So so rubbish at blogging

yadda yadda yadda - said it all before.

But... this is a record of the life I am leading right now - and even the little I blog is good for me to read back on. I read the pregnancy stuff last week and it was lovely!

I ahve however made a bit of a decision not to use the internet as much as I did - Beckie wrote a great post about packing in using it so much and prioritising life things, and she is (as usual) very right. But I do want to keep the blog up, it's a document of my life - and it's lasted longer than any paper diary I have ever kept!

Things are.. busy, to say the least. Take tonight for example. Picked up the boys, but before I went for T, put a toad in the hole into the oven. Never made it beofre, and usually I never put something in the oven and leave the house, but I was going to be out for twenty mins tops, and it took 30 to cook. No problem! So at nursery discussing Ted's bad mood (teeth, tiredness, cold) - suddenly realised we had a long standing dentist appointment at 5.15. Current time? 5pm. Oven on. £30 fine if we don't go to dentist.

So, we had to go to the dentist via our house for me to run in and switch off the oven, which is a HUGE no-no for yorkshire pudding, dash to dentist. No one had brushed their teeth and A was, for want of a better description, quite grubby. Had to apologise to the dentist who was really nice about it. Three sets of teeth checked and back to the house, heat up the oven again, deal with wingy baby, get A changed for Beavers. He is going through a real phase of being a Johnny head in the air, and taking hours to do anything, answering back... *sigh*. Both boys did at least scoff a huge plate of tea (abeit rather flat yorkshire) and T had a banana. T whinged all the way through tea. Then I had to get T ready for bed, and administer some precautionary inhaler, as well as calpol. Then we had to wait for A's lift, and then get T milked up and in bed. Oh, and did I mention that dh is in Reading? And that during this lovely evening, I had dirty hair, itchy excema and knickers constantly falling down? And that I had also been to Asda and corrected a load of work as well?

A Book blog

What you do is, look at the list below, and then:
bold the ones you’ve read;
[bracket] the ones you love
italicise the ones you intend to read.

1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]
4 [Harry Potter series - JK Rowling]
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible - lots of it, but not all, so I've part bolded
7 [Wuthering Heights] - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 [Little Women - Louisa M Alcott]
12 [Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy]
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read the bulk of them)
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - I really struggled with this one, and could not finish it
18 [Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger] (I really loved Franny and Zooey, and also Raise High the Roof Beams Carpenters)
19 [The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger]
20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - my second favourite Dickens after Our Mutual Friend
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll]
30 [The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - I loved the film as well, the David Jason/Michael Hordern one]
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 [Persuasion - Jane Austen]
36 [The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini- this is in the pile by the bed to be read - Loved a Thousand Splendid Suns
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - no no no NO!!!
39 [Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden]
40 [Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - I like the idea of his books, but never quite get the thought to read them
51
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 [The Secret History - Donna Tartt]
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy I haven't bracketed this, but I was really moved by it, loved isn't the right word
68 [Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 [The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett]
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - oh dear God...
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 [Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome]
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 [The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton]
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 [Hamlet - William Shakespeare]
99 [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I am just so crap. I know no one reads it anyway, but this isn't for anyone else, it's for me in years to come.

It's so long since I wrote that we're now three weeks into the holidays. We've been to Devon for a week and the boys and I have just come back from a little break in Wales with my friend G and her boys in a caravan on a lovely site - spoiled only by torrential, and I mean torrential rain - it's in the mountains which made it worse. I feel great taht I've done this - taken the two of them away, done swimming and stuff, all alone - G and I are like Thelma and Louise (just without Brad Pitt and the driving off a cliff at the end). G and I have been friends since the first day at University, her boys are 3 and 5. It's been so great to go away with her, it's been years since we spent such a concentrated time in each others company, and it was so... easy. We have lots in common, and we are completely honest with each other - always have been. And that is so good.

Ugh. Haven't had time to blog - well, technically I have but have been doing other things or not able to summon up the energy to type, merely to read. It's been so busy, it's report time at school, my class had their holy communions, I have ahd all sorts of shit to deal with at school which I am not at liberty to print out in this blog, just in case, as stressful as working at my school is, it still keeps me in childcare and shoes. My eyes are all scabbed up again, after a discussion with my mother, I suspect I may be allergic to lanolin. She is, and she developed it in the summer of 1986 when she was *gasp* ...nearly 37. And I am *double gasp*...nearly 37. How wierd is that? I have googled the item I suspect is causing the scabbiness, and ker-ching - it contains lanolin. Been to the pharmacist today, who has given me piriton and suggested daktacort. She initally suggested E45 cream, but I bought that yesterday, and whilst it moisturised the very dry area, made the itching and redness worse. And what is E45 full of? You guessed correctly, dear reader - lanolin.

I am going out with my friend tonight, so God help anyone in the fancy schmancy restaurant who has to look at my beautiful eyes! If nothing else, my social life has taken off recently, and I have lots lined up for the next few weeks, necessitating some creative accounting and regular fake tanning. Meals with friends, dinners out - lots to do, which is really nice. On Tuesday I can turn the calendar to the page that has "end of term" written on it, which is fantastic.

M went to Reading yesterday at some god forsaken time 3.55am. I was vaguely aware of him leaving, so when there was a huge crash downstairs and a rattling of the front door at 4.30am, I shot out of bed like a bat out of hell, and (bravely, but most likely because of still being fast asleep) pelted downstairs to investigate. Nothing. Silence. Had the children fallen out of bed? No sound. Then, I heard a car starting outside so rushed to the window. M leaving? How did that happen???

Turns out he had got about 15 miles and had to turn back as he had forgotten a vital piece of large equipment - which he then dropped at the front door, hence my rude awakening. Needless to say, I could not get back to sleep at all, ended up getting up and watching TV till 6.30 and then going back to bed and reading until the boys deigned to wake at 8am. Humph.

Ted is still not walking which is very normal for a child his age, but wierd as Alfie was trotting around by ten months. I think he is happy pootling about on his hands and knees and letting everyone else do the running around.

Had a manicure today for the first time in my life. My nails look short, but nice.

I went to see the Sex and the City film yesterday evening with my friend. We are both big fans and have been since the beginning, so we went with great anticipation.

And I did enjoy it, it was good, but...

it was too long, even though there were many strands of the story that were barely investigated - Miranda and Steve for example, and Charlotte's sudden fertility. I know it has to be Carrie-centric, but...no. I would much preferred to have had a new series or three hour long specials or something. I love it so much, but I feel slightly let down. We also went to a nightclub that we used to frequent back in the day, and that was good too, but didn't quite hit the spot either. Had a good night with a dear friend though.

More!

Boy with a Lizard!



Big smiley boy!

I am not Mary Whitehouse, but....

It is 10.30am on a Bank Holiday Monday, and my six year old and I are in our pyjamas browsing the TV. We've watched "I'd do Anything" from last night (taped because it was Ted's Birthday party yesterday - more on that later). We have flicked through for some music - I had to turn off E4 because there was a song with an accompanying video portraying a busty lady in her sexy underwear walking through a desert (I think it's called "Flashlight" but then I'm not with the kids anymore), flicked to another channel and immediately switched over as it was "The Thong song" and then on the third was faux lesbian kissing with Tatu's "All the Things She Said" (who interestingly DH and I were only talking about on Saturday as he remembered they once represented Russia in the Eurovision. But I digress)

My question is - how can this be the choice on a Monday at 10.30? Why should my six year old be exposed to that??? I realise I only have the three free music channels but I have no reason to believe that it is any different on the paying ones. Am I a prude????

If you were going to the SATC Premiere

...would you dress like this woman behind Cynthia Nixon?

I don't even claim to be any kind of style icon, but I mean, really???? It just goes to show that all black is rarely a good look.

If this goes right it means that I have finally worked out how to do something fancy with my blog, and you'll never hear the end of it. And if it does work then it was piss easy and I don't know why I haven't done it before