaching given issues such as these.

I recall retraining from a customer service background because I believed that I could make a difference in a child’s life. I was inspired by my Chemistry teacher who made learning so much fun and who contributed to helping me pass my O’Levels. But it looks like we are even losing teachers who think like this.

We have a system at work where experienced teachers offer a silent presence in the classroom for NQTs so that the new teachers do not have to struggle with the so called “challenging classes”. Since September I have been supporting a new female teacher with such a class. On speaking to her this week, my heart went out to her. She had already had enough after just 5 months of teaching. She explained about how at 27 years of age, she is exhausted, and in tears most nights due to the work load. The only comfort I could offer her (since I agreed with her) was the fact that this year, for this school, had indeed been quite a challenging year and things could only get better once we get over this current valley low. But I could see that she was not convinced. The only light at the end of the tunnel for her was when I told her that there are other schools which are not as intense as our current one and for her to stick at her job until she passes her NQT year. Another young teacher remarked about how she would love to just do a job where when she comes home each night she can just eat normally and not be juggling this with putting in an additional 2 to 3 hours work and be so sleep depraved. Both of these young teachers are what society would deem as outstanding teachers. They are excellent at what they do. But they are burnt out – one after 5 months and one after 3 years.

So this blog is a tiny rant at how politicians move the goal posts so much within my profession (and don’t even get me started with what they are doing to the junior doctors and nurses) that we are currently experiencing a mass exodus of teachers with no one qualified enough to adequately fill these positions to ensure our children receive high quality teaching.

In terms of being a Windows 7 die-hard fan, that is.

I have very humbly submitted to the pressures of the Windows 10 upgrade prompts after having significant problems with my laptop since my last blog entry.

I went on quite an interesting journey of full system formats and disk cleans, a hard disk drive dying, re-installing Windows 7 and then not being able to update since the beginning of this year.

Admittedly some websites including the support forum at Microsoft had wondered whether it was because quite a few of us were just plain happy with Windows 7 and did not necessarily want to change to another operating system. For me personally, it took me a while to get to know Windows 98 and XP and as was always the case, as soon as I was familiar with each system I then had to upgrade. So the prospect of doing it yet again did not appeal to me.

Well, last night saw the last straw, I had spent the whole day pretty much waiting for a Windows 7 system update, had tried pretty much all the remedial tasks that Microsoft recommended you do in the event that your updates are not working or taking too long, but to no avail.

Eventually I quite literally exclaimed the title of this blog entry and stayed up so that I could install Windows 10.

I must admit that I am impressed and as some bloggers have pointed out it looks on the face of it as though they have taken the best of both Windows 7 and 8.1 and combine it into a very user friendly interface.

My only biggest reservation stems from privacy – this is really the one where Microsoft needs a bit of a smack on the wrist but in their defense they are no different to Google in terms of harvesting personal information from your computer. As best as I feasibly can, I will just limit how much I put out there of myself and my family.

So overall a thumbsup from me in terms of Windows 10. Whilst they have indeed forced me to upgrade due to how frustrating Windows 8.1 and 7 updates have been since January, I do actually like the fact that I can get on and do what I need to do on my old laptop.

A belated Happy New Year to all who read this blog. I have had a few internet issues around the Christmas period and just when I was hoping to update this blog I was not able to log in, and then unfortunately I had to get back into the hectic day to day life of being a teacher and single parent.

The important thing though, was that over Christmas, I was able to rest and reduce my blood pressure levels to a point where my doctor has signed me fit for work. I am so pleased about that.

We are fast approaching week 2 of our Spring Term. I have had to do a phased return which has also helped me to monitor my blood pressure levels, but – more importantly – enabled me to get into the mindset of getting my social media life in its correct pecking order around my faith, the kids, pets and the day time job.

So although I do not normally make any New Year resolutions I am going to make just one for 2016 and that is to place my health above everything else. One of the ways of achieving this (besides my as of yet, non-existant run in the park every weekend) will be to take a more committed approach to keeping the blog going with tutorial videos that I am going to have to make anyway due to my line of work offline.

This post is also a trial run of a software called Open Live Writer. I saw a review of it today in a magazine that I bought. So far I am liking the fact that I can write this blog entry without being connected to the internet. So the software is right up my street in terms of being able to do all my “bloggy” kind fo stuff such as uploading my videos and animations but I can do this all offline. When I was unable to get online a couple of weeks ago this was the main headache that I had as I was not able to log my thoughts with a view to being able to eventually get back online and send the views off. Now, when I do eventually go onto the internet, I am able to update the blog with my ramblings for the last couple of days or even weeks which should hopefully see more activity for me writing on my blog.

Another added bonus appears to be the fact that I can save each blog entry on my computer ready to update further at another time similar to this screen shot.

The GUI is also very user friendly and has adopted a similar format for Microsoft Word which I particularly like.

So for me this is going to be a New direction and hopefully a New opportunity to beat my 2015 blog entry record of a whopping 10 posts  .

I have been trying for the past year to pick up on posting to my blog more times than I have done the previous years. Whilst there has been a little bit of an improvement, I think that I have only exceeded my previous year’s posts by two/three *face-palms*.

That said, I have to admit that this year has been a better year where I have learnt much about myself as well as seeing that I have yet much more to learn.

Whilst in 2014, I felt that things did not go according to plan I can reflect on 2015 as being the year where I feel more attuned to pursuing my dreams and having a better direction for this. I’ve also had to toughen up a bit more than previously with having to witness my son going to hospital again and then my latest bout of illness.

But for all of this I have come to the conclusion that whatever comes my way I need to still be able to think positively and give thanks for all that I have been given.

So if this ends up being my last post for 2015 I intend that it will be one where I can consider what I have gone through and what we have gone through at a family an in all this we can give thanks to the Lord.

This has been quite a crazy couple of weeks.

Since my last blog entry I have been signed off from work. What started as a thought that I might need just a couple of days off work turned into something with the potential for being more serious.

High blood pressure linked to stress is truly the ‘silent killer’. On that Monday when I called in sick, I was inches away from just popping a couple of pain killers to mask the beginnings of a headache and still soldiered on through the day at school. I would have ignored the heart ‘flutterings’, the badly thumping temples, and everything else going on in my body which was screaming at me to slow down.

I have some very tough decisions to make in the coming weeks. On the one hand, my employers are being exceptionally helpful and desire me to get well. I have kept them up to speed with what is going on and what the doctors have said. I am humbled by that fact that I work in an environment that is very very supportive.

On the other hand, being this ill is nothing new. Nearly 10 years ago I felt that it was time for me to leave the teaching profession. The way in which I wanted to work in the classroom just wasn’t feasible. I wanted to personalise my teaching to each student, regularly feedback to them so that they could even further exceed or reach their potential. But such a teacher puts in a 60+ hour week. My daughter’s Year 6 teacher was one such person. He was young, just married but his wife is a teacher too. They do not have any children. He would arrive in work at 7.30 am in the morning. He would still be at work at 7 pm. He would then bring further work home to mark each night, Monday to Thursday and do a further 2 hours. He would also have to work the weekends. Such a teacher is deemed by OFSTED as ‘outstanding’. He contributed to my daughter scoring above average marks for her SATS and through his hard work she is now coming on in leaps and bounds at senior school. I have recently heard of a Head Teacher is has now suffered kidney failure which has been linked to the pressures of his job role.

So all things considered, last week I began to consider the leap of faith which was to completely leave teaching behind.

On each occasion where I have attempted to work similar hours with being a single mum, I have fallen ill. Even doing part time hours now, I was trying to catch up with work I was unable to do at work by bringing the work home during my days off instead of resting. The end result was my doctor being blunt with me about the fact that at that continued rate I would have caused permanent damage to my internal organs (it didn’t help that such news caused my nose to bleed).

So I have had to stop dead in my tracks and re-evaluate these past weeks as to where I go from here.

I know that I will have to bring forward significantly, the fact that I will need to leave teaching for good. The uncertainty of what else is out there jobwise (better the devil you know) together with the fact that I do enjoy teaching on ….. some level, are factors that I will need to weigh up when finally letting work know what I am going to do.

So things have been going really well albeit hectic offline. Although I have some financial concerns with working part time, overall it’s been better in terms of the balance between work and life.

Or so I thought…

What I have been forced to realise since yesterday is that I have allowed my main part time job to creep into my so – called ‘me time’. This particular time is the very small zone between the kids all falling asleep and me following after. This ‘me-time’ would be the occasional 45 mins to one hour on the weekend when I am able to sit in a silent house. It is the spare days off that I have until the supply teaching starts to supplement my low income. It is so very precious and it was suppose to be the time when I devote my ideas to the book, my blog and my vlog.

Since September I have been working part-time as a teacher and initially I slipped into the biggest mistake which was to take advantage of the extra time in order to catch up with the work that I physically cannot do during work time. I started by bringing marking home to work on during the spare couple of days that I had off. Then on top of those days I began to continue with work over the weekend. Bed time turned into late night, coffee filled jaunts purely because it is exceptionally difficult to mark work when a 4 year old needs to practice phonics (and quite rightly so!!). But pride made me press on. I had to prove that a single mum could most definitely do all of the above and then some.

Yesterday morning I woke up not feeling myself. Mentally I was more than alert but physically I felt dizzy, exhausted and confused. I had the beginnings of a thudding, thumping headache. The usual thoughts entered my head at this point, “Ahhhh get over it pop some pills (again) when you get to work!!! A cup of tea in work and you’ll wake up!!! Grow a pair and get to work!!” But I couldn’t help but ignore that my body was screaming at me that I needed to get checked out. At 5 am I swung myself out of bed and reluctantly dusted off my blood pressure machine. I had purchased this machine at the indignation that a nurse at the surgery had noticed a high reading after some bloods were taken earlier this year. I had ignored that reading due to the fact that after a good night’s sleep and a Half Term break, my BP levels were down to what they were throughout my pregnancy. So I dismissed the one off reading.

Yesterday morning I checked my blood pressure and it came out at 131/95 which was abit on the high side. Still conflicted thoughts went through my head. The headache of getting this investigated, plus supplying cover work, against ignoring this and having something worse happen (I seriously need to sort out life insurance for the sake of the kids). In spite of feeling tremendously guilty, I rang in sick and tried to relax.

The morning started ok, I still felt ill but thought that talking to my sister (who is also a nurse) might put my mind at ease and it did partially when she said that the reading was within limits. But the thudding head would not go away. The nagging ansgt about something not feeling right would not leave me at all. I chastised myself but decided that I would not trouble the surgery but I would instead get my BP checked at the local chemist. The reading came out at 149/95. This got my attention.

Two weeks ago a family member who suffered from high blood pressure died suddenly from a stroke. This along with the fact that my older sister plus my mother all have to manage their blood pressure medically, made me arrange for an appointment with my GP towards yesterday evening. Initially he did a quick check ( I was the last patient that evening) but when the reading spiked above 177, he booked to see me this morning. He immediately signed me off work.

My GP has checked my blood pressure quite a few times since yesterday and I left the surgery this morning with a BP of 152/95. He confirmed the obvious which was I was doing too much and it is now affecting my health. Having the black coffee so that I could push myself to complete just one more student’s work had now affected my health. Doing just one more class so I can at least be closer (not on top of things mind you) to not having as much to do just in case OFSTED calls….. has affected my health. Juggling quality time with my son with one hand while the other hand is marking level 3 coursework ….. has affected my health.

This sounds like a bit of a dumb remark but it has taken a blood pressure reading of 152/95 for me to sit my backside down and re-evaluate what is actually important to me. Do I seriously need to battle a career in teaching if it is going to eventually shorten my life span?

I have just about a week, having been signed off work by my GP who is insisting that I do nothing linked to work in that time, for me to formulate what I need to state to my employers in order for me to not spend the rest of my life on blood pressure regulating tablets like my mother and my older sister.

I also have a week to reduce my blood pressure reading by trying to relax and even think about doing above and beyond school related stuff.

I also need to stop checking my work emails….

This is the week before we return to school and work and I am flabbergasted!

I cannot believe where all the time has gone. My only consolation is the fact that I shall be down to part-time hours which may help for me to manage this blog and other projects when I am not in school but I am nonetheless a little disappointed at myself that I have not been able to be online, updating this for the last 6 weeks.

Thats said, what I have managed to achieve during the last few weeks was a major catch-up in terms of DIY projects. Project number one was my son’s bedroom. My little hero’s bedroom is nearly completed. I had repainted the spare room to encourage this little man that my bedroom is not shared, that no toys are allowed in mommy’s room…. that it is actually mommy’s room and not his. The two-ing and fro-ing finally sunk in for him when he saw his Thomas the Tank engine theme room.

I now have to convince him that the room is not an additional play area to ‘his’ bedroom and that it is actually ‘OK’ to sleep in said room.

Project number two was to regain control of the garden.

It is a sad fact of life that a teacher tends to have a jungle for a garden during term time. During the breaks I can only devote a couple of days tops in order to tame the jungle. For this summer break I was determined to go all out and recreate an area where I can detox from working a 40+ hour week. I have now got a lawn, a plum tree with two whopping big plums, an apple tree teeming with so many apples due to the fact that it was watered regularly. I have been able to discover what is at the bottom of my pond (I was able to find the pond again under all the bramble and weeds). So, I am pleased to have sacrificed these precious waking hours to something where the kids and myself can once again enjoy outside.

Project number three this summer break was an unexpected one. Two weeks into the summer break, I had to take my little one for a check up at the local hospital. It’s been nine months since he had quite a big operation last year. Needless to say we were both not looking forward to it at all. I was told that they had to operate again. To say that my world nearly collapsed around me was an understatement. I had to prepare both my son and myself that he was going to have to go under the knife again in only a couple of weeks time. Obviously I didn’t put it to him like that but for a four year old, he knew that he was going to have to endure something which was really tough for him yet again.

This final task has been the hardest if I am completely honest. This was his third operation and to witness his floods of tears as I carried him to the operating theatre was extremely hard. You see, us moms (and dads), have to put such a positive encouraging face on while our children are in so much pain while we ourselves wish above all else that we could have taken their place 10 times over. He went to sleep in my arms and the operation took place. His recovery has been fantastic in terms of no pain, praise God. As to the success of the operation? I am not as certain. I will need to phone the hospital today as post op, the area is not doing what it ought to be doing.

So I guess having a child recovering from an operation again has me back at a cross-roads career wise. My current employers have made it quite clear that they do not like parent employees having to take too much time off work for a sick child. Being a supply teacher gave me this flexibility but I lacked the stability of a permanent job. Do I have stability but a crappy attendance record due to being a parent or do I gamble to the vocation which is sporadic in terms of continuous work but has the flexibility to drop everything and be a parent? This should be an easy decision to make but I am struggling.

I have one week to basically see how my son recovers and then assess whether there may have to be a meeting with my employers next week where I will need to see what they are prepared to do in the event that I have to take time off work as a result of this latest operation not working.

In all of this the Lord is my strength.

The weekend is here and there is only so many hours in the day.

So since my last blog, my little man recovered from quite a nasty case of stomach flu and we slid back into the hectic life of work and school. I am so thankful that we have one more week to go before we have Half Term which means for me that I can spend more time on here and update things on my other social media accounts.

I wanted to summarise how easy/complex (depending on how much coffee and lack of sleep one’s had) it is to update one’s blog background. Don James from “Blogger Tips Pro” has a blogger’s tutorial on customising your background and the process was really nice and easy to follow.

One thing to remember though. If you have made your own background – like I did – in a graphic editing software like Adobe Fireworks, then you will need to export the file in a web friendly format. Most user screens on their computers can be as big as 1920 by 1080 pixels and so if you try to upload a file which is not exported to a .jpeg  file format then Blogger will reject it as being too big.

So overall I’m hoping that my house style is not too intrusive to the feel of the overall blog.

Hope you enjoy the new look.

My same little man is slowly recovering from another – or possibly the same – virus which hit him a few weeks ago.

He really had a tough time on Saturday and was really violently sick. As a mom, it is a horrible thing to witness, as one feels so very helpless. By yesterday the vomiting had stopped but he still had diarrhea. He spent most of yesterday sleeping. Today as I am typing this blog entry he has fallen asleep. He is still washed out but it definitely looks as though he is getting better.

With the demand on our NHS and A&E depts, I’m sure I’m not alone in that we spend part of that first day of sickness deliberating whether or not to drive our sick child to either a walk-in centre or emergency room. I have linked here to the NHS Choices website which gives some guidance on what to look for and when it is necessary to send your child to A&E when they have more than two days of vomiting.

But basically, the main thing I had to do over the last few days was to keep a close eye on him. Another thing to not take for granted is to sanitise any shared surfaces in your home. As a single mum, I cannot afford to miss any time off work (as I do not get paid), plus any other siblings in the house can mean that the virus remains in your home to re-infect the little ones. So from quite early on, I maintained a routine of wiping down door handles, and surfaces with anti-bacterial wipes. the bathroom surfaces and floor in particular has had to have a complete clean through every time my little one was ill or had an accident. Another thing is to make sure that everyone in the family had their own separate towel. I’ve just remembered that I have to wash the guest towel!

As for him, on Saturday, I had to make sure that he remained hydrated as he point blank refused food. I had to ring the new NHS direct helpline (111) and was told that products like dioralyte was good for him to have in regular sips after each loss of fluids. On speaking with someone there, I felt better at managing his sickness at home. He didn’t have a rash on his body, a high temperature nor did he have any blood in his vomit and stool. The service was excellent in firstly reassuring me as to the care that I was doing.

The most difficult area is the issue of work tomorrow. If I go off the above website, then he cannot return to nursery until Wednesday because, he had a runny tummy in the night and we need 48 hours of no sickness and diarrhea before a child can return to school/nursery. So “thanks alot” to those parents who sent their kid(s) into school to where my little one got sick! I need to go in or else not get paid, but at the same time, my kids comes first. I am in a position again to not have any other family member to look after him while I go in but at the same time I have a work deadline to meet no later than Wednesday. It’s times like this when I realise that I need a vocation where I can work from home.

So as my little one sleeps, I will capitalise on his recharge to update this blog, and complete the items ready for work (either to send in by email and stay home or that he is well enough, strong enough to go to nursery tomorrow).

Oy Vei!! the joys of being a single parent!