Before I had children - and until Linnea was walking, even - I thought that insisting that children say "sorry" was pointless, at best, and completely devaluing the concept of apology, at worst. I've changed my mind.

I really, really value an apology. Which is not to be confused with the attempts they make to get out of jail free by doing something dreadful and chirping "I sorry now!" with a beaming smile.

So now I make my kids say sorry.

It started with me apologising to them, and on their behalf, a lot. Then I started instructing them to say sorry (I don't ask them unless I'm willing to cheerfully accept a "No," it's bad for my blood pressure to shoot myself in the foot that way). At some point I started adding a sorry-for-what? which means they don't just say Sorry, they say "Sorry, Name, for doing the whatever it was."

If they're not ready to say sorry, they have to go somewhere else until they are ready. Sometimes, they are not ready to accept each others' apologies. That's ok. Saying sorry doesn't make everything better, and it's not supposed to. It's just a first step.

I think arming them with the ability to make a prompt and sincere apology (which is often a difficult thing to do) is a good thing for the rest of their lives. And it makes it much, much easier to live with them. We all apologise a lot. I like that.

Do you remember Baby Seri, for whom you gave money towards a specialist wheelchair to help her breathe, over a year ago?

It's her third birthday today. Breathing clearly worked! And it looks like the older she gets - and therefore the higher her chances of survival - the easier it will be to get funding for her necessary equipment.

I'm not well, but nothing like as ill as yesterday. Yesterday I couldn't eat much and went to bed after dinner and slept until 10, after which I woke up and drank almost two litres of 7-up (yuck). Today I was able to get up and stumble around the house without losing my temper with the children too much. I took some photos of Emer's lego creations and did some reading with Linnea. We made tomato soup. Emer and I had a bath and washed our hair.

This is definitely not Norovirus, none of us has been ill enough for it to be that, thankfully.

But you can tell, looking around the house, that I've been under the weather. I hope to get the energy to clean it up a bit soon.

This weekend we have lots of masonry drilling planned, for Saturday before noon, and a little more for Saturday afternoon against an internal wall of the house.

So *this* is what they mean by holding someone in the light!

Goodness.

We were changing a truly spectacular nappy on an ill, cranky and violently struggling child! Aren't we lucky?

Thankfully, Emer is both more cheerful and more digestively normal this morning, so that leaves me and Rob with this yuk, whatever it is.

First thing I did this morning was to stand over Linnea while she cleaned up the mess she'd made in the bathroom; she'd poured water all over the floor, distributed the toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes widely, and done strange things with nailbrushes. She was completely cooperative about the clean-up, not quite in the manner of a Quiverfull-style cheerily serving child but certainly cooperative enough that I felt somewhat disconcerted.

Now I'm composing a huge online shopping list for Sainsburys; I'm planning to buy all our meat for the month in one go, except the Christmas dinner stuff. So I can also get all the breakfast cereal, tins etc in one go.

And I hardly feel queasy at all! Perhaps I'll even eat lunch.

(We have reached the stage of disinfecting all the doorhandles and lightswitches and so on, as well as handwashing, clean towels, the usual).

Memorial service on Wednesday. Linnea went to Girls' Brigade on Friday (and came home with a TON of sweets, suspect the advice Rob got about how much to leave was slightly flawed). Rob and I made it into the hideous, heaving town centre on Saturday to do some Christmas shopping. And on Saturday afternoon Emer developed a dodgy tummy and ended up back in nappies!

Today I'm the only one actually ill though both girls seem a bit wan. Rob has taken them out for a cycle.

It's now definite that Linnea is reading by the light coming in through the crack in the door, after bedtime. She mainly reads a book called "Yuck," which neither Rob nor I like. It has almost no pictures but we have no idea how much she's reading, as usual. The cheap paperback binding is disintegrating from being fallen asleep on or stuffed out of sight when a parent comes in. It's a bit daft.

Still, I remember doing it, and my eyes were fine until I started working with computers...

Today I started reading Dr Dolittle aloud and both girls listened to about 60 pages. That's not that unusual, but the strange thing is that when I stopped Linnea forgot to pretend she wasn't listening and instead asked me to read some more.

They are still dead.

That's the thing about murdered people, they stay dead. Their mothers never get to hold them again. They never get up and make coffee again. They never write another poem, never build another house, never swim again. They don't write any more software or toast anyone's health or buy any more tins of soup at the supermarket.

Stop killing them. Stop ignoring them. Stop reporting their deaths as though the inside of their pants is the only thing that matters, or talking about their deaths as though their apparent physical sex change isn't an important part of why they died. Stoppit.

Please.

1. What's the coolest place, monument, thing etc that you have ever
visited and why?

2. Do you have a favourite book?

3. Cat or dog person?

4. Have you ever done any sports or martial arts?

5. Do you watch shows like X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing etc and if
so/not, what are your thoughts on them?
( Answers in here )

All around me, it seems, people are ill, often with cancer, or they are mourning natural or violent deaths of loves ones, or dealing with fears related to past events, or overcoming recent or not-recent traumas, or fighting ongoing David and Goliath style political battles without a proper sling, or...

And my life is lovely. We are more or less accustomed to our (rich developed nation style) slightly straitened circumstances, we are all four of us well, we are working gradually on getting our house closer to perfection, we are not in any way persecuted or singled out for mistreatment.

And we're happy and the four of us are getting along really, really well; seeing Rob come home after a rough day of work and be transformed by his daughter's joy in seeing him is mindbogglingly enriching.

I have no idea whether the memorial was good or not. I went. I hope it helped.

Emer's "Very Hungry Caterpillar" plate broke; it was part of a gift set she got from Nana.

Going to and from the memorial I got a taxi, because I don't feel confident going out in the dark at the best of times and especially not when my focus is on a woman who was murdered by a man.

Linnea and Emer like each other a lot and I can't believe how well they get on. The bickering is really minimal.

Emer's bedtime went really well in my absence. She did miss me, but was not devastated. (I explained that I was going to Meeting because people were very sad, and she said But you happy! so I said what did I do when she was sad, and she said Tuddle, so I said I had to go to Meeting because sad people needed a hug. That worked well.)

"When I finish writing this book we have to draw the pictures and then the last thing is the cover, we have to make its cover, it needs a new one when the story is finished, we will port to the new cover from the old one."

My head is spinning. But we went out earlier and brought shelves to the community garden, and tidied up the summerhouse there. And now we need to haul out all our wood and see what we can use to make shelves and put adverts out for the rest of it to go for salvage of some sort.

Today I brought the children to the surgery to witness my blood being drawn (we used our childcare favours up on Tuesday). We were late. We were ready to leave, and Emer wet herself, so I had to change her. Then we left, and partway there Linnea inexplicably turned around and started to walk back home. Then we arrived, and the nurse was running late anyway, so that was ok. I got my paperwork (the main blood tests are for hereditary clotting things which some of my family recently discovered they have) and sat down to wait. But Emer needed the loo again. The nurse called me while we were in there - I ran out, leaving poor Eem sitting on the loo alone, and popped my head into room ten to say "My three-year-old is on the toilet." So she called someone else, and Emer finished up, and we went back to wait some more, and it was AGES, and then they called us in.

I sat Emer in the buggy in the doorway and Linnea on the floor behind my chair, because there wasn't much space. Linnea put a book up in front of her face and ignored the whole thing studiously. Emer said...

"Is this the doctor? What her going to do? Why they need you blood? You don't have blood! What that? Why? Is that a needle? What the needle for? Why? People don't put needles in people! Why? No it don't hurt you. Is that blood? Why you blood? No needles go in people."

The (foreign origin, not mocking Emer's babytalk) nurse said "What a clever girl! The ones who ask why, they clever."

Both children were good as gold, and Emer's chatter seemed to amuse rather than irritate the nurse - she didn't repeat herself, because I answered very quickly every time. There's little as irritating as completely repeated unanswered questions.

The most difficult part of DIY for us is the timing. We got it wrong twice - once in July 2008 and once in September 2009, IIRC - and had people bothered by the noise. I hate this, it makes me feel sick to my stomach. So now we plan things carefully; if we can't get them done between 10:30 and 18:30 on a weekday we ask neighbours when is convenient at a weekend.

Tonight we had to hammer the veneer back of a wardrobe into chipboard, so we assembled it with lightning speed and started hammering just after 6pm. It was fine.

But sometimes we have to ask the 7 independent occupants living either side of us when at a weekend will suit them. One woman gets up early on a Saturday and goes out so she'd like us finished by noon on Saturdays and not to do it on Sundays. Far more people lie in at weekends but then go out in the afternoons. What works best is the weekends when the people living on one side are all away and the people living on the other side all sleep late and then go out shopping.

But it doesn't happen very much.

Of course, ideally, we'd have enough money to get it done during normal working hours, when this is the only occupied house and so it's fair game to cut off the water, the electricity, the gas, or the peace-and-quiet while people hired to work in neighbouring houses get things done.

Still, we managed it tonight.

Someone next door is watching something with a lot of revving cars in it.

The children will finally have clothes storage which doesn't fall over. However, it's more than twice as heavy as the reviews on the website said it was! Ah well.

In other news, the pan velcrokitten told us about has now arrived and last night we cooked meat in it and today I put it in the oven with a casserole inside. Hurrah for multipurpose pans!

It's also another pan with no long handle, just two little D-shaped ones, which means it fits well in our confined cooking space.

I have lost my glasses. The children managed to turn the telly on this morning so Linnea is really cranky. They can get their own breakfasts but have inherited a desire to use so much milk on their cereal that the bowl is half-full when they finish; I find the waste infuriating. I have also scrubbed the damn toilet again which is always good for my temper.

If anyone can suggest where in the house I ought to look for my glasses before leaving to have blood drawn for half a dozen tests I'd be most grateful.

Still, at least I should get a lot of laundry dry today, it's lovely weather.

We enforced bedtime for Emer tonight. It's time. She's about ready for the slow transition, we're about ready for the extra work. We're not willing to do the scream-herself-sick method, so it will take a little longer, but that's ok.

She actually seems to need 10-11 hours a night, I think.