While other Ebay vendors clearly grab a handful of Grandma's buttons and sell them in mis-matched, muddly lots, the clever people at Sydney and Jay gather together truly scrumptiously themed collections of buttons and buckles and arrange them for sale like tiny works of art.

Create similar collections yourself, stitch on to something pretty and frame...

While I may be all sweetness and light online, in reality I can be a bit of a cow. While my Dad tried to impress upon me the importance of reading How To Win Friends and Influence People I was too busy obsessing over the naughty bits in the rite of passage that is Judy Blume's Forever to be concerned about my all too obvious lack of social skills. And so it came to pass that I grew up firm in the belief that I AM RIGHT and YOU ARE WRONG and no more is this evident than should you find yourself in discussion with me about anything remotely babba related, because when it come's to parenting I (shamefully) KNOW I am right. Even when I'm clearly completely WRONG!

Now as you can imagine this is the kind of attitude that can get you into all kind of fixes when your entire social life is based around the school gates and every conversation you ever have with the suburban mommies in your Mommy possie naturally revolves around your respective children. While other women nod politely as they listen to each others experiences, I am there shouting my mouth off about my latest theories in not very progressive childcare, shaking my head vehmenently at anyone ludicrous enough to be following anything other than the Alison May School of Mothering and feeling sad in my heart for the little blighters unlucky enough to have the kind of Mummy who isn't me!

I know. Don't worry, there are times when I want to strangle me too.

And then my own little blighter started shooting all my parenting skills sky high and I have to eat humble pie in the cupboard under the stairs and pretend I reserve the right to change my mind in public, should I then find myself having to explain why I am now embracing something I previously loudly deplored.

Take for instance the question of extra-curricular activities. These, my darling oh so tolerant friends, know I could once barely stomach. No! Not for my child the dragging off to football three times a week and karate on a Friday and Recorder lessons at lunchtimes and drama class followed by swimming and a quick shimmy under the monkey bars at the baby-gym on a Saturday. No! Of course my son wouldn't be having extra maths lessons, joining Scouts or Sunday school or Big boy Tumble Tots or playing the violin or learning street dance, or indeed doing just about anything that didn't happen between the hours of nine and three, or ate into the empty, just being time I have long believed paramount to the development of the kind of wild imagination I think every child should be blessed with.

So for a while I stuck to my guns. I looked mildly disapproving at the very idea of any child having to endure another lesson of whatever when they crawl home white-faced with baby exhaustion after a long day in reception and I failed to feel sympathetic when one Mummy after another bemoaned their own lack of time due to their willingness to spend every spare minute ferrying little children from pillar to post. I was that Mother. The superior being you want to smack.

And then the rebellion began. The occupational therapist suggested that Finley might benefit from the discipline of martial arts and so off to karate he went. Then Finley himself announced that his friend Mark was brilliant at football and if I didn't let him go to to Saturday morning footie he would DIE and because one cannot sacrifice one's child for the sake of half an hour shivering at the side of a cold field, I said ok to that too and before I knew it I was dallying with the idea of swimming lessons and a weekly half hour with a tutor to help him with his writing and maybe even drama lessons and then he announced his intention to be a model/actor (!) when he grew up and I, flailing permanently in single mummy guilt, decided that drama lessons it was and promptly delivered him to an empty school having mixed up the starting dates for the class that was going to make my baby a star!

And so it goes on. I'm riding a coconut mat down the helter-skelter of IT'S ALL TOO MUCH and all of a sudden I find myself helpless to resist the kind of peer pressure little boys and other Mummies apply in great big dollops and I have to apologise to Kath who bears the brunt of my most outraged and usually desperately dull parenting rants because it is clearer by the day that I haven't got the courage of my convictions and will go on delivering my child to activities I suspect neither of us much enjoy, when in my heart of hearts I know that it isn't a man in a football kit  or a scary lady with a whistle at the side of a swimming pool who will help my little boy become the strong, imaginative, creative man I know he will be, but instead, the cosy hours spent lying next to me on the floor, telling me in great detail the reason why Willie Wonka is the scariest film ever made that will make all the difference. The time he spends apparently talking to himself, narrating games of such imaginative magnitude I cannot ever hope to understand them, that will shape his creativity, and all the other rituals that we maintain as a tiny family that will let him be the kind of little boy happiest dangling upside down off his chair, singing at the top of his voice and dancing by himself when he thinks no-one is watching, and  ultimately provide him with the ability to entertain himself without constant stimulation. 

I KNOW this and yet and yet and yet: I could be wrong.

Tell me now how much is too much? At what point did I begin to lose confidence in that which I was sure of?  Is that what happens, do we begin to doubt ourselves the minute our children assert themselves? When they become not mini-me's but little people in their own right?

I really don't think I was cut out to be a Soccer Mom.

There are things in this world I covet in a nonsensical fashion.  Take for example this collection of ten French fabric covered miniature books. I don't speak French. I have books coming out of my ears. I don't need them and I can't read them, but, oh readers, how I want them because they are pretty, and French and flowery!

While one of my favorite Ebay dealers, Winter Garden was proferring three of them last week, this dealer has the complete set of ten and they would look utterly charming piled together nonchalantly just about anywhere in my house, so should you stop by you would find me both infinitely interesting and in possesion of culture, intelligence and good taste...

Alas, they will not be mine this time, but who knows when serendipity will once again bless me with that which I have no choice but to resist? I'm a believer Housekeepers: I am a believer.

MONDAY. Today is the day it begins. Sniffly nose and a chorus of funeral bells from the church next door. Clothes reeking of offensive conditioner already neatly stacked on the ironing board. It is Monday after all. Poetry. Yes poetry. To make sense of things. Potato farls and normandy butter. "Struggle (now) by  little and little against idleness". Remember mushrooms. And toilet paper and strawberries (for a little pirates lunch) and maybe another pint of milk.  Tell yourself bleach isn't the only answer to the stain on the carpet. Skin on milky coffee. Acidy bite of morning hunger.
Today is the day it ends. No more so. Stack books you intend to read on your bedside table. Make promises. Find the lost car (the one with eyes) and leave it where he will find it. Write things down. Obsessively pouring that heart (and a five year plan) onto linen paper. Feet snuggly in stripy socks. Missing the one before the last one badly. Still.  Eggs in a bowl, stained the colour of water.   Laughing out loud at a man on the radio. An accent so thick, so familiar, it is foreign.  Bitter taste of yesterdays argument.
Today is the day.  Buy sunflowers when you pick him up. Ring the car tax people. SHOUT AT THEM. Read, read, read. When all is said and done, read. Down on your hands and knees fishing out lego. Making his bed. Face for a moment in his dancing rabbits pillow.  Make mackerel pate for lunch. SERVE WITH WATERCRESS. Consume with lust. ( But don't let it destroy you). Euculyptus on an old womans handkerchief.   "Here is a soul, accepting nothing". It is Monday after all. A September Monday so there is no better. Hiss of the iron steaming in the kitchen.
Laugh now. Make lists, plans. Try and MAKE sense.
It is Monday after all.

"My portraits capture the souls of heroines, everyday women who have found strength and personal victory in their diverse experiences. The portraits carry a range of emotion reflective of the life events that have shaped their character. Their historical reference invites us to look at reflections of the past to learn about ourselves."

Given my penchant for art featuring ladies with over-sized heads, it won't surprise you to know that Cassandra Barney's portraits of everyday heroines are right up my rose sprinkled street...

I have got a crush on Sadie Olive. Whether it is her photographs, blog designs or now on Etsy, her wonderful taste in all things vintage, she never fails to thrill the little part of me that aches for the kind of innate subdued style Sadie applies to everything to which she turns her hand...

I think you will agree that any man who lands on your doorstep clutching a bottle of pink lemonade is a keeper. Last night my six foot four man sealed an already promising deal with a bunch of flowers, a packet of gluten free jellybeans for Finn (who he has met only fleetingly being the single parents conundrum that it is), a loaf of tomato ciabatta and (oh joy!) a bottle of sour cherry lemonade for me...

And this my darlings is good fizzy happy stuff. Until now the only ready made pink lemonade option widely available was the Lorina version found in Tesco's and Waitrose and selling at the really rather hefty price of £2.39, but in steps Aldi, in it's mildly bonkers in with the zeitgiest for buttons manner and lo and behold, we can now drink pink lemonade, in a pretty curvy glass bottle (and a variety of flavours!) for 69p a throw (available in America at Trader Joes for $2.25) which methinks means we could be serving a little bit of decadence for elevenses on a daily basis.

Life is good Ladies. Now get thee to an Aldi and make it pink.

See? I told you bad literature was the cause of who knows what, not to mention flirting and coquettery. My darling Book Group Mummies, I do hope you are taking heed...

Snobbishness comes in many guises. Some deluded types get a bit twisted about number twelve lowering the tone of the entire neighbourood while others would rather die than shop at Asda. Some people can only tolerate organic this and soil covered that, while others (naming no names) rather believe it is both a sign of low intelligence and dubious social class to enjoy Coronation Street with the same degree of enthusiam they should reserve for the maudlin best of high brow French Cinema.

While the journalism in the Daily Mail may border on scaremongering on a daily basis, the writing for women is occasionally excellent if only in terms of its cringe-worthy ability to tell it exactly like it is (excluding anything spluttered from the vitriolic, whinging gut of one Ms Liz Jones).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a woman prone to the most fleeting of culinary obsessions. Cravings come and go and I, not in possession of the willpower I was born with, find myself unable to resist them and eat current faddy food until it comes out my ears and I am quite plainly sick of the sight of it.

Shudder inwardly and proceed to Room 25, the rather grandly titled “Ambleside Suite”. Install Peggy in prison cell single room and greet maid still making beds at three o’clock in the afternoon in ours. Try not to be violently ill when Finley reports that the bathroom tiles are “stuck on with blood” nor have a hissy fit of the most ugly kind, when kind maid advises me to open the windows on pain of death or else the room will fill with pigeons. Thank her for large pile of individually wrapped custard creams for Finley and promptly hide them in suitcase in case he is suddenly struck by the true horror of hotel and embarks on a gluten riddled biscuit binge.

Step out in rain wet enough to dampen the spirits of even the most ardent of Japanese tourists and consider buying over-sized translucent mac and looking as utterly ludicrous as everybody else. Decide, even in the face of adversity to maintain dignity. Drink the first of many cups of tea with Peggy and try not to bash her when she announces that Mark’s new girlfriend is a nice girl with a lovely slender figure. Feel like a bitchy heffalump as you retaliate with the news that the oh so slender teenager also has a hole in her tongue. Watch her lips purse and feel guilty for at least three seconds. Watch her posing with vicious swans on the lakeside and remember how much you love her. Decide not to be offended by her mildly thoughtless tongue. Eat in a restaurant straight out of 1970 and refuse the offer of “fruit juice” for starters. See red felt shoes I would sell my son’s grandmother for, in window of pretty shop. Resist! Get in bed at seven thirty in the evening and wonder if purgatory is also equipped with the smallest kettle in the world.

Wake up to a chorus of pigeons pecking at the window. Don wellies and wade through puddles to Beatrix Potter museum. Love it. Debate what the sentence would be should I be found in possession of Mrs Tiggywinkles vintage linens. Decide stealing off a hedgehog goes against my morals. Watch Peggy talking to waxwork model of Miss Potter. Suppress hysteria when she tells me woman has lovely skin. Get on open topped bus to Windermere and drown. Arrive looking MAD. Eat gluten free cheese toasties (WOW 2!) in gorgeous little cafe. Try not to punch ex Mother In Law when she tells me she has warned her boys (Mark and fellow errant husband, brother Simon) not to take up with women with children because they are “more trouble than they are worth”. Ask her if she wants to phone Richard and tell him. Ask her if she wants to ring Mark and give him bashing for forcing me into the ranks of potential trouble and long term spinsterhood. Drink coffee and remind myself that she once accused me of stealing a collection of aluminium teaspoons. Find solace in teeny old bookshop. Buy first edition Amelia Jane and feel better. Take child to posh restaurant. Order flame grilled chicken for him and receive biggest paddy ever seen as reward. Chase him down hill shouting. Glare at appalled tourists in matching anoraks. Reach end of tether. Agree that yes child too may have reached the end of very wet tether and smile winningly when he tells complete stranger he hates me so much he is taking me to the police station and reporting me for being a rubbish Mummy. Feel grateful when Peggy takes charge of child. Ring Mum and describe fabulous day. Sleep. Boil half to death in hot room. Strip sleeping child down and blow cool air on his skin and wish someone would come and do same for me. Begin to feel rather fond of ugly room now brain has gone into suspended animation.

Wake up and find Mark on doorstep. Offer him mountains of individually wrapped custard creams as reward for timely arrival. Tell him his Mother is a Darling regardless of all that should never be said. Tell him hotel is so lovely the maid gave up a great job as Manager of a Mercedes Dealership in Newcastle to come and change the beds here because she loved it sooooo much. Wonder out loud what is wrong with the people of Newcastle. Agree to go on one more day trip to Grasmere “en estranged famille”. Get wet. Eat famous Grasmere gingerbread. Get wetter. Find absolutely gorgeous little house shop and refuse to listen to ex Mother In Law and Father of Child tutting at prices of beautiful objects. Buy lots of beautiful objects. Tote expensive beautiful objects shamelessly. Defend purchase of beautiful objects then remember it isn’t necessary and go and spend silly money on more. Feel better. Get in car and tease Father of Child with reckless spending mercilessly all the way home. Get delivered to Mums and skip into sanity. Feel giddy. Feel like I’ve been to hell and back in wellies and rather liked it. Wonder if all holidays are the same? Run home to de-stink house and resolve never to go to on holiday again. Put tired little boy to bed and open door to Richard. Feed him something terrible and endure impertinent insults to cooking and random hair growing willy-nilly out of nose. Feel at home again. Rather miss hotel trouser press. Rather miss Peggy.