Archive for family

Urgh.

{ March 8, 2008 @ 10:17 pm } · { family, food! }
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I feel like a pie.

Bloated, lethargic, slow and with a sweet pastry crust with an astonishingly bad headache.  This is because I have spent the last week at my parents’ house, and we all know what happens when a girl on a mega-diet visits the homestead don’t we?  She eats like a ravenous goat!  Not just that, no no (it gets better) – yesterday I baked chocolate brownies.  Chocolate brownies in the sense that it is just one huge gooey, sticky chocolate brownie and I’ve eaten far too much of it.  It sits on a plate in the kitchen under a shroud of cling film, tormenting me in what I imagine to be a seductive French accent (think Olivier Martinez and you’re almost there) until I give in and have yet another slice.  I’m paying for this by feeling like a pie.  A horrible huge chocolate-filled pie.  All is not lost though, because tomorrow BeepBeep and I return south to the big city where I will leap willingly back onto the Dax Moy Elimination Diet bandwagon, be chastised by Mr Fox for my sugary weakness and exercise within an inch of my life before seeing my lovely doctor for a weigh-in in two/three weeks.  I haven’t lost thirty-three pounds only to put it all back on, you know, no matter how alluring another slice of chocolate brownie may be.

Hair stylist are bloody rude, aren’t they?  Armed with a pair of scissors and a range of dirty looks that would make Stacey Branning (née Slater) green with envy, one took a look at my hair last weekend and asked “when was the last time you had your hair cut?  Three years ago?”.  I kid you not, I almost walked out there and then (I would have, had my hair not been soaked after the pre-cut wash at the time.  It was a very cold day after all).  After I’d wished for the ground to open and swallow me, I presented to her my magazine clipping with a nice, wispy long-at-the-front-and-short-at-the-back-but-not-like-a-boy’s style that I wanted for myself, only for it to be folded (folded!) and placed on the shelf below the mirror in front of me and the hairdresser to describe how she had “a few ideas”.  She ummed and aahed and held up lengths of hair in front of my face and tied a ponytail before finally deciding on a chin length bob.  I’ll admit the haircut is nice, but to be honest anything would have been better than the shoulder-length mess I started with.  Whilst cutting, the woman couldn’t have appeared more disinterested if she’d tried, occassionally yawning and then disappearing into the back room for ten minutes at a time, before coming back and looking a bit puzzled before continuing with the cut.  I’m not a conversationalist when I get my hair done, I prefer to sit with a magazine and let the scissor-bearer get on with it, but since there were no magazines (or at least none being offered to me that particular day, not even when I asked for one) I made up shopping lists in my head and watched the other stylists behind me through the mirror whilst the woman snipped at my locks.  It won’t take a rocket scientist to realise I wasn’t impressed, and definitely won’t be going there again.  I would mention the name of the salon, but I don’t want to end up with their other explosion-in-Topshop-clothed stylists sending me comments saying “zomg we r teh best, ur hair was lyke a BUSHPIGS btw!1!!!”. 

I have the joys of a three hour train journey with a toddler to look forward to tomorrow afternoon.  My bags are filled with snacks, juice, crayons, toys and my mobile phone is fully charged should I need to phone my mother and scream for advice.  My plan is to feed him up just before we need to catch the train, so he’s all dozy and sleepy…  He’s a sneaky one though, probably lining up caffeine pills as I type and hiding them in his toys so he can be wide awake and in full torment mode.  Alright, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly.  Toddlers are terrifying creatures, though.

Spring cleaning.

{ February 6, 2008 @ 1:30 pm } · { beepbeep, family, food!, yoga }
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Busy busy busy. I’m in one of my moods where everything needs to be done now, including this blog post. Beepbeep has a huge pile of new toys; well, not so much new as a bunch of toys he got at Christmas but had been left at his grandparents until the other day. The joy on his face as we pulled out a toy tool bench (with spinning plastic saw and colourful “nails” to hit), a Bob The Builder steering wheel, a big wooden xylophone (my ears!) as well as a heap of other multicoloured bits and bobs was brilliant. He’s spent the morning using his tool set and occasionally driving away somewhere, pretending to be Bob The Builder.

Last night, when he listened to me asking him to help to put his toys away, and every time I asked “could you pass me your ball/Iggle Piggle/trucks?” he went over to each toy and passed it to me with no fuss. He knew exactly what I was asking him to do, and whilst he might not have a lot of words yet (his new words are “brush”, “ball” and “shoes”), I know it won’t be long before he does. He’s amazing.

So, whilst he played I was busy stripping the bed, putting on washing, tidying up the cupboard/alcove/wardrobe (it’s basically a deep alcove down one wall in our room, deep enough to hang clothes and have a chest of drawers, but we removed the mirrored doors because mirrored doors are horrible -

These aren’t our doors or our room, just a helpful google image search to illustrate the point that mirrored doors = yuck). I also went into crazy mum-mode when we got up and made us all pancakes for breakfast. Sometimes I am too domesticated for my own good.

Another mum at playgroup and I made a plan yesterday to dump our kids with our partners and go off to see a local band play one night. She and her husband set up the kitchens in two of the city’s most well-known and well-loved vegan restaurants/pubs/gig venues, so she’s pretty clued up on the newer local bands and where they now all play. It has been… *counts on fingers*… almost five years since I went within a two mile radius of any local bands, so it would be both long overdue and a little intimidating to go. That is nothing to do with the bands playing and more to do with my own paranoia issues, but hey ho! I’d really like to go out though, it’d be nice to feel like me again, and not just “mummy”.

In yoga news, yesterday I managed to get my forehead to touch my knee, and for the first time since I was twelve I managed wheel pose -

I wish this was me – I’m a long way off being this slim, but still, I did this! And held it!

 

 

 

A quick question.

{ February 1, 2008 @ 7:34 pm } · { family, food!, not so good }
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Does anyone know a good, relatively idiot-proof recipe for coconut ice cream?  I’m planning to cook the meal to end all meals (and no, I’m not planning on proposing, despite the leap year) for Mr Fox soon and I want to whip up some homemade contraband ice cream.  Contraband because of the big healthy eating plan we’ve been on since November – dairy of any kind is forbidden.

I did have more to say, but it is scarily serious and I won’t know anything concrete until tomorrow (hopefully).  Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

I’m slow to finish but I’m quick to start.

{ January 27, 2008 @ 3:12 pm } · { buddhism, family, out and about, religion }
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The more I read, the more I want to learn.

Picking up on a relatively new interest of mine, Mr Fox took me out yesterday to a big out-0f-town shopping centre and bought me this.  I’ve been filling my spare time reading internet articles and blogs relating to Buddhism, but having something tangible in my hands makes me feel as if I’m being a bit more active in my learning.  Of course I’m still pretty clueless, so if anyone knows any helpful sites or other books that would be of interest, you know where my comments box is.

We’re having a good weekend, all in all.  We bought a shiny new iMac which Mr Fox has hogged!  I don’t mind really, I have my laptop so I doubt I’ll use it all that much, but it gives him the excuse to sit at a desk in the spare room and look important.  Today however he is up to his eyes in what I like to call Tax Return Hell, buried under a mountain of letters, invoices and statements.  If he doesn’t emerge from the room by the evening I’ll call in a search party.

Tomorrow it is my father’s birthday, so many happy returns to him.  Sadly I won’t seem him on the day since I live a couple of hundred miles away from my family, but he has some good mail winging it’s way to him.  My brother turns eighteen next month which scares me to death – I remember the night he was born, hell I even remember my mother telling my sister and I that she was pregnant with him!   I have no idea what I could get him other than the usual aftershave/clothes/jewellery.  I’d like to get him something a bit special since it is his eighteenth, but… I’m clueless.  I’ll check Etsy, maybe it’ll surprise me.  Then another birthday on the horizon!  This time my sister’s twenty-second in March.  Luckily she won’t be back in the country until mid-April so I have a little extra time to get her something.

The Metformin is making me so tired; once it gets to ten or eleven at night I have to drag myself up to bed before I crash out on the couch.   I’m really hoping this passes, I don’t fancy spending goodness knows how long feeling so exhausted all the time.