Family fun and new horizons.

A NEW YEAR, NEW JOB AND NEW START FOR ME...

KEEPING OLD PEOPLE COMPANY....

WHEN IT COMES TO JOBS, I NOW HAVE THREE,

I THINK I’M GOING TO BE KEPT BUSY!

Hello again and this week I have good news.

No, I didn’t manage to get the matching cup to my Pinky and Perky saucer from the auction site (stupid computer crashed just as the last bids were happening!), it’s even better than that... I have a new job.

Some of you may know that before I had my children I was a qualified nurse (R.G.N). I gave up after having Sam to stay at home with him. Then I had Luke and was away from work completely for about 5 years. If you stay out of nursing for more than 3 years you need to do a 3 month refresher course to renew your qualified status and this has never been practical for me as a single mum. Even if I re-qualified, shift work would be very difficult to organise, as I struggle enough through school holidays as it is with my current 3 day a week optician’s job.

However, I have been starting to miss the caring side of the nursing job and after some browsing on the internet I have come up with a solution. I found a company that offer care at home for people who need help with daily life. I had an interview last week and am happy to say I have got the job. After my induction course I will be calling on people who need support in their own homes and offering help with cooking, cleaning, transport, washing, dressing and pretty much anything else they need help with. (I’m hoping not DIY though as I really am useless at anything more technical than hitting things with hammers!)

Some of the time it may just be company that people want, especially the elderly and if so, I’m hoping I can entertain them with my stories of Iceland antics, and life with children and dogs! It will be closer to the line of work that I originally trained for and I am really looking forward to the one to one care. Sometimes working in the care industry can be challenging, I already know that, but I also think things that are challenging are ultimately more rewarding too.

The plan is to start this work on the days I don’t work at the opticians but to also keep that job as well. Some weeks there may just be a few hours work with the care agency and some weeks there may be a lot more so I need to make sure the mortgage gets paid!

I think it will be a busy few weeks until I establish a regular routine but I feel very positive and excited about it.

When I say I have three jobs I am including my winning year as “the new face of Iceland” which I suppose isn’t technically a job in the normal sense, but it is great fun writing a weekly blog, testing food and writing reviews, officially opening stores and appearing in adverts. It really has gone very fast in fact it is almost coming to an end as it will be a year ago in April that I won the competition. One thing it has shown me is how much I like writing and I think whatever else happens I will continue to be a “blogger” in one form or another. Perhaps a novel is the next challenge! (Well I do like to keep busy!)

Also this week I had a lovely evening out with my family. We decided to go out to celebrate my new job and had such a nice time that we all agreed we should make time once a month to all meet up, whether for Sunday lunch, a takeaway night, or a meal out. My mum helps me a lot with childcare when I am working but sometimes that means the boys end up seeing her a lot more than I do. I would say we are a close family but getting everyone, including my brother, in the same place at the same time doesn’t seem to happen as often as we all agree it should.

We are generally quite silly when we are all together and we spent a lot of the evening laughing. My Step-dad had been sorting through the old photos to make a display on the wall of ancestors past and present. We found some very funny pictures of odd hairstyles, bad clothes and forgotten memories. I did try to point out that you have to put fashion and taste into context and at the time my mum’s big curly perm and my embroidered dungarees were probably the height of fashion! My brother seemed to win the prize for most different hairstyles over the years and we all agreed it was good that he grew out of the bleached blonde spiky mullet style!

Anyway once we had all laughed at each other and censored the photos that we definitely didn’t want out on display, we went out to a lovely pizza restaurant and that’s where we decided we would all make the effort to co-ordinate our lives once a month and meet up.

My induction days for the new job start tomorrow so please come back next week to see how I got on. It feels a bit like first day at school all over again!


Thanks for reading

Ellie

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