Do you ever suspect you aren't doing too well at this parenting lark?

We just had another contretemps with my toddler.

We seem to always be having contretemps with my toddler.

He is three years old, wilful as a colt, sensitive as an eyelash and, at times, demonic. This morning it was about switching off the TV, as usual. They had been watching it for a blissful hour, allowing us to lounge in bed a little longer. I warned of the great TV shut off, I executed the great TV shut off. Queue a toddler nuclear explosion.

He lashed out at me in fury, his tiny fists really wanting to do harm. So, in great Supernanny tradition, I time-outed him. Lately, when he gets a time out he has taken to spitting or peeing on the floor. He had done both this time, so more time out (not sure if that is the right way to do things, but hey, advice gratefully accepted.) Then we cleaned up the mess together.

So my husband is going to the gym and taking them to the soft play there, and I get a morning of peace. Toddler realises we aren't going to the same place and screams and shrieks that he needs me. Husband now loses cool as we have now been engaged in battle for about half and hour. He doesn't understand how a tiny chap can make life so unpleasant for everyone. My daughter is the biggest casualty. While we are all focused on the human air-raid siren, she is quietly ignored in the corner. (yes, we know that is now the way to do things, but in the heat of the moment...)

So I am now having 'my morning' but feel horribly guilty that husband has to put up with screaming toddler, and toddler is potentially going to be traumatised by absent mother.

Sometimes I wish I had Supernanny in the attic, to wheel out at times like this. Or Tanya Byron to advise me when yet again the kids are whining about food, clothes, going somewhere, not going somewhere etc. I just feel as though I have a plan in my mind how to deal with child hot-spots, but when it comes down to the heat of the moment, all these plans become tangled and incoherent.

Does anyone else feel as though they are not only making it up as they go along, but also that they aren't exactly in control of their children and their lives?

Tell me about your Bonfire Night. I miss it...

Canadians seem to go crazy for hallowe'en.

I mean, there is a house on the next street that, not kidding, has a twenty foot spider scaling the wall. I have seldom seen anything quite so barking, apart from those loons who put a strain on the national grid by covering their 3-bedroom semi in fairy lights every year, complete with Santa, a sleigh and his reindeers 'en rampant.'

But I kind of like hallowe'en. Gory witches, spooky skeletons, trick or treating...it's loopily nice.

Why are the holidays we celebrate so violent and bloody though?

Guy Fawkes night - hurrah! Lets burn a catholic on a pyre. And make dad nail a rubbish catherine wheel to the fence.

Easter - hurrah! Lets stuff our faces with Cadbury Creme Eggs because some chap got nails through his hands.

Hallowe'en - hurrah! Ghoolies and ghosties abound. Some of the masks you can buy here are beyond terrifying. I can't wait to see my daughter's reaction to being offered candy by a sinister straw man with a sewn up slit for a mouth. My bowels are turning to water just thinking of it. Will she need counselling in later life? Have a corn field phobia?

Christmas is a little bit jollier, birth and all that. Diwali with the festival of lights also sounds like a pretty happy event.

But I do miss Bonfire Night a little bit. The 'oohs' and the 'aaahs' as a roman candle farts light into the air. The drizzle. The numb hands holding sparklers. The fact that our old neighbourhood seemed to think that firework night started two weeks before and two weeks after the actual date, condemning our pitifully bad toddler to a months worth of broken sleep.

Ah. Perhaps I don't miss bonfire night after all.

When your child is a bit racist...

I do not live in a terribly ethnically diverse area.

Essentially, the demographic is white, middle class 2.4 (actually, more like 3+ children, we are in one of those areas where 3 children is the new 2.4) children. And tons of Japanese students who go to the local language school.

My daughters school has a good mix of nationalities. Iraqi, Jordanian, German, Acadian, and many, many Chinese students etc. But I struggle to think if I have seen any black children at the school.

Nope, still struggling.

I took my daughter to her first cheerleading class yesterday. (hmm...) The class was in, what friend's black nanny (who I often hang out with at the park) described as, a 'ghetto' area. I lived in one of the roughest parts of London for 7 years, so didn't think too much of it. Surely even the worst parts of chirpy Canada-land can't compete with the depths of 'Sarf-Laaandan town'.

Yep, the area was a little intimidating. Scrawny-looking, heavily-tattooed men hung over balconies. Young men loitered in the park, holding up their half-mast jeans with one hand on their crotch. Every surface available was covered in graffiti tags. Swarms of young children, from about age 3 up, ran on the grassy square in the centre of the community centre, with no obvious parental supervision. An enormous part of me envied their freedom, it looked so much healthier than my friends and my helicopter-hover. Altogether, it looked like a cross between 'The Wire' and 'Sesame Street'.

My daughter then asked a question which no cringing middle-class liberal parent wants to hear: "Do you have to be a brown person to live here?"

I went into Guardian reading overdrive, giving what I hoped was a informative, culturally sensitive speech about how we are all the same, yet differences are to be celebrated...yadda yadda. My teeth started itching with how hideously politically correct I was. Trevor Philips would have held me up as a beacon of hope for integration.

Yet here I was, nervously clutching my purse and holding my child's hand a little tighter because we had arrived in a part of the city where folk were unlike me. I try and think, would I be as defensive if there were a bunch of young tattooed white dudes hanging out at a park looking intimidating, and I am relieved to say that I think I would be just as nervous.

My daughter loved the cheerleading lesson. She was the only white girl there. At the end I asked her how she liked the other little girls.

She said, "Mummy, I like brown people, even though I am not meant to call them that."

Nothing like a middle-class cringe to end the day.

I want to go home. Only I don't know where home is...

We are not coming back to England. At least, not as of this morning when my husband found out he didn't get the job that would have seen us secure the rest of our lives.

Part of me is happy - the town we would have ended up in made me feel elderly even just looking at it.

Part of me is terrified - there have been so few jobs on offer anywhere that we are in limbo, just waiting and hoping for a job to come up anywhere.

Part of me is desperate - I miss my family in the UK and now we are thinking we may have to look further afield to New Zealand and Australia it has become a reality that we may never live in the same country again.

I feel homesick, but not sure for which home. I think it is the home in my mind where we are secure, my daughter is in a school for longer than a year and my husband is settled in a job, at last.

That home is not here, as this is temporary. It is not in England, they don't seem to want us.

Where is my home now? And if I don't know that, when will this longing end?

Can you remember the first time you ever saw...?

...a pierced tongue?

...a mobile phone?

...the Internet?

...a video player?

...a CD?

...a 'normal' person with a tattoo?

I remember all of those things, so that probably makes me officially very old even though age 40 is a way off yet.

The pierced tongue had to be around the time of 'Firestarter' by the Prodigy. So, what, around 1995-ish. I remember being really disgusted that spaghetti would get wrapped around it and potentially you could end up chatting to someone whilst flapping Linguine Carbonara at them.

The mobile phone must have been around the same time, or at least in common usage. Whilst I was university it was all about the landline and hoping someone would take pity and actually leave a message on a scrap of paper.

I definitely remember the internet. It was 1997 and I had just spent a year writing lovely long letters to my boyfriend in Australia. Someone took me to the computer room at work and showed me this newfangled thing called email. I managed to ignore it for another year. I have kept every letter my boyfriend/husband sent me. The same can't be true of our emails. Shame.

The video player we had was a Betamax, and I have felt the stigma ever since. I think we watched 'Lord of the Rings' the cartoon on it about 800000 times.

The first CD I saw had to be the same one that everyone else saw, the one being smeared with jam on Tomorrow's World. My sisters and I loved the rainbow iridescent surfaces.

Trying to remember when I stopped associating tattoos with ropey sailors. I think I was about 20 and they started to become de rigeur.

Would love to know when you remember seeing these things or whether they were always there.

How to write a novel. It's actually working!

We all have a book in us. Apparently.

At least, if Katie Price is able to 'write' several bonkbusters, surely I can as well? And you. And the dustman...

I read on Powder Room Graffiti an article called 'Give NanoWriMo a go'. Here is the link.

http://www.powderroomgraffiti.com/love-it/better-than-sex/give-nanowrimo-a-go.html

Essentially, you write 50,000 words in the month of November. You write quickly, with minimal editing. It works out at 1667 words a day. Pretty intimidating, no?

Actually, it has been surprisingly easy so far. I decided not to wait until November to try this out. I've had an idea for a ghostly, prison tale for older teenagers that has been brewing in my brain for some time. Splatting it out on the page and not editing is liberating. It doesn't matter if it isn't perfect, you can always edit later.

But the main point is, at least you have something to edit. All too often I start my writing, falter at part of the plot or dialogue, then stall. I've had fiction published before, very minor league stuff, but since the kids have come along I have less energy to do it.

If you are the kind of person, like I am, who works better under pressure and with goals, I think you will find this amazing. I've been using this blog to warm up my brain before starting. So in two minutes time, I will be churning down my 1667 words. It's getting to the exciting part where she is just about to pull back the plastic sheeting in the prison wing...

Different countries, different smut.

Americans, Canadians and Brits speak a different language when it comes to smut.

OK, so the standard words of fuck, shit and c*** (apologies!) are pretty much universal, but around the margins the edges are blurred.

This morning I was having a bit of a chuckle at the 'Up and at 'em Morning Glory Muffin' at my local cafe. Now, to me, it is a celebration of an early morning erection. To them, it was a peachy keen baked goods label.

Or me inviting my daughter the other day to 'stroke the cat'. Apparently in Canada, stroke is definitely a rude word and I should use the word 'pet'. Now, I can see how it could be rude, but I'm pretty sure unless you said 'stroke the pussy' in the UK what I said is not particularly laughable.

Having lived in the UK for so long, there are so many many words and phrases that just aren't recognised. I asked where my handbag was the other day, queue lots of Canadian laughter. I should have said purse or pocketbook.

I asked what my daughter 'got up to at school', also laughter. God knows why.

Even new words like 'minger', 'chavvy' and 'Sat-nav' are met with a blank face. I need to use the word 'heffa', 'ghetto' and 'GPS'.

It can get exhausting trying to translate in your brain even simple phrases. How on earth do people cope with having English as a second language?

Anyway, I'm off now to enjoy my morning glory muffin. Sounds damn rude, doesn't it?