Fail - 1; Win - 1

After reading about Mia Freedman listing what she considers as a success in being a mother and her "Crap List" about how she felt she had failed, I realised we have these every day. In fact today was an example of getting it very wrong and then getting it right. Fortunately the Nugget is very forgiving of his Mum. He realises my faults and does not push it when he can see steam coming out of my ears.

This is how it went down.

As the Moneymaker is away in China for 9 days, I need to fill in on the driving kids to school, sports, etc. So yesterday all I had to do was get the Nugget to his Saturday soccer game by 10am. We had been to this particular field before and I was driving the 'good' car with the in-built GPS - shouldn't be a problem eh? We left in plenty of time, on our way I entered the address and then I remembered - "Linda" (what we call the GPS) did not like this suburb and would only list the street name under a general "Sydney". Not helpful but I locked it in and hoped for the best.

Linda let me down.

As I felt ourselves moving further away from the suburb we should have arrived at by now, I whipped out my iPhone and Google mapped the address. Between these two devices and my SHOCKING sense of direction we turned up in time for half time. Big Fail! But my little trooper ran in to relieve the substitute from another team (we didn't have any reserves) and immediately scored two goals to bring them ahead. They ended up 10 all so not too bad an ending, but I still felt horrible. The swearing must have been colourful on the way there too (Moneymaker calling from China to see why he was getting calls from the coach asking where Nugget was didn't help either!), because on the way home when I missed a green light and said "poo-bugger-bum-wee", the Chicken laughed and said I said alot worse than that on the way there!

After lunch and Chicken's first basketball game (she won!!), we rushed home for a quick change and then to drive another half hour to drop her off at her friend's for a sleepover. That left me and Nugget free to do whatever we felt like doing, which meant the playground for him and finishing Mia Freedman's Mamamia under a tree for me.

It has taken me ages to read this book, not because it's hard to read but I have been totally distracted by blogs, tweets, newspapers, and the real life stuff as well. I've snatched moments waiting in the car at school, at soccer and escaping for a coffee now and then. I've loved every page and Mia is my new idol. Some situations that were familiar made me want to write to her to sympathasise and/or celebrate and other circumstances inspired me to believe I could do something useful with my life. What that is I'm not sure.

Anyway! back to being the schizophrenic mum ... the playground bought a special treat, Mr Whippy!

It was coming onto 5pm and I told Nugget I could tell what time it was because all the little kids had started getting a little 'narky' and crying was coming from all corners of playground. I explained to him about "witching hour" and he was very amused by this mum theory. After a little while he agreed to leave because the toddlers were too witchy. He also wanted to avoid the little girl that kept following him and trying to show him her necklace. He could only run away so many times. He had also tried to join a group of boys playing ball but they had gone home. Nugget now admits sometimes it's good to have a sister around for company.

We were going to go to the Fish Markets to have prawns for dinner but they were shut so ended up at the local bowling club where we had a woeful seafood basket and I watched a Rugby replay with a lonely glass of wine while Nugget played with a cricket mate he found (he has friends everywhere the little bugger).

So I had scored points on Nugget's mum scorecard but it was all wiped out when I had to nag him to get to bed after watching Rockwiz. I got that evil look again and Mr Whippy was melted and forgotten.

How do mums keep in their kids' good books and still have some control and discipline over them? Or do we have to wait for them to grow up and appreciate all the nice things we did with them? Do they forget all the good times and only remember what Mum didn't do for them? I know I remember maybe three great things I did with my mum and know of dozens of instances where she wouldn't have won any mothering awards. Hopefully I've not done that badly and they will still tell nice stories about me to their children.

How do you keep the fun and control on even scales?

[Also don't forget you've got 1 week left to enter my Panasonic competition, so visit here soon!]

(I've added this as it seems we are all facing being imperfect lately - thanks to Picklebums!)