The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Are Numbers

and also a bit of mum guilt

Four.

That’s how many apps my child’s school expect me to download in order to keep up with his progress, and remember which days he has P.E. and which days are for dressing down/dressing up/donating to the food bank/bringing in money for other things.

There’s the imaginatively named ‘School App’.

There’s the slightly confusingly named ‘Parents Portal’, which has no apostrophe, so it’s unclear whether it’s a portal consisting of parents, or a portal belonging to parents.

There’s SeeSaw, which is not nearly as much fun as the name suggests.

And now there’s Teams, which is apparently to be used during the holidays to view my child’s “profile” there — for what reason, I do not know. I mean, I’m guessing we should expect him to be having Teams meetings at some point, like a bored home worker whose boss insists on weekly catch-ups? Is that what it’s for?

(Like Daily Walks, Teams is one of those pandemic things our household missed out on, because we were already self-employed, and could only really conceivably have set up Teams calls with each other. (Is it even for calls? Am I making this up?) Every so often I get a bit panicky because I don’t know what you’re supposed to do on Teams, in the same way I’ll randomly start worrying that I don’t know the rules of American Football or how to re-string a violin. And even though knowing these things could have no possible relevance to me or my life, I’ll still feel bad about my lack of knowledge. I… really hate being me, sometimes…)

On top of all of this, the school also communicates all developments with us by both text and email, and there’s also the parents’ Facebook group, so, technically that’s six modes of communication to keep up with, JUST for the school alone. Hate that for me.

Here are some other numbers that help sum up this week…

5 is the number of the books in this photo, which has literally no relevance to this post whatsoever…

16,803

Words written in my Work-in-Progress. (Not all this week, needless to say…)

1,239

Words I need to write per day¹ to meet the totally arbitrary, self-imposed deadline I’ve set for myself.²

55

People in my new Instagram broadcast group, which is a place for me to share links to things I see online and want to buy. I figured this would be a better option than just spamming everyone on Stories with them all the time, but, well, Instagram hates me, basically, so we’ll see.

16,091

Instagram followers. Which sounds vaguely impressive until I tell you I used to have almost 18,000, but have been cunningly and gradually repelling them all, to the point where I’m expecting to dip below the 16K mark by the end of this month. Yay me! I am the BEST at being the worst at Instagram!

7,539

Approximate number of times I watched the video of Taylor and Travis dancing to Love Story in the club. Please tell me someone’s currently writing a rom-com about a pop star and a football player, and this is the ending? Because I’d do it myself, but I’m 16,000+ words into a rom-com about a woman who leaves her life behind and flies to Spain to find her first love, and, look, I can’t do everything here, OK?

3

Days left until the end of the school holidays, not including this one.

5.6

Weeks until the next school holiday after that. Seriously, WHY DO THEY NEED SO MANY HOLIDAYS?! Is it because of all of the Teams calls?!

27

Number of times I’ve made the observation that school holidays in winter — and when you’re poor — are a bit like being back in lockdown again.

1

Migraine I had that may or may not be connected to the point above.

6

Children who visited my house last Sunday alone (not all at the same time, thankfully…)

10/10

Level of guilt I’ve felt at not being able to afford to do anything more interesting these holidays than possibly a trip to soft play and Pizza Express on Monday (but only because we have Tesco vouchers to use up, otherwise it would just be soft play…).

2

Number of times I deleted then re-typed the two points above, because it sounds really whiny and self-pitying, and, honestly, I’m lucky to even HAVE a house to be stuck in all the time.

4

Number of weeks I’ve been battling the cold from hell. It’s now basically just an annoying tickly cough, but it’s an annoying tickly cough that just WILL NOT quit, so I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I’m just going to be like this forever now.

13

Weeks it took for a very large, household-name brand to pay me for a blog collaboration. This is why blogging may not be ‘dead’ exactly, but it does feel almost impossible to make a living from sometimes.

25

Minutes I’ve spent trying to think of an interesting way to end this newsletter, before realizing I really should just crack on with writing those 1,239 words of my novel instead, so, until next week, folks, please hit me up with your hot takes on Taylor and Travis, because literally no one in my real life will speak to me about this stuff…

1. Well, Mon-Fri. I take weekends off so I can be anxious about a different set of things.

2. OK, it’s not TOTALLY arbitrary: it’s a summer book, so I ideally want it to be out in time for summer, otherwise it’ll just be a bit weird, really.