Last post of the Year - and a late shuffle!

31st December is always a funny day - there really is a feeling of fresh start and new hope for a new year. This has been a lovely year in so many ways.

We won't be doing much tonight - my mum and stepdad are coming over and we are making a nice meal. I doubt we'll see the New Year in, I simply can't stay up until midnight at the moment! (Must turn the phone off though if we do go to bed!)

Here's my inaugural Friday shuffle - please bear in mind that there's not many tracks on the iPod at the moment as I only just started to put things on, so it could be a bit repetitive.

1. Shine - Take That
2. Perfect Day - Kirsty McColl
3. I Still Haven't found What I'm Looking For - Coco Freeman featuring U2
4. High - James Blunt
5. Untitled - Oasis
6. Frozen - Madonna
7. Mancunian Way - Take That ( this is quite a funny song, there's a big fly-over sort of thing linking east and west Manchester called the Mancunian Way, and I used to have to travel across it to work every day. If I still did, I would have to play this song whilst I did)
8. Here With Me - Dido
9. Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis
10. I'm Not Brave - Kirsty McColl

Dix, Wonderwall was number 14 on the shuffle - not quite kismet today!

Not too bad - if you're going to have two repeated artists you can have worse than Oasis and Kirsty McColl.

There's a couple of my CDs that aren't recognised by iTunes and therefore have transferred with their titles as "track 1, track 2 etc". Is there any way of manually putting these in?

I don't really have any New Year's resolutions - I need to spend less time at work, as some of the time I spend there after school is chatting/procrastinating, and I don't have the time for that these days. I also don't want to put on too much weight, I think I'm about right for this stage in my pregnancy, about a stone, but I need to keep an eye on my chocolate and carbohydrate consumption. I want to spend less time on the Internet/crap tv. Most of my evenings are mindless surfing/staring at tv that usually I have seen before (Friends re-reuns on E4 usually). As a consequence I have read less and there are DVDs I haven't watched yet. There's a new facility on my cable to watch things that were on last week again and at your own pace ( a kind of low rent TiVo, so I could use that). My January resolution is to get things a bit more organised for the baby, starting with reorganising the bedrooms so that A is safely ensconsed in his new room before the baby comes. I have nearly paid off my credit cards, should be done by mid Feb (managed Christmas without using them at all!!! Yay me!!) so that will go towards my financial cushion for the unpaid part of maternity leave. Since I found out I was pregnant, and paid of my student overdraft, I have saved £100-£200 per month, so once they are paid off, that will go up to £400 per month. I should have 2 months salary saved by the time I'm not paid any more. So that needs to be kept on track, which is another reason to start getting things together for the baby gradually rather than all in one go. Luckily, I don't need anything big, just clothes, nappies and bottles etc ( still needed even though I am really hoping to breastfeed again).

So actually, that looks like quite a lot!

Happy New Year to all those who read this little blog. It's two years old this week! Hurray!

I am still here!

I think I've had the opposite of that NaNoWriMo or whatever it was called this month. I just couldn't be a****d to write,even though I have thought about it lots...

Had a lovely Christmas, with lots of friends and family, food and chocolates. Yum. I've not really missed wine too much either, although i did find a nice 5.5% pinot grigio spritzer at Sainsbury's which i had a couple of glasses of over the festive period.

We're in the middle of rearranging all the furniture in the house to convert our dining room into a playroom, as I am feeling the need to use the space in the house more effectively, and until now, the dining room has been a "dressed" room rather than a functional one. God I'm knackered! Hopefully we will get it finished in the next couple of hours, I'm sure me blogging whilst A watches Nick Jr is really helpful to the cause.

The big news is that I have an iPod! I got it for Christmas, and I am very excited to join the Friday shuffle gang, apart from I only have one album (Take That) and three random songs purchased from iTunes on it at the moment. However, tonight's job is to put a load more stuff on it so that I am ready for tomorrow's inaugural shuffle. Very very excited, also because she is a beautiful, red (the one that gives money to AIDS charities) iPod, christened Scarlett O'Hara. I love her! I also got some nice jewellery from Pilgrim, some lovely Aromatics Elyxir goodies, some cash and a stylish compost pot for the kitchen. I'm rather pleased. A had a great time, and it is lovely to all be at home together - it's doing us the world of good.

In pregnancy news, all is well, although I suspect I have been doing too much as I am pretty sleepy (not like the first few weeks though!). Lots of movement, and then 20 week scan looms on the 9th Jan, which is a real milestone. I can't help but have little niggly worries about it, but whatever will be will be.

Had a crap week

Just loads of crap to deal with. Christmas in a primary school is not something that any sane person needs to have to deal with.

Baby is really moving about now (apparently it is 10cm long) which is nice as it makes me feel more like it's real. As I worked for the NHS when I had A, I had a midwife appointment every week, heard the heartbeat every week etc. It's not like that in the real world.

I am sleeping really heavily at the moment - rudely awoken by the alarm each morning, usually from a very vivid dream. This morning's was me in a hotel lobby in New York with a man who is not my husband (!) and I had just drunk a very delicious gin and tonic (I could really TASTE it in my dream). We were about to go upstairs together but we couldn't because we were on the 25th floor, and the stairwell got smaller and smaller and narrower and narrower, so we couldn't fit. Whenever I dream about being with other men, and it does happen, hey, I am not responsible!, I am never actually unfaithful, something always happens to stop me. Something distinctly Freudian there I think. And then the alarm went off, and I was very bewildered.

I bought the most fantastic CD this week, Rhythms Del Mundo. It's fantastic, loads of really great songs like Clocks by Coldplay and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by U2, but done in a Cuban Salsa style. It's amazing, really uplifting, happy, makes you want to dance even though you've got a big old pregnant ass. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Christmas shopping is sort of on its way to being done. Mostly on line, the days of being able to go and have a good old all day shop are long gone.