Mothers Ruin

jingle bells batman smells

2011-11-16T05:45:00.000-08:00

Hurrah!
Halloween is over.
And now... bring on the tinsel and bells and ho-ho-ho-ing Father Christmas's.
Rock n Roll it's 6 weeks till Christmas.
I have been going through my mental check list. I thought I would share it with you because you never know, it may help you too.

Have you done your Christmas shopping?
Yeah right. Who does it in November? Per-leeez.

Have you found your glittery baubles?
In a damp box in the basement going green with rot.

Have you darned your childrens' Christmas stockings?
Will sellotape do?

Have you remembered all those things that popped into your head over the year (or since Boxing Day last year) that you may like for Christmas?
No.

Is it going to snow this year on Christmas day?
No. They'll be so disappointed. Again.

Have your children started The Countdown yet?
A little bit. But their maths is bad.

What is your current account status?
Dire.

Are you excited about Christmas?
Currently more excited about the spelling of the new Greek Prime ministers surname.

Are you a little bit too bah-humbug.
Perhaps. But if I play it down massively then the day can only be a bit better than expected, yeah?

Have you written to FC yet?
Not me personally. I don't believe in 'him'. But Liz has; a hilariously painful process. I now have to work out how to post the letter to FC so that the right elves - doh, I mean, humans - see the requests.

Do you have a survival tactic for getting your Christmas Shopping done?
Yes. It's simple. Online. Glass of Wine. Credit Card. Bish Bash Bosh.

Finally, some tips for enjoying the Christmas season as a family...?
Be positive and encouraging...
Whatever they query - tell them its true.
Jesus was born in a manger (poor old Mary - must've been dreadfully uncomfortable...) under a huge star;
Father Christmas comes down the chimney, no, he won't get stuck, no he won't wake you, yes, he'll like a mince pie;
Yes singing carols in the rain is FUN;
Yes, we have to go to church because otherwise God will know and you may not get any presents;
Yes, I need this next glass of prosecco.

And just remember - as you're on the edge of sanity and about to explode with annoyance that you've wrapped your stocking presents with the same paper as the bloody presents under the tree - that you were once a child too, and how fun all the mystery was, and take heart that your supreme efforts do not go to waste... Shine the halo, take a deep breath, suck on the red wine, re-wrap. FC will have a place for you on his sleigh next year, no doubt.

not halloween? please... no...

2011-10-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

Ugh. I bloody hate halloween.
What is this 'celebration'? What's it all about? Something to do with the eve of the somethings that had to come out and scare away the something elses and save someone or other from eternal hell... And some people throw in the word 'pagan' to be really intelligent about its origins.
Or is it just a ploy from Tesco / Sainsburys / Asda / Aldi / even Waitrose I believe (not that I shop there more than once a year because my credit card - that belongs in fact to Husband - starts to quiver and shake in my wallet) / any supermarket / corner shop / news agent to get our children to eat shit for 48 hours, wear shit for 48 hours, talk shit for 48 hours and scare the crap out every person they possibly can for at least 2 weeks in the name of Halloween?
Ask any child on the street that you pass, or your own if you are in possession; ask them, and pin them down (literally if needs be): what is this Halloween you insist on dressing up for every year? Tell me, good child, honestly what is it all about, and I will maybe let you go out and threaten to put doggy-do through old peoples' front doors if they refuse to 'treat' you for making them get off their sofas, shuffle into their moist slippers, stumble for the light, creak their door open timidly and suffer a panic attack when they see a gang of masked idiots shrieking in their face. Tell me why I should let you do this, sweet child of mine?
And the chances are they'll say, in their sweet innocence: "coz you get loads of sweets mum!"
And because I never actually listen to much of what my children say in the first place, and being the daft lilly livered brain-leached wine soaked mother that I am, I'm likely to say, as if on perma-auto-pilot (which I generally am on): "Ah, free sweets! Go on then, off you go. Rot your teeth! Scare the elderly! Just make sure no one nicks your loot on the way home! Sweet things. Oh, and I love that fake blood all over your face! Are those real guts or just sausages you've stuck to your stomach? Lovely!" And off they'll toodle, in a gang, to scare the elderly, steal their sweets, slip on turds hidden under the autumnal leaf folliage, and come home off their frigging heads.
And after we've managed to calm our little sugar-tots down, wash off the black lipstick, black nail-varnish, rinse off the strange sweet-dyes from around their cherry lips, reassure them that we promise not to eat the shit, I mean, treasure that they have come home with, after all that, AND a bedtime story... us parents limp downstairs, attack the nearest bottle, slump onto the sofa and go into the zone that parents are so familiar with.

Only to be disturbed 5minutes later by the bloody teenage hooligans who come banging on your door after the watershed demanding sweets. Bugger off!

So, a tip to you all.
Shut the curtains and make like you're out...

chopper-ing hell

2011-09-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was innocently lying in my bed last night.
All tucked up.
Pretty cosy, you know.
Husband was just beginning to snore, lying on his back, leg propped up on a pillow (recurring cricket injury; I don't need to spend time going over it any more than I need to - other than to say that it took a lot of charity for me to dig up some sympathy as this is 4th time he's twisted / popped / screwed his knee... - but you'll be relieved to know I found some near the surface of my small supply and his knee has been given enough attention to pass as sympathy).
My eyes were heavy after a nice day in Brighton. Mol & Liz breathing heavily and dreaming of rainbows and pink ponies.
All peace in the house.
When, suddenly FLASH! And, GRRRRRR-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-GRRRRRRRRR (that's the sound of a helicopter written down, if you need to use it for your own literary achievements you're free to contact my lawyers).
A bloody great helicopter swooped down OUTSIDE the window of my loft and shone its fucking cheeky torch right in to my bedroom. On my face!
Like. Hello? Do you see a criminal in this house of peace and synchronised snoring?
I think not! Get ye to the streets of Soho or Bangor, and get ye away from my window.
I sat up in bed as quick as a frogs-tongue catching a fly, and leapt out from under my warm duvet as fast as that new physics thing that says things can move faster than the speed of light, and I saw the helicopter turning away from the house and swooping over the houses of the adjacent roads, and then, coming to a hover over the Church at the top of the hill.
Huh? None of it made sense to me.
Anyway, whatever criminal was hiding out in the Church at the top of the hill, it/he/she stayed there for too long - and 40minutes later, with heaps more noise and flashing searchlights (meanwhile Husband snores gently through it all, in Ibuprofen La La Land I suspect), my head beginning to wonder how the helicopter intended to actually capture the crims in the Church (given it was a helicopter) - it just flew away. Vamos. Off it went.
Having woken the entire neighbourhood except for my immediate family, the chopper chopped off to shine its light in someone elses window.
Do you think helicopter pilots like freaking out nervous housewives at 11.45pm on a Sunday night?
I think they do.
Well the last laugh will be on them. Next time they come near my window, I'll be ready for 'em. In my pj's with Husband's crutches.
Trez menacing.
Or maybe I should just get an eyemask and earplugs...? Urban life. What a bore.

The net result is that today my hair looks like its been in a candyfloss machine and really this weather doesn't help.

And its only Monday.

Let it begin, again

2011-09-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

Here we all are again. That's you too.
Back at the beginning.
The great boulder at the top of the steep hill called life which had been teetering on the edge has just been flicked over the side by an enthusiastic do-er who likes to do things and now we're on the annual roller-coaster of life that takes us on, eventually, via the M25 (probably blocked) and the Dartford Tunnel (definitely shut) to the heady warmth of summer 2012...
How nice it'd be to press the fast-forward button on the great control-in-the-sky and get the year done and dusted.
But I suppose we'd only find ourselves once more on the brink of total-organised-chaos as nothing can alter the flying of time. Time which is flying so incredibly fast - faster even than the Concord or than a Jaguar in full gallop, faster even than The Bolt doing the 200m...
And its not like I'm having a ball every moment of this flying time. Probably same as you.
Much of this time is currently spent de-nitting the heads of my two infested but still huggable (just) girls. Another bunch of this time is spent looking for a leotard that fits Mol (think I may have permanently scarred her recently by sending her to a new dance class in a leotard that had a baggy bottom a baggy stomach a sagging chest we could nearly see her nipples and shoulders that kept falling off - as first impressions go, the other dancers may have had a proper impression to chew over...).
Another bunch of time is working out the new timetable and checking that all the pieces of the weekly jigsaw fit together. So far no missing pieces. And no pieces from another puzzle have yet slipped in.
Not a huge amount of this time-flying-by is spent in a glamorous bar in Mayfair with a rich sugar daddy who says he'd like to buy me a villa in Southern France, or in the beauty parlours of Kensington having my back hot-stoned. Oh not for me!
So we bump down through September, praying for an Indian Summer - and instead we get the cast off weather system from the West Indies and all the pylons in Durham fall down.
Oh and another bunch of time is spent scribbling in the cheque book. Swimming. After school club. Dancing. Name tapes. Printing photos of the long since passed summer (sob sob). Uniforms (checked too late and realised Mols jumper had shrunk to her mid-waist and the sleeves were like bits of thread dangling from a shoulder...). Shoes. The list goes on but may start to bore you even more. Out-goings are out-weighing the in-comings (mind you, there's not a huge change there).
Already we're nearly half way through September so I guess that's maybe a good thing. Because soon we may be through to November and December and then Father Christmas will come and make every one feel cosy and wrapped in cottonwool before we plunge back into the freezing waters of January.
I feel like I've never had a year so full of potential, and yet so full of clutter. But if I de-clutter the time, then the potential falls away - so it's all one mother of a chicken with a sodding big egg.
My horoscope probably reads something like this: Cancer, if you are a true cancerian you will want to crawl back into your shell and make your home pretty.
Well that'd do me just fine. If someone else wants to drive Valient Ship of Life on my behalf while I plump the cushions, do drop me a line.

och aye

2011-08-30T12:47:00.001-07:00

A ten day holiday in Scotland?
North west coast?
Do I see you smirking behind a politely positioned knuckle in front of twitching mouth?
But... Won't it be freezing?
Won't it just rain the whole time?
Isn't there a risk of snow, even?
Wouldn't you rather spend 13 hours going SOUTH?
Ha! Not on your nelly! The only risk to us 5 intrepid adventurers (uncle scratchy was uncle-napped for the holiday) was inadvertent bog-snorkelling (both Liz & Mol fell into bogs... First liz - up to her waist... It was like a scene from an old fashioned Tarzan where the desperate damsel in distress is running from an evil woman-eating baboon (in this case Liz running from crazed sister...) and she slips into quicksand and sinks up to her chin, gulping with bulging eyes knowing her time is up... Luckily for this damsel her mother was two steps behind and pulled her muddy derrier from the black goo. And then Mol (moment of parental concern: how thick can you get?) 20 seconds later despite my "watch the bog Mol!" yell, goes and dives legs first into the exact same bog that just ate Liz...) - and (returning to initial train-of-thought) being decapitated by a low-flying Tornado Jet plane (that came over our heads just as Mol asked Husband if we are really allowed to light fires on the beach...- we thought being blown up by a missile would be pretty harsh punishment... Mind you, it's what to expect nowadays... N'est ce pas?) that had us all flattened to the smooth pebbles of the shore as it blew our eardrums and reduced Liz to a screaming shivering frightened wreck. Spare a thought for children of war-torn countries I thought as it disappeared over the brow of the local Munroe to dodge some deer antlers or claim a haggis or whatever.

Scotland totally rocked the family of MR. Not least because of the genuinely breath-taking views & beaches & crystal clear emerald seas & pink Heather & lack of sirens & fluffy eared cows that meander lazily over the roads & the little men with orange hair and swishing kilts that jump out of the bushes and play Bonnie Prince Charlie on their bagpipes (just checking if you're still awake) & all 4 of us plus uncle scratchy having the most amazing rowing sessions over the loch while seals with beseechingly scrummy brown eyes bob in the sea beside us...

It was just. Well. I don't know. Scotland!
Brilliant!
Can we come back?
(Will bring snorkell & ear defenders...)

is it a snail? is it a whale? no its a trussed up M.R...

2011-08-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm just having a negative flashback.
Rewinding a week or so, before the whole Not Quite Gastric Flu incident, on the first day of our time in Devon I did an IDIOTIC thing.
Possibly the most stupid thing I did since getting paralytically drunk when I was pregnant with Mol (explains a lot... but I was young, I didn't know that if my period was late I'd really be pregnant... Yes, I did biology for A-Level...). Or maybe even more stupid than that time when I was getting on the tube with Mol ahead of me and Liz behind me, and I got stuck in the doors as they closed with Mol on the tube and Liz on the platform. Both children wailing. And obviously no gallant passenger jumped up to help me, no, no, in true Brit style the assholes in the carriage looked up from their dirty Metro's with raised eyebrows wondering how this interesting predicament was going to end. Well, all 3 of us are still here to tell the tale, so the complacent fuckers on the tube can shove the dirty Metro up their dirty...
Anyway, going off on a tangent.
Sorry about my language. That occasion on the tube really pissed me off though.
How can people watch and not help? Is it another sign of our strange times... Hey, look! A panicking mother with children on and off the tube, lets do some rubber-necking! Hey! Free trainers! Lets go raid some more shops! Hell, lets burn it all down afterwards too - I've got matches in my pocket that say light-me! The relationship is as clear as the water in the local council pool (once you've pushed the pubes and verucca-plasters out the way).
Anyway. So, back to the point.
So, on the first day of our Devonshire Cream Break, I said to the girls as we bumped off the A38 nearing the end of our 4 hour journey (which I was driving alone, so had a tennis racket to hand to whack any moaners or "are we nearly there"-ers, or shouters or fighters, or mainly, sorry - not to whack the girls with - any petrol pumps that dared totalise a filling up pump over £50... - a lot of whacking going on I tell you), HEY! Girls! I've got a great idea! How about I buy myself a wetsuit too?
I had visions of us all splashing into the crystal clear Devonshire sea, a bit like a scene from Baywatch, but English and a little greyer, great white smiles on our faces, the sun bouncing off the modest waves, a boogy board tucked under our arms, and people admiring us from the beach...
I thought they'd not heard me, and that I may have actually got away with it, and not have to buy a wetsuit (because my other vision which quickly slipped over the Baywatch scenario, was of us tiptoeing into a weed-filled-sea, the skies black with cloud, our towels blown onto wet sand, and the car key lost in a sandcastle-moat...), but no. To my horror... YEAH! COOL MUM! Way to go! Awesome! Lets go now! Get a pink one! Get a shorty! Get a board! Get a new body too...
Huh?!
So the very next day, true to my word, we snuck to the local Devonshire wetsuit shop called Pickles (is that because you get pickled when you go into a wetsuit and then into the sea?) and the 15 year old shop assistant stuffing a pasty into his mouth surrounded by acne (not his fault I know, but can't help what one see's), spat his crumbs out in my face and told me: You need to be able to fit two fingers, no more, between the suit and the skin. UG - I'm thinking, well, I don't need your fingers going anywhere near my skin thank you.

2 Hours later, its scene two (minus the lost car keys thank god) and we're tip toeing into the water, me feeling like a sausage that's about to burst its skin in my pink and black (wow, its the same as mine mum, says Mol, how cool are we? - I'm nearly replying, about as fucking cool as MCHammers crutch) wetsuit, and my girls in theirs looking way better and 'at home'...

Despite a lack of paparazzi and camera flashes to admire the 3 of us jumping and boarding in the fridgesome water, and despite the fact that a man left the water (he had strange man-boobs that actually bounced as he walked - has he NO idea his boobs bounce?) telling us 'watch out for the jellies' - we stuck it out and screams of delight were fast replacing screams of ffffff-hahaha-colllldddddd, as the wetsuits warmed up and we caught some fat-waves.

So in fact now I come to think of it, although I feel a bit like that man with man-boobs (what on EARTH does a woman my age think she's doing in a pink & black wetsuit, clutching a board that has cartoon fish on it?) I have to say: it was the bloody best thing I've done for a long long time.
Rock on the sea!
Rock on wetsuits!
Bring on the fat surf - and yeah baby - see that chick standing on the board? (yep, in my dreams...)

being nearly 5

2011-08-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

So Liz hasn't had a birthday party for 2 years. We feel a bit neglectful. This year she's getting a party. And proper presents (last year to her great delight she unwrapped a packet of cocoa-pops... - is that qualifying as child abuse? Nearly?).
Having a birthday in the middle of the school holidays has its pros and cons. The pro is that for the last two years we've fobbed her off with a "but everyone is on holiday my dear. We'll have a family tea party, ok? Just as fun!".
Now she's nearly 5 she's caught wind of communication methods other than jungle-drums. "Why don't you email Aisha's mum? Mum, you should really text Alices parents, I know you have their number. Why don't you set up a twitter feed? Mum, there's this new forum attached to google where you can post tailored messages for exclusive parties for 5 year olds..."
I feel like the petulant teenager. WHATEVER.
The con to having a birthday in the holidays is that there are still a few people around and about who are very very very happy to have something to do on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of August.
Suddenly there are 12 children to entertain and feed.
And on top of this, I have returned from a week in Devon with some sort of bug. An Almost Being Sick Bug. My nieces both spent the last 5 days coughing up every sort of wondrous substance - at any time of day - maybe in the drive home from the beach (said wonders being caught in an upsidedown frisby - who'd have thought how useful they really can be?) or say, at 1030pm just as the last glass of Valpolicella has been sunk and the cheese board polished off - loving parents repair to the bedroom of their beloved for a goodnight kiss and tuck-up to find them caked in regurgitated pizza... etc. I could tell you more but we've done the sick-thing previously and you know what I'm on about.
I came home with a mild strain.
I've yet to revisit my wondrous lunch or breakfast, instead, my stomach is festering and boiling sordidly - like its plotting for my ruin at the most important part of the day... and can't decide yet at what point it'd be most inconvenient to empty myself. "Neeeheeheeheeee"(evil laughter from stomach), "what can I do to cause ruin and humiliation..?" (rubs hands together and laughs another burst of evil)
Tomorrow is Liz's party.
This morning I made THE cake - practically with a clothes peg on my nose, such was my disinterest in the production. I felt robotic as I wizzed the ingredients up, not enjoying the aromas of vanilla and sugar and all things nice as they bake in the oven. This evening I will transform the cake into a magnificent ... (don't want to ruin the surprise) - and hopefully the sardines dear Husband sensitively bought for our dinner won't make it as a garnish for the cake...
Liz and Mol are in a state of nearly high excitement about tomorrow.
I'm in a state of oh god how will we do it low excitement. I may have to go down to Green Lanes and score some crack to get me through it.
Actually as I write I already feel better. Maybe I just needed to vent anxiety at the computer - my therapist - and bit by bit the games the chocolate fingers the party poppers the balloons the screams of delight as Husband gets them in a tizz over Simon Says - will all fall neatly into place over night, and the Almost Being Sick Bug will get bored of trying to find the ultimate moment for its show and piss off to the noisy student house opposite us. That'd be a much better home for the Almost Being Sick Bug. Except I'm pretty sure that by the time it got to the student house it'd have transmogrified into virulent vomming and disastrous diarrhoea... That at least would shut them up in one sense of the word.
And with that. I embrace the party. I embrace the cake. I embrace the madness that will be shortlived for 2.5hours. Its very manageable.
I wonder where that local dealer has got to...?

chicken on the bone

2011-08-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

So, I was sitting with Liz & Mol last night as they chomped away on some chicken I'd baked for them. Chicken drumsticks. They call it "chicken on the bone". It's a pretty clear definition of what they are eating.
So, chomp chomp. Liz (who is nearly 5...) takes a hearty bite of her chicken-on-the-bone and then, while teeth are gnashing the white flesh around her mouth like a cement mixer, she asks me a question (a few bits spit out onto the table landing close to my vegetarian elbow).
"Mum, so, is this pork or beef that I'm eating?"

My last blog entry was months and months and months and years and centuries ago. Almost last millennium before internet was invented. Why such a long break in the correspondence to the masses who need this drug? The drug of words and distraction from the mundane routine of work or children or cleaning the kitchen floor for the 2nd time in a day as the 2nd meal of the day has been uploaded off a spoon or fork or plate and joyously left by the children who squash a bit into the tiles so the mother who is on her hands and knees actually has to scrub the baked bean off with real traditional elbow grease. fuckers.

Well to answer the question I asked about 400-sentences ago it is because I've been preoccupied by academia and school and children and housework and cooking and sainsburys and eastenders and wondering if the sun will ever come out again after that lovely drought of a spring and I sort of got carried away by time and woosh before I knew it hey pasta&pesto it's the 2nd of August. Shocking how time flies.

I heard a rumour that time flies when you're having fun.
Well I would say since March I've had a bit of fun but mostly I've been chasing my children to school and then chasing my tail around essays (and then sobbing at the results) and then trying to feed everyone nourishing food (chips tonight? Pizza tomorrow! Fried eggs and bacon on Thursday! Fish fingers on Friday as is tradition... of course you can have another packet of crisps to tide you over). So the mother has been feeling a bit literally ruined. Whilst clasping vats of chardonnay and chugging the occasional cancer stick.

I'm sure I can hear necks creaking as the masses who read this nod in agreement at the recent chaos and accelleration (can't spell it sorry) of life generally.
Answers on postcards if you think its to do with us all having collosal amounts of fun.

Although I have had some massively fun times. Like going to Take That (even the 3 hour journey home as fun). Like going to North West Ireland, otherwise known as Donegal, otherwise known as Southern Ireland (of course it makes sense!). Like drinking black zambucca on my birthday and being drunk for weeks afterwards. All good fun.

My theory is this: I blame the children. If the childrens lives weren't so full of after school clubs and dancing and birthday parties and uniform updates and new shoes and hair cuts and more packets of crisps or trips to the park and then urgent dashes for the loo (always a poo) in the middle of nowhere.
So now I have a solution to slow down life: home schooling, never leave the house (unless for adult activity), long hair, Iceland ready made meals delivered to the door, potties in every room.
With this resolution I believe life will slow down and I may have more time to write my blog.

Although I may also go insane.
So, perhaps a happy medium. Send them to school! Don't cut their hair! Eat meals together (rather than having to cook two suppers every day of the week). Cut down after school activities! Increase DVD consumption!
Yeah.

Who want's to join the slow-it-down club?
See you in WHSmith buying bumper packs of dvd-box-sets, and just think how bloody glorious all the blogs will become?

How Michael Jackson really died

2011-03-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

OK - so, hands up - I admit it - I bailed out, I chickened it, I froze in the headlights of physical activity. I didn't do the half marathon. And what a goddamned relief that was too!
I had a moment of clarity one morning when I was running UP Muswell Hill - which, so, I know its not exactly a Scottish mountain - but its pretty bloody steep - and I was sweating and thinking I can do this, I can do this, only another 1/4 mile to go till I'm at the top... and then I got to the top - huge sense of satisfaction - but then, I realised if I want to get FIT for this thirteen-fucking-miles (which was what I'd labelled it in my head by then) then I'd have to carry on running for about another hour - at least! and not just once a week - like, 3 times a week.
Well. I realised another thing. Life is too short to get worried about getting fit for a half marathon. So. When I got to the top of Muswell Hill, I did in fact carry on and run for another 1hour and 5minutes. And when I got home I said to myself: Mother, you did good. You know you can do it if you really want to or if someone came into the house with an AK47 and demanded I run it - yeah, you could. But frankly there are other fish to fry right now in this life or yours - namely - essays and children. Neither to be eaten and mainly to be handled with a lot of care and tenacity.
So. I'm afraid I (with great relief to all parts of me - physical mental emotional spiritual musical political biological pedagogical) I sent an email to my Brother In Law and resigned.
Now, I just do 'nice' runs of about 1/2 hour. Around Finsbury Park, where I comment out loud to no-one how disgusting the people are who leave chicken legs and cans of high-alcohol beer strewn around the park.
People really are disgusting.

And onto something very different. Did you know how Michael Jackson REALLY died?
Well I do now, now that Liz (aged 4.5) has told me the truth for real life.
"Mummy, when I get an ear reflection (infection) and I take a lot of mendicine (medicine) you know I have to be careful because Michael Jackson (OW!) is dead because when he was ill he drank too much mendicine, you know? How much calpol can I actually have anyway for real life?"
I must get in touch with those Lawyers. I think that murder trial can be put on hold.

long distance driving

2011-03-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

We drove to Scotland for the half term.
Alarms rang at 6.15am on Saturday morning. Into the dark grey rain by 7am, onto the M6 by 9.25M... Great motoring.
So what does one take in a car to keep the children occupied for 7 hours of tarmac joy?
Well.
Food first and foremost.
Liz & I spent Friday pm boiling and mashing and mayonnaising eggs for the essential egg-sandwich travel munch. (Liz promptly refused to eat any the next day. Insisting on 'ham, cream cheese and cucumber, MUM, like I always have?' - where did she get the question mark dialogue from? Its like, yeah?) Egg sandwiches always bring a smile to the face - just when the back passengers get a whiff of the freshly opened egg sandwich container... If small children were allowed to swear, there'd be a major kick off: FUCKING HELL MUM YOUR SANDWICHES ARE TWATTING RANK. Or something. I think we have a few years left of not having to endure such language. (I'll keep you posted though.)
Crisps. Essential for dropping down the booster chairs and emptying on to the violating all public health measures car carpet (which are then eaten about 1 hour later when Liz or Mol remembers they're down there).
Chocolate. Great for bringing on huge life threatening thirsts. And for smearing all over car seats and faces. Liz usually gets it in her hair. A good look for the start of a holiday when you're never sure when the next hair wash will be.
Fruit. Especially tangerines. Peel. Everywhere. Pips galore.
Sweets. Great for causing huge fights in the back seats. How many have you got? How many have you had? How old are you anyway? Do you deserve these? Mum, Mol has got 4 and I only have 1. etc.
So, food over and done with, there then have to be activities.
Activities are best if they don't involve the front passenger having to double-twist around in order to facilitate.
Forgetting that Liz cannot read, magazines (of the pink and fluffy animal variety) were purchased and given at 7am. By 7.15am, Liz had thrown hers on the floor (not yet covered in food debris) and sworn (not in an adult way) that she couldn't ever do it and it was smelly and a poo.
So, in reserve, having subconsciously been aware that this could be the case, a large pad of paper and a new set of Sainsburys cheapest felt tips were available.
Paper is great. Not only can you draw on it but you can also rip it into tiny little pieces. Hundreds and hundreds of them. And then drop them all over the discarded magazine (2 hours later - where's my magazine?) sticking to the freshly licked chocolate smears and generally scattering like dandruff from a Dulux dog.
Pens with lids are good too. Because the lids are always lost and fall on the floor or down cracks and then Liz gets the chance to shout (again) at Mol for being STUPID and the pens will all dry up if there are no lids and then Liz gets the chance to hit Mol and call her a big STUPID poo (for the 8th time).
Finally, cd's are a good thing to have. Especially when the boot of the car is SO full up that the back speakers are blocked by bags and tangerine peel, that the children demand it to be LOUDER (in union at this point) so that the adults who are admiring the views off the M6 and wondering how many miles to the gallon the old X-reg volvo really does, have to listen to Josephs Technicoloured Dream Coat full blast, for the 50th time.
Its quite good to try to get lost too - this adds a brilliant distraction to the rear-seats, who zone into parental gunfire - but on this journey we were too into the M6 to get lost.
Anyway. So, 7 hours later, the car in need of some sort of fumigation process, the children needing to be sent into a high-pressure-hose to remove tangerine peel chocolate pen lids cd-covers etc from most parts of their body, and parents in need of a high alcohol transfusion - we made it to Scotland.
Where it rained for 7 days.

how late?

2011-02-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

3am!
That is the time the clock said when I finally collapsed into my bed on Saturday night - I mean, Sunday morning. 3am!
And here's the weird bit...
No child had woken me up demanding I clean up their vomit.
No siren had gone off on the road outside.
No car had crawled down the road with its thump-thump-music blaring. None of the above!
And, Husband wasn't snoring! No, because he'd been up and about till 3am - voluntarily - with me.
What's this I hear you say? Have you been partying? Yes, I reply! Triumphantly not feeling geriatric for a millisecond. Yes, partying with a capital-P.
Actually, there was a slight geriatric moment at about 930pm when I realised, having quaffed almost a whole bottle of very quaffable prosecco, that I really needed to fill the bubbles in with some food otherwise I'd last about 1/2 hour more before I either vomitted on the purple walls or collapsed messily on the dancefloor - at which point I dragged my husband out of the party (which was a tremendous joint 40th (I know, ok, we're fine with that) of some super brilliant party givers who are also super lovely friends of ours...) down to the ground floor where I demanded copious mounds of bread and butter and cheese and my husband swallowed a burger like it was an inconveniently sized pill. After which, geriatric food requirements over, we returned back upstairs and proceeded to 'rock-da-house' till well after 230am. (Rock-da-house. That's quite a geriatrically sad thing to say. But it has to be said because 'da house' was rockin'.)
And at some point the dj realised that the requests for ABBA were outweighing the requests for any thing that resembled music so he kindly let us have the final request (now I can't even remember what it was) and then he pulled the plug. And like someone letting out the air of a balloon, when silence fell so too did my levels of energy and suddenly all I wanted was to be in my bed, contact lenses out, make up off, pj's on, eyes shut, room not spinning.
We had to go via a cab firm where apparently I roared with disapproval at the fee the poor man quoted us (Husband told me about this in the morning when I was feeling weak and vulnerable from general abuse) and we bumped our way up to Harringay, still shouting as though we were in the club with the music blaring in our ear holes (which it wasn't because we were in a taxi that smelt of floral air freshener, ug - I mean, do they really wonder why people puke in their cabs? its not from booze mishandling its triggered purely by their foul 'fragrant' mirror dangle things).
I thought I'd lost my phone so the friends in our cab frantically phoned the people left at the club (can I call it that? It was a bar, but it was also a club, and although technically our friends had hired a bar, it was so a club because we were there DANCING till 230am... if that's not a club, then tell me, world, what is?) and I drunkenly tried to recall where I'd last used it (no idea other than trying to see what the time was last time I sat on the loo) and then suddenly my pocket was vibrating and I was like 'hey, guys, I'm vibrating! Is anyone else?' - er, no, you thick drunk mare, its your phone. So it was. Phone found, we scrambled up the stairs to our bed via the loo the sink the toothbrush avoid eye contact in mirror at this time of the morning and then bed. Mild spins followed by blackout.

Hurrah.
2 days later I am fit enough to tell the tale.
And guess this? So, I worked out, this is the first time in over EIGHT YEARS! yes, EIGHT YEARS that I have voluntarily stayed up till that stupid hour of the night. Do I blame the children? Entirely.
I thank you.

2feb...

2011-02-02T06:54:00.000-08:00

would you adam and eve it?!
its the 2nd feb and still no alcoholic bev has passed my quivering lips. (they don't quiver that often, mostly at the thought of a nice quenching glass of wine... or perhaps the perfectly fresh bagel with the perfect butter and perfect marmite on it... or maybe a freshly baked home made brownie...)
what's happened?
my halo still shineth! brightly! positively blinding!
can you see it? no - that's not the sun!
why such abstinence I hear your enquire? why, you turncoat, have you not yet fallen from your perch of moral highground? get ye to the bottle shop! Absinthe required!
well, its like this see: yesterday, 1st feb, as my liver was getting ready to brace itself for a Victoria Falls sized wave of booze, I realised in fact that I had to be on my course. And given that its a counselling children course I realised that it wouldn't really do to turn up pissed as an old bat who'd fallen into the barrel. Just not the thing really. So, I have had to postpone the reentry into the world of wine for another 24hours. And actually, truth be told, at the end of the day, you know what I mean, innit, to be frank, to be fair, I have to admit, shockingly, (gasps from the crowd) that really, I'm quite happy in my little no booze bubble. And am rather, (more gasps) dreading the re-entry.
A bit like when an astronaut tumbles off the lofty heights of the moon, and then has to go through the trauma of re-entering the earths atmosphere... The astronaut, lets call it, her, "Sheila" for now, just to give her a face. She's got long hair, sort of honey colour, and her teeth are really straight because she had tracks when she was small. Sheila, has been on the moon, all free and clear headed for a long time - lets say, the month of January, and then she realises that she has to come home. And although she wants to she's a bit scared of the voyage. She knows it'll get really hot. And that her face will maybe go all g-force a bit when she goes through the landing part of getting to the earth. So. Understandably, there's ambivalence, right?
Well, I'm Sheila. And right now I'm feeling a bit ambivalent.
Although I am looking forward to a bloody MASSIVE glass of something tonight after bringing the girls back from their hellish ballet class.

nearly there...

2011-01-30T14:06:00.000-08:00

30th Jan!
wow.
so, it looks like I made it! yeeeeeahh. looks like I made it to the end... unless something terribly stressful happens tomorrow and I am forced against my quivering will to imbibe the demon alcohol.
but, fingers crossed nothing terribly stressful will happen tomorrow other than the usual Monday stresses (work, taking the girls to ballet - which is actually a form of hell on earth, however much 'one' likes ballet and small girls, its still hell...).

30 days without a drop to drink.
how ripe and ready for the picking do the bottles in my larder look tonight?

the halo is about to reach peak glow... and I wonder idly how long it'll take to tarnish?
answers on a postcard. or, better still, we can discuss it down the pub...
24 hours and not counting a little bit at all.

the big 13m...

2011-01-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

OK, so while I polish my no-booze halo (Husband has fallen in a ditch... and now I'm going to verbally stamp on his weakness. You're WEAK Husband. WEAK. - he's been drinking red wine. In my house. Under my nose. And in front of my jealous eyes... Oh, but he's WEAK) I am also trying to buff up my mid-to-late-30's-some-what-unappetising-physique. Buffing up by which I mean, I've set myself a physical challenge. Via my super-fit brother-in-law. Who is a 'big runner'. He ran the London marathon in about 45minutes, and in December he flew out to Las Vegas for some gambling and another marathon which I believe he ran in-between visits to different casino's. With his pockets weighted down with lose change. And on top of all that he raised shit-loads-of-dosh (such a good phrase) for a very close-to-home charity (Saving Faces). So over a drunken Christmas conversation as I shoved my face full of Christmas cake, pringles, brussle-sprouts, olives, smoked salmon, brandy butter, Cadburys Roses, prosecco, toast and marmite, stuffing, pasta, pasta sauces, more prosecco, white wine, red wine, port, coffee, tea, cucumber, humous, butter, kettle chips, peanuts, beer, ginger beer, tangerines, home made fudge, the table, napkins, one Volvo, Father Christmas and a 200-year-old-lime-tree - basically anything in sight went down the cake-hole, my lovely brother in law propositioned me with a half marathon challenge. Having just eaten Father Christmas and an ancient tree I felt a bit cornered and heartily agreed.
So now on March 20th, you may experience what is more commonly known as an 'earth quake'. Fear not! This will just be me stamping reluctantly and inelegantly around a 13mile (What the..?) track somewhere out in Buckinghamshire.
What I'm currently concerned about is a.) what to wear (does my bum look big in these skin-tight legging things and this strange fluorescent t-shirt which appear to be compulsory clothing for runners?); b.) how the fuck do I get around a 13mile course without dying? And should I collapse at the 1mile mark, how humiliating will that experience REALLY be (for me and then for my family, after-all, they'll be there, at the 1mile flag, with a stretcher...); c.) if I'm feeling really energetic, what's the etiquette for elbowing slow-coaches out the way and pushing them headfirst in the mud, laughing outrageously evil-y, down, ye of little speed?
I ran for about 45minutes this morning, (relief: not in fluorescent - although I was in tight leggingy things which have a certain amount of derrier-revelation... unpleasant for pedestrians who have to witness 'it' as I 'bounce' by like a baboon in trainers...) - and actually, I didn't collapse or wet myself or get heart palpitations or vomit - and when I got home in my blue leggings, I felt, wait for it - yeah, OK!
So. There is hope. There is hope.
Albeit small.
The other etiquette I wondered about running is, so, is it OK to have a pint of Chardonnay at the end of it or do I HAVE to have water?

over half way

2011-01-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

To keep you updated.
The glow of my alcohol free halo is still shining, and feeling quite glow-mungous. Not a drop has passed my lips although I realise that in the paella Husband cooked the other day there was more than a 'dash' of sherry (I didn't even know we had sherry in our house... Must have inherited it from one of my Granny's all those years ago. She must be looking down from the clouds above, happy to see her bottle come out...)...
And now I don't feel the need to fall into bed at 9.59pm! I am actually super awake at 11pm! Reading my very most excellent Jonathan Franzen book Freedom although having said that I do then wake up at 702am feeling a bit like, huh? late night? no hangover? feel a bit snoozy? why is the sky SO DAMNED BLACK? etc. Winter still sucks however glowing my halo may be.
The recycling men must be shocked at our lack of weekly wine-bottle-disposal. Our recycling bin is one of sparkling water bottles and spinach packets. Oh yes. We are good. Very good.

No one has yet come up to me and said, my god, you look 10 years younger! whats the secret?
But that's ok because its not about looking younger. No. I'm really not THAT superficial, thank you very much. No. Its how I feel! And if I'm really honest, I now feel about 36 instead of 46. So, kind of age appropriate I should imagine.
Husband has done very well too and imbibed no alcohol as far as I can tell. Unless he has a very good breath-adjuster for his homebound journey from Soho.
Only a few more weeks to go.
And then it may all fall about in about 24hours. But at least I'll have done it.

New Years Resolutions

2011-01-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

Hello! I'm here! Remember me? I used to write an awful lot of rubbish a lot of the time and post it up thinking that you guys would want to read it! Ha! So big headed.
And then I had a bit of a calamatous time which involved a lot of sofa-lying and a lot of brain-shut-down and a lot of not a lot. Poor Old MothersRuin really felt like life wasn't playing fair. So MR kind of fell off her own perch temporarily.
But don't worry!
New Years Resolution is to come back. Make a Take That Come Back. Selling out in Wembley Stadium in less than 60 seconds - that's me! Or in cyber terms, 100,000 download click-through traffic jam gridlock come back.
Already as I type the power surge is teetering on the cliff of all out failure.
Talking of New Years Resolutions... I have made one. And it lasts for January. And its so predictable and I feel so terribly 30-something-suffering-from-over-indulgance that I'm nearly embarrassed to disclose it. But I shall. And then all of you other 30-something-suffering-from-over-indulgance can join me in the fight for the Quick Finish Of January.
Usually I wouldn't want to rush a month, especially one as fragrant and rewarding, colourful and warm as January. But now that I've given up imbibing alcoholic bevs for the entire month, I'm wishing it away. My nightly mantra is wake up and it be 1st feb, wake up and it be 1st feb, wake up and it be 1st feb ...
I know I'm a bit sad.
God how sad I'd be if I'd given up chocolate or cheese as well. Maybe I'll do that for Lent though later on in the year. Depending on how the current battle goes.
Actually its not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I did this last year and remembered feeling like a frisky 24 year old by the end of the month. Jumping out of bed at 7am without a groan, wrinkled eyes no longer wrinkled, bouncing through the day without batting an eyelid of exhaustion - my health halo was glowing a deep gold. So I do this with anticipation. The fridge has been cleared of all offending bottles and Husband has decided to join me until he decides to not join me. Fair enough. He's done 7 whole days with no complaint. We've even been out to dinner and been in a BAR where booze is sold and visible and shouting out buy-me, buy-me quicker than a chocolate bar says eat more eat more, and we have resisted. Will our will be so determined this time in 2 weeks? The proof will be in the pudding. Or Liver.
So.
And since the absence has been so long here's a small update on the kid situation.
Mol nearly 8, still believes in Father Christmas. So we had a joyous and magic time filling stockings in the dark whilst full to bursting with rich claret, and then in the morning we realised that FC had totally fucked up and put all the wrong presents into the wrong stockings. So Mol and Liz didn't have such a joyous time as they opened their presents with slight frowns on their faces as they realised that most of their presents were completely age-inappropriate.
"Ha ha" we laughed nervously with smelly morning Claret breath, "Father Christmas must have been so tired and it is so dark in your room - poor him, I've heard of this happening before..." - seemed to do the trick.
Mols faith in the magic was tested again at a later date when my brother opened up AN IDENTICAL chocolate Lindt Bell - "but that's amazing - Father Christmas gave me one of those too Uncle Scratchy..." exclaimed Mol with wonderment. We all exploded with more nervous laughter and said HOW AMAZING!
Liz is a 4.5year old who is, I sympathise also being the youngest, on perma-catch-up with Older Sister and Older Sisters Sophisticated Friends. I feel for her. I can understand why she has outbursts and hits and throws things at people and behaves like an escaped asbo a lot of the time. But she had such a great time over christmas - measuring how much mince pie and carrot were eaten by FC and his reindeer with such care, wishing that every day could be Christmas, finding the idea that if winter was HOT and summer was COLD extremely hysterical. Its the little things in life that make a person tick.
My kids don't know about New Year Resolutions and by default of being my children they're perfect anyway so no resolution aint gonna improve on them I tell ya dat! ha.
(Am I delirious...)
So that's about it for the first one of the year.
No big story line (unlike East Enders...). Just chewing the fat.
But there'll be more. I hope. In time.
Adios amigoes. From the increasingly glowing from super human self restraint MR.

the voms are in town

2010-11-12T02:31:00.000-08:00

So. Usually when a child says they have a sore tummy, their mum or dad or granny or uncle will say, hm, when did you last poo? Maybe you should go sit on the loo for a bit? And the child will go and sit on the loo for a bit and the stomach issue is 'resolved' with a little plopperoo.

Last night this trick didn't work so well. Poor Mol. Grey face. She comes downstairs just as Jack is discovered in the boot of Max's car - on his wedding day NO LESS - to say, muuuuuuuuum, my tummy hurts. So, only looking at the TV, I wave her off with the standard, ah, bad luck, go sit on the loo for a while and see how you do. I'll come up in - oh, just after 8pm?

So, just as the titles role and Roxy's anxious face is frozen for the night, I hear this awful clonking and gargling and screamy-choking from upstairs. Hm. That doesn't sound like a successful trip to the loo I think, and for the first time in 30 minutes I look away from the TV and make a move for the door.

Upstairs.
Carnage.
That's the only word to describe it.
Utter Carnage. Well, that's two words now I realise.
Lumpy utter carnage. Yes, OK, maths not a strong point.
Mol had managed to not recognise that the pain in her stomach was actually her feeling dreadfully sick. And because I'd not seen her grey pallor when she came to check out East Enders, I hadn't linked sore stomach with obliterating her room 15minutes later.
Poor wee thing.
There is something desperately sad (I just deleted 'and funny' because I could be hauled in for child-cruelty) about seeing a small person surrounded by a sea of chunks. So helpless and SO covered. It was a minefield. Where to start I just don't know.
I put on my Professional Cleaner Head and assessed the damage.
1.) Get Mol to a sink and get her pj's off.
2.) This is difficult. Do I strip the bed or do I try to scoop the lumps of (what?) stuff off the linen first? In which case do I leave Mol on her own shivering and grey whilst I fetch bucket disinfectant re-inforced rubber gloves gas mask and plastic sacks?
3.) In fact I went for a bit of all of the above at the same time which may explain why it took nearly 35 minutes to clean up.
Mols bear and a seal and oodles of bed-linen all went into the washing machine. Whack up the heat to about 400-degrees. Sorry Bear.
All cosy in bed, 35minutes later, a bin beside her head, a towel on her pillow, a glass of water, all the home comforts - Mol drifted off back to sleep.
2hours later. Choke COUGH gurgle MUUUUUM.
Replay the above scene, but with a tireder greyer child, a mum who's run out of bed linen, and a washing machine who is aching to be left alone.
This time at least Mol got 2/3rds of the vom into the bin beside her bed. Bin now in Bin. (It was made of cardboard... not sure it'd work if I cleaned it... the room would be at risk of being on perma-smell.)
Thankfully the voms ran their course after that. And we all slept happily ever after.

war zone

2010-11-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

Harringay is like a war zone on bonfire night. Anarchy.
All night the blasts go off, near and far, and at times uncomfortably sounding like something is about to come popping straight through my bedroom window and join me as I read my unsavoury academic mulch each night.
There is a crescendo at about 9pm - I guess as people have finished their dinners and have drunk their 6-packs of Tescos lager or bottles of acidic Blossom Hill - and they pile in to their gardens, drunkenly waving rockets about and planting them in the turf at dodgy lopsided angles (after a bottle of Blossom Hill the average person is probably feeling pretty lopsided too) and drunkenly trying to attach a match flame to the short fuse... with comedy moments of "oh no, its gone out! oh, no don't go back! no no! leave it! at least 2 hours I read... it could go off any time..! oh god, don't... oh. well done. you re-lit it!") and slightly pathetic oohs and aahs as the fizzings and squeakings don't live up to what the packet tells you they're going to do...
I took Mol and Liz to fireworks last night in a friends garden and it was everything a garden firework party ought to be. BBQ hotdogs, nuts, cupcakes, Shrek, children spreading mud all over the kitchen floor, sparklers, adults trying to have conversations in between scraping ketchup off their kids clothes and cheeks, and the host, hovering outside over a pile of demon-looking rockets and wondering what the safest distance from his house is, but not making it too obvious that he doesn't care an awful lot for his neighbours' windows... OK kids. Its time. A grand statement and a hoop of excitement from 15 over-tired-end-of-week-its-friday-night (do kids have the same sense of Friday-night-itus as adults? Do they get out of school and all they're thinking of is heading straight to the sweet shop for an overload of sugar and then fall into bed having watched some crap CBBC with their eyes half closed, thinking, its ok, I don't have to get up in the morning...) kiddy winks who are so unjudgemental that anything that goes WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE and SQQQQQQUUUUUOOOOOOOOOO and FFFFFZZZZZZZZZ with different sparkly colours is, well, pretty awesome. So nice to be the host of a fireworks party for 7 year olds! So rewarding! So powerful!
Now kids! For the grand finale!
And with some quick twizzles to the Catherine Wheel (the one before had managed one full rotation but was kind of a bit on strike generally) the thing went off like a, um, y'know? Well, I was going to say Rocket but that'd be inappropriate. It went off like a dingbat.
Many oohs and ahhhhs, and I was surprised to find that I was in fact making more noise than Mol and Liz, and most of the gang, put together. Quick glances behind them at their weird overly-vocal mum... Oh dear I foresee 'embarrassed child' moments in the playground coming up (no, mum, just GO AWAY and please stop doing that to my friends its NOT COOL...). In fact the other day Mol I think had a bit of a moment as I started singing a little rhyme at her class-mate - who had just told me he was in the choir, so I enthusiastically said, Oh brilliant, sing us a song? To which he said, No! To which I said, OK! I'll sing one instead! and made up a little (and pretty brilliant) ditty - to which Mol started to nudge me and sidle away from the weird-woman with toothpaste all over her mouth.
But that's a bit of an aside.
Anyway. A top night of homegrown organic yumminess.
And some genius woman who had a three week old baby clamped to her breast had somehow managed between sleep deprivation and exhaustion-hallucinations to make the most delicious chocolate cheesecake that had real exploding fairy-dust in the base. Too good. I was probably getting odd looks from my children because I was oohing and ahhing with a brown chocolate smeared mouth and looking a bit like a hangover from Halloween.
The girls were in bed by 8.30pm, with the blasts continuing outside their windows - and by 8.35pm - they were all fast asleep, despite them lying bang in the middle of a war zone.

its the end... continued...

2010-10-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

Oh god. X-factor is on.
The screaming contestants. The screaming audience. The celebrity-ification of dreadful people on TV for less than a few minutes. Oh, please. Spare me.
Get me to BBC 1 for some spangles and D-listers tripping about the glittery dancefloor in floating dresses...

It is the end of summer that's for sure. All the autumn-to-winter-extended shows have all just kicked off: X factor, Strictly, Spooks, Apprentice... There's simply not enough time! And that doesn't include the old fave... E.Enders.

It worries me that Mol, who has never, as far as I'm aware, seen more than 30 seconds of X-factor, did an impression of Simon Cowell two nights ago, whilst wearing nothing but a pair of pj-trousers. She pulled them up to her little boobies and said to me: Mum! (cracking up because it was actually really funny she did look VERY stupid) Mum! who am I? guess! who am I (more hilarity and cackles...)?
Mol, I said. Are you Humpty Dumpty? (Have you seen the nursery rhyme story books? He has high waisted eggy-trouser-clothing-garment things.)
Shrieks of stomach-crunching-laughter.
NOOOoooooo! Who AM I? She says, hauling the pj's up higher still, (I'm thinking, ouch? wedgy doesn't even get close to what's going on down there...)
Um, Obelix? (Another round person with flattering high waisted cover-all-body-shapes trousers...)
NOOOOOOOooooooooo. Mol on her back on the floor howling like a baby ware-wolf.
Liz meanwhile is just laughing - no idea what the hell is going on but its way too funny whatever it is so she's shrieking too. I'm thinking. Fuck get me out of here these kids have finally turned.
Anyway.
Then Mol goes: SIMON COWL!
I'm stunned into goldfish gasping.
Mol, I say. How do you know who this man is?
Oh, Miss Emma (their teacher) did an impression of him in PE with her tracksuit. It was sooooo funny.
More hysteria.
I creep out, slowly, backwards, of the bedroom, and leave them there cackling like a pair of demented witches.

Mothers Ruin: its the end... definitely

2010-10-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Mothers Ruin: its the end... definitely

its the end... definitely

2010-10-08T03:35:00.000-07:00

... of summer, that is. not necessarily the world. yet.

autumn is on the way.
I can tell this by being very perceptive about seasonal changes. I don't imagine that anyone else has yet noticed that the change is upon us. (that's all of us, not just for women of a certain age...)

the smell of bonfire smoke - even in london - is all around, burning leaves, hedge cuttings and lawn mowings and old apples - all dropped on the fire, huge plumes of white smoke going into the atmosphere for some smokey corruption.
the leaves, the leaves. down they come. their colours have turned... no longer are they lush green edible looking appendages on the chestnut trees. no, they're now withered brown burnt-toast-like crinkly forms rejected from their little twigs... down they fall. getting slippery on the wet pavements and hiding treacherous dog poo from unseeing pedestrians (much more poo-stepping-accidents at this time of year. must be a scientifically proven fact by now); it'll be 'leaves on the track' comedy moments fast and furious, soon.
the squirrels! they're mad. there is a squirrel in my garden who is literally squirreling. busy as a pret-a-manger-barrista on the morning shift, this squirrel has squirrelled away so many chestnuts - somewhere in the garden - that my 'lawn' (ha, such as it is) is now covered in the spiky cases that the shiny brown nuts come in. where though are the damned nuts? I'll find out next year when 400 chestnut tree saplings start poking through the ground...
other signs of the change in season which I observantly observe?
children walking round with dishevelled bits of tissue rubbing the end of their pink noses (if you're lucky, otherwise if your children are like mine, its the sleeve or the collar of a t-shirt, or your leg, or the tea-towel, or the top of the duvet cover...) as colds take on their first-round-opponents for the season.
bring on the snot.
bring on the olbas oil.
other signs of the times. well. its cooler. its darker. tea time now takes place as the sun is going down behind the local tower block on the hill, and breakfast time takes place as the sun (if its not covered by cloud) is coming up behind the local tower block on the hill opposite the other hill, to the east.
and sainsburys. oh dear.
not only did it have halloween consumer goods which are really consumer-useless-nesses on its shelves before term even started, but it now has an aisle with christmas puddings, mince pies and crackers. save us!

I'm trying to think of the nice parts of autumn and winter and spring, but all I can think of right now is thermal underwear, cold rain, and finding the time to do the bloody christmas shopping.

so. summer is way out. long gone. au-revoir, cheree! come back soon.
PS who has a house that is completely surrounded by fat oversized macdonald-eating spiders? each morning we open the front door to a barricade of web. its too disgusting.

Health and Safety

2010-09-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

please note: there are many typos in this copy because I'm being very modern and writing this on my phone. But it makes for pretty poor grammar and sorry if it offends the more discerning readers.

I'd like to think I'm not an overly protective mother. I mean there are boundaries it's wise to keep within for the whole family's sanity and safety: like making sure sharp knives are out of reach of small hands or making sure hot pan handles are turned in from the kitchen or testing the bath water before small toes dip in for the nightly ritual. I suppose I'm a bit cautious when it comes to crossing roads: don't cross the road without me EVER even if it's a deserted country lane in Wales with no access to motorised Vehicles...
Child safety is pretty important and knowing my children are safe in their activities and environment and with their friends is pretty much the safest way for me to not turn into a messy insane mother. And it's relatively simple at this point in our life of being a family to uphold the standards of safety. Although small people are a bit idiotic and a bit prone to falling over and a bit prone to maybe walloping each other with hula-hoops or trying to accidentally on purpose push each other down the stairs, or whoops- did I really just knock the paint over and ruin your billionth picture of a flower, hey don't thump me I HATE you, etc - all this sort of activity requires is domestic vigilance and a certain level of maternal (or paternal) authority to ensure health and safety boundaries are not over stepped.

What is so hard to control though and here comes the crux of my story, is when the lives of ones children lie in the hands of others. Such as teachers. Or dinner ladies. Or after school club managers. Or childminders. Or grannies and aunts and uncles who generously have the 'winks for a weekend whilst slightly over worked or over stressed parents take off for 24 hours.
All the above are in theory reliable stand-INS for the absent real-deal and on the whole he safety of the child is not compromised in any way at all.
But, just sometimes a lapse in judgement can leave a parent cold withanxiety and fear for the safety of their child, as what hapened to me and Liz yesterday.

For various reasons I have recently had to take on a childminder (I've started a new course; Liz hasn't quite started school yet; there is an overlap of me needing time to study and therefore having to off load Liz onto others in order for me toget to grips with coursework etc). So. I found a childminder through an advert. She seemed perfectly fine. Chatty. Friendly with the girls. We had met up three times. She's had Liz on her own once.
Yesterday she was due tohave Liz for 3hours so I could study, and she turned up to my house 15 minutes early. Ina black mercedez Benz. With blacked outwindows. With a man I'd never seen efore driving. With a lady I'd never seen before in the backseat. Liz looked at the childminder getting out of this huge ominous vehicle with these strange alien faces peering out of the dark windows and headed straight to my legs with a vice-like grip.
Childminder said 'yeah hi we're going to get a lift back to mine in this car' I was like 'yeah hi who the he'll are those people I've never seen before and do you really think I'm letting my child get into that car with you? I don't know that man I don't know that woman and that car has blacked out windows and my daughter funnily enough is looming pretty anxious at the thought of it too.
Childminder agreed it may not have been the best plan but Liz could sit next to her in the car they'd be fine.
Childminder didn't seem to understand the concept of providing a secure environment for my child. Where is the safety in bringing 2 total strangers into the equation of this relationship?
I was overwhelmed with a strong physical reaction- shaking and felt sick - what if I had let Liz get into that mercedez. What could have happened? More likely that absolutely nothing would have happened and they'd have got to the childminders house and built a jigsaw. But something in me just balked at the whole setup and the lack of sensitivity demonstrated by the childminder. I reminded her of how it may feel to be 4 years old and to be asked to get into a car with one person she barely knows and two people she's never seen in her life. How would you feel? Safe? Secure? Happy? If you answer yes to all three then maybe you are made of stronger metal than I.
Just thinking about the potential risk I could have put Liz in yesterday had I nonchalently let her go with the childminder makes my heart actually beat faster.
Health and safety. Just can't be taken lightly.
I slept on yesterdays event and spoke to Husband and various super-intelligent friends and the conclusion is obvious. I have a phonecall to make.

stomach bug

2010-08-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

Me Mol and Liz were on a jaunty country walk with my mum and her dog, about this time last week. Walking gayly through the village allotments admiring the beans and bulging beetroot and marigolds and rhubarb and feeling a bit envious that my garden in London is incapable of even bearing me a geranium let alone a Jerusalem Artichoke... when suddenly Mol started to choke and cough and wretch.

The noise of someone wretching is enough to make anyone wretch too. Even if you don't know the reason behind the wretching, its that hhhhhhhhhhhhhuh noise - so strong you can feel your stomach muscles clamping and your Bran Flakes on the verge of being regurgitated.

So Me Liz Mum and the Dog tried our best to ignore this dreadful noise pollution by walking on, talking loudly above the sound of air being gasped for and stomach-contents-imminent-evacuation. Although at the back of my mind, because I am after-all a responsible mother, I was thinking, hmmm, this doesn't sound too promising, I wonder why my daughter is gasping so loudly and revoltingly, I wonder if in fact she needs my help?

Eventually, after about an hour of this awful noise, Mol hadn't actually been sick but was still walking along sounding like a parrot with a pair of bellows stuck down its throat, I figured I ought to pull my finger out (of my ear) and try to solve the problem of the choking rather than ignore it.

So with nostrils shut like a camel, lest Mol vomit and the puke-fumes spark off a chain reaction in me, I made awkward loving movements to my eldest precious daughter to find out what the problem was.

At the same time, for some reason unknown to us, other than total fluky coincidence, Liz started to hum a familiar tune that we have on one of our really old nursery rhyme tapes in the car saved for traffic emergencies (these also have the effect of making people want to vomit).
"...I don't know why she swallowed..." hummed Liz;

"...yak yak yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak... I swallowed a fly..." yakked Mol.

Ah!
There was a young lady who swallowed a fly.

We all started to laugh and Mol was most upset by our unsympathetic reaction, so I gave her a hearty pat on the back and started singing with Liz - "...she swallowed a cow to catch the dog to catch the cat to catch the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled inside her..."

I was sympathetic enough to not sing the last verse where the (stupid) old lady swallows a horse, and now she's dead, of course! Because I thought that would push the boundaries of sympathy towards that of mocking, and that's really not nice.

Mol yakked like the old winded parrot all the way home, and I gave her a jelly baby to wash away the remnants of fly - which had probably just had lunch on a cow pat before it unfortunately flew down Mols windpipe.

the age of innocence

2010-08-21T02:55:00.000-07:00

I was just doing a rather long run in the rain over dale and down dips in t'country, and for some reason started pondering the loss of innocence of my small girls.
Yesterday I met up with an old friend who has girls aged 9 and 11 - I hadn't seen them for a long time and so I'd forgotten what older girls are like. In fact, I have no idea really anyway - because I don't know any one much older than Mol. These girls are tall and gorgeous, and behave much older (obviously) than my little gals, with uptodate technology and knowledge of popular-music and they communicate in a way I'm not familiar, and y'know, are just more grown-up.
I was quite in awe of these girls (and vainly wondered what they thought of me) and then I turned to see my little Mol, who - still in a bubble of frank-innocence, Father Christmas features big and so to does the strange fairy who collects teeth at midnight and the concept of magic is way-believable - didn't basically quite know where to look as these exotic girls gyrated (in a slightly off-hand-way) around the kitchen to tz-tz-tz-pop muzac with an air of experienced-coolness.
I wasn't sure what awed me the most.
Was it their confidence with technology that I barely understand? - non-chalently thumbing through their tunes on the ipod? Was it the skinny jeans and jeggings? Their language? Body language? That they were taller than me (not difficult I admit)?
Or was it the fact that one day, very soon, my little Mol (and following shortly on, little Liz) would be thumbing her way over her own i-whatever, bopping in time to pop tunes which I've just about heard of and feel much disdain for?
And I wondered, as I skidded over some cow-pats which decorated the bumpy Hampshire tarmac, how long exactly is it that we have, as a family, before that gorgeous innocence - the belief that magical creatures DO exist, and that Dad really CAN do magic with cards, and that £40,000 is probably not much more than £40 or £4...?
Whilst we have been staying in Hampshire this week with my parents, my two girls have been hanging out with their cousins - a boy aged 6 and another 4 year old...
And what merry times they have had. Running around the garden playing "Cheetah's" and "Lions" and "Babysitters" (Ok, so I'm 21, you're 18, Liz is 2 and Cherry is the baby... and I go out and leave you and Cherry starts to cry because her nappy is pooey, ugh! poo! ... - I mean, these games can go on for DAYS...). And then after a healthy supper of pasta and pesto and chocolate icecream and pringles they all jump into the bath together - having first run around the upstairs unclothing themselves willy nilly room by room...
No one notices that the clothes have come off. No one comments on the bottom (unless conversation turns to farting or poos but that's not in a self conscious way - maybe Liz has done a massive fart so lots of hilarity and fake farting follows...) or the lady bits or the boy bits. They just jump in the bath and carry on with whatever game they had been playing, but naked and surrounded by water.
And as I panted my way up a very steep hill through the pretty hamlet of Ramsdean, I wondered, will Mol WANT to have a bath with her boy cousin next year? She'll be 8.5, he'll be just over 7 - will they be too old to share a bath? I'm pretty sure I didn't have baths with my brothers after they were exiled to prep-school aged 7 & 8... (me being 5 at the time...)
And then I remembered, as I rounded the corner of the steep hill, to see that I hadn't yet reached the top and had at least another 300m to go, puff puff, that when we, as a young family - me (aged 8), my two brothers (10/11-ish) went to the South of France - mum had sort of strongly encouraged me to not buy a bikini top and just wear the bottoms -and I remember feeling mortified by this and totally self conscious and wanting to hide and not go to the pool in case all the boys saw my (nothing to reveal) flat as a pancake boobs. But I did feel embarrassed, and I remember that feeling so well. Please. Don't. See. Me. (I did swim but spent a lot of time in the water as opposed to standing on the edge doing dives...)
So, as I limped my way into the last mile of my run (legs a bit leaden I must admit) I came to the conclusion that we may not have very long before our childrens' bubble of innocence is popped and Mol decides that baths with cousins aren't such a fantastically fun idea and that she'd rather spend her time gyrating around the kitchen with an electronic gadget listening to some teen-hunk-crooner.
And playing "cheetah's" is a bit last year?
So now I feel a bit sad and wonder if we moved out of London now, to a remote coastal hut in Wales, we could extend the period of innocence till they're both about 15?
Or would that be a bit weird?

those hazy halceon days...

2010-08-16T14:18:00.000-07:00

today was warm and balmy and very gardeny and ice-creamy and the wasps were out a bit and the clouds were high in the sky and liz kept remarking upon how much she'd really like to eat the clouds and mol remarked back how she would probably now only eat cloud when she was in an airplane and then i dug up some of my dad's beetroot and cooked up some of his fine green shiny courgettes and warm tomatoes from the greenhouse (if that smell of tomatoes in a warm greenhouse could be bottled...) - (top-banana courgette & tomato pie I wizzed up by the way - recipe will be released with my book... - ha! fooled you! as if! like, er, never? I have one friend who each time I see him, maybe once every other year, he says, SO, MothersRuin, when is the big novel coming out? and I'm a bit like, uh, quoi? bless you, you fool! I have no imagination bar what goes into my brain [which is mostly inactive anyway, dulled by wine and chocolate] via my eyes and out through my fingers on the keyboard - no epic or sordid or thrilling or animal or kid stories stored up in this grey matter Mr RHS, no, but thanks for the encouragement...) - (so the courgette and tomato pie recipe is safe with me and goes with me to the incinerator) and lots of children under the age of 7 sat around my parents dining room table and ate their herb sausages and mash and beetroots and sweetcorns and courgette pie and then skipped out of the dining room merry and full in the belly and happy to "I'm just going to digest my food mum, in the garden" go do running races directly after eating meat and 2 veg (no one vommed although if they had the dog would've happily cleaned it up) and then 6 children under the age of 7 sat under the bulging tulip tree and melted icecream in bowls to make icecream-soup whilst making polite conversation with each other (what do they talk about? Russian politics? the state of the economy? why don't brits holiday in UK? what does the tooth fairy really do with old blood-encrusted-teeth?) whilst two grandparents and two mothers sat in the august sun drinking black coffee and talking about Russians and politics and holidaying in Europe whilst occasionally being interrupted by small people requiring understated attention such as a bottom wipe or a nose wipe or a tonka-truk or a quick escape from a dog on the hunt for bowls of icecream...

just one of those good english summers days where the hours are long but not hard and the sun is high but not burning and the kids are happy to idle and the wrinklies get some time to finish their sentences and enjoy watching their children being sweet and happy and child-like without knowing that they are the centre of attention as the wrinklies sit exclaming how sweet they look and how happy and how good it is for children to be outside sitting under a bulging tulip tree.

sparkles and cake

2010-08-15T03:00:00.001-07:00

is it possible to have a birthday with no tantrums or tears or fights?
(I ask that in reference to children aged between 1-7... rather than as an adult 36(give or take a decade...)

back to life

2010-08-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

Here I am back again.
Life as I know it.
No more crystal clear warm agean sea to splash about in with Liz & Mol.
No more Amstel beer to neck after a long slog on the beach.
No more over-sized tomatoes that ooze Mediterranean-delights.
No more factor 50.
No more hot nights listening to mosquitoes honing in on my legs for their supper.
No more hunts for the goggles - the biggest stress of the day.
No more skies as high as can be filled with stars that twinkle in such a cliched way its almost not real.
No more skies filled with bright azure blue and bright blazing sun.
No more no-skimmed-milk.
No more hot tip-toed-runs across slippery sand.
No more wondering whether to have coffee or 7-up or beer for 11-enz-ees.
How do holidays go by so incredibly quickly?
You book the flights and before you can blink its like a dream and already you're back at home doing the washing hanging up the washing ferrying grumpy kids around rummaging in the freezer for fishfingers again listening to the sirens blaring up and down Green Lanes endlessly buying skimmed milk because its there in the Tesco cold-box under bright lights all sterile and impersonal.
The photos come back and I think to myself was I really there? I can just about smell the sea and feel the texture of the white bread in my mouth and the warm tiles of the veranda under my toes, but it doesn't feel real any more. Did Liz really swim with no arm-bands? Did Mol really spend 4hours a day laughing and splashing in the sea as though the sea was her home not the land? Did Husband really not have a single conversation with work for a whole 8 days? Could it really have been possible.
Apparently so.
The problem with really brilliant holidays is that you have to come home. And however lovely it is to come back to your own bed and sleep really well again, the grime of the streets, the constant having-to-do-things, the computers, the work, the phones - all the clutter comes back so quickly - and that is the bad thing about brilliant holidays. There is no clutter on holiday. You need only fret about which beach you're walking to and which bikini to wear.
Right now all I can think of is Shirley Valentine.

I am not the fastest

2010-07-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

I may not be The fastest girl in the room, but I sure as heck got around that 10k in (my own) record breaking heel-smokin' speed.
And after a refreshing drink of gatoraid (pink, not orange, flavour? not sure) I was pretty much restored to Mother, Ruined - not by kilometres, but by Husband forgetting to bring my spare change of dry, fresh, clean, non-sweaty clothing. And after a small domesetic with Husband (whilst Brother tried to calm the situation, tragically with no real effect) amid 22,000 sweaty over-achievers, it was clear that it wasn't a practical joke that I had no non-sweaty clothes to change into - and that yes, I would have to spend 25mins getting home clad in salty-stinky-sweaty-sodden-shorts and feet with toes covered in pulsating callouses with no flip flops to slip into, and that it was, yes, still, likely that all the people on the Piccadilly Line would look at me like I had just wee'd all over myself, my vest, my shorts, my legs, my shoulders and my hair - and not see the great glorious medal that was swinging between my ancient-sagging-post-natally-abused-flop-mungous-boobs and realise that in fact I hadn't wee'd myself and that in fact I was, too, a victorious over achieving 10k-runner, fresh off the field glazed in real hard-earned LEGAL sweat.
So the run was superb.
And the after-run could've scored higher.
But the best thing about it all was that I had a ball, and I raised lots of money for P2B (about £8000, which means 76 children can go get counselling next year, for a whole year). And that was what I'd put myself through all this for in the first place. yeah?

Every cloud I realise has a silver lining. Like seeing Husband, liz & mol on the Embankment when I ran up it and then 6km later when I ran back down it; like standing on the underground in soggy running gear and thinking how very lucky I was that Husband Liz & Mol even wanted to come watch me doing something which really if you think about it is quite boring (mum, running?); and like, Husband making me just the best cup of coffee I could ever have had after possibly the nicest most comforting and cleansing shower I had ever had, and my feet, slipping into their £3 flip flops - ah, warm and fluffy feelings of glowing halo and family yum.

But next year, I'll put my non-sweaty clothes ON husband so that he can't forget to bring them down for post-race-urgent-change-requirements...

thank you all very much for supporting me on this run. you're all just brilliant.
x (see, you even get a kiss, and that doesn't come about very often...)

count down

2010-07-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

Only a few more days before The Big Run.
I have been practising, as promised, but possibly I could have been doing more.
But it's very hard to do more when my days have consisted of school runs (not running to school literally, I'm slow but even my kids wouldn't be able to keep up with me) going to work, coming back from work, doing the school run in reverse (I mean not like walking backwards because that would be weird and would embarrass my children and I'd probably fall down in the poo on Poo Passage) and domestic chores (there seems to have been a lot of cake baking lately, I'm a bit caked out) and shopping and doing baths and ballet rehearsals and more school runs and sleeping a bit lightly in this delightfully hot weather.
You know, there's always a little excuse around the corner for NOT donning the old Addidas and setting fire to the pavement with my speediness.
But, I'm quietly confident that given a good headwind and healthy elbow tactics, I'll probably win. There are only about 20,000 other people "racing" too, so, piece of piss really I should think. I'll probably be back home before Husband has managed to get Liz into a pair of pants without the world thinking a nuclear bomb is attacking. (Screams of terror if Husband attempts to dress Liz...)
Do your nearly-4-year-olds have strange selective memory issues?
Every day in our house is like groundhog day. We wake up. Liz has a tantrum and refuses to talk to Husband. Then about 40minutes later, just as he's off out the door to work, she suddenly remembers that he's a GOOD MAN and can be approached - without caution, even - and suddenly, screaming with excitement she launches herself at full speed at the front door, manically hoping to get a kiss off this man who overnight she forgot was in fact her Dad.
It is a bit odd.
Every night I go into her room and sometimes she's hanging off her bed, or is completely off her bed, and I wonder if she bangs certain bits of memory out of it upon landing? Specifically the bit about The Man who comes into her room each morning and says MORNING BETH and linking it with the bit that notes That Man is DAD - not to be feared unless caught with fag / absinthe in hand.
Hm. Food for thought perhaps.
Talking of food, that reminds me, I have a new cheesecake recipe I need to test out, I wonder if cheesecake is good pre-10k-run-fodder?
Hm.
Cheesecake really is the dogs bollocks.
So. Tomorrow. Wednesday. Again.
Then its Thursday, and I guess I should do a run.
And then its Friday and Saturday. And then Sunday.
So that gives me 4 more nights of "training" (I am fiercely competitive, I will win! I will lead! Conquer! Bow to me you slugs of slowness!) and strange dreams about not being able to tie my trainers laces, or get to a portaloo, or in fact move my legs at all (have been having anxiety dreams about a non-competitive 10k, Oh Dear, get out more Mother)...
Watch this space.
I'm going to smash records on Sunday. After Cheesecake.

oooh. home grown.

2010-07-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

I have strawberries
I have tomatoes
I have basil
I have parsley
I have marjoram (not sure what to do with it mind you)
I have peppers
I have apples
I have lillies
I have sunflowers (hm not very sunny or flowery, yet there is hope).

N8 and the Good Life? I think so.

what's warm and gushes?

2010-06-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

Well, for all you sordid mamas out there, go wash your mouth out.
If you want to know the answer to the above question, read on.

And because this blog is all about ME and ME and ME, you may find that the answer to the above question is in fact...

ME!

Yes, I am warm and gushy.

And still you raise your eyebrows in mock-oooh-er-missus-surprise.
And again, I say, go wash your mouths out you filthy bag of retrogrades.

I am warm because, well, it is really warm out there. So, for once, my finger tips aren't a bit blue and sort of wrinkled and damp, and I'm not wearing socks whilst I type up here in my study, and the heating is properly off and I have 10 open windows to prove it.

Isn't it just so nice to be warm though?
And not only am I warm but so too am I gushy.
Why so, I hear you ask, in mock-interest? Why is mothersruin declaring herself gushy? Isn't she on a perma-gush most of the time anyway? Gushing away about nonsense that no one comprehends? All that rubbish about dog poo and children who think Heaven is called Devon and that green food is dangerous and obsessing about East Enders (so good, Stacy had a baby and I reckon a massive round of postnatal depression is about to spark up in the plot...- get the kleenex mums)... Why is she more gushy than usual? (Apart from the fact that its taken 7 paragraphs to get to this point.)

Well, here comes the gush.
It was my birthday on Friday. Yes. Another year, another claw on the crows foot, another few million brain cells never to return and 30? Well, here we are slightly on the other side.
So typical of life. This growing old business. Such an arse.
But, to counteract all that depressing I-wish-I-was-21-again, why-doesn't-any-one-id-me-in- offies-any-more, am-I-literally-just-a-laundry-come-cook-come-chaperone-who-enjoys-64-zoo-lane?thoughts, I found myself surrounded by A Lot Of The Worlds Nicest People on Saturday night down the local N8 public house. And oh, how comforted I was in my time of need by these loves.
Greeting me with eyes full of sympathy (and empathy too I noted from some of the more elderly friends who ventured out on their zimmers to celebrate with me - and yes, I know, totally out-late-nighted-me) and cotton-wool-hugs, they felt my pain and knew what I was going through. And by throwing beautifully wrapped parcels in my direction, accompanied with a glass of prosecco (alternating with water - god, see how old and sensible you become when you reach the end of your 20's?? I mean reach your mid-30's, sorry, forgetful too - it's all water/wine/water/wine and a pint of water before bed with 2 paracetamol... don't want a hangover in the morning now, or an excuse for extra wrinkles now...etc etc) well, I was distracted from said pain and learned to enjoy myself again.

What a lovely party and so good to see the gang in outstanding gladrags and killer shoes and jewels and funky shirts and mascara and - well, etc. So, gushing on I just wanted to end my rambly gush (flood gates are opening...) with a little thank you to everyone who came and got a babysitter and drank a few glasses and endured the heat after a long day of more heat (and for some after also a long day in a playground shouting at children and parents at the school fete) and like some dreadful acceptance speech at the Oscars, I just wanted to say I love you guys. Thank you - without you, I wouldn't have got where I was today, and if my arms could stretch around you all at once, you know? Feel the lurve.

With that, I will wipe my nose on my hairy forearm and head for the bath where I'm about to start Huxley's Brave New World. Only apt as I venture forth in to the next phase of life.
As a 36 year old.

running woman

2010-06-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

I'm running 10km in July.
Ouch.
I did it last year at the Croosh Ond 10k, in lashings of rain and being pumelled by the running crazies that attend these sorts of events.
As I accepted the challenge (which came from the charity I currently work for) by enthusiastically pressing SEND on a chirpy upbeat - yeah, I can do it - sort of email, as the email disappeared into the ether and my computer made that noise of a distant airplane going somewhere even faster than usual, I suddenly thought shit why have I just done that? Is it because I've been sitting at my desk for longer than I can remember and my arse has melted into my grandmothers old leather chair and the 10 bars of cadburys keeping me alive have now run out?
Probably.
So. For the last few weeks I have been in "training".
I am actually a bit like the man in the film Run Fat Boy Run as I stagger over the pavements in a pair of grim shorts grim shoes and some sort of grim vest thing, panting heavily and hoping that I don't give the sweet lady who I always pass on Poo Passage a cardiac arrest because I always seem to run so close to her without her hearing my approach (she's old, presume deaf? - how can she not hear my puffing?) - that as I pass her she sort of waves her shopping bag in the air in vague self-defence/terror/surprise/horror (what is that red puffing creature that resembles a female human?)...
In the film Fat Boy (Simon Pegg) is a loser who leaves his pregnant wife jilted at the Alter and to win her back he decides to run a marathon. With 4 weeks to train in.
So I have a bit longer to train and not for a 26mile race and also I'm not trying to win anyones' hand back. Luckily. Watching the film gave me hope that I could at least get around the course and I've been reassured by my friends in the charity that 'you can walk it in just under 2 hours' (cheers for the support).
(I think Fat Boy gets his not-wife back in the end by the way, so any aspiring love-in-the-making, this could be a really top way to win the hand of your fair lady or man... yeah, like so romantic... you can show off your blisters and cracked nipples post-race, and your inner-thigh-chaffings. And for extra romance: get her nose under your pits. A real love-inducer.)
So, any local readers, watch out! I'm going all runner on yo' ass as of a couple of weeks ago! If you see a flash of discombobulated human limbs accompanied with strange sound effects: no its not a local Labour Councilor canvassing for the next election, its most likely me, chugging round Finsbury Park swearing a lot and wishing to god I wasn't doing it.
Get me the cadburys I'm having a panic attack.

foxes

2010-06-14T05:45:00.001-07:00

God and damned and curse those vile skanky bin lovin' shit-givin' garden-killin' creatures. The urban fox. 'Twas a mere 10 days ago when 2 small babies were attacked by the ghost-eyed demons of the streets, causing wounds to the vulnerable babies which left them in hospital for longer than a casual trip to casuality after a night on the tiles.
So this morning, husband having got up at sparrows fart and domestic harmony prevailing on such a sunny Monday, spirits lifted and strawberries gleaming in the light, you could hear the tinkle of bliss in our house on the hill. Cereal had been eaten with no 'but mum I'm full' 'but mum I wanted toast' 'but mum I have to go and poo' 'but mum I actually don't like rice-pops any more don't you know' 'but mum I do need to have more sugar' you get the jist. Mols packed lunch (ham and cream cheese bagel, banana fairy cake, cheese string, yoghurt 'health' drink) had been constructed, washing up done and all that remained to be done was hair and a bit of pre-school-chillaxing.
I was in the sitting room fiddling with the mop of hair (remind me to get it cut) on Lizs head as she pointlessly cut up a piece of paper into minute pieces for me to pick up off the floor after I returned from my run.
When...
From outside there was a very loud high pitched Mol-like "agh", and then a pounding of feet (more like rugby player than possible Grade 1 ballet dancer) through the kitchen and a sort of panting like some creature with not enough air in the lungs... Mol leapt in to the sitting room gulping and very pink and sort of with a crazed look in her eyes and then she burst into tears and said "fox, garden, close, ugh, on the fence, bumble bees, fox, flowers, talking to..." ? quoi?
And so to unravel this alien shpeel...
Mol had been talking to our collection of bumbles who like to congregate on my (outstanding) lupins in the morning sun. And as she talked to them (not sure what about, I'll find out, I'm interested to know where the common ground lies between a 7 year old and bumble) she heard a rustle from next door neighbours garden (tony) and she just presumed that it was Tony coming out to enjoy the morning rays (but given that he never rises from his den until after noon...) - so she turned around to say morning to our usually comatose neighbour and lo, it wasn't Tony, but scene from a horror movie, an URBAN FOX, with ghost eyes mangy fur and fangs was balancing on the fence not more than 1.5m away. Hence the scream.
Brazen fucking creature.
We had to switch on Timmy Time to calm the nerves.
I went out with my shotgun and blasted a few rounds off into the air.

Pain is...

2010-06-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

Pain is when ones not very old computer dies on one, leaving one to go through the process of technological cold turkey. I am writing this brief entry to reassure you all that I haven't been murdered by my parents or drowned in vintage Harringay dog turds or fallen into an alcoholic induced coma. No no it's all very straight forward: no computer. Husband, who I secretly admire for this but god forbid my British ways permit me to tell him, is a total wizard on computers and promises to set me up again soon, once he's nicked the equipment from work. So in the meantime I suggest to you all, in sympathy for me, because let's face it this IS all about moi, for you to take a technology holiday too. Let's share this experience... Together we will grow stronger from experiencing mutual pain... Do I sound like a total loon now?
Mothers ruined.
Again. And this time amazingly it's not self induced. Apologies for any typos. I'm not very dab on the iPhone. Until next time ...

nesting season & the nose trick...

2010-05-21T02:42:00.001-07:00

oh there is a nice yummy feeling in the air this morning. warm air. clear sky. I hung the washing out on the line, and as I was hanging, I could hear this cosy cooing noise coming from a bush in the garden. oh, whats this I think? and then I hear some flappy flapping, and out flaps a pigeon... who promptly flies up to a neighbours roof and does the biggest shit in the world. I carry on hanging the washing in the bright sun. I think there is a pigeons nest... so maybe in a few weeks time we'll have little fluffy chicks hopping around the garden? (or being maimed by the skanky foxes...)
the chestnut trees are in full candle-tastic-bloom.
the honeysuckle is about to pop.
the strawberries are flowering left right and centre.
the tomatoes are growing rapidly.
and the grass groweth long long long.

ah. I love May.

(although I feel a bit sorry for the hayfever sufferers...)

oh and I just love it when a kid does something they've never done before. so, tonight, as the girls were munching their chicken nuggets (well, at least they were home made...) liz starting singing something completely random which made mol have an attack of snorty giggles. at the same time as said attack took place, mol had also just sucked in a large quantity of pink-milk (a la lola).
end result: Mols first ever go at The Nose Trick.
laugh or cry - she knew not what to do, but pink milk was snorted across the table, via her nozzies, and as I heard this weird assortment of noises (gloopy raspy sludgy poppy choky kind of noises) and turned my head away from my calming cup of Lapsan Souchong tea, Mol was sitting there with two great lines of pink milk dripping from her poor nostrils.
mean mum that I am my first reaction was to laugh out loud and congratulate her through this momentous rights of passage - I nearly put on a pot of spaghetti so we could try it with another genre of food.
but then I realised that mol is only 7, and this had come as a bit of a surprise and shock. so instead I reached for the tissues and assumed maternal concern, whilst Liz continued to sing her random song of nothing oblivious to her sisters mastication malfunction.
bliss.

how clean...

2010-05-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Domestic bliss!
The dishwasher is whirring away downstairs in the dark kitchen, cleaning and polishing and drying...
The washing machine has had a cycle with sheets pillow cases duvet covers and pyjamas.
The wind and the sun has dried aforementioned on my clothes line. No birds flew by and pooed on the white cotton.
The girls rooms are tidy (ish).
I've folded the laundry and put it into neat piles, and on my way to bed, I shall drop the folded clothes at the door of the appropriate room, a bit like father christmas dropping his toys into the stockings of the good sleeping children... I deliver clean clothes at the door of clean sleeping children...
The spare room has clean bedlinen on the bed and my desk isn't too horrendously messy - ready for the arrival of mum tomorrow afternoon.
My bed has clean sheets and duvet cover and for a special treat - ironed pillow cases. I have on clean pyjamas. And. I have just had a bath.
So - how much am I looking forward to slipping into bed, in approximately 5minutes after I've brushed my teeth? The cool sheets. The slightly crisp almost feel of ironed cotton on my cheek. I can't wait. I just love nights like this.
(ooh, crumbs: just watched two episodes of Dr Who on re-run - god? scary? hide behind the sofa stuff? and what, 8 year olds watch this? I'm forbidding any child of mine access to Dr Who until they're legal to vote or marry - whichever comes first...)
And to top it off, there is a fresh batch of fairy cakes in the tin downstairs.
A triumphant day in the life of Domestic Goddessness - especially given that I had the hangover from hell most of the day. Wine. Don't you just love it? (But right now, I love my clean sheets better.)

U-Turns are illegal. Or are they?

2010-05-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Depending on the sort of U-Turn you are committing... I'm not talking about a U-turn between junction 17 and 18 on the M25. That's a quick way to kill yourself and probably 2/3rds of the commuter population.
No, I'm talking about other sorts of U-turns. Like, when you change your mind about something. I think politicians maybe do it quite a lot. I think maybe some animals do U-turns quite a lot, like slugs: today I'm a man-slug. and tomorrow I will be a woman-slug. and have slug-babies. and then maybe i'll be a man-slug again. Politicians, slugs... you know. they're all at it. And so too are errant daughters, and sons-in-laws.
A week last Thursday we experienced the biggest U-turn of our married life (no no, don't be Melodramatic! Nothing silly like realising we're both gay and feeling the need to go explore our true sexuality in Brazil - nothing so exciting as that, don't worry!).
No, a week last Thursday the buyers of our beautiful, much cherished, loved, polished, nurtured N8 house, withdrew their offer. Now that was a catch-the-breath-moment, I can tell you.
Initial reaction: fuckers? what? why? This was at 10.30am - Husband was in his busy technologically flamboyant Soho office; I was in my technologically challenged but very flagrant Garden Centre, so we both continued with our duties in the work-place. Meanwhile, our subconscious heads were whirring like a propellor on a spitfire going full throttle. What were we going to do? My parents are expecting us to be in Hampshire in less than 3 months - paying them rent - and its almost impossible to put a house on the market (even one as desirable as ours!), catch a buyer and clinch the deal in under 6months! Shit a brick as mum would say.
so, that night, after I got home from my ballet class (I haven't told you about that yet - oh, SO good - but for another bloggette, later), I sat down, buttocks wobbling from the plies I'd just been bending and stretching in and out of (ouuuwww), with Husband, and we had probably the Most Mature Conversation of our lives. Ever.
And in this conversation we outlined what we could do, our options, sell or rent or... dot dot dot. This 'dot dot dot' became a big 'dot dot dot' and we realised that our buyers pulling out was our last opportunity to speak-now-or-forever-hold-our-peace-and-move-to-the-country (i.e. put the house back on the market and crack on...).
And so, we started on the black-hole of the dot-dot-dot. I think I went first, and saying something a bit whispery like "I think my biggest regret for moving away from London would be that I couldn't do..." (fulfill my dream training and actually chase a small ambition i've been working at of late...). And then I said to Husband, what's your biggest anxiety about moving? To which the response was "I'm dreading it", at which point I think our fate was sealed.
How could we move away if Husband was dreading it (there is a specific aspect of the move which the 'dread' encompasses - not the whole thing, I think...) and if I were to be full of regrets?
Recipe for disaster.
And at that point in the conversation we both looked at each other and there was a dramatic Pinter Pause where our brains both went CLICK at the same time, as we realised that maybe the country dream would have to be postponed for a while, whilst we worked out our life courses just a little more.
Talk about a U-turn! I could make a bloody brilliant slug I reckon (I have the right skin tone for it too.. a bit bumpy, prone to slimy-episodes [especially after a night out] a bit slow off the mark... etc.).
So after sleeping on it - we Maturely decided to sleep on it, so no rash or rushed decision was made only to be unmade 12hours later... - we (actually, I) had to break the news to my parents (awful awful, horrid, hard conversation) and gradually, over the last week, we have been undoing the doing of the last 6months. Which is an awful awful horrid hard thing on one hand, but on the other hand, I am experiencing a massive wave of relief, as I realise how dangerous a situation we could have been in had we gone through with the move.
So. Slug on. We have u-turned indeed. Mammoth.
And I've applied to do some more training (although not guaranteed a place - fingers crossed huh) and Husband can now spend the £4k we've saved on not commuting - on, oh, how about ME! Hurrah all round!

end of an era...

2010-04-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm a giant alarm clock right now.
tick tock.
If I look and act a bit crazed a lot of the time at the moment its because, well, I am a bit crazed. I have a lot going on in my head and a lot going on in my household.
So. To be blunt. We are leaving London. At some point. In the near future. Near being defined as within a few months. Possibly. Dare I say it, hopefully.
People may say:
It's been a long time coming, we knew, we knew, we could tell you'd move eventually (don't the majority of people move at some point in their lives?)
Or
Yes yes, I could tell, you were never a real Londoner (why's that, I ask nervously? because, well, you know, I mean, well, look at your clothes for starters... - yes, this has been actually said that to me - even though we all shop from the same barrow - Sainsbury's, Primark, H&M, New Look, Peacocks, Tesco...), to the countryside with you, and your strange non-London clothing!
Or (from non-Londoners)
Yes, I can imagine the schools in Harringay are pretty tough places for a child (? what? does my child give the impression of enduring a 'tough' schooling? By this do you mean, oh person from a place of homogenous race and culture, that the schools in Harringay are diverse and full of people not converging with the traditional meat and two veg Brit? In fact our schools are a wonderful cultural cauldron of fabulous children... So, no this is not why...)
Or
Has the dog shit driven you mad? (very possibly)
Or
Is it the danger of stepping out of your front door every morning with two small girls who don't know how to cross a road that has frenzied commuters rat-running down the steep hill as though Terminator himself was chasing them? (Or perhaps a desperate politician...) Yes this is a definite factor in our lives. The element of containment that is life in London. Or at least in this part of London. Or perhaps more localised to our road?
Or
Its the black snot that you get after being on the tube for a few stops isn't it? (yes, absolutely - there you have it! the key to leaving London. Black snot! Bingo!)
And actually, here's another mad idea:
To try out a new life for our family.
It means leaving so much behind and each day I wake up and look out from my loft window across the London roofs at Canary Wharf flashing away like a lighthouse, and I know that just down the road is Yassa Hallim and all his delicious baked breads and olives; and that if I throw a stone in one direction it will pass 6 houses of people I know and love, and if I throw a stone in the opposite direction, the same thing - more friends, perhaps a brother or a sister in law or an uber-granny, the fabric of this mad community which my roots, my children, my husband- are embedded in (and hopefully the stone won't smash someone elses loft window...).
So my alarm clock is counting down (date yet unknown) and my roots are feeling like they're not sure about this uprooting thing, and my heart is doing flip flops left right and centre and my mind is all over the place and frankly if you get a sane sentence out of me in the next few months then congratulations.
I think Tesco and Sainsburys will get a lot of business from me, particularly in the wine and kleenex department (I can't write kleenex without thinking of teenage boys, really sorry but its true) - in this case for my sniffly nose and drippy eyes. Nothing icky! Promise!
I shall keep you posted of family trivia but thought I should break even with the whole thing.
Adios for now cheekos. (? what ? see. nonsense)

afternoon cinema trip

2010-04-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

SO! today i took the kidlings to see Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang. It was so good! I loved it. Les Kiddies loved it. We landed at the stinky shopping city cinema at 4pm - we were the only people in the cinema (ooh, possibly a bit creepy...) - and had a ball. Liz liked all the references to poo (loads of them especially at the beginning) Mol liked the small kid called Vincent he was a dude they both loved the 7 synchronised swimming piglets and i cried. twice. Oh dear. what is happening to me? i can't cry, surely, at a Nanny McPhee film? But I did. (Husband away at war; mother left poor and being heckled by horrid brother-in-law, then told husband killed, sob sob sob; then right at the end the husband is seen walking towards them over the hill - Ewan Mcgregor cameo! - oh, no, amazing happy ending, father survives 2nd world war! children are no longer fatherless - sob sob sob...)
And the best bit about being in an empty cinema was that there were no over-cheesed over-sugared over-fizzy-popped smelly people and we were able to eat our cream-cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches without feeling like the weirdos that we probably are (or that I am for forbidding to allow over-cheesed-natchos to eat into my purse).
And it was fine when Liz shouted loudly at the gigantic CHEERIO advert - "mummy that's my cereal look cheerios on the wall they're so big" and it was fine when Mol stated the Peugot 206 advert was "really cool mum" (the driver straps the car up in a giant harness and 'swings' the car in an empty dock-yard) and for me, no one noticed my sniffling runny nose episodes each time the films topic turned to fatherless children...
In fact I maybe see this as becoming a regular post-school haunt. I mean, its kind of educational (in a school of life sort of way), keeps us out the house, means no Cbeebies one afternoon a week, and I get to sit down for a whole 90 minutes.
Result. Next time i'm going to smuggle a bottle of chardonnay in too...

back to school

2010-04-19T02:30:00.000-07:00

(Volcanic Ash Victims)
I wonder if I will in fact be a VAV?
I've just hung my clothes up outside (first time this year! hurrah! its the real deal! dare I say it? whisper it? type it even... could summer be officially on the way? I've even turned my heating off) and even though the sky is clear, I am wondering if, when I return from collecting my children from school, my whites will have turned a darker shade of grey and will be covered in ASH?

Back to school today. Mol seemed ok with this, although she spent a while longer in the bathroom this morning than perhaps she usually does (I think she was on the loo rather than applying mascara and eye shadow...). Her slightly gothic teacher with a bit too black teeth was waiting for her class when we got into the playground, Mol and her friends compared the plaits in their hair and then meandered carelessly into school, with a little peck on the cheek; clean gym clothes in her games bag (these gym clothes get cleaned once a term...) and the first ham sandwich of the summer term in her lunchbox.

Liz amazingly seemed totally happy to skip back into her crazy manic classroom of 30 4year olds. Reunited with her two best friends - they stood in a little circle exchanging important-to-4-year-old-news ("look, I'm wearing a pink t-shirt", "I've got a new pink ribbon in my hair", "have you seen my new pink bear I keep it in my trouser pocket" etc.) and barely waved goodbye to the wrinkled old mother who felt like she'd been up all night, although the alarm had only gone off 2 hours prior to school drop off.

Anyway.
3 months to go...
More on the biggest count down of my life (except perhaps the countdown to birth, I guess) at another time.

in honor of malcolm maclaren

2010-04-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

I came downstairs this evening having just hung up the wet bath towels belonging to liz & mol - to find mol dressed in a white floaty skirt which she'd turned into a shoulderless dress, tied with a purple ribbon around her waist and a red ribbon in her crinkly mol-like ever-knotted hair. she looked really pretty and sort of etherial. i admired her secretly and thought how imaginative to turn a skirt into a shoulderless dress and tie a ribbon around it for shape and control.
she then said, shh. sit down on the sofa. I'm going to do a show for you.
so me and liz sat on the sofa and wondered what the show was this time. she'd murmured something about cinderella earlier in the bath.
i said, what's it about?
she said: it's a dance mum.
i said, ok. cool.
i like it when Mol puts on her 7 year old innocent dance shows. its kind of endless and she gets all whimsicle and is usually the dying swan, in lots of agony and am-dram-pain, taking hours to sink to the floor and flutter her eyelids to a final close.
she went over to the cd player and pressed play.
liz and I waited.
and then RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOAR.
it was only the mother-fuckin'-SEX-PISTOLS!
and mol, dying swan cast flippently aside, started poge-oh-ing (?sp?) around the sitting room, in her now gothic rather than whimsically balletic frock, flinging her head from side to side, flailing her arms around madly and with strange crinkled up scrunchy eyes (occasionally winking badly) face, in a mock-whoah- sort of shouty way.
WHAT?
How?
when did she learn to dance mod-like? she then started hopping like a rabbit on a massive dose of coke. (was she on coke? - I dont think so although she did have chocolate at supper.)
occasionally her dress would slip down and her little pale torso would be flung around careless of its clotheless state - and then she'd laugh hysterically when I pointed out that we could see everything - and whilst jumping up and down on the spot like the over-dosed-easter-rabbit she'd sort of shift her frock upwards only for it to fall down again as she continued with her mad mod rock punk dance.
anyway. I thought it was pretty bloody cool despite the foul language (luckily she was so in the moment i don't think she actually heard the lyrics) and made quite a change from the dreadful swan which she keeps trying to kill off.
(but shit. god knows what she'll be doing this time in 10 years when she's 17 and really off her head in a nightclub. its probably not good for my mental health to think about it too much.)

pastie, anyone?

2010-04-14T13:57:00.001-07:00

Cornwall. Land of the cream (it comes in many different formats... all with the same net result: fat. fuckin' thighs). Home of the beach (which also comes in many different formats with the same net results: wet. tired. screechy children).
Love it or hate it, there is something magic about a holiday in Cornwall. Maybe its because its like being abroad but everyone speaks English? Maybe its just not being in London that does it for me. Maybe the magic is something to do with the fact that we were down there just as the land was bursting open with life (new lambs in the fields, a day old calf in the local farm, blossom just opening from its buds, and the grass couldn't have been greener if Liz had coloured it with her fluorescent green marker pen).
Maybe its also because 'one' packs thinking, oh well, its going to be sodding cold and wet and it'll probably rain every day, snow even, because this is England and the weather is so unpredictable, that when you get landed with 6 days in a row of golden sunshine and a sun-licked cheek at the end of each boldly-rayed-up day - well, that's pretty darned magic in my book.
The four of us set out last Wednesday morning, with our suitcases bulging with all our grey thermal underwear, our middle layer of long sleeved t-shirts, our 3rd layer of 'thin' jumpers and a fourth layer of thick winter woollies. Tights by the bucket. Hats stuffed into every spare pocket our bags had. Wellies. Winter walking boots (not that I have summer ones mind you). Winter anoracs. And when we arrived, 5hours later, at our small house named Corncockle (must have been put together by a drunken holiday maker with an untreated STD) we stripped off our outer layers, revealing our unsightly thermals to the pretty smart beaches of Rock (its all brassy glamour down there, even in April). 6 days later we were still in our string-vests and thermal shorts, sweating it out on the beaches as schools of dolphins leapt in the bay and mackerel hooked themselves onto our fishing rods over the side of a pirate-fishing-boat.
If that's not magic, well, tell me what is (apart from Paul Daniels).
Anyway. Liz and Mol enjoyed the Cornish Magic and their hair has got blonder and for the time we spent there, they actually didn't fight all that much, and they did sweet things like collect shells and make sandcastles and we built a spectacular dam across a stream on the beach turning upstream into a very cold paddling pool, and they ate ice-creams, and played with their cousins, and made my parents love them a little bit more than usual, and after they'd flaked out in their funny fishy-smelling-beds at night, we'd sit around the table and talk about their childish ways and the grandparents would make considered observations about each one in turn. (Mol is good at being on her own; Liz is just awful; Alice is very good at rock climbing; Jake is a great hugger - etc.)
And I got to drink a lot of wine. And because it was the holidays I also ate too much cheese, too much chocolate and didn't do enough exercise.
So, if anyone can recommend a good lippo-suction-surgeon on Green Lanes please pass on the contact.
Magic. (ooh, I feel a Queen moment...)

stomach unrest

2010-04-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

For nearly 7 weeks I didn't glimpse the cheese cabinet in Sainsburys. No brie for me! Oh no, thank you! I passed on the chocolate mousse on Good Friday. I didn't flinch when the macaroni cheese was bought steaming and golden from the oven by my mum 2 weeks ago (Oh, darling, there's some salad you can have instead), and I waved off the left over Christmas Quality Street (and it wasn't just the coffee ones left at the bottom, I spotted two caramel drums and a toffee penny) at post-cheese-post-pudding-lets-wrap-the-meal-up-with-a-waifer-thin-chocolate time.

Then. On Sunday. April 4th. All hell broke loose. We laid the table on Saturday night so the children would be amazed at the deliveries from the notorious bringer of Eggs, the Easter Bunny (for gods sake - why does a Rabbit deliver chocolate eggs on easter day? surely it should at least be something that lays eggs? A platipus or duck perhaps? - I have no recollection from my minimal religious up-bringing of cute lop-eared-rabbits dropping by the houses of sweet well behaved children [ONLY WELL BEHAVED CHILDREN GET CHOCOLATES. IF YOU WANT THE EASTER BUNNY TO COME BY TOMORROW THEN EAT YOUR BLOODY BROCCOLLI - so went the mantra in our house for the last 2 weeks or so...] whilst Jesus rose from the dead to save our souls? Maybe that was the day I was off with alcohol poisoning from Religious Studies, such as they were at my school...) - and my eyes goggled at the tons of dark luscious chocolates laid on the table all ready for the big off on Sunday morning (after some branflakes to line the stomach).
And in the fridge, I knew already, I'd sniffed it out, was a large slice of delicious Emmental cheese. Chewy and yellow and holy. (holy! ha, gettit?)
And so, that night, I dreamt it was breakfast time and lunch time and it was great. my taste ducts getting ready.
And then, in the morning, dreams over, after my bowl of branflakes, and a round of hymns at the church, I finally got to dive in to my cheese and chocolates.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Long pause while I think back to the divine moment of chocolateness and total cheese-fest.
How good it was to feel it slipping down my osophagus? How happy was my head to know that I'd abstained, and my halo was glowing and now my time was up I could lap it up like a pig in the shit. Hurrah.
After about 2hours of constant scoffing, I realised that I was last at the table, (the kids well bored by now of their chocolate and more into running around on that scary choc-high kids get) the front of my easter-dress splattered with crumbs of chocolate and yellow rubbery cheese, my mouth covered in the same, my finger-tips brown from licking and re-licking, my plate surrounded by wrappers and the tough skin off the cheese, and I also realised that my stomach had fallen out of its normal shape and taken on the shape of a large easter-egg. And that in fact my eyes had started to spin in opposite directions.
And that in fact I was now feeling a bit less holy and a bit revolting and totally. in fact. sick.
So. I put down that last bit of chocolate (the really good thick bits you find at the base of the egg...).
And went for a long walk and wondered if I would make it through the year without suffering cardiac problems or just drowning in my own chocolate/cheese vomit later on that night.
Well, I didn't drown. Here I am. Writing about my stomach and over indulgent behaviour. But dare I say it, I'm quite looking forward to the next round of Lent because there is something rather fantastic about abstaining from something that 'one' really loves. And the gigantic hit I had from my first bites of chocolate & cheese on Easter day. Really. Super. Duper.
However, my skin is now all covered in zits.
Now that's not quite so tasty.

general total failure

2010-03-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

please excuse current "blog" entry.
mothers ruin has fallen off her not even very high perch and finds herself like an overturned lady bug, unable to clamber back on top of things, and unfortunately unable to engage brain. brain... hello? are you out there brain? come back! I need you!
its the kids.
the kids.
i blame the kids.
they've sucked my brain out, digested it over the last 7 years, and now, the last remnants have been flushed down to the N8 sewers, never to be seen again as they wash out down the Thames towards the Channel and the big ships which will swill whatever brain cell was left into the final nothingness of its existence.

or it could just be that I went to a very good wedding on the w/end and am now a bit tired and my liver is probably saying OK, enough already! and my brain has shut itself down in an act of sensible self protection.

but its better to blame the kids. afterall, in about 10 years time (or less...) they will blame me and Husband for every damn thing that goes wrong in their life. from broken nail to failed A levels.
so, whilst they lie cute and sleepy in their beds, I will say to you, that my current status quo is entirely the fault of the children, and not me.
just off to get another glass of red...

spare pants required

2010-03-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

I don't think I ever went to a school disco before the age of 9. But in London -everything starts decades earlier. Dancing lessons take place for babes-in-vitro. New borns have raves down the drop-in. Toddlers do 4-day-festivals. So 7 year olds get school discos in their school halls with bad ecoustics (?sp) bad light slippery floors cheap tat for sale at the door and the joy of seeing their teachers "mum, I saw Paul, he was DRINKING BEER in the school hall that is sooooo weird" (7 year old puts on what I'd only describe as sooooo weird American accent from her one-ever-viewing of Hannah(eugh-give-me-the-vom-bucket)Montana) what was I saying, oh yes, teachers being off-duty drinking beer in the lunch-hall.
I'm really referring to Mols school disco that took place last Friday.
Possibly the worst day of the week for a disco to take place?
Children: way too tired (therefore prone to tears and general-malfunction)
Parents: way too tired (as above)
Teachers: way too tired (as above but probably magnified 10x)
Music: way too loud (I should think the music is directly responsible for Liz's ear-drum-explosion yesterday afternoon where she spent 5hours with my hand clutched like a vice to her head as she yelled "OOOOOOHHHHAAAAAAAH" like a scene from One Born Every Minute - listen to the sound effects on this link)
The intentions I know, are valid: fun, community spirited - and it may be that I wasn't feeling very community spirited on Friday as I was recovering from a day of violent vomming (and I hadn't even watched Hannah Montana) and I felt weak - too weak to endure the base of the kiddy-muzac booming out full blast - but gawd...
I remember school discos with a trembly tummy sort of - oh god, I've got to dance in front of all these people and my brothers-hand-me-down-jumper is just so un-cool and I'm not allowed to wear eye-liner but all the girls are and now I'm just a wall-flower and I don't know what to do.Some kids can dance. Some kids can't. Some kids have flashing shoes. Some kids don't. Some kids have cool parents. Some... well. Y'know. And I went to the disco on Friday actually carrying the same anxiety for Mol: will she be ok?
But now I realise that 7 year olds don't have quite the same levels of self-conscious-anxiety as perhaps a 9 year old (or just me), so actually the school disco on Friday was really quite a happy place (bar Mol getting whacked in the eye with one of those day-glow-necklaces, and Liz peeing in her pants and all over her tights, and therefore going commando, and then deciding to do rolie-polies on the dance floor - I'll get my coat) and it was actually quite sweet, if I stuck my fingers down my ear-holes and ignored the teachers "dancing", to see the little people hopping about in a totally carefree way.
No wallflowers at this disco.
No pre-teen-angst in the hall last Friday night.
So that was nice. Yes. Indeed. Happy faces all round.
Oh but how old do I feel now? My girls go to discos and I moan about how loud the muzac is? (Call this music? Its just a thumping noise! I'll show you music!)
The lesson to be learned from Friday night: take ear plugs; smile at anything anyone says even if you can't hear them, and most definitely bring a spare pair of pants.

leave the kids behind

2010-03-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

I think its been nearly a whole two years that Husband and I went away together, without the kidlings (although we've been to a wedding and had a night 'off' when the kids have stayed with Granny but we'd been under orders to be back at her house for breakfast - which sort of defies the purpose of leaving them with Granny in the first place... but mustn't grumble because we're JOLLY LUCKY to have such a lovely Granny who has them to stay at all... etc etc. don't look a gift horse in the mouth - another weird and idiotic phrase - don't look ANY horse in the mouth frankly, unless you want green spit in your eye or worse) so this weekend has been trez-spesh as the French would say. Trez spesh indeed.
Starting on Friday which was a day like that scene in the film Goodfella's when, near the end, the paranoid coke addict is cooking a tomato sauce but also trying to sort a massive drugs trade and also has to collect a granny or disabled sibling from somewhere whilst trying to deliver the coke to another venue all the while a helicopter is following his car and he's getting more and more psyched out with all the things he has to do before dinner - too much to do, too little time? I felt a bit like that on Friday. Too many things to do before I could get to where I really wanted to be: Beaulieu, with my Husband, away from it all.
8am - the plumber comes by (had already forgotten he was booked in)
8.45am - get the girls to school
Then spend 2hours packing cleaning tidying emailing administration making tea for the plumber thinking of an excuse to get Mol out of school 1/2hour earlier than normal pack the car up make sandwiches for Liz's lunch and for the girls 'tea' in the car later
11.30am collect Kid 1. Pay the plumber shit loads of cash for 20minutes work. (Make note: investigate plumbing college for girls - seems like a lucrative career...)
12pm go visit latest addition to the world in N16 (ah, sweet little baby!)
1pm go visit less recent addition but still pretty new to the world in N16 (ah, another sweet little baby!)
2pm Liz does huge poo in someone elses house - make a sharp exit and hope they don't need a plumber recommendation
3pm collect Mol
3pm hot-foot it to Hampshire
6pm and 68miles later 2 girls asleep in the back of the car after 2hours of solid fighting and Mother totally loosing her rag at 90mph on the A3 telling them the teddies will be chucked out of the window RIGHT NOW unless they SHUT UP and SHARE THE BLOODY THINGS
7pm say goodbye to suddenly extremely cherished girls breath enormous sigh of relief wish my parents best of luck with Liz and her not peeing in her bed 9 times in the night hot foot it to Winchester to collect Husband off train and then hot foot it even faster to Beaulieu - land of the free parents, home of the beer and wine, shelter to the on-verge-of-collapse-due-to-exhaustion Londoners.
We arrived eventually - sucked up most of the bar and a wheelbarrow of chips and then passed out in a coma for 10hours, waking up in that fug of 'huh? where are we? why is there no child by my bed whinging? why can I hear ducks instead of sirens? is this actually heaven?'.
Heaven indeed. And my, how time flies when one is in heaven. And oh - here's a novelty: conversation! uninterrupted conversation with the man I married 10 years ago. Fancy that? Oh yes please! None of Liz's endless drivel or Mols moody glares - just whole conversations that have a start, middle and end. It was like a miracle. But I guess when having a temporary residence in Heaven, then Miracles can be on the menu.
Anyway. its all over now. No more ducks. Tonight I go back to sleep in my less expensive bedlinen and will wake up to the sounds of the 141 breaking at the bus stop down the road and an ambulance/police/fire-engine siren belting down Green Lanes at sparrows fart. Usual noise of urban life.
But it was super-great having a wee reminder of what made me and Husband well, me and Husband, I guess - its easy to live with someone day in day out and completely lose touch. And these little snippets of time away from the every day - well, as the French absolutely don't say, trez-spesh indeed.
(PS just had a message from my mum: "love your kids. have necked a bottle of white. will survive.")

traditional sunday roasts

2010-03-07T13:50:00.000-08:00

what is it about the words roast and sunday that go together and create sunday roast and before you can say pass the bread sauce your saliva ducts start saliva-ating and all you can think about are mounds of golden potatoes, perfect buttery peas and a huge sparkling fresh from the oven chicken with crispy bacon curling over its back, steam rising in the hot kitchen and a table with all your beloved's around it, waiting eagerly and patiently?
its like something out of the Darling Buds of May!
plates heaving with food and gravy and everyone laughing amiably as the red wine is passed from glass to glass.
today we had pheasant no less. not that i ate it being a vegetarian, but that was the sunday roast, no less! fresh from the woods in suffolk! a life of brambles and oak trees, a short stint in the freezer, and then a glorious debut on a happy kitchen table in Highbury.
but god! bloody hell! the LABOUR that goes into putting together a sodding "traditional English Sunday Roast" is just daft. bloody daft! to eat a pheasant by 1.15pm, we got to mother-in-laws at 11am and i basically didn't leave the kitchen until the last splat of breadsauce had been wiped off the plastic table cloth at 2pm. its bonkers!
roast potatoes (involves peeling and chopping and par boiling and fluffing and heating oil roasting);
roast parsnips (as with potatoes);
carrots (peeling and chopping with blunt knife steaming buttering thank goodness no parsley to chop for these ones - not enough manpower to spare);
bread sauce (sticking spices onto an onion in some milk about 4 weeks before lunch is due, then cubing some stale white bread saved especially for the event, then simmering for 15mins - after all that);
cauliflower cheese (cauliflower cheesey white sauce blah blah blah - honestly just make a small one I PROMISE the kids won't eat it);
pheasant (kill in a wood 85 miles away, pluck & sneeze each time pheasant fluff ventures north up a nozzie, scream like a girl when chopping off head and getting out stinky slimy twisty things, hang in London basement for 1 week, freaking out mother of house each time she goes to put a wash on downstairs; wonder how best to freeze then decide plastic bag & bottom drawer of freezer, defrost 3months later, cook in an oven whose door doesn't shut properly, complain bitterly that the oven is shit and the pheasant clearly wasn't defrosted);
OH! and the vegetarians & children all require separate menus SO if you don't mind the list continues with:
sausages (that's relatively easy you think! but NOT when the oven already has cauliflower cheese, pheasant, parsnips & potatoes already in it);
salmon for the pheasant-phobes (same problem as sausages - no room in the oven).
you see, its not so darned simple, is it?
but we got there in the end.
the kids ate their sausages first (where's the ketchup? - so insulting spoilt little brattoss-'s - mine, unfortunately);
then the vegetarians ate their salmon;
then about 1/2hour later the pheasant was finally produced golden crispy meaty smelling and attacked by three people who made out like they'd not eaten since it was actually 'taken' from its happy world in suffolk.
and Liz who had a massive tantrum before lunch - just as the cooks were getting hot under the collar about the lack of co-ordination between the three protein-sources - because ALL I WANT IS A HAM SANDWICH, to which the standard reply was shuddupbrat you must be joking you are eating what you are given YOUNG LADY etc etc - Liz then went on to eat SO much pheaz- I mean - "chicken" that I wonder if the really stinky farts that took place a few hours later were connected?
kind of meaty smelling? may be a bit like the smell outside macdonalds?
so we survived it. but for all the "yeah, lets do a sunday lunch! cool! fab! we can bond over the hob! " well, next weekend its PIZZA all round.
Open box
Turn on oven
Put in oven for 10 minutes
Eat
(possibly burp too)
Return to Cbeebies / newspaper - ignore each other happily for rest of day.
Sunday Roast MY ARSE!
(although it tastes a darn sight nicer than a tesco budget pizza with "real" mozzarella)

friday afternoon

2010-03-05T10:10:00.000-08:00

Whilst my beloved children are downstairs eating pizza in front of Madagasca (I like to move it move it I like to move it move it) and currently not trying to throttle each other with ribbons or stab each other with the remote controls, I have snuck away to contemplate the sunshine and the week, which has flown by like concord going supersonic.
Is it bad that I've left them downstairs on their own with the nursery maid aka dvd? Well, I watched the first 45minutes so I reckon I'm ok at the moment.
So this week has been all a bit stomach wrenching and peculiar.
Sunday I let a North-Face-Clad-couple-from-Crouch-End in to our house to look around it. We may be selling it. But that's another blog for another day. And I proudly showed them around (Husband was at work going a bit insane on a completely insane job, and had a bucket under his nose to catch the snot which was on perma-drip); admiring my own home, which we, Husband and I, and I suppose to an extent, Mol & Liz, have put together over the last 8 years. And I am proud of it. And by showing them around I realised how much I totally love this home of ours. Our FIRST grown up home, with upstairs and downstairs, a garden, and a roof that we own 100% of. And its really, really made my stomach do flips thinking about not being here any more. How odd will it be for two small children who've only ever lived here to pack up their things and watch the house empty out into a large lorry sometime in the summer (with their drunken mother sobbing into one of Husbands oversized overused man-hankies)?
So that was weird.
And then on Wednesday night I watched a re-run of Location Location with the wordy Phil & Kirsty, who were re-living their very first couple who happen to be excellent friends of ours. And seeing them on the telly from 7 years ago was surreal. (Not a new line on their face since, which disturbed me somewhat as I climbed into my bath aftewards, my face covered in lines and indellible sleep-patterns around my eyes...) The very night their show was broadcast I went into labour with Mol, so as I was watching them again on Wednesday my tummy started going a bit flippy and I must admit I shed a tiny tear (also probably because I really wanted to jump on the first express train to Glasgow and I know I probably won't be able to do that now until 2011...). So that was weird. In a nice sort of a way.
And then weirdly a really good friend of mine, who's husband is Liz's godfather, on that very same night as Phil & Kirsty re-lived their love of our friends in Scotland, only went and got herself into labour too. Crazy huh? Maybe there is something about watching friends on TV when at a critical stage of pregnancy that triggers a hormone rush that triggers contractions? I may have found something here.
So that was weird.
And then today when I took Mol to ballet me and Liz sat in the hell like waiting room listening to the clonk-clonk of the piano in the studio and like dominoes, one by one, each toddler in the waiting room hit each other, with increasing intensity. ella hit jasper. jasper hit theo. theo came over and demolished liz and tried to remove her hair as if it were merely a wig.
so that was a bit weird.
something about the YMCA which induces crazed behaviour in small people.
anyway. I can hear "I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it" which means Madagascar is finishing, which means I better go down before the killing of siblings begins. Again.
Have a nice weekend folks. May it be free of weirdness.
(see. not even 10seconds has passed and I can hear them battling downstairs. HELL.)

lizards and sun

2010-03-01T13:39:00.001-08:00

ooh! I have one more official follower! thank you follower! I think I may love you.

anyway. onto today's hot topics.
spring?
sun!
bulbs!
birds singing!
people smiling!
could it be could it be..? or are we sad misguided weather-nuts who see the best in a bad situation. will I wake up tomorrow and my house have slid down to Green Lanes under the weight of a new dump of Siberian Snow, fresh in off Cloud 9?
I know we're a nation of weather-nuts but is it any surprise? we've had 4months of grey drizzle vitamin-d-deprivation, combined with a recession, christmas, january, pot-holes, teenagers throwing their chicken-wings-food-wrappers all over Hornsey rail station (actually that's not seasonal, that's constant and so disgusting I want to go and shut down chicken-wings or get some fire-crackers and set them off each time a Horsney School for Girls Teenager chucks her carton nonchalently on to the wet floor; have they NO pride in their surroundings?) and Bradley being killed off in East Enders. I mean, the times have been really tough.
so when I woke up to a ray of sun beaming through my bamboo lined blinds this morning I actually jumped out of bed and felt - dare I say it - happy!
Mol and Liz, peeling their faces off their green with snot pillows, also felt the joy of the beams. they both got dressed with no fuss, they both ate breakfast without argument, they brushed their teeth and hair (different brushes) almost with merriment. they even shared the making of a jigsaw. actually that's a lie. i can't push it too far. they had a row over the jigsaw. out came the green snot again - flying in all directions as they chucked jigsaw puzzle bits at each other in rage. a bit like when a camel gets feisty and spits at the moronic tourist trying to get on its back - greenies flying galore.
BUT: can this be put down to the joy of sun?
I think I may be a lizard inside a womans clothing. And when the sun comes out my fingers start to move properly, my skin feels less vulnerable, my body wakes up. I wonder what the Xray in the new airport security would see as I saunter through? would it bleep because of the belt buckle or the large diamond ring Husband gave me for having his children (oh, wait, delete that last bit) or would it bleep because the security guard had just seen an upright lizard skeleton walk towards him and he'd vomited in shock on his machine and set off the alarm? Who knows. This could be a conversation to have with my parents.
anyway. its very nice to have the sun out, however briefly it lasts.
(even the dogshit on the passage caused humour today rather than anger... - how rare is that?)

Amateur witches

2010-02-23T04:32:00.000-08:00

Mol looks like an adolescent witch at the moment. On her birthday she lost a tooth in the morning (top floor) and a tooth in the afternoon (top floor) which made three missing in a row, and then the next day she lost another tooth (bottom floor) and so now with 4 teeth missing she looks wholey scary. When she smiles there is this row of gum. Pink. and sort of soft. And when she crunches into a carrot its even more scary. there is no crunch. just a sort of snaky like sucking.
Anyway. So, bleeding gums aside, Mol had a truly lovely birthday surrounded by her friends and family up in Suffolk. for the first time in weeks, months, centuries - even, the sun came out and melted the frosted white ground - all the acconites came out and the yellow petals blazed with joy. birds were tweeting and twittering (not digitally, i mean like for real man, nature, brilliant) blinking in the rays, thinking about the nests they'd be making in the next few weeks, wondering if worms were on the menu yet.
One by one car by car friends arrived at the house, 7 year olds leaping from their booster seats, unchained, running into the garden and screaming a lot about not very much, comparing things which are very important to 7 year olds (like plastic jewels or wobbly teeth or shoes or pants or how low they can go with the splits). mothers happily wrapping their hands around a cup of hot tea and mouths round custard creams.
Then - on a load of hobbie horses - there was the Hobby Horse Horse Grand National (actually I wasn't outside for this - but I think there was some sort of race) which I think ended with one or two jockies going on strike because they were being criticized on their equestrian techniques. (7 year olds are fantastically honest about how rubbish their friends are...)
And then we did some pasta pesto for lunch and a load of jelly and cornflake chocolate crunchy things.
And THEN... the main event: pony riding. We jumped back in the cars, and headed over to the local stables where Tilly, Storm and Daisy-Pops were waiting, tacked up, to take their precious loads on their first ever pony rides.
Ah! Sweet! Kids in crash helmets on huge hairy beasts! how happy were these children?! Not one complaint! Just a lot of squeaks of delight and squawks of laughter as the ponies made their funny pony noises (stinky farts nose-blowing coughing tail swishing etc). No one fell off. No one got bitten. No one had a fright. It was all pure wholesome country fun.
And then we all piled back in the cars (please can we go again? please please I want to take Storm home with me, please?) back to the house for some major tea and cake... and here Mothersruin nearly RuinedDaughter by buying hilarious re-lighting-comedy-candles... Poor Mol. Got so frustrated she put her face right in the candles and blew really hard but the buggering thing relit just as her chin was by the candle: burnt chin; tears; howls; embarressment; loss of face; Mothersruin feeling soooo guilty I nearly went straight to the brandy for a large dose of dutch courage (I didn't though, Alcohol doesn't fix problems we all know that, der?) - anyway. she finally pulled herself back together and the party finished off with a whoppa treasure hunt.
and then we kicked everyone out at 5ish.
and then i realised that i hadn't sat down since I got out of bed at 8am. My legs hurt and my eyes kept wondering over to the wine rack.
All in all, I'd say Mol is one lucky little lady. Great friends. Great friends' parents. and a very strong gum.

old age creeping on

2010-02-19T00:05:00.001-08:00

oh
my
god
I
have
a
7
year
old
child

how
did
that
happen
?

ready for another yarn about laying babies..?

2010-02-13T05:57:00.000-08:00

So the not very shaggy or doggy story continues.
Fast forward 3.5years and I find myself, after making vows to never ever EVER have sex ever again regardless of how much fine wine or how many stems of asparagus or gloopy male-fluid-like-oysters or romantic walks along exotic beaches Husband treated me to, (don't worry, I've never eaten an oyster...) I find myself unable to tie my shoelaces or cut my toenails because there is something IN THE WAY. Yes! You guessed it! Another heir to our North London Kingdom!
Pregnancy was all pretty fine: I was my usual unpleasant self (Husband and I had a spectacular argument one morning which ended with me actually unloading a whole bowl of Rice Crispies (soaked in milk) on his head); hating my body which was getting wider than it was tall, and the inability to turn over in bed without feeling as though I had a water-balloon with a whole cow in it stuck in my stomach sloshing around and sticking hooves in to my organs. Oh those were the days!
Such a joyous positive person I must have been for those 9months. Lucky Husband.
So, as we were nearing birth time, for some reason I came into contact with a new baby (I can't even remember whose it was) and spent about 10 minutes canoodling it. Trying to remember something about how to hold small people - shit, there goes the head, shit, there goes the head AGAIN (is the mother watching? shit, yes!), shit, its vommed on my shoulder (it was the height of summer, my shoulders were covered by the straps of a spaghetti vest - hmmm, must have been a pleasant sight: heavily pregnant woman wearing a skin tight vest).
Anyway. As the old wives tale goes, and as what happened in my story with Liz, the canoodling a new baby totally revved up my hormones and a mere 24hours later I found myself in the next chapter.
Lying in my bed, having just read a few pages of a very Sainsburys chick-lit-book (all my brain could cope with) and turning out my light, I felt my body tense up as I prepared to do a sneeze.
I sneezed. What a whoppa!
I felt marvellous! What a completely fantastic sneeze! My whole body felt like it'd been cleared of all the summer dust.
When suddenly - about 5 seconds after my roaringly successful sneeze - I felt another sensation. WET WET WET! (As marty pellow may sing as his wife goes into labour...)
My waters popped - the balloon with the cow in it had finally worn thin.
GUSH-O-RAMA?
It was like the niagra falls.
(I had to throw away the rug that most of 'it' - oh, gunk - fell to.)
I got a bit excited in a silly hysterical sort of way.
And then shouted for Husband who came to assess the situation in a rather 'this isn't quite what I had in mind for my night' sort of a way.
So blah blah blah - move forward a couple more hours as contractions developed - Granny Highbury installed into the house to babysit Mol who was in heavenly-deep-sleep - we're going to the hospital and I'm in the back of the car, looking out the boot window, holding on for dear life as the niagra falls carried on falling and Husband revved through a number of Red Lights - me howling the usual pretty phrases like 'fuck fuck fuck this fucking hurts why the fuckety fuck did we do this again? oooooooooooooooow. shitcuntwankshitcuntwank...'
Get to the hospital to be greeted (its 3am) by a Spanish Male Midwife. WHAT? A man to deliver my baby?
Oh well, fuck it! I had little choice.
I did some amazing visualisation taught by my fantastic yoga teacher "take yourself to a safe place you love going and breath deeply through the contractions..." she'd say, and I'd find myself in the sea in Devon.
And about 20minutes later Husband turned green and had to be half-carried out of the delivery room, suffering from heat-exhaustion (meanwhile I was about to have his baby...). So he was in disgrace, although at that point I couldn't give a flying-cow who was in the room as long as this baby was taken OUT NOW!
And whoosh.
Out she came. Very fast. The spanish male midwife was shouting at me "don't push don't push not yet" I was like "fuck off its coming out you stupid twat and where's my fuckwit husband anyway?" (remember that feeling? like a white-hot-breeze-block-coming-out-the-fandango?)
Midwives must really love their patients.
I always meant to write to the ward to say thank you for looking after Husband so well whilst I was puffing and panting and pretending to be in the cool Devon sea. I never did.
Anyway, at about 5am, a grey-screaming-mucas-covered-Liz arrived safe and sound and me and Husband shed a few tears (oh god, another 3 years of hell to come) whilst the Spanish Male Midwife tended to my nether-regions' administration.
And voila, Liz. Snuggly. Warm. Pain-over. kiss-able. Snuffly. And ah, that overwhelming sense of yummyness all over again.
Aren't we lucky?
And 3.5years later...
(ha ha ha! Joke!)

cross your legs?

2010-02-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

Cast your mind back, mothers... Remember those post-natal moments? I've been thinking about them today because a friend has just gone through the pains of baking a baby and giving birth to the little person on Wednesday night.
Its dreadful but i actually can't remember what day of the week either of my loafs of baby were born: i know that it wasn't the weekend (because I wasn't out clubbing at the time).
Both births were at silly times like 8.32pm (Mol) which meant that Husband was unkindly evicted from the hospital within an hour of seeing his first child and experiencing screaming trauma for 14hours; and 4.30am(Liz) as the watery sun was coming up through the wet august clouds over Hackney - which meant that i'd just spent the night huffing and puffing and blowing down the Homerton with my deep-throated-animal-like-curses.
I was put in mind of my own experiences, when i was texted on thursday morning by the husband of this lovely friend, declaring that the little bundle of wonder had been released from the dark warmth of his mum into the cold light of UCH. And it's quite nice to recall those special first moments.
Both very different, each labour, each birth, each post-natal-moment.
With Mol I'd been brain-washed by the NCT that any form of intervention excepting the rubbing of my back by Husband, was forbidden and WEAK and would have implications for the well-being of my (our) baby.
So, when Location Location Location (starring gorgeous friends who uprooted from Stokey N16 to the balmy shores of Loch Long courtesy of Phil & Kirsty) credits started to roll, and Braxton Hicks became a fixed and far more painful entity, I was all gung-ho, ha! we'll beat this thing! Lets-stay-at-home - we'll call the midwife, have a bath, walk around a bit, lets stay up all night getting utterly exhausted... But then I realised it was all getting a bit more excrutiatingly painful, so we stumbled off to the Homerton (highest rate of knife crimes in the whole world: if we're doing urban in 2003, lets do it right, yeah?). I think it was a god-awful time of day (like 5am - no-mans-land), and we didn't have any supplies other than Husband thoughtfully bought Harry Potter for himself, and planted himself in the corner of the Natural Birthing Suite, occasionally offering a rub or a hand-hold... That day was endless. ENDLESS. PAINFUL. (No, no, please, no painkillers, it'll ruin my baby, my sacred birth right to endure pain! Taken from me! no, no no!) And then after two hours of sodding painful pushing and vein-popping-heaving, and an Irish midwife at the end of her shift who was really quite bored, Mol finally appeared. And then came the uggy bits. And then true NHS post-natal-charm: not a big yummy squishy slightly gunky hug with baby, but instead the most painful stitching to repair the parts relieved of their natural beauty due to the gigantic baby passing by... Oh. My. Fucking. God. And I thought that the birth was painful, as some viscious tired nurse poked round my regions with a needle as long as a giraffes neck.
But once all that admin was out the way there was a brief moment of - pause -; - breath -; look, here's your baby; nuzzle and cuddle and look on in total dis-belief. And then the hospital chucked husband out and I was wheeled up to a ward, hidden behind a grey curtain and left to my own devices. Never having seen a baby before in my life, my precious moment of love was slightly diminished as I realised I didn't have a bloody clue what to do and I couldn't even get out of bed to have a pee or wash my really overdue-a-wash body.
I'm wondering at what point the love-hormones kicked in? Was it pre-birth? (not for me - I was in denial until I was heaving around my living room sounding like a prehistoric creature from a muddy puddle.) Was it during birth (the anticipation building up with each ridiculous contraction)? NO WAY! So, for me, it must have been post-natal. And actually, I can pinpoint the exact minute my love hormones kicked in with Mol: it was when she was put in her oversized stripy babygrow and button hat (we didn't realise there was a fashion for cute First Outfits) and handed to me, fresh as new life itself, and she started sucking, unaware at how easy she'd made this first terror of post natal care for me, on my very unprepared boob. Her fuzzy coloured eyes tight shut, no idea where she was, not a care other than milk and warmth body to body. At that point the past 24hours and extremely horrid terror and pain were catalogued into another section of my brain (but totally not forgotten!).
Was this the weirdest day of my life? Absolutely.
After all that pain, so much total adoration.
It was also the best day. And also the worst.
Is it a wonder that mums are totally mad?
(if you're interested I'll recall my little Liz's entry into the big bad world, another day... - I bet you CAN'T wait!)

end of Jan

2010-02-01T02:23:00.000-08:00

hello!
its the 1st of Feb. Not only is the 1st Feb a significant friends' birthday (happy birthday P - although I know you never read my rubbish... but happy birthday anyway!) but today is the day that I can glance up at my overly-fluorescent and proudly shining halo and then pat myself on the back and then say well done mothers-ruin, you've done yourself well. I have now officially done 31 days booze & cheese free. A couple of mental wobbles here, a couple of close-to-fingers-temptations there, but still, my body (livers & kidneys in particular) is a temple at which I can worship, for today at least.

I'm actually feeling a strange sense of loss that my self-imposed-embargo has been lifted. I've enjoyed testing myself. I've enjoyed seeing the beer on the shelves at the shops and just wafting pass, thinking smugly to myself, I have no need, I am free of all that. I've enjoyed, even, going out with friends, and watching them chucking back the bubbles or absinthe (I move in those sorts of circles, sweety), getting merry, being a bit wibbly drunken incoherent, whilst I remain quietly smugly not drunken and waking happily in the morning with a clean head and breath not like a dogs arse.
I've enjoyed getting home at night after seeing said wibbly incoherents and going into my girls' rooms and kissing them goodnight (I do this every single night of the year, unless they're at a granny's house...I have to kiss them goodnight. I wonder in how many years I'll stop creeping into their rooms to kiss them goodnight when they're asleep?) and not falling over as I lean down or breathing stale wine fumes over their flawless skin. Its a good feeling. There is something a wee bit skanky about stumbling up the stairs into Liz or Mols' room and breathing wine fumes all over them while they obliviously dream of fairies and sweets and building sandcastles.
So. I feel a bit sort of anti-climaxy that its over. Maybe I should set myself another challenge?
So. For tonights supper menu: grilled haloumi followed by macaroni cheese followed by cheesecake followed by a round of cambazola all washed down with a couple of bottles of claret.

what happened to micky?

2010-01-24T12:51:00.001-08:00

it's a dark wednesday morning.
the alarm goes off. nicky campbells sweet scottish accent quietly comes to life on the radio.
i lie in bed and enjoy the last minute of warmth before the day starts.
i clamber out of bed, the nice fug from under the duvet slips off my body; quick: slippers on, dressing gown on, glasses on, dis-organised hair scraped back from face, excepting 5-live on Husbands alarm clock the house sounds like it normally does at 7.10am on a weekday: ticking over and quiet.
i pad down the stairs past mol and liz's rooms, enjoying the sound of their heavy breathing, feeling mean that i'm going to wake them soon from their cosy slumber (when i ask liz what she dreamed of last night she always says i dreamed of you mummy. what did you dream of? and if i say i dreamed of a beach and sunshine she'll say did you go to that beach? where was i? when was it? it all becomes a bit confusing) down more stairs, i switch on the kitchen lights and walk towards the kettle.
something on my left catches my eye.
and through my morning blurred vision i see a slash of red and grey. huh? quoi? i turn back and fill the kettle and put the tea things on a tray. lapsang souchong and regular teabags, one of each, in the tea pot. two cups. oh, i need the milk. i turn to the fridge and again this slash of irregular colour on my work surface by the knife rack. i peer, like an old lady trying to work out a train time table, closer. and then AHGHGHGHG!
i recoil like a reverse jack-in-the-box. blurrrrrgh. aaaaagh. gag. this is too much for the morning.
i'd forgotten that husband had set lethal machinery into KILL position last night - slathered in peanut butter, over the sharpest needle with the strongest snapping mechanism since crocodiles - this was a mouse trap no mouse would survive (or human finger for that matter).
micky is dead.
but the aftermath of this shocking act of murder (i quite like mice; i was thinking we could've trained him to bring us tea in the morning and i'd pay him with crumbs - seemed like a good deal for the winter?) was sorded! not only did mickey bleed torrents of ruby red mouse blood, like everywhere, he also took part in a mouse-death-explosion-trick, whereby some of his bloody-parts, presumably during the snap-section-of-murder, had flung themselves far afield to other places on the work surface. it was like a scene from a tarantino movie, but in miniature.
anyway. my peaceful morning-zombie-state was fairly shattered. i turned my back on the death-scene, filled the pot of tea, remembered the milk (had to look one final time at mickey - who did he leave behind? was his wife with him? what if his teenage son had seen it? he'd be back for revenge, surely...? i felt a small pang of guilt...) and went swiftly back upstairs to alert husband to clean the gore before breakfast so as to not risk damaging the mental stability of our impressionable and innocent girls.
mol asked why the kitchen smelt so 'clean' when she came downstairs. she probably thought i'd had an attack of anal-cleaning-frenzy during the night - nothing that odd about it i suppose.
(actually she didn't but i like the idea of her inadvertently sniffing out the crime scene. she only asked me tonight in her bath if we'd trapped anything... i said, hm, i think maybe we did, anyway, don't forget to clean your cheesy feet, monkey!)
RIP Mickey. A mouse family somewhere will miss you. Our fruit bowl, however, will be a cleaner place.

doh a deer

2010-01-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

i really mean 'do', as in the sound of music kind of a 'do' not a homer-simpson 'doh'. mol had her first ever piano lesson on monday and she has 3 notes on her head: C,D,E. Do Re Mi.
and now its do a deer a bloomin' female deer at every passing the piano moment. i am not going to scream impatiently one day in the near future "LEARN ANOTHER BLOODY TUNE MOL!" because that would be deconstructive and mean of me. i must nurture her musical talent and one day she'll be up there, wembley stadium, under the spotlight, dancing to the songs she has written and recorded earlier in a trendy soho studio with dudes from the backstreets of n8 - the dudes who weren't kicked out of the room for having smelly dog-shit-feet that is. you can't go into a cramped recording studio with dog shit on the soles of your feet. it'd ruin the soul of the song. yeah, maaaaan.
but before i project great talent i have to deal with the learning part. mol's teacher is a flame-haired-eastern-european with a sharp accent and finely painted lips. the lasting impression mol has of her after one lesson is that she left a lot of her lip-make-up on mols' favourite mug with a hedgehog. 'what's this mummy?' 'oh, it looks like L's lipstick.' 'oh. its very red and slimy.' can you respect a teacher who leaves such a mark on your favourite mug?
i'm already quite scared of L but i will try not to let mol know about my fears. although L is smaller than me in size i fear that she could argue me into allowing mol into being pushed through the music tube like toothpaste out of its nozzle. i have a feeling L likes RESULTS and RESULTS come from EXAMS and you don't PROGRESS unless you do EXAMS and why would you not want this?
I had to remind her 3 times in the first 10 minutes of MEETING her and taking this red-lipped-vixen into my house that music is surely meant to be pleasurable, especially at the tender age of nearly7?
although mol is much more casual about trusting her teachers, for me, the jury is still out...
roll on monday and lets see if we can get mol fast tracked to Grade 2 level. STOCCATTO! NOW! DO RE ME.
DOH?

oh.
and book clubber-wanna-be's...
so, talking of fast tracking.
I finished Lucky Jim to tremendous applause in my head as he got the bird and the job and didn't fall into the ditch labelled useless alcoholic.
and then I moved swiftly onto The Road (Cormack Mckarthy) to change genre and get modern and down with the kidz. i finished it last night (prune like and glued to the final pages in the near-cold-bath) and i went to sleep sobbing. don't read it if you've recently had a relative die on you who you very much loved or if you fear the end of the world. whatever the reviews say on the back it has to be The Most Depressing Book I've EVER Read.
I'm going to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next to cheer myself up.
Imagine. Owning. Your. Own. Chocolate. Factory? And more importantly - a whole tribe of OOmpa-Loompa's?
Sleep well readers.

late nights

2010-01-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

Mol had her latest night EVER in her nearly 7 years of existence last week. Courtesy of Granny Darling who ventured up from dark Hampshire to The Big Stinky Smoke of London Town and treated us to a night at The Snow Queen. A night of dazzling glitter and sequins and pointed toes and painted faces and men in tights proudly flaunting their nether-regions splendidly emotive music a sweaty conductor in a cummabund that looked like it may explode off into the First Violins at any given moment strawberry ice-creams wine gums chocolate rolls (cadburys) (of course) a pint of orange juice a wide-eyed Mol with every new dancer that leapt slid twirled plied lifted crept hopped skipped and jumped onto the gigantic Colliseum stage.
The dancing was gob smacking. Little Kay who is one third of the main characters - not a big man - was on stage nearly every scene lifting and sweating and lifting and spinning - like the ever-ready-bunny but more together about his position in life; and our seats were so incredibly close to the stage that apart from being at risk of his sweat spinning off and giving our wine gums a salty coating we could actually see his muscles rippling under the strain of heaving the waify ballerinas about for nearly 3 hours.
Usually we're in seats so far from the stage that its more like watching multi-coloured fleas hopping around a distant tray of colour. Even bino's don't help in those circumstances. But on this night - Mol could have hopped from her seat, over the lady with the jingly bangles and joined Kay and his eternal heavings. Magic. At one point Mol said "Look Mummy!" I thought something very exciting had been observed. "Look! It's the Snow Queens ZIP" as though Snow Queens and Ballerina's [period] were exempt from such mundane clothing accessories.
At 9.30pm when I realised Mol was in it for the long haul - and with another act to go it dawned on me that somehow we'd have to get home, through the rest of the theatre-rush-hour and it dawned on me that an over exited over tired over sugared 7 year old may not find the piss-heads on the Piccadilly Line very fun at 11pm. So I craftily texted Husband who obligingly - a loving gift - booked us an Addison Lee which was waiting for us outside the Colliseum at 10.25pm steaming with heat and what felt like at the time, the softest seats in the world.
Mol was so over-wine-gummed that she didn't fall asleep in the car; instead a long discussion was held about who I would want to dance if I was in the Snow Queen, who Granny Darling would dance if she was in the Snow Queen, and much debate was given to Mol as to which character she'd play: the conclusion, at 10.52pm was that she'd be the Snow Queen herself, because she's the main part so the most important and she got flowers at the end, and also because she gets to wear the biggest spangliest diamonte tiara any of us had ever seen in our lives.

Good news that my plea for the snow to melt worked, huh? I'd say it's pretty much down to me, entirely. If I hadn't done my plea we'd still be sliding down the hill and breaking our skulls every five minutes. Seriously. Every five minutes.

ground hog day

2010-01-13T05:42:00.000-08:00

bleedin' hell.
here we go again.
opened the blinds this morning and OH piss off already - snow? MORE?
can't you get the message: we don't want you here any more. now go away. melt. do whatever you do snow when you're asked to leave politely. down the drains. clear off. else we'll set the grit on you.
(well, maybe not, because the rubbish council (who owes us a rubbish collection talking of rubbish) doesn't have any salt. but snow doesn't know that we don't have grit, does it?) well, we can threaten you with hot water and table salt instead. but please, just stop this white business and go snow up in finland or somewhere where people own real fur coats and snow shoes.
we're not interested any more.
sick of chapped lips and toes which have white tips (early onset of frost bite).

even mol has got a bit blaze about the whole "lets make snow angels" story.
its old news. like pete & katie - we just don't care.

bring on the buds and the bulbs of spring. please. now.

what to do when...

2010-01-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

What do you do when you've imposed a no-alcohol January?
I feel bereft as the clock strikes 7pm and the kids are brushing their teeth or fighting over who gets to sit on the loo first or pretending to suddenly have an urgent appointment with another Mr-Man book downstairs and therefore develop deafness which reminds me of our old dog Polly who used to run away on walks and we'd all end up shouting ourselves horse (ha! that looks so funny. to shout myself horse! oh sadness that I find myself funny, no one else does... its like my own support group, run by me) trying to find her... and I am wondering around the house without a wine glass in my hand or a bottle of something tasty in the fridge.
However. Although I feel bereft of the habit (so, what I miss essentially is the action of opening the fridge and filling up a large glass and hearing that noise of the wine leaving the bottle and glubbing into the glass and taking a greedy sniff followed by a greedier gulp followed by a long sigh of relief - as it generally signals the end of the working day) I actually don't really miss the feeling of having drinking the stuff.
I am really surprised that I don't miss it more.
However. (Again) I realise too that my social calendar for January is sparsely populated with appointments which I think makes the imposed embargo a whole lot easier.
Being the socially inept shy day creature that I am, I do find that holding a well supped glass of wine (I'm not really too fussy about the colour, although if its fizzy that really is a bonus point to the host) helps bring out the well hidden night time party animal that I keep shrouded behind glasses and cheap jumpers from TU.
So what do you do instead of getting a bit tiddly?
Well, January is a time for Thank you letters (an art that I fear is fast fading from the etiquette of present giving and receiving and hosting and hostessing or general just being a brilliantly helpful friend / relative / employee... - thanks seems to very readily be given via text or email now. Which is fine if its just a 'cheers for the cuppa' but y'know, when something big has taken place, a letter (hand written, remember what that's all about? Pen! ink! Paper! Stamps!? quoi?) encapsulates an emotion so perfectly... I don't know, I think maybe I was bought up in the wrong decade), so I have been doing some thank you letters.
Other things to do when not out on the lash releasing the inner night-owl:
sort the photo album (I bet yours is more than a year out of date?);
clear out the basement full of rotting old furniture;
try and get in touch with a structural engineer to reassure one that the house isn't going to eat itself due to subsidence;
make phone calls to friends!
empty out the kids drawers full of tat and clothes for 12month olds;
eat chocolate as a booze replacement;
and finally have long hot baths whilst reading latest novel.
Oh - my book club book is now: Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis). Oh me. Its making me laugh out loud (LOL!!! as text speech would have it - oh, get me a vom bucket). You should read it. And then we can discuss it. Or as in the past, I'll just discuss it on my own because no one invites me to their book club.
No booze January is actually doing me lots of good and I really do feel like my halo is beginning to glow again very dimly.
Oh, and also, I do feel a bit more clear headed and able to think in a bit more logical way. Which is why I've decided to go and have a boob job and a tummy tuck.

ice ice baby.

2010-01-07T13:44:00.001-08:00

Yo! Vip! Alright, stop collaborate and listen... ice is back and there ain't no grittin.
Hey!
Home-girl!
I is rappin, awight?
Actually, this is a complaint against the council. Official. Harringay you are useless, useless USELESS.
The school texts us at 8am "School is open, we expect you to bring your children to school for normal hours, do not skive despite the fact that you will probably break your legs / wrists / skull in the attempt to reach us. We don't care, we have attendance figures to create. See you in 45 mins, or else... Love, Headmistress from the House of Officious Kitten Heel."
Or its something like that.
So, dutifully obeying the powers that rule, we tog up to the nines in tights, trousers, vests, long sleeved t-s, jumpers, jumpers over jumpers, coats over jumpers, scarves over coats and hats/gloves over other exposed parts. Boots on. Door open. We face the ice.
And this is not ice that you take out of the freezer and put into your G&T at 5pm. Oh no. This is ice that is out to get you. It wants you to slip. It wants you to fall across its black shiny brilliance. And there must be a reason why the council therefore has left it on the pavement and roads? They're either trying to kill us outright (population booming out of control) or they want to teach us to pay our council taxes accordingly and not fair dodge on the number 29 bus. Whatever, it seems an extremely harsh way to teach us lessons.
So, we hobble slip stamp screech our way down our ice-piste, clinging onto each other, laughing out of fear, watching the cars career totally out of control down our road (its very steep, I may not have mentioned before that it's a bit like a ski jump but instead of landing in powdery snow at the bottom with an adoring audience you land in Tesco Metro or their double-length delivery truck that blocks Green Lanes at critical moments of the day) - I've seen one bump into another car (parked only in front of mine - I was ready to step in the way to protect my poor inert Volvo, but I was flat out on the floor eating wee-d on ice...) (not really, I fell over later, but I like to exaggerate for effect). Mol really loves it. Adventure! Snow! Ice! It's like being in a film mum! Liz really hates it: 3 year olds with short legs who are wrapped in 12 layers are not made for walking on slippery ice death traps. Poor Liz. She was actually trembling with fear. So after walking a little bit I did the charitable motherly thing and picked her up.
It was all going OK-ish, (a walk that usually takes 5 minutes took 15 because of the councils LACK OF CONCERN FOR ITS RESIDENTS) and slowly slowly we were approaching the Institution of the Kitten Heel Mistress crossing the last road - when WOOSH - and I'm on my knees, Liz is flat on the floor beside me, school bags galore, and an exhaust pipe but 10cm from my nose.
Sore sore sore knees. Pride - where have you gone? (up the exhaust I should think) Liz - completely hysterical (doesn't like cars, now is ice-phobic, has a sore back where we fell). Mol a bit like: where's mum gone? Oh, she's on the floor.
School bell ringing.
And the cloak of death sweeping over us as cars skid towards us uncontrolled over the perma-ice covering the road.
Some kind gentleman scraped me up, and Liz up, and my bags up, and I unbended my bent knee, and we hobbled on through the school gates... Where La Mistress de La Heel Kitten was waiting, all smiles and red lips and Mrs Adams-Family strange grey hair streak...
Did she realise what she was calling us to?
The journey home was even more bloody. Although no one in my party fell - it, and here I exaggerate not, took 1/2 hour to get home.
She, the messenger of the Council, summoning us to our near-calamity accidents... She rocks up in a nifty sports car to school. Us parents stupid enough to bring our kids to school when summoned suffer the consequences, not she:- well, tomorrow, unless there is a big thaw (in my mood and the ice) she can shove attendance figures up her squeaky little kitten heeled arse.
Read it and weep authority!
PS grit the bloody pavements. If not for us young-er ones, at least for the oldies who must be getting low on denture securer by now. Its just not on.

how they grow...

2010-01-03T04:21:00.000-08:00

oh I suddenly feel a bit sad. my little baby (liz, age 3.5, so technically not a baby at all) is off on her first all-growed-up tripette with her granny. to the theatre they have gone! no room on the broom (ah, julia donaldson what would we do without you? apart from read other books?). a cat and a hat and a long ginger plaite... (how do you spell it?). and liz who usually wails and clings to my legs and has to peeled off me like a plaster that's been on a verucca for too long and leaves those horrid black marks round the edges - she just waltzed into granny's house, gave a mandatory kiss and let us shut the door no fuss. no sticking or wailing. i wonder if i should check her forehead for tempretures or her skin for mysterious rashes when she gets back.
i just felt a bit sad. for a moment, as i made her little tiny person sized bed, i realised that she's not a smally any longer. but a small-to-middly. which is a massive difference. and i felt a tiny small person sized pang of 'oh'. its all irreversible. she'll only go up (maybe out a bit depending on when she discovers Mc-vomit-donalds) and get wiser and cheekier and start drinking cider.
these small things. i also cut her hair on new years day (such a bad day to do it! with a hangover!) and now she is wearing a long-bob as opposed to a long-straggle and so she looks more growed-up too.
ah. how they grow. i must savour these rose-tinted moments for soon it'll all be door slamming and 'i hate you mum its so unfair', like every day all day.

anyway. check this out its quite funny. albeit 2 weeks too late we wish you a merry christmas!
and this one too: pogues new york tale

happy hangover!

2010-01-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

why oh why oh why oh why?
new years has two predictable paths: path one: find some friends and get really drunk; path two: bah-humbug the whole thing and wake up the next morning feeling smug that you're not hungover.
this year i chose path one and
a.) found some friends (yes, i have them, despite the fact that i probably piss them off royally for most of the year)
b.) got really drunk and...
c.) had a super duper time getting drunk with said friends (there was laughter! merriment! mohito's made by husband! wine tasting game provided by efficient slightly-less-drunk than us at the time neighbour! lots of food! more laughter!)
d.) clonked up to the loft to check out the fireworks over london town drunkenly clonking past mol & liz's bedrooms shouting expletives and general clonkiness (usually am a wee bit anal about not clonking past their bedrooms less they wake from their beauty sleep, not that my little beauties need it... nothing to improve on their faultless perfection. not sure if you can have faultless-perfection in the same sentence?)
e.) wondered about my new years resolutions... (maybe try to get my head around the sodding child-tax-forms i keep getting sent mend the puncture in my bike so i can get to work by my own power not that of the increasingly stinky over priced driven by madmen/women bus oh and the predictable no drinking in january maybe no cheese because i'm more addicted to that than anything else in the world - maybe east enders a bit...) work out where a ' is supposed to go so that my sentences become more grammatically correct
f.) and then passed out at 1.10am - a record late night for me - i actually don't think i've stayed up that late more than 3 times since i became a mother.
g.) woke up this morning parched with a snotty nose that was blocked (possibly the worst sort of nose issue to sort out - how do you blow a blocked yet very snotty nose? nearly impossible) and thought to myself: how long will i feel like this? the answer is: at 6pm my hands are a bit shakey so i guess the hangover is beginning to kick in. it was merrily postponed by a long walk on hampstead heath and the discovery of a cafe called MOL's which nearly made me cry with amazement at the pure coincedence of the name! i'm easily made cry. i'm clearly not with it as i can't write english right now.
and oh my god! have you been to the heath recently? its like a dog-off circus! everyone is there with crazy animals on leads. from tiny little things you nearly get stuck in the tread of your shoe (even if they wear hi-viz jackets - which they mostly do - you still don't see them) to GIANTS which liz screams at as they loom towards her as though she's about to be kidnapped by snakes - giants with muzzles on their snouts, giants with huge bollocks that dangle just at liz-head-height, giants with mad looking owners who carry dog-brushes and spades with which to shovel the elephantine-size shits off the paths with. and when you follow the lead up to the hand that is holding it and then look at the owner... it often says it all. all the rich hampstead-highgate nut-cases wearing matching barber-jackets that their doggy-woggy is wearing... its just plain bonkers.
i could have put liz on a lead and she very possibly could've been mistaken for a new bread of hairless hind-leg-walking puppy. (wouldn't sell very fast as its taken over 3 years to potty train and sadly this bread of dog answers back.) they'd've been queuing up to have a stroke and ask who the breaders were...
ANYWAY. hangover ramble.
liz & mol have watched the railway children and are having a quick bath before they go on to watch charlie and the chocolate factory.
in't near years day tv smashing for hungover parents?
what is your new years resolution i wonder?

tip toeing...

2009-12-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

shhh! its christmas eve! we're all tip-toeing around the house. I mean. shit. Father xmas is. He's filling.
he's doing his stocking thang. Anyone with a stocking fetish in fact, Father Christmassing is the perfect job!
anyway. stockings are being laid out at the end of sleeping childrens' beds.
there they lay, peacefully dreaming of the logistics of one man and 800,billion children's stockings to fill in one night (anxiety dream onset: how will he do it in ONE night only? it's worse than an anika rice challenge...), and the true luminesence of Rudolphs nose in this fog (will they just crash into the first tower block in a Porstmouth suburb?).
so we're tip toeing around Granny Darlings' house down in the country. there is even a bit of snow in the garden. and we've just eaten our weight in stilton. and drunk a lot of rioja (it should probably officially be claret... but we're more cosmo than you think down here in the sticks...). and chewed some home made truffles (courtesy M-in-Law & Husband) and the scene is quite dare i say it, perfect?
and if you can guess where granny darling has put the turkey then I'll give you the last truffle...
answers on a postcard.

oh. and if anyone else does want to sign up as a "follower" that'd be a lovely christmas present for the slightly tipsy Ruined Mother.
(I discovered tonight that my mum has read it once and the rest of my (grown up) family hasn't actually even clicked on the link...- apart from Bert.... fellow brother blogger... which made me feel a bit sort, y'know? sad? mind you, not that my life is that damned interesting...)
But enough self pity! there is a night to sleep through and then a day of smoked salmon, champagne, wrapping paper and general mayhem!
Rock on Jesus! good luck down the birth canal tomorrow!

The holidays are actually here.

2009-12-22T07:20:00.000-08:00

Snow!
Twinkling lights!
Log fires (if your wood isn't too damp)!
Chestnuts!
Tinsel!
More Snow! In your wellies, down the back of your neck, all over your hall floor, up the stair-carpet!
Credit card melting!
Mol & Liz were playing like street-urchins last night, on the pavement, and made a respectable 3ft-high snowman with bamboo arms and a carrot nose and stone eyes... And some arse in the night kicked it down and trampled it away. Typical Harringay YOBS. Kill joys.
I was waiting for Mol to ask me if we could bury the dead snowman (we have in the past buried dead ladybirds and butterflies) which would've been a confusing ceremony.
So, snowman death aside, it is all Christmassy and I've done lots of wrapping and the tree is dressed (although its needles are falling and its getting a bit autumnal) and we're packing up the house for the annual family Christmas get together.
Which means Mothers Ruin is having a little Christmas break too (although our destination does have internet and a mac-computer despite being in the depths of rolling countryside) and will report back later on after Christmas (that's if I haven't gone and exploded a la Creosote...).
So, merry Christmas! And if you don't celebrate Christmas then merry holidays!
Bon Vacances!
Joyeux Noelle!
(And lets hope you've all been very good girls and boys and the mysterious Father C gets down your chimney and gives your stocking a right and proper filling.)
Until next time, friends...

bad diet

2009-12-20T14:20:00.000-08:00

oh god. I forgot that with Christmas comes major nibble food galore overload and wine flowing out of every possible oozible-place and parties and more cakes and oh, just have a small one for the Christmas cheer... and then by New Years Eve everything in the body is heaving and sighing and moaning and pleading STOP STOP no more - not another drop, not another raison soaked in brandy, no more Quality Street (not even the green triangle ones) and your head is saying, well, y'know, I mean, you've already eaten 3/4's of the tin and drunk nearly 2 bottles of Claret in less than 48 hours what does one more wee-snifter really matter?
And then like that fat bloke in Monty Python Mr Creosote, you, in your head at least, feel that last sip of Baileys slip down the throat and ignite the fuse that results in spontaneous combustion and the walls of your mothers house are covered in 4 days worth of partially digested food, a couple of chocolate wrappers (sometimes there is no time to unwrap them completely... you just shove 'em in and hope that like chewing gum, it won't block the gut for 40 years as the urban myth suggests), a few hair balls and maybe even a couple of pennies you swallowed as a child. All out in a big fat-man-explosion.
And that is what Christmas is all about. Surely? Nothing to do with Virgins, Bright Stars, Wise Men (that's a mad idea! Wise Men! It must be the undoing of the whole Christmas Story...Like the tooth fairy, Wise Men Do Not Exist) and a small wee babe in a cot of straw... No! Its just about food. Drink. Piles of wrapping paper. Getting over the cold you contracted on Christmas Eve. And wondering how inpolite it would be to return the unwanted strange looking items from John Lewis which have piled up at your feet.
(Talking of colds. All the girls in the Mothers Ruin Family caught colds last week. And by Friday we were sort of feeling a bit less dreadful. [Husband now has it I believe - its before 11pm and he's sloped off to bed. Not a good sign.] But the point to this small side-chat is that on Friday I went to collect Liz from her school-nursery and bent down to give her a tender motherly loving kiss, at which point I managed to injest a mouthful of freshly-run-snot which was surrounding her mouth/nose area. And because it was in front of a lovely gentle teacher, and this is true, I felt I simply couldn't spit in the middle of the classroom. Yes. I slugged it back. Eyes shut. And thought of Britain. Or something. OH TOTAL VIOLATION! 30 seconds later and I nearly did a Mr Creosote there and then in the school playground. So. Watch out for those tender motherly moments when children have colds. Its just not worth it.)

glitter cont... and other things

2009-12-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Just a small continuation from the glitter debate have a look at this clip. This is actually how my entire house feels right now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJbYMHLmamE

And to continue with the feeling-christmassy-theme, we're off to watch The Snowman, for real, this morning. A family trip! Imagine that. I wonder how many arguments we'll have throughout the whole adventure? I'd say on average about 3 per hour?

Brrrrr.
Its actually too cold to type. My. Fingers. Have. gone. sort of wierd dead-colour.

all that glitters...

2009-12-16T05:40:00.001-08:00

All that glitters today, in my house, is glitter. All over my house. All over my washed floors. All over the kitchen table. All over the radiator. All over the kidz' fingers / hair / faces. Up my staircases. On the sofa. etc. And the thing about glitter is that it embeds itself into the surfaces. Liz once had glitter stuck to her scalp for about 3months, despite weekly washes and scrapings with the metal nit-comb. I wonder what would happen if glitter got into the blood stream?
Why, you may be wondering, are Les Enfants at home on a Wednesday?
Well, the simple answer is that they are ill with nasty green snot and wheezing chests.
So we're kicking back in N8 getting down with the Christmas cheer.
And today has been well-Christmassy despite grotty kids. (I keep saying to them If you're well enough to fight then you're well enough to be at school...But they're still fighting and still snotting.)
I lit the advent candle! No.16 already!
It snowed!
We got a parcel!
In the parcel were 'glitter-up your own tree decorations'.
We glittered 'em up!
I cooked some hot soupy lentil broth.
We watched The Snowman sitting under a rug on the sofa, and I cried but tried not to let Mol see because otherwise she'd cry too. And then we'd both probably start flailing and wailing.
And we got a Christmas card! (I'm sure the postman is hiding ours... seem to be much fewer than usual... maybe WE'VE been struck off everyones list? - Wracking my brains thinking who I've offended lately? - Oh, can think of a few people I've let down... maybe...)
And its snowing still!
And the Christmas tree lights are twinkling.
And we're all snotty and exhausted - and isn't that just the surest sign that Christmas is looming?
And I have my red Christmas nail varnish on!
Glitter-on dudes.

Sunday best

2009-12-13T12:49:00.000-08:00

Today consisted of:
3 night time wake up calls from hot sweaty snotty Liz;
spilling iboprofen on her carpet 2 times in the dark;
knocking over water beside her bed in the dark;
washing all her sweaty sheets this morning;
snot snot and more snot;
carrying Liz pretty much everywhere;
suffering extreme shoulder/arm pain;
wondering if I'll get my post natal Madge arms back as a result?;
the house smelling of roast chicken, leeks in white sauce, maple syrup, apple crumble;
decorating an oversized needle-dropping Christmas tree;
anticipating more needles on the floor in the next couple of weeks;
snot;
one kids party;
one lunch party;
one cold walk in the park (saw a mouse);
hoovering needles;
watching last nights (shocking) Strictly results;
ironing;
smoked salmon;
nearly dying on the sofa watching BBCs sports personality of the year, but saving myself by forcing butt off sofa and upstairs for bath.
All lots better than last nights report. Although I missed a damned fine party by all accounts.

Christmas Time Is Fun. Yes. Really.

2009-12-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

Oh well, I didn't chuck myself off the blogging. Not just yet.
And today my head is going to explode with all the stuff that is going on in it. So much going on inside because there's so much going on outside. Life. Busy. Busy. B.U.S.Y. I thought Christmas was meant to be fun. But tonight as I write I'm feeling all clogged up - like I've eaten my entire weight in chewing gum and then been put in the freezer and now I'm stuck.
Today was meant to be a fun Christmassy day. In fact it started off quite badly with Liz coughing insessantly from 5.30-7.30am and it sounded a bit like the cough that Mol had which was actually an asthma attack that hospitalised her for 4 days. So I lay in bed wondering whether to get up and listen to her chest. But after 2 hours it was morning time and we all woke up. And she stopped coughing and starting snotting instead. Fair exchange.
And then things picked up a bit - Husband made bacon and eggs for Mol and himself and then they skipped off (well, drove) to pick up our American-style-over-sized Christmas tree (discount at the garden centre you see) and bought it back and the house immediately smelt of Christmas and out of the cellar I dug our slightly dusty damp decaying decorations (they'll do, again).
And then we all jumped back into the car and drove off on phase 2 of our day (lunch in Waltham on Thames). Hurrah.
But disaster struck outside the Sobell Centre (I went ice-skating there once when I was a teenager) when some STUPID COW with her totally MORONIC fuck-wit teenage son (with bad bum-fluffy hair growth - she just had mad womans' stubbly hair on her face in a beardy fashion) drove her VW into the side of our car. And then because she didn't speak very good English she got a bit overly-loud and started say "I no liaaaaar" at which point I was like 'Husband, she's probably given us a false telephone number' and Husband started taking photos of her and her sons' hairy faces and their car.
Meanwhile Stan who was sitting in the bus-stop with a white plaster stuck on his most recent shaving accident on his chin gave me his number and said he'd be my witness (even though he's from Leicester- not that that means he shouldn't be a witness, but just that he's quite not local, so it could be a bore for him...).
So after 30mins of standing in the no.91's bus-stop and causing a bit of a jam, I implored Husband to stop talking to the by now almost ranting woman and her fuck-wit teenager ("please can I have your address?" I asked him. "What? I don't know my address. I'm a teenager?" - and that's the absolute truth. See? Fuck-wit.)
So we drove off and I was so cross. Daft idiotic woman. And we were 1hour late for lunch. And lunch was lovely but hard work as I had Liz on my knee getting clammy and refusing to eat her pizza and I was spilling butternut squash soup every where and each conversation got cut short by one of the 7 kids falling off a chair/biting a tongue/wanting more/wanting less/not sitting next to the right person/needing a pee/doing a fart/screaming for the sake of it/snotting on their mother (me) - y'know? And then before I could put the last scary monster on to my godsons most impressive Castle Of Doom (comes with monsters which really are the stuff of nightmares)
it was time to plod on to the next session - phase 3 of the day: tea with sister in law in Shepherds Bush, followed by their Xmas party (have been looking forward to it).
Phase 3 goes as follows: arrive at The Bush of Shepherd, unpack 50 fairy cakes and a ton of brownies made last week in spare moments for the party. Feed Mol a giant plate of spaghetti. Realise that Liz really isn't feeling very well (sweaty coughing refusing pizza, again - refused brownie - even), make executive decision to not put on gold party shoes, load the car with crying Liz (covered in snot) crying Mol (who'd wanted to hand out fairy cakes to her grown up friends at the party) and myself - with a phone running out of battery, a car with a battered rear end (a bit like mine I guess) two crying snotting kids and a 45 minute journey to N8 (and a traffic jam on the West Way).
So here I am.
And this is why I'm wondering where the fun bit of Christmas is? This run up to the Big Day is mental. Office parties. Neighbourhood parties. School parties. Nursery parties. Shopping. Making endless lists. Going round in circles. Having moronic hairy women smash into your rear. Feeling anxious about the credit card. Wondering if this will be the last year your child believes in Father Christmas. Not knowing what to get Husband for Christmas when he asked for a jumper and yet came home from work last week having bought himself a - yes, you guessed - jumper! Worrying about the crack in the ceiling above my bed. Trying to remember to send cards to all the right people. Its sometimes just too much. Or am I just a bit too precious?

Actually I think I'm feeling guilty. I have guilty mothers' syndrome: I don't spend enough time with my kids, (and when I'm with them my mind is elsewhere). I don't spend enough time at work (so permanently feel poor). I don't spend enough time with Husband (and when I do we talk about money and work and house and try to make plans for the future that don't seem realistic). I don't spend enough time cleaning (finally cleaned the top of a picture in the bathroom - it was black). I don't have enough time for friends and when I do I'm thinking that I should be at home with my kids or Husband. I worry about my liver. I worry about my skin. And my wrinkles. And my expensive eye-sight. And my cheap clothes. Oh, and I guess I worry about the childrens' education, sometimes.
So that is why my head is a bit spinny and I guess that's why I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug. Or maybe it's just plain and simple: I'm peeved that I'm not in my gold high-heels drinking a bottle of bubbly that I saw in sister-in-laws giant fridge... sneaking a fag in their garden and trying to find a star in the black clear December sky...

cutting the mustard

2009-12-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

Is the expression "cutting the muster" or "cutting the mustard"?
Husband sent me the link to another North London blog and I was really upset that
a.) he'd been sniffing around other ladies' blogs (a bit like having a sexy dream where the object/victim of your desire isn't the one who shared the bed with you for the last 12 years - not that that's ever happened to me, obviously) and;
b.) that her work was probably going to be loads funnier/intellectual/politically-wise/observant/more read/higher-amount of followers than mine, and;
c.) this forced me into a horror Latin class flash-back (GCSE) where the teacher would look at me in pity when it was my turn to answer a question about the River Styx or the declension of idioticum and I'd simply want to melt into the maroon carpet because I was clearly too thick and shouldn't even be doing Latin GCSE - and its that feeling I'm not good enough I'm going to fail again my brain is only semi-developed I'll never know what a noun is let alone a declension my 6 year old is already better at maths than me, and;
d.) that there are more Mother Bloggers in the world than there are £'s what bailed out the bankers in the recent bank-crisis, so who would want to read another anyway?
So now I'm wondering about this whole blog business. Too many bloggers ruin the... ? (Internet soup?)
My life isn't very interesting and my children's lives are quite similar to lots of other children's lives in N8 (well, maybe not quite the same as the children who go to Rokesley or Fortismere...) and what goes on in my life probably isn't even very well represented by the words I put together anyway. Another author could probably articulate my daily angst far more accurately.
And I don't even know if it's cutting the muster or mustard (I always thought it was mustard, because I like the idea of cutting mustard, because, now here's the clever bit, mustard doesn't actually need cutting, so its like a double-bluff? Similar to a Spooks plot line...).
And so I am going to spend some time deliberating my fate. Its a bit like America's Next Top Model and if I fail the next task (um, like, maybe, not gaining another "official blog follower" between now and the next blog I write) then I guess maybe I'll be kicked off the blog-scene. Some other colourful laugh-out-loud kind of blogger can fill in your next spare 6.5minutes while you sit on a loo in your echoey office facilities...
(God, I've just thought of another invention: internet that gives you sensory experiences: if you could smell the farts (click on that link its he he he) that Liz has been letting off whilst I'm sitting here, you'd be laughing/crying/gagging/re-gurgitating your sushi... - its a sensory overload.)
Anyway. Enough self pity.
I've got to go sort out Liz's rear-end, and then think about who is on my Christmas card list this year. And put icing on about 50 fairy cakes for the school Bazaar on Friday.
See? Plain and simple dull dull dull dull (a la Craig off Strictly...).

Is it that time again, already?

2009-12-03T13:24:00.001-08:00

Jingle Bells Batman Smells Robin Flew Away!
Oh what fun it is to ride on a one horse open slay...
Jesus Mary Holy Lord how did it get round to being Christmas all over again? I'm sure it was not all that long ago that I was making a list of people I had to buy presents for and cursing my bank account for not being fatter and cursing my arse for being too lardy and here we are all over again. But we've had spring and summer and autumn and now its winter and cold and wet and miserable and dark and the shops have their dreadful Christmas Window Displays (I want that one Mum) and through the fog and drizzle a street light has the haze of cheery Christmas lights planted up its trunk... And the post office sends out reminders "You only have 20 days left of Royal Mail deliveries! Panic! Come and join the queues! Share some germs with the other 50 queue-ers, get swine flu while you're here and we'll offer you some health insurance to go with your over priced stamps!" And get on the phone to your friends and ask them if they're sending Christmas cards because if they are then we are and if we are then they are and we'll all hopefully receive the same amount of cards without feeling like we have no friends. And if someone doesn't send a card this year REMEMBER it for next year - cross 'em off the list! In these times of bad finances every card counts.

Cliff Richards Shaken-Stevens Pogues Mariah Carey hangovers mince pies too many parties sore livers exhaustion colds illness no money lists satsuma's and gold coins where's the sun actually gone too many people on the bus no money house smells of Christmas tree's and laundry.

And so Mol and Liz drag themselves out of bed each morning in the darkness and we send them downstairs for their breakfast, their eyelids drooping, their hair stuck to their cheeks where snot may have run in the night, their dressing gown cords trailing on the (occasionally a bit dirty) floor, and then when they reach the kitchen its HEY! WOO HOO! Advent calendars! And they suddenly wake up full of joy and happiness at the endless possibilities of what sweet Granny will have hidden in their (home made, per-lease, as if we'd have shop bought...) calendars. This morning Liz disappointed by her green Opal Fruit (sorry not called that any more, its a STAR BURST!!! BURSTING WITH SYNTHETIC FLAVOURS! - hey I've just thought of a really cool multi-billion-pound-business: create sweets that mimic vegetables, but make the kids think that veggies are delicious desirable and, um, sweet? Hey, I'll swap your brocolli for my cream of sweet-corn? Well, only if you give me the deviled-beans with it. I'm on to something here, definitely...).
But advent calendars are good for waking kids up on shitty black cold raining school mornings, even if the meaning behind them is lost. What are they for, other than counting down to Christmas - when "I get loads of presents and chocolate money from Father Christmas".

Do you think Madonna's children ever get confused by their mums name?

Anyway. So, I'm thinking about Christmas a little bit more. I've done some Amazon ordering for the god-kiddy-winks. I've only gone made not one but two goddamned Christmas puddings and to celebrate the fact that I've only gone made my own goddamned Christmas pudding I took a photo of the mixture and then drank all the rest of the bottle of beer that didn't make it in it. Yee ha. Drunken domestic goddess.
I need to get Husband a present.
I once got him a weekend in a nice hotel.
And once I got him a Christmas jumper.
And once I got him a book of photos which were verging on erotic (I think there was a picture of a willy that wasn't in its down position) and that kind of freaked him out.
Last year I think I got him 4 Haruki Murakami books which have mostly been read by me.
So this year is going to be a real humdinger. Just not sure yet. And if you're reading this oh Husband you could drop some hints...?
I'd like some time off. Time. It's free and comes in all sizes / colours / fragrances / locations - so its quite a versatile concept. Do you think its on offer this year? Good for the bank and good for the Mothers Ruin.
Tomorrow is Friday. One of my favourite days of the week.
Oh, did you see Spooks tonight? My keyboard is the VERY same as the computer-techy-wizzo's and frankly I think he got the idea from me.
22 days to go...

2009-11-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

God what a weekend. I don't know who invented them but after a week of working and heaving kids around London like a regular skivvy I like the idea of sitting on the sofa drinking Lapsang Souchong (some people say its actually cat-pee, but I like to beg to differ) reading the magazine of the Guardian (its the only part that makes sense to my brain-cell-deprived head). Instead what happens at weekends is that it's suddenly really really really really majorly important to fill every waking moment with activities cooking friends car journeys shopping trips swimming golf theatre meeting new babysitters stressing out the toddler getting to D after making stops at A-B-C arguments about taking public or private transport... and the thing is everything is really good fun and really wholesome and refreshing from the norm of the week previous or following but it doesn't permit for sitting on the sofa drinking cats pee and looking at bonny photos arranged elegantly by the Guardian staff. So its Monday night and I just want to run through a few of the highlights and low-lights of the weekend.
Saturday started with a hangover (low) - (4 people 5 bottles of wine strange carb-free supper = painful head in the morning) but hangover was soaked a bit by (high) croissants and toast supplied by MotherInLaw.
Then there was cooking (soup / cake) and friends for lunch (high). That's nice friends for lunch. Sit around chatting and controlling kids and not allowing them cakes (high) until they're near breaking with frustration (they all know which cupcake they HAVE to have... and little dirty fingers keep prodding them and putting stick and ugsome marks on them... OK! please! take! stuff in face! don't choke! and if you do, please choke the crumbs onto your parent not my table or floor...).
Then there was walk in park (avoid dog poo don't fall over on skin-grating pavement, if you do please put snotty crying face on appropriate parents leg). Parking ticket (low).
Rain (low). Cold (low). Tidying house (low). Appreciating clean house (high).
Argument with neighbour about lift to Sadlers Wells (low). Trip to Sadlers Wells (extremely high). Admiring Akram Kahn (very extremely hot and therefore major high).
Sleeping badly because of rain (low). Needing loo in the night (low). Being car-less on Sunday whilst Husband plays golf in the rain in near-hurricane conditions (low). Taking kids swimming (low for me, high for them).
Tea with friends who have a fresh baby which has a very sweet head of black soft fuzzy hair and smells very fresh (high).
I watched a bit of X-factor last night (about 30 seconds before Husband rants "not this shit...") and during the first 20 seconds I realised that a friend of ours has a Simon Cowell Hair Cut (SCHC). I find this alarming. Was it intentional to have an SC? Fair enough that many older men have SC waistbands, but that's generally not intentional and just the hand of fate... but to go to a hair dresser and actually come out with a SC... I wonder how sane said friend is and whether he (at least it wasn't a woman coming out the hair dresser with an SCHC) needs to stop watching the programme. Or maybe he just needs to buy a wig. Anyway. The good thing about blokes hair is that it seems to grow quickly so maybe next time I see him he'll have a Louis Walsh or a Dermot O-Leary or a Gordon Brown. Strange though. Could be a new wave (ha ha) of do's. Thank goodness Sianiad O'Connor (click on this one all fans of 90's music...) isn't a major celebrity any more.
And so now I'm wondering if I can take my weekend early? Like, tomorrow and Wednesday? Anyone want to join me? It could be the new Simon Cowell Weekend In the Week trend.
hm.
Must go eat some food my brain cells clearly need some food.

things that are flat

2009-11-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

Being a small person, relatively, in this day and age that is (maybe 600 years ago I'd've been considered freakily gigantic and people would've put me in the ducking chair and I'd've survived (I'm good at holding my breath) and then I'd've been hung drawn and quartered and burned at the steak for being a witch...(I can't say I'm burn proof - not if the burns on my hand from the oven are anything to go by) I like to wear shoes which give me a bit of extra elevation... And when I'm out on the razz, which I less and less frequently am, I slip my feet into a pair of high heels and I strut around for a few hours ignoring the strange dead-toe sensations that get more and more dead-toe-like as the night progresses (which is also why I like to quaff a few bottles of wine or beer or absinthe...).

But I'm not here to write about those sort of flat(or not) things. Or the flatness of my wash-board stomach. Or the flatness of Suffolk. Or the flatness of a lake with no wind. Or the flatness of those televisions called flat-screens. They're really flat, I've been led to believe.
None of that.
Today I write of the flatness of my tyre on Wednesday afternoon when I went to climb on board my trusty tank of a bike (my brother kindly told me that "its the worst bike I've EVER ridden on in my life you should leave it in the street and see if a bus can run it over") which I love and its served me well for the 4 years I've owned. Anyway. On Wednesday I had one of those mad dash horrors of an afternoon where I had to leave work a little bit early to get to Liz's nursery which was shutting early (so the staff could go bitch about our bratty kids for an hour or so) and then rush like a mad haggered over-wrinkled-35-year-old up to school to get Mol before she starts to believe she's been abandoned by her family and is off to the Annie-style-home... So step one was to get home from work. Which was smashed to small biscuit-crumbs used on cheesecake bases when I saw the extent to which my back wheel was punctured. Holy shit. And a lot of other obscenities came out of my mouth as I threw my now not trusty tank of a bike (hate you you bastard crap thing of all the days to get a puncture you're out for the rust... etc.; bike gives me sad look of rejection). So then I run for the bus like aforementioned mad haggered over wrinkled 35 year old and get the bus and get to nursery just in time, panting, and then sling Liz over my shoulders like a bag of spuds, and limp my way, panting like a half dead haggered over wrinkled unfit 35 year old and get to school just as the Orphan Minders are about to load Mol up into their van and take her off to some Victorian Institution. Or do I mean after school club? Anyway. I made it. Just.
And that night it rained and rained and all I could think of was, oh, poor bike, out in the exposed open air, rusting and crying with pain. And I did feel a bit bad.
So the next morning as I walked to school (that means pushing Liz on her scooter that has no brake whilst carrying her bag and Mol's bags) trying to maintain a bit of cool, when I mention in passing to the local bike guru (LBG) that my bike is trashed at work and I'm wondering because I'm a pathetic girl how I'm going to get it home with its puncture. And then we talked about a friends daughters' "bring a pony party" and the subject was dropped.
At work, 1hour later: said LBG rocked up at the garden centre in his fluorescent bike gear, clasping an inner tube, a spanner and a very pumping pump.
And now I have a new hero.
Thank you LBG. My bike is snug under its rug like a bug and I feel no more guilt and don't have to spend any more money on overpriced London buses.
Beer courtesy of me next time we're in a public house at the same time... (Xmas drinks...?).

hanging on...

2009-11-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

I was walking back to my car after work today (Sorry. I drove. I know I shouldn't. But. Too dark. Too wet. Too wintery. Too tiring. Carbon Footprint goes up one more size...) and I heard the sound of birds chirping cheerily in the trees, probably just tucking themselves up for the night as the sun (somewhere behind the greyness) was setting and the sky getting dark. But as I looked at the trees I noticed that they were not swaying in a nice calming to-and-fro sort of way. They were way-jerking around, flapping almost, with wind whistling through them cruelly tearing the last crackly leaves off the branches and all I could think was: shit I'm glad I'm not a bird right now. And then when I was lying in my bath tonight with my book (hey. Because no one ever asks me to join their book club - I'm too stupid / get drunk / inarticulate / wouldn't complete the homework / would just want to talk about Politics and Tax rather than the sex lives of the fictional characters in the book being studied - its ok, I've accepted my isolation: I've decided to start my very own Mothers Ruin Book Club. I can only read and assess my books in the bath, after a round of East Enders and 1/3 a bar of Sainsburys Own Brand Belgian Milk Chocolate; and if I get distracted its OK! No one there to tell me to get back to the point! I can just bark on at the steamy walls, the towels and the kids' rubber ducks: they won't mind!) which is still really good and really readable (Zadie Smith On Beauty), the sash windows in the bathroom were totally clattering (and still are as I type) and I wondered to myself: I know that the whole of Cumbria is underwater, but how many birds actually get blown off their perch in this wind?
Their little gnarled claws clinging onto twiggys for dear life. Their feathers ruffling and their eyes blinking in the hard wind. I felt a bit sorry for them, personally.
Talking of hard wind. OMG. Who got caught in the bad weather yesterday? Oh fuck the birds falling off their perches in this instance. What about ME? and Liz? And my mum who made her annual pilgrimmage to N8 to "see you darling" and stupidly I decided to go-green and walk to Liz's Fun Fit Gym Class with Granny Darling and Liz. And within 10 minutes, in the most exposed part of Hornsey, a major howling roaring like a Caterpilla-Digger sheet of hail & rain & wind whipping in circles came at us like an animal from HELL.
And this bastard in his people carrier laughed at us as we cowered (I know! Call myself a sturdy country gal? We were so completely cowering) behind a skimpy hedge that did nothing more than, well, nothing frankly. Liz had total-humour-failure; Granny Darling gritted her teeth and muttered something about 'never seen anything like it in all my life' and I think I just swore a lot at the fucker in his silver car flashing his great white teeth in the luxury of dryness.
Mol just told me she's got a part in her Christmas sorry, WINTER (no religious words allowed, ever, in the multicultural North Harringay Schools...) Play. I'm going to brain wash her to go on the stage and start singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing! Glory to the new born King! just to see how many members of staff faint with shock. Such audacity.
So. I've done birds. I've done book club (sorry guys, its for me only). I've done weather. I've done smug bastards. And I've done Christmas, no, WINTER, Play.
Think that's all for now.
Oh - no - Spooks. They killed Jo. Husband very upset. No more bottom to watch. She had a good one. Although he claims to never have noticed it.

illiterate

2009-11-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

It was pointed out to me that I left out "e" in my last blog. Not a conscious choice and I guess I was just so excited I even had a list that went as far as "e" that in my excitement i forgot all about it. I'll have an "e" please Bob. Remember those heady days as a student watching Going for Gold?
Do you remember going out and getting drunk (triple vodka for £1!) and coming home after the pubs closed and making about 25 rounds of cheese on toast?
And then sitting around the tiny TV scoffing the cheese on toast which didn't do much other than make the house smell not-damp and perhaps delay the going-to-bed-with-a-spinny-head moment after stabbing your (well, mine, really) eyes in a desperate attempt to get the over-used-under-cleaned-contact lenses out of the eyes before falling into comatose sleep?
I don't understand how any student every really learns anything given that 4/5ths of the time spent at University or College is generally spent being pissed or high or asleep or drinking tea in a fuzzy state of morning-after-the-night-before-recovery at 1pm. How I scraped my degree - given that I wasn't even interested (at the time) in more than 2 of my courses, and for one of the courses I didn't attend a single seminar (god forbid - the idea of 'talking about my idea's on the topic' just made me want to hurl the 25 rounds of cheese on toast from the night before... - I had no idea's on any topic other than 'how much is that cheese sandwich?' 'can I afford a whole bottle of wine?' 'does To-Be-Husband fancy me or his flatmate Rosie who is small and has a square head and a northern accent?'... I basically was shitting myself permanently that they'd find out that actually I didn't have much more than 2 brain cells to rub together...) well, its beyond me.
I didn't get busted by the academics.
A bit like at school - I think I was the only one of the gang not to get busted for being utterly pissed most weekends of the 6th form - although I think my tutor once turned a blind eye as he saw me and a bunch of retrogrades quaffing Somerfield Cider and chugging Silk Cut in a field of long grass one lazy summer afternoon. I seem to have always just scraped by... not quite catching the eye of anyone in a position to whup my arse and tell me to pull my socks up. Go read the goddamned chapter in the book what you are meant to have read for this weeks seminar.
And it's funny how now that I am a responsible adult with a Husband, children and a house and a green Volvo with flat tyres and even a credit card, the idea of Education and learning actually interests me. Although I wouldn't necessarily want to do an exam. I still have anxiety dreams about Exams. Always my maths gcse... (which actually came into use this afternoon as I had to COUNT a lot of Christmas Trees that came into the Garden Centre freshly cut from Denmark... - I got up as high as 140! I think that was stretching my record by a few digits.)
Anyway. All enthused about students and that. Not sure why but it's something to do with that "e" from before.
Cheese on toast anyone?

small things kids say

2009-11-16T14:06:00.000-08:00

If you know what a "bless-you-fart" is hands up? Only a finely tuned mother or father could answer that one. Answers on a postcard.
And here's another one: what is your reaction to your child singing Annie at the top of her voice at supper time with a mouthful of fish-fingers and chips, who then bites her tongue?
A.) laugh in her face;
B.) tell her she's disgusting for spitting fish fingers on your clean floor;
C.) wipe the part-masticated food off the floor and pretend that it's normal to bite your tongue whilst singing TOMORROWWWWWWW and act as though nothing happened, whilst more chewed up chip falls out of her crying mouth;
D.) tell her she'll be in the orphanage if she carries on singing that shit any more - we'll both be dead from ear-strain;
F.) hug her and get the food all over your shoulder and a free sample of green snot chucked in for good measure.

Am I a bad mother? (My answer was a combination of A,B,C,D&F...)

weekend update

2009-11-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Have you seen them yet? It's the coke ad (sorry if you hate coke and despise everything it stands for) but there is something super exciting about the theme tune the holidays are coming and there are little ding dang bells to remind you that it's referring to Christmas holidays and not easter or summer...
However not only are the holidays coming but so too is a strange invasion on my skin. The Invasion of Mothers Ruin by small and large blemishes. I woke up this morning to find a smear of blood at the end of my bed - oh, gross! I realised as I stepped out of the shower this morning that I have a mysterious mini-mountain range of spot-like-erruptions on my shin. So that's pretty grim. And then on my face? Well that's a whole 'nother range from another planet, which meant an outing for the Witch Hazel in a desperate mission to blast the new features back to hence they came... Its like a horror movie. They keep coming back for more... just when you thought you were safe... the nightmare continues... down to your last cotton wool ball and the last drop of killer-spot-acid...
I should just pretend I'm actually adolescent to keep my hopes up that one day I may grow out of it.
Biology really sucks.
Another thing that really sucks apart from sitting above the engine on the 141 which is so loud and vibratory that its like being inside a giant noisy thing that vibrates (I want to say dildo, but I have never ever in all my 24 years set my eyes on one, least not one that vibrates, so I can't really speculate on what it feels like to be inside one) is that Liz has got a really snotty nose and is on calpol and because her weeing became so prolific over the last 5 days I've been forced (how many times a night do I have to change the sheets when she's in a nappy?) to re-protect her bottom with Sainsburys pull ups size 5. Shame but there you go.
Another thing that really really sucks is that Jade couldn't dance last night. Even Liz was sad that there was no Jade or Ian. Where is Jade she asked? Her knee has popped says Mol. But where is she asks Liz. She's not dancing says Mol. But WHERE IS SHE? I'm like, go check her twitter if you really want to know?
Another thing that really sucks is the state of London roads. Have you done any driving recently? Diversions, road closures, traffic jams because there is like a small hole somewhere with some bollards around it, abandoned diggers and traffic lights out of order. The Giant Meltdown - Gridlock Hell - its coming. Its just around the corner. And when it hits, I'll be ready. (By that I mean I'll have stocked up my freezer so I won't have to go to Sainsbury's until the Gridlock Hell untangles, 5 years later...)
This is all a bit bitty.
I'm wondering how my friend managed to move her entire office of 80 people and their desks and computers and potted plants and water machines and photo copiers and mixed-sex-lavs' and mail boxes and desk top lamps and twizzle orthopedic chairs and bad wall art, whilst the main road she was moving to was closed by the Lord Mayors Show yesterday. In the rain (the WORST STORM TO HIT ENGLAND THIS YEAR!! SHOCKER!! BIG WAVES HIT THE SHORE!!). Meesh, I hope you showed the Lord Mayor who the real boss was yesterday and today.
Anyway. I think the main jist of the matter is that I had a good weekend despite traffic and ate lots and watched Strictly and saw both my brothers and ate some more and cracked open a new bottle of wine (on the red now that its officially winter) and its only 10pm which means I can go to bed and read some more of Zadie Smiths' "on beauty". It's got a really pretty jacket which is a good start.
Bon soir as they say on La Continent, innit.

things i like

2009-11-13T01:49:00.001-08:00

I like the smell of freshly boiling coffee on the hob.
I love a clean house. I even like cleaning my house. I like watching the hoover leave a clean track on the carpet (just like in the adverts! and whoosh its gone!). I don't like so much hoovering up bits in Mol or Liz's room - like a small finger puppet and the other day a whole glove (from a witches dressing up costume) went up the metal spout - shit - am wondering if I need to do an autopsy on the hoover bag? I think a necklace went up in this bag too.
I love walking past Yassa's bakery in the morning, the smell of vanilla and baking bread overwhelming the stench of the bus fumes and white van mans fags on Green Lanes.
I love running in the rain.
I haven't tried running in the snow.
I really really like Monday and Fridays when I have Liz to myself for a few hours.
I love kissing a little bit on Liz's nose - just at the top between her eyes. Its soft and peachy.
I love watching Mol making faces at herself in the mirror and dancing to Radio One songs with a bit of sausage on a fork waving around a bit out of control (and I have to sit on my hands to stop myself from getting anal and telling her to put the fork down).
I love driving over the M25 and knowing that I am officially now in the Countryside. Here are the green fields of Surrey, see? And lo! There is not so much traffic on this side of the M25!
I like a glass of wine when I read to Mol & Liz on the sofa at the end of the day.
I like a glass of wine when I have supper with Husband after the kids have gone to bed.
I like a glass of wine and a piece of chocolate when I watch East Enders (ooh, how psycho is Lucas going to get...? A reliable source assured me in person "its only going to get better"...).
I love Queen. Truly. I miss Freddie. I miss his teeth and trouser braces. To devote a whole song to Fat Bottomed Girls, you make the rocking world go round...? I mean. That's WAY brilliant.

And finally, I really really really love getting presents.

Good Winter TV

2009-11-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day.
Actually. Tonight was what I mean by a good day.
East Enders (Ronnie shags ex-evil-alcoholic-husband-of-Deneise; Peggy shacks up with double-crossing Archie and LIES no less to PAT who had extra thick blue eye shadow on tonight and Lucy is about to fancy J who mugged her but she doesn't know that and she's a cow coz she blackmailed her bi-sexual perma-tan-uncle-Christian).
Followed by a tastily baked salmon fillet. With home grown tomatoes.
Followed by the result of America's Next Top Model (cycle 11! wow. its been on that long?) - London (that's one of the models) got sacked because in the 7 weeks of the competition she's nearly doubled her weight. Uncanny viewing as her face arms legs bottom waist just get bigger and bigger.
Followed by, and now it's totally officially winter time, but that's Ok - because now we have SPOOKS. Even though the gorgeous yum yum actor Rupert was blown apart in the first episode of the last series making it nearly a boycottable offence, somehow the dark blue grading of the show, complete with about 8 different agents all double crossing each other on the brink of being horribly tortured or murdered - and a lot of whispered conversations which make no difference if you hear what they say or not - and Harry Pearce. Gawd love him. Spooks is just spooker-duper.
Preceded by Liz weeing in her bed at 4am this morning. This kind of night was most definitely called for.
Thank you bbc 1 and living. I love you equally.
And I love chocolate. And wine as well. Also I really hot baths but now its 10.10pm and that means its bed time not bath time. There are lots of other things I love but I'll talk about them another time.
Spooks. God. In't spooks bwilliant?

important things to think about

2009-11-01T13:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I worry about myself.
I have been sleeping badly recently. Big thoughts have been entering my head in the dead of night and jolting me awake, demanding their attention, solving the conundrum they have bought to mind, mulling things over, rolling them about my cerebral matter... But does it have to be in the middle of the night? Can't it be during work at the Garden Centre that I think about why it is that my house smells damp? Or couldn't it be when I'm walking down Poo Passage at 8.43am each morning of the week that I wonder whether I'll get a puncture on my next long drive down a motorway without Husband? Or maybe while I bake the girls their Sainsburys chunky chips (with skin, so they're healthy) about where I should go to buy my bi-annual sock haul. And just recently a crackingly important point for nocturnal self-analysis: why, after 16 months in the loft, do I still bang my head when I get a t-shirt out of my drawers? Am I really such an old dog that I forget? Its an alarming issue.
For some reason these challenging thoughts come to the fore at approximately 2-5am, just as my subconscious reminds me that Liz probably needs a wee (its week one of no-night-time-nappies) and I, in my light sleep, prepare my body for the removal of self from warm cosy bed and the malco-ordinated journey down to her room to take her to the loo (down another set of stairs) and back to her bed ("well done, another star on your chart tomorrow, back to sleep now...").
Its all too profound for my little head to take. I wonder sometimes if I am a genius constrained by her environment?
But frankly all this sleeplessness is wringing me out.
I wish I just wasn't quite so, you know, intense about the big issues in life?

olives: don't be deceived

2009-10-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

Firstly. Here I am. I'm back on. Although I think I may have sweated a lot of my mojo out whilst I was ill for I am suffering a way-big lack of writing enthusiasm.
Secondly. So I apologise if my work is dull.
Thirdly. Husband returned from his 9 day trip to Sardinia in his 4* hotel with no present for me and an American-sized-jumbo-pack of Kinder-chocolate, which I believe isn't Italian, even, for the girls. Humour fast dissolved. Not that a happy relationship should be based on presents. But giving is meant to give joy to the giver in an altruistic and halo-shining fashion. Husbands halo was fast knocked off its already rocky perch when I realised (as I put on the third load of dirty been-abroad-cloths-wash) he really wasn't joking about the lack of gift. My gifts to him were therefore retracted and my extra complicated and unfriendly pyjamas have been worn on a nightly basis since.
Fourthly. Do not be deceived by olives on an olive tree. Do not think to yourself, oh, this reminds me of my trip to Greece, or that time in the South of France when... or, remember when we were in Spain in that olive grove with all the lizards; popping them into your mouth like a minstrel... In England, if you see an olive tree with plump black shiny olives glinting at you - run a mile. Put you hands in your pockets and turn-heel. Do not listen to your practical-joker-work colleague and believe him when he says, oh, yes, I had one earlier, simply scrumptious. Go on, try! For you will be left feeling like I do, 9hours later: ill sick disgusted at my own idiocy.
How could I have ever thought that an olive on a young English Olive tree in the middle of a Hackney Garden Centre could be anything other than utterly repulsive?
I gagged in the same way I heard poor Mol gagging down the loo 3 weeks ago. But I wasn't in the privacy of my home, I was in front of my work "mate" on a street in the middle of N-bloody-1. Fucker! I vow to get him back. I VOW...
Although, my tale of near-vomiting is not nearly so tragic as that of a chum who was out at the gig of some sadly relaunched pop-legend (he was in a Boy Band of the 90's)... who got so over-excited by all the celeb-spotting that she drank her weight in Pina-Collada's at the gig, and then projectiled on the street outside the show. And she's a mother. I won't mention names and I won't tell your daughters about it at their 16/18/21st birthdays either.
Olive anyone?
(oh, so who is watching X-factor and Strictly? God, I LOVE Virgin right now - replay just rocks the house for being able to accommodate both...) (but, SHIT - who saw Whitney's dress pop? and who saw Robbies eyes spin? Freak-oh-rama.)

sunday pm

2009-10-18T13:58:00.001-07:00

Mothers Ruin, that what has been ruined for the last 2 weeks, is now on the mend. The forecast is as follows: head area small chance of aches and blinky eyes (as though coming out of a dark place into bright light); chest region suffering chesty cough residue from green snot which has dripped into lungs over past fortnight - flood risk: low; sweat concern: reduced from red-alert to amber.
Would benefit from trip to spa-like-environment for half a day, but likely to be put on hold until children are 18 and have left home.
Updates and observations on their way later on in the week. Hold on to your hairnets.

nothing this week

2009-10-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Mothers Ruin is not on this week.
This is due to full bodily meltdown which includes organs and mental coordination.
Hope to be back up and running next week.
Please try not to panic during this time of cerebral deprivation.
Permanent attachment to wine bottle is a good alternative to filling the void left in the absence.
Apologies.

vomit.

2009-10-08T01:57:00.001-07:00

6am on Tuesday.
"aaaaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhh" "uuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrggg" noises came up from Mols room. What? Is White Bear murdering Dog? Is a living operation being performed by Mol onto Liz?
Leaping out of bed like a cobra attacking prey Husband ran downstairs to see what the commotion was all about.
Mol lying in bed. Groaning. "I have a sore tummy." Oh for goodness sake Girl! Is that all? Be quiet! Go sit on the loo or go back to sleep it's still night time was the sympathetic response from less spring-like Husband who clomped back upstairs adrenaline all pumped out and need for sleep returning fast.
"aaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhh" thump thump stumble stumble thump thump, whack (that's the loo seat) choke cough gasp splutter choke some more moan moan uggggg spit spit choke pant cough wretch-noise drippy-gooey-drippy noises... The sound of poor neglected "go back to sleep" Mol vomming what was left in her stomach from last nights sausage beans & chip dinner (yeah yeah ok we're not that healthy I accept...).
We both "leap" (me more like crank myself out - feeling very full of cold and having had a night in a pool of sweat) out of bed and "run" downstairs to the location of the noises... Mol! No! A very pale drooping confused upset little Mol was standing forlornly by the loo which was now full of stringy yellow biley liquidy-yukkyness... Some of the stringy yellow biley liquidy-yukkiness was also dangling out of Mols mouth onto her PJ's and over the loo seat and stringing its way to the floor.
Oh lazy parents! Feeling guilty we wrapped the empty child up in a towel and wiped up the stinky stringy mess and popped her back in bed.
Fifteen minutes later more moans more thumping and whacking and ugging and wretching and heaving and moaning and stringy yukkiness down the loo. More towel wrapping and water and suggestions to brush teeth. Meanwhile Husband & I "calmly & maturely discuss" who's work is more doable from home. Clearly Husband's is because he works off a laptop and phone and my work on a Tuesday is based in a school with the children who go to that school ("um, hi, would you mind bringing your 11year old down to Harringay? so sorry, my daughter is ill with the voms so I can't get into school but you're welcome to come to me!"). But Husband has important meetings and a complicated schedule to organise for a shoot he's on next week (Sardinia! 4* hotel! - is it really a shoot or is he off with that fancy bird from Bognor..?). After a bit of stroppy foot stamping Husband gathers his wits, wizzes into town and collects his work and wizzes back. What a champ.
As I leave the house at 10.45am, Mol has been sick on her feet, on the bathroom floor, in the downstairs loo, on the downstairs loo floor, all over her pj's, in her hair (woops, must wash it). I have just put on the 3rd round of washing. The house has that smell of disinfectant. Mol has a very sore tummy.
Just as I'm getting to the school my mob rings. "Do we have any more disinfectant? Mol has been sick in her bed..."

The First Cold.

2009-10-05T03:02:00.001-07:00

I think Autumn has struck me with her crinkly-leafed-finger. I woke this morning at 2am to the sound of Liz in full wail ("where's my duvet?") and as I stumbled blindly down the stairs to rescue her duvet I realised I was completely drenched in sweat. It was dripping off my nose and my non-existent cleavage resembled bonsai-sized rapids. And as I stumbled back upstairs my t-shirt got cold and my scalp tingled with chill and I fell back into my sweaty pit and then woke this morning with shivery limbs and a clonky throat.
And a few hours on, after a therapeutic trip to Sainsburys and Homebase, one coffee and a handful of grapes later, my limbs still feel shivery and my head has that under-water-what's real and what's not sort of fogginess.
Does the saying 'starve a fever, feed a cold' ring true? Thing is, I'm not all that hungry.
I wonder if I should wash my sheets? Or will I wake up in another pool of fast flowing sweat tonight? If that's the case I don't see any point in the laborious task.
I have taken my echinacea and my vitamin pills. I will take some more. I've got to get Liz to her gym class this afternoon. Drive or Walk? Its raining and I feel weak...
I shall see how I feel after lunch with Liz whether I stamp some more of my carbon footprint on the well stamped route to the YMCA where gym takes place.
To snottily be continued over the course of the week.

autumn

2009-10-02T05:45:00.000-07:00

You know its autumn when all around you people are sneezing, coughing, looking a bit pale suddenly, looking a bit over or under dressed, snot rags dangling about with careless abandon and all the children get flu.
Oh, and also the leaves turn brown and fall off the trees hiding all the dog shit.
"Look mummy, can I go play in the leaves?" shrieks of delight followed by groans of repulsion from mummy who then has to pick out the horrendous turds from the ridges in Start Right shoes. Have you done that?
I got home once from a very splendid walk in the park and un-beknownst to me I had dog(I hope)faeces all over my trainer. I joyously walked through the house. Up and down stair carpets. Across floor boards. Onto white laminate bathroom tiles. And it was just before having to go and collect Mol from school. I had about 5minutes to get a drink and leave the house. And then I got whiff of something that didn't belong in the house. Yet here it was. In the house. Stomach does small lurch of of-for-fucking-shit's-sake. Check the shoe. Offending brown turd smeared all over sole. Kick off shoe. Then look at clock. Then realise I have less than 3 minutes to clean crap off 3/4's of my floors before Mol is left standing at the school gates forlornly assuming she's been abandoned forever and ever.
I was like a cartoon character with those go-faster-wind-whoosh-movements spurting out from the feet: I raced around the house swearing very loudly a lot (fucking dogs fucking disgusting smell fucking irresponsible selfish dog owners should be shot etc.) with a marigold on one hand, a large wiry sponge and a bucket of not nearly hot enough water and an evil "lemon fresh" cleaning agent in the gloveless hand.
The house smelt of lemon for weeks. The poo I think was obliterated. My obsession with dogs in London (or not being in London, at all) increased 10-fold.
Which reminds me of another more recent poor story. My neice (who is nearly same age as Liz) was romping through Finsbury Park. And for some reason the family was in a bit of a hurry, so my brother kindly picked up his sweet rosy cheeked daughter and gave her a lift (laughing all the way) to the car. When he got to the car he had that 'something smells dodgy here' moment. Sniffing deeply he realised the smell was very close to home. Worryingly close to home. It turned out that Nieces shoe was covered in the shit. Her shoe was no longer pink leather. It was brown sludge. And my brother was now smeared from head to foot (literally, it was on his shoulder, it was on his stomach, it was on his arms, thighs and ankles) in shit too. It was a classic moment as my brother who is usually a pool of calm started on a voyage of simultaneous cussing and stripping down to his birthday suit (kept pants on) whilst applying copious amounts of baby-wipes to his daughter himself his clothing her shoes... They had an hour to drive down to Putney. I know they made it down but - gawd - an hour in a car with a load of stuff stinking of dog-shit?
Beware the autumn leaves...

lipstick & nail varnish

2009-09-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

I don't really like seeing small girls in make up. It is all a bit yukky and sickly and makes me think of those adverts on Ch5 in the morning with small girls wearing make up as they rock their pink baby to sleep (the one that cries and wets itself) and they slightly also make you want to vomit. Its not really their fault but it does still induce nausea.
Anyway.
So here's a story about make up and small girls wearing make up.
We had The South London Cousins for lunch today. Liz has a nearly-twin-in-age-cousin and together they make mischief and play in a cheeky funny way. I have visions of them aged 16 in Leicester Square pissed out their brains tripping over their high heels and wondering how to get home without Cross Parents noticing they stink of cider.
So. Today, as we were enjoying Global Warming with a bbq and eating out in the garden, soaking up some hot sun, we noticed that there was a bit of a kid-free-silence. Hm. I wonder where the small people are, I thought.
But it was a not very important thought as we sat chewing our way through sausages and sea bream and end of season over-chewy-under-sweet-sweet-corn. We were lost in chat about horror films and what some old and wrinkled rock-star had chosen for his Desert Island Disk. Really important issues.
And then I thought. Hm, its still kind of quiet. So I sent Husband on a reckee to see what was going on.
About 3 minutes later he came down with Liz & her cousin. At first glance all looked fine. And then at closer inspection we realised that Liz was covered, from her forehead down to her toes in shiny pink lipstick, all greased up like a pig on a spit. And Cousin had an open pot of nail varnish, plus, lipstick all over her face, and some over-gloopy lip-gloss dripping like honey off her little cherry lips. (Both offending articles were old cast-offs of mine which I'd donated to Mol a few months ago. In fact she never uses them. So, I hold my hands up. I'm actually kind of responsible for this sick charade...)
And they came up to us very pleased and chipper: don't we look good?
Ughh!
No!
Gross!
And so in true mother style we spat on bits of kitchen roll and wiped the gloop and grease off the soft peachy skin and told them we didn't want our little cherubs turning into chav tarts at the age of 3. That learned them that did.

hot hot hot!

2009-09-25T13:52:00.001-07:00

Sunbathing? At the end of September?
Shall I start a rant about global warming and the end is nigh?

Nah! Fuck it! I so loved sitting in a slump in the garden with hot rays bathing my bod.
Bring it on!
(And my last 10 tomatoes now have a chance of getting ripe.)

Burning Bottom

2009-09-22T13:38:00.001-07:00

Ouch. I just had a bath with really amazing bath salts (Burts Bee's) given to me for my birthday but I don't think the salts dissolved 100% so as I lay there in the close-to-boiling-bath-water (how I like it) reading my book (such a good book even though I've forgotten what its called) I realised that my arse was actually burning. Not like smoking burning (that would be hard in a bath) but sort of stinging burning and I realised that I was lying on undissolved megga-strong-Burts Bee's Bath Salts which were now dissolving my bottom skin rather than dissolving directly into my close-to-boiling-bath-water.
The idea behind the bath was a cleanse-the-body-from-the-weekend-of-excess - but not to purge myself by consciously skinning parts of my body. Anyhow, I'm not sure that burning my arse on Burts Bee's Bath Salts would absolve me of my booze sins and disgraceful dancing on Saturday night at The Wedding.
So. A short lived Bath. One chapter claimed of my book (was aiming for 2 or 3...).
Talking of absolving me of my booze sins from the weekend reminds me of the weekend and what an extra-lovely (booze fueled) weekend it was.
Looking back on my previous blog entry I'm wondering how I faired when it came to my wedding prep-hit-list?
I certainly ate at least half a loaf of white bread on Sunday morning to soak up the champagne & wine & beer & fags (and the same at lunch and then a large pizza for dinner).
I certainly danced exceptionally brilliantly, no, wait, check that - cast my mind back 48 hours, oh, no, not brilliantly! BADLY! to Dancing Queen AND Don't Stop Me Now (Queen, ah, gawd-bless-you-Freddie... I'll never forget hearing about your Death. I was in a woodwork lesson at school and Radio One (Steve Right?) was on. And then me and Mirry ran to our study and wrote to Radio One declaring our undying love for the now dead Freddie).
Amazingly given the height of my not-real-gold-shoes I didn't fall over at all and the loo's were in a field too which was difficult terrain to master. But I saw two women fall off their chairs in between speeches (high heels sticking up in the air, pants and tights a-kimbo, all dignity and sobriety out the marquee window...) and then I captured on camera another woman climbing out of a bush having fallen into it on her way back from the porta-loo.
Our gorgeous friend The Bride really was the star of the show. A luminescent Audrey-Hepburn-esque presence. Floating around in a gown fit for film-stars with the broadest smile of happiness. Glowing&Gorgeous. Drop-dead. And now I believe her and her new husband are off in Italia soaking up the remaining September sun and drinking in the Chianti and sucking on olives. I am more than mildly jealous.
But it is true that only the best couples go to Italy for their honeymoons.
As far as I know that really is the truth about honeymoons and couples. Scientifically proven. By me.
So as I sit here with a tingly bottom, purging myself of the last few units of incredibly delicious champagne, I'm thinking, yes, weddings really are splendid and I'm wondering, who's next? and How long do I have to wait till I can don another pair of silly high heels and wobble my way through a night of excellent frolics with all my most-excellent friends?
(Someone mentioned they may get divorced just so that they can get married again... well, if all else fails...)
In the meantime I have snapfish for memories, flashbacks of dancefloor anthems and the image of a lady climbing out of a bush trying to retain her dignity whilst actually nearly peeing herself (again) laughing.
I love weddings.

In preparation of a wedding.

2009-09-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

In preparation of a wedding there are certain things a girl with any amount of vanity (that's any amount, even if its pin-head-size. Some girls loudly ascertain that they are definitely not vain. Well. That's just a load of cow-pat if you ask me. Every girl has a certain level of vanity. Its ingrained. Society grains it into small girls from the age of 1 day, when they gaze at the baby and say, ah, isn't she just gorgeous? And from that day on the baby feels pressure to be gorgeous and will permanently mirror check, wrinkle-check, smelly-nappy-check, cute-smile-check, and first-curl-check. etc.) must do.
First.
Kill a chicken (best by hand). At mid-day the day prior to the wedding make a jelly from the jiblets. Apply chicken jelly liberally to entire body and soak in a bath of chilly oil for one hour whilst reading Grazia.
After one hour skin should appear smooth, silky, young, and your persona will take on the pezazz from the chilly, creating a hot-chick on the dance floor. Literally. This is the truth. I have just come from my chilly bath.
What the?

Here's the REAL wedding prep-hit-list:
1.) Go to Boots. Find the sharpest razor in the Mens Toiletry section. Find most wrinkle-smoothing skin toning moisturiser. Bring home. Soak in bath (read approx 1 chapter of good book). Apply mans razor gently but firmly (huh?) to forestry areas (applications for deforestation need to be received by council at least 1month prior to destruction date). Pat skin dry with old grey towel. Liberally apply cream to deforested areas. Run for loo roll to catch drips of blood where deforestation has led to ruptures.
2.) Cut nails of toes (new shoes hurt with long nails) and fingers. Find emery board. File nails. Rummage for 1/2 hour in over-stuffed bathroom cabinet for ancient used-once-a-year-for-weddings-nail-polish. Apply to finger nails. Avoid finger tips knuckles palms of hands wrists clothing floor or white walls. (House and body can resemble scene of murder otherwise.)
3.) Remind Husband once a day for a week or two that he needs to check his suit is clean. Get rebuffed once a day for being repetitive nag.
4.) Get very excited.
5.) Imagine self on dance floor very drunk singing to DANCING QUEEN with old friends.
6.) Imagine self not drinking so much that one is sick in bed at 3am.
7.) Imagine self next morning eating half a loaf of bread and pretending to be sober and looking forward to going to bed that night.
8.) Finally. Go to bed the night before the wedding trying not to worry about forgetting part of extremely glamorous and over-planned outfit.
9.) Final finally. Remind self that the wedding is not about me but about the beautiful blushing bride throwing herself into the arms of her best beloved.
10.) Really. Last finally. Aren't weddings just the best?
Who's next...?

gimmegimmegimme

2009-09-16T02:58:00.000-07:00

Maybe I have writers block or maybe my brain has finally gone on permanent vacation (if I was it I'd be heading somewhere like Mexico, the beans are so good down there and so is the tequilla even the bottles with uggy sort of grub things in them)? But I feel like there is so much going on right now that I can't actually process it and make sense of it.
There doesn't seem to be a good starting point.
I could start from where I left off (Cricket, damp jock straps, tall-men) which would mean that I'd be starting the process of processing from Monday (school) but I think I'd miss other crucial bits of information and then I'd be misrepresenting of my overly fascinating life.
I'll try starting from Sunday night. Me and Mol went to Hyde Park to see an Abba Tribute. (This IS a good starting point, now I come to think of it.) I've never been to a Hyde Park concert - I've been in London for 12 years now. Mol is 6.5years and I suspect this marks the beginning of an expensive ('but its cultural mum, to go watch Girls Love Pink in Hyde Park and where is my mini-skirt', 'there is NO WAY you're going out in that belt Mol' etc) habit.
It was a bit cold and a bit blowy but I had a bottle of rose hidden in my un-suitably un-spangly bag and Mol had a packet of Chewitts - so we were well equipped for a night of hard partying and singing our lungs out.
And there were 30,000 people there! How bonkers is that?! I've been to a football match where there are lots of utterly vomit-inducing men and I've been to a concert in Wembley (Stone Roses! how old am I?) with lots of stoned students, but this outdoor concert malarky is a whole different kettle of chips. Just loads and loads and loads of people! My very intelligent friend (whose brain is never on vacation, but that's probably because she uses it) suggested we wrote our phone numbers on to our childrens arms so that if they got lost they could ask a nice stranger (in flares and wig) to call us and reunite us. So I did. I think that slightly freaked Mol out. The thought of getting lost in a crowd so big all she could see were peoples bums and bad shoes. So once I'd tattooed my number to her arm, she then climbed on board and I had her on my shoulders for pretty much the entire concert. No chance of losing her then.
I chugged my rose.
Mol chewed her chewitts.
We sang very loudly.
We shimmied.
We shammied.
We admired Kylie and her outfits.
We laughed at Chris Evans' rotating ginger wig.
We crowd watched.
We ooed and ah-ed at the end-of-concert fireworks.
And then Friend-with-brain brilliantly gave us a lift back home and Mol fell into bed in an Abba-induced coma.
I can't believe there are people out there who don't like Abba? Who are you criminals? Its just unthinkable that you couldn't not want to dance when Dancing Queen strikes up... (ooh, that reminds me... I've got a wedding this weekend... I hope hope hope we have a bit of Abba... that'll totally ruin my new golden stilletoes! watch this space, I'll probably be checking in next week with a broken ankle...)
Today I have a sore throat. Singing for 2.5hours at full blast clearly not the best thing for throats.
Thank you for the music.
Honey honey honey.
I love you. Shmorgersboard.

cricket tea

2009-09-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

Husband got back from Sardinia with bags under his eyes and nothing in his bags for me or the girls. Disappointed from N8. Where are our Italian souvenirs? Not even a curl of penne or a moldy olive from the crust of a pizza. Dreadful.
And today was Husband's cricket match against the Greenwich Giants. That makes them sound like an exotic team of Americans. But what I mean is that they're actual biological giants. The average height of the opposing team is probably about 6ft-4inches. The average height of the Ladder Eleven is what, maybe 5ft-2inches? The air is more polluted up in N8. We're all a bit stunted. So anyway. I gather from upset-Husband in SE10 that the Giants squashed the Eleven (David and Gollaeth is a fable afterall) and have probably since put them on the bbq and actually eaten them half-cooked, cricket bats as skewers and the balls, well, enough said.
I realised as I drove down to SE10 that I was the only cricket wife attending from Husbands' team, except for my gorgeous sister in law (who forgot her cake...) and I realised why as the teams got on with their standing around on the pitch for 5hours. The cricket tea and the kiddy-care. Its all left up to the wife (and her loyal wife-helpers). I mean. I like my kids and I like tea. But somehow on the side of a cricket pitch it just doesn't have the same delightful ring to it.
So I had this ridiculous conversation with one of the team-players of Husbands team whilst Husband was on the pitch having Giants chuck fast balls at his balls (not sure I noticed his jock-strap going on - hm, potential for real pain I thought, and when I was sorting out the tea, I found a jock-strap, kind of scrumpled up and a bit sweaty looking right by the sandwich box. A bit un-savoury thought I, and then I thought, (cue evil laughter) I could just pop it ON the sandwiches and the boys would never know... A bit like the waiter spitting in the pea soup...).
Anyway, conversation went along the lines of:
me: so, how long till I need to get the sandwiches out and prepare the tea?
him: oh, about 26 overs.
me: right. so how long till I need to get the sandwiches out and prepare the tea?
him: oh, yes. well, probably in about 182 balls.
me: look you stupid fuck, I don't work in overs or balls. just tell me how many minutes?
him: (looking at me with fear) I don't know.
So I got the tea stuff out and cut the sandwiches thinking, wish I'd rubbed the jock strap on these and I hope they go stale and curl. That'd show them! I mean, god...tell the time in sodding OVERS what is THAT about?
So. That was cricket tea.
It's really good fun. Michelle, you'd have loved it. Honest to god.
XX

spiders

2009-09-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

You'll be delighted to hear that Mothersruin is back up and firing on most cylinders once again. After Saturdays shenanigans I was beginning to doubt I'd ever squeeze the last drop of Lauren Perier out of my soggy muscles, but as it turns out biology (in't biology bwilliant!) won over and I am pure once again.
Which means that in the absence of Husband (got to pop off to Sardinia luvvy, back on Wednesday... oh. work or pleasure?) I have achieved achieved achieved. My house is a haven of beauty and smells like freshly baked cakes (not much change there then) and my garden could have been lifted from Hampton Court so well pruned and tweaked is it. I wouldn't be surprised if a scout from Elle Deco dropped by to congratulate me on my success.
But has anyone noticed that the spiders are back? Or is it just my house and its strange Haringey location - plonked between two bachelors' houses on top of a steep hill, a magpie nest in a nearby tree and cats everywhere - it sounds like the makings of a witches den... Often there is a strange old man who sits on my roof, in a moss-green-cloak, I can't see his face, but he holds a crow and cythe... I don't know, all very suspicious.
Anyway, back to the real world. So, I have spiders in every nook and cranny of the house.
First thing in the morning - I get into the shower. The shower door is currently housing a spider and web. Not an obvious place for passing flies and grubs, perhaps Winkworths has been applauding itself on another fantastic rip-off sale in the neighbourhood...
In the kitchen above the kettle if I follow the path of the steam as it boils (takes forever our kettle, I could read War & Peace AND watch Broke Back Mountain and it'd still be on the warming up stage) there is a spider just to the side of the spot the steam hits. Again, not an obvious location. What's it doing there? Is it waiting for me to be hungover again and then fall happily onto my nose? Bastardo.
Outside the front door there is a whoppa who each night weaves a complicated and probably quite beautiful web which I put my head through every morning (well, for the last two mornings when I've been first up & out of the house, Mol appears to be below web-level so doesn't get that clingy stringy thurpy ug ug stuff in her face). Gross.
And then just today, as I was doing my wonderful tweeing-up of the garden it was a constant stream of hurl-inducing-webs - on my legs/arms/head/hair, even my eye-lashes (so long and lustrous are they). As I climbed the ladder to chop a very spiky bit of neighbours hawthorn (SUCH an antisocial bloody thorny bush to plant) I saw a seriously ugly spider, well, more ugly than the rest, in that it was greeny-transparenty-long-leggedy-grosso-ey make-me-slightly-screech/wretch at the same-time-y. Of course I wasn't physically vomiting and I didn't kill it but my natural reaction was to kind of flick it with a very globby paint brush.
And then the man in the cloak on my roof waved his cythe at me and his crow delivered a message in its croaky voice: do not interfere with even the ugliest of spiders, great strife will fall upon your shoulders. I'm like shit. But yeah, like, its well ugly and its on my ladder and for god-sake I'm imagining that Death is sitting on my roof so I really suspect great strife has befallen me deja, ya?
And now, after freaking myself out with my strange ramblings, I am actually quite looking forward to Husband returning tomorrow.

very tiny hangover

2009-09-06T03:21:00.001-07:00

I have a very tiny hangover.
But that's what is to be expected when Mothers Ruin finds herself kidnapped by wreckless no good wino's and drinking Lauren Perier champagne at 1am in Claridges.
There I am walking along Bond Street (doesn't happen often) in my M&S platforms when WOOSH this bunch of well quoiffed ladies grab me by the (not so brown any more) arms and threaten my life if I don't obey their orders. You must drink lots of wine and then when your body is full, go on and drink some more. And then really push the boat out, break your 12am curfew and chuck back more booze, this time fizzy, even if it spills out of the side of your mouth, YOU MUST DRINK.
So my body does feel a bit hungover this morning. But all in the good name of fun.
Actually this shouldn't be about me but the friend who's not-hen-party/birthday we were out celebrating. But because its my blog I can actually shift the focus of attention to me because, well, I can.
Actually I think I'm still a bit drunk so I should probably stop writing. I think I'll go cut some grass in my garden. Fresh air is a good hangover cure I believe.
Hope you girls are all feeling as happy and rough as I do this morning!

asbestos hair

2009-09-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

My hair dryer what I was given when I was 9 years old and on my way to Boarding School (yes at 9 years old. I've seen 9 year olds. They're small. Why was I sent away at 9 years old? Was I really that bad? Has it scarred me for life? Am I bitter and twisted and permanently damaged? Did I ever call my matron Mum and my ginger-bearded-science teacher Dad? Why do I dream so much of school as a wrinkled adult?) is dying.
Last night was the fortnightly "Mol, we have to wash your hair. You have creatures living in there and they're not from this world" hair washing session. Actually, the older she has become the better the session is. There is less AAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOO thrashing and more, oh, yeah, I like this Pantene stuff, wow, my hair is like WAY smooth. But I still have to dry it because she has long hair and I was told by my Mum, no, I mean my Matron Tamsin, that to go to bed with wet hair was like a walk down pneumonia alley and kissing death hello. So. We do the hair wash. ("Mum feel my hair its like silk" - maybe I should film and send to Pantene and see if she can be their next shampoo-model.) And then I get my creaky hair dryer out. The box has long since disintegrated. I admit, over the last few years I've been hearing strange noises come from my old Braun friend. Ignoring them because I don't want anything to be wrong. But last night the noises were no longer ignorable, the rattle was the sound of parts which no longer wanted to be together. It was as though in the quiet days in between use they had been having a big discussion about breaking up.
You know, I don't like these shiny red walls any more. And hey, I feel old and tired. I need a change. And you're not the macho fan you once were. Well, you can talk. You just blow hot air down a tube. Badly.
And then when I slide the switch to ON, there is this almighty rumpus, and then I notice as the hot air blows weakly down the tube that bits of 'stuff' are being spat out onto Mols hair. It looks like asbestos. But surely I can't have been 9 SO long ago that hair dryers were made of asbestos? And then there is this dilemma. Do I carry on drying Mols hair and let bits of asbestos spit out all over her precious head, or do I quit the drying and let her go to bed with wet hair and therefore invite pneumonia into her room on a red carpet? Being sort of mostly English and a bit incapable of making firm decisions (sometimes) I went for the middle of the road: dried the top of the hair (which now has bits of asbestos nesting at the roots) and left the long bits wet. Which basically was probably the worse option, but as I type she's has a whole day of being OK no weird asbestos side effects and no pale pneumonic looking chest. I guess I ought to investigate a new machine. Sad though. The old model being replaced by the new. There are many fun dorm memories attached with that old red hair dryer. Singing to Eye of the Tiger or Take my breath away (mainly down deodorant cans but occasionally if there was a shortage out came the hair dryer). Maybe I could do some modern art with it, turn it into a kind of shrine, attach it to the wall in a frame - could be a new movement - and I'd be the founder of it, me and my Braun. I can't be so flippant and just chuck it. I think not.

Oh my god! Lucas! East Enders! Ex-wife dead on a rake! Who'd Adam n Eve it? We watched her bleeding to death! Before 8pm! SO. GOOD.

On a final note I'd just like to congratulate the new mums in my life. Congratulations New Mums in my life. You're amazing! New babies! Sore bits! Long nights! No sleep! Loads of washing! I am a girl - no, sorry, not true, I am a woman (with wrinkles) - with a few words of advice: eat cake (by that I mean good home made cake); not too many visitors; get into East Enders as soon as possible and be nice to your man once a day if you can, otherwise he'll stop bringing you tea. Mind you its highly unlikely that any new mum will be reading this so I really shouldn't bother.

tick tock...

2009-09-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

...is the sound of my biological clock but more importantly the sound of the end of the holidays fast approaching. I'm not so concerned right now about my biological clock, except perhaps that as it ticks the wrinkles find themselves more permanently attached to the corners of my eyes. No. I'm more worried about the fact that now bank holiday has been and gone I have this sort of pit in my stomach that reminds me increasingly regularly that Monday marks a new term, a new academic year, a new career opportunity for me, my kids growing taller and gaining Norf Larndan Aa-tit-tood, innit?, the onset of wrinkles, sorry I mean Winter (have you noticed the colder air...?), another 15 weeks chasing our tails and living for Friday nights and getting blue (hopefully not because we're hypathermic) on Sunday afternoons.
Having spoken to a few Mum-friends I have been having conversations along the lines of "thank goodness its nearly over" and "god I can't wait for them to get back to school" and "I think they're bored of being at home" and "I'm going nuts" and "I'm sick of spending all day clearing up after them" and "I think teachers should be paid more money" and "teachers must be insane" and you get the message. I can see their point. The house is no longer the ordered peaceful haven it was 6 weeks ago. The dirt is prolific. The mess is giant sized. But for all the endless clearing up after them and the repetitive conversations "what are we doing today? who with? where? are we going now? can I watch TV? Actually, can I watch a DVD instead? I don't like peas. I don't need the loo. I have brushed my teeth. I haven't brushed my hair. I forgot to wash my face. Do we have to go to Sainsbury's again? Where are my shoes? Can A/B/C come and play? Can we go to the soft play centre? I still don't like peas..." I have had a splendiferous time this holidays with Liz & Mol.
After 2years of the girls apparently completely hating each other - fighting and shouting and hitting and pushing each other down the stairs and under passing taxis, or where Liz simply was too baby-blob like to play - this holidays has finally seen them come-together as relatively good play-partners. OK they still occasionally hit/push/shout but they have developed one or two games which keep them going for hours: teachers (Mol patronizes Liz for 2hours); Nursery (Mol patronizes Liz for another two hours); doctors (Liz sticks cellotape on Mol's arms and legs and inserts a plastic spoon in her ears/nose/throat); princesses (complicated network of silk scarves draped over the bunk-bed which turns into a sort of innocent - I think - harem where they then pose and drape themselves in elegant princess like fashion whilst listening to Classic FM). Which is really nice. And then I get to prune the over grown plants in my tiny patch of shit-filled-garden and make fairy cakes for my little doctors/princesses/teacher-girls.
Harmony.
So I am in fact not looking forward to them going back to their institutions where the under-paid teachers in their over-filled class-rooms try to teach them numbers and letters. I am going to miss the chaos. I am going to miss their daft questions about totally random unrelated things. And I am going to miss not having to worry about what time it is in the morning... tick tock brrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. UG!

Bank holidays

2009-08-28T10:32:00.001-07:00

bank holidays. the end of the summer. the last bbq. the last weekend before the kids go back to school in their new Clarks shoes and their new Sainsburys outfits and their new pencil case tucked into their bags ready to get lost within a few hours of putting them down in the classroom.
the last of the hot sun.
the first of the major downpours that last until the following May.
getting stuck in a mass-exodus-from-London-traffic jam.
having an argument about whether to get off the M road.
forgetting to pack any waterproof jackets. therefore getting caught in rain.
should I start planting my autumn bulbs?
I can't believe Gal sailed off with Dawn into the sunset last night on Enders.
hmm. that smell of autumn bonfires.
picking blackberries.
squashed apples on the floor and too many wasps.
dusting off the alarm clock and thinking about the new routine which will be starting in just over one week.
the last glass of white wine before moving onto red which always warms the fingers a bit better than icy chardonnay, as the nights close in and the air gets crisper.
and watch out! don't be tempted to step on that pile of leaves! there WILL be dog shit in it.
oooh. jumpers.

Climbing back on

2009-08-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

Have had another day of being On The Wagon (why is it a wagon? where is it going? is it pulled by a tired mare with blinkers and hair loss or by a strapping stallion with rippling muscles and the wind in its mane?). That is because Husband is out tonight which means I don't open wine and I get to watch my first episode of East Enders in WEEKS. Months in fact. Its sinful. Shocking. Dis-respectful of me to have missed so much of the Square. But life on a summer holiday is very hard to plan around Fill & Dawns affair and who the father of Evvas' sprog is - 7.30pm is not a convenient time to drop everything and rush to the old TV (its deeper than it is wide. I think if this TV was screwed into a wall like a trendy modern flatscreen I'd have Tony from Next Door screaming in fear as the whole wall collapsed in on us... its a big TV). But tonight I caught a whole whopping 20minutes of it and it ended with Gal punching Fill in the middle of the square and Dawn looking hopelessly on with too much makeup and a seriously trashy wedding dress. Will they get married? Will I be able to watch the episode on Thursday? I'm not sure as we have friends for dinner and I just may have to cook something for them rather than check the make-up continuity of Dawns lips.
But onto healthier things than Enders. My throat hurts and I've told my Brother that he's to REFUSE my pathetic requests for his cigs. I am now going to cut the cord between me and smoking. I'm too old and too unhealthy and you know what? Smoking KILLS. Like knives. Guns. Earthquakes. Illegal dogs. Bad council paving. Airplanes. They all kill. So I've decided to give up smoking because at least I can. I may not be able to give up illegal dogs (our neighbourhood is over run with the creatures, drooling like a rugby player with oversized gumshields and shitting all over our streets for our small children to carelessly run through and then spread all over the inside of their cars or houses - Mummy whats the smell that's making me gag?) and I may well trip over a big crack in the Harringay pavement caused by an undetected earthquake (you don't know what goes on when you're asleep) but I can at least force my brother to stop feeding me cigarettes. Actually I may well give up airplanes too. They're a dreadful invention. Partly because they scare me a lot (even more than my old riding teacher) and also because they do sometimes fall out of the sky and also because they do waste a lot of energy and also because they have horrid loos which when you flush them you think 'am I going to get sucked out of the plane now?' and also air stewards are generally orange and that's quite scary. You also have to go to airports when you get an airplane and they are full of orange people wearing bad clothes to go on holiday in, and there are queues and over priced newspaper shops and too many people in uniform who are mainly out to get you and then the plane gets delayed and all the orange people go to the Ye Olde English Pub and drink beer at 9am and that's quite scary too. So yes. Smoking AND planes (Monsieur Coff I know you'll pick up on this at some point and when I book my next flights to the Costa on the most orange planes of all I'll have to pretend that it was Husband and that he didn't know my latest vow of abstinence...).
So my list for today: no booze, no fags & no planes. I scrub my halo.

totally failed

2009-08-24T14:22:00.001-07:00

well. that was a short detox. and I didn't even buy a lemon.

curdled liver foggy head

2009-08-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

I was reading the contents page of a Sunday paper magazine today - and my heart gave a little hopeful leap as one of the articles was titled Mothers Ruin! Fame at last! I've been reviewed in a Sunday paper! Strange that the journo hasn't contacted me to ask me any pertinent questions about how my writing is inspired and am I a permanent pessimist in real life and how many of my fascinating accounts are truth or fabrication...? But then I read the little side-line attached to the title and realised that the article was nothing to do with ME but something to do with... Oh, crumbs, I've forgotten what the article was about and I've forgotten which paper it was (my sister in law gets the Mail on Sunday which we all sniff our noses at but then find ourselves reading and making oohs and ahs at the EXCLUSIVE headlines about Anne Robinsons latest £12,000 facelift and Husband buys The Observer and we all read it very quietly pretending to absorb important facts about Global Warming and how to mulch a city garden).
Why have I forgotten the name of the paper and what the article was about? I only saw it, what? 5hours ago? I hope the reason I have forgotten is because the article was in fact in The Mail on Sunday and was so mundane that the words didn't even reach the perifory of my brain. What I worry is that the reason I have forgotten is because my body is currently a sponge soaked in cheap white wine and smelling slightly of the raw onion I crunched into by mistake at last nights post-cricket-Hog-Roast-party.
My body has been through the mill of late. A mill created entirely by my weak will, my lilly-livered-behaviour which is fueling my poor liver to actually ripple as I douse it in yet another shower of acidic wine, or possibly an (these are so good: elder-flower-gin&tonic) extra strong gin made by my cocktail-crackers-Dad. But these are the holidays, right? No need to get up in the morning (apart from Thursdays to skip into work where I type letters for Mrs B who tells me in falsetto whispers all about the various members of staff and their vices), what harm will one more glass of cheap white wine do? So down it goes. Maybe accompanied by a cigarette (I don't really smoke, honest... just annoyingly nick of others...) rolled by my brother or maybe a lump of chocolate or a slice of cheese. It's always so good at the time. But come the morning I wake feeling groggy. And recently my stomach has had some gruesome aches which can't be down to stress because this being the summer holidays there is nothing to stress about except whether the wine is not cool enough or the tomatoes need watering. After a long hot day in the park with two kiddies splashing around in a filthy lido there is nothing better than a large icy glass of wine, no? I can't believe you would disagree ('you' being my one reader, although he'd probably opt for a glass of cold beer). So it feels excusable. But I wonder how much my body is reacting to constantly having to process another 2-4 glasses of wine each day?
I have seen that programme "Make my body younger" where some young party animal who drinks and smokes and parties all night gets a "living autopsy" and the doctor says with very dramatic music moaning in the background, "if you carry on with this lifestyle you'll be dead before the end of this programme" and then they stop drinking and smoking and go to the gym and before the end of the programme they have another "living autopsy" and the doctor declares "well done you have reduced your risk of death before the end of this programme by 100%". But my point is this: if I had a living autopsy would the doctor say the same thing when he looked into my liver? Would it be curdled? And would he look down my earholes and see a very foggy brain that only had two fully functioning nerves remaining? How much does a gal have to drink, regularly, before her body has a physical reaction in the Sainsbury's Cheap Wine aisle?
Afterall I am no whipper snapper any more. NO! I am half way through the decade that takes me to the big four-oh. My body cannot snap into shape like it could, um, when it used to snap back into shape.
I just found this website about detoxing. I may try it. And I've got the Green Tea already so I'm half way there. I just hope I remember to do it. What with a foggy brain and a curdled liver its very difficult remembering what one is meant to be doing at all.
Whats on my shopping list for tomorrow? Bread, cheese, chocolate, fags, wine, wine, wine (its still the holidays afterall...). This mother is well and truly ruined.