Coffee Good, Morning Bad

zoo, zoo, zoo to ow, ow, ow.

there he goes!, originally uploaded by RellyAB.

Toby, Daddy and I went to Drusillas yesterday. It was really good fun watching Toby watch the animals, something that seemed  a lifetime away just a couple of months ago. I toted him around in our ergo baby-carrier, all 20+lbs of him, for most of the afternoon and was pretty comfortable despite my fears I might wrench my back (still pretty over-elasticated thanks to pregnancy)

Irony then I should turn my ankle over on my stairs this afternoon and hear a gut-wrenching (literally) CRAAAAAAAACK come from my back. I think its just a muscle pull and some over-enthusiastic ligaments pinging but it has been a little painful today picking up said 20+lb baby. Who, but of course, has wanted to be picked up and carried around all day.

And my childminder's little boy is ill so I'll probably have him all day tomorrow instead of resting my back.

Despite all this, I'm in quite good spirits. Or perhaps that's the prescription post-ceasearan painkillers I found in the bathroom cabinet?

ETA - I'm not pregnant again by the way, but my oh-so-attractive last stubborn half centimetre of muffintop doesn't look the best when wearing a big belt designed to support mini-me.

Gratitude Attitude

So, today, prompted by Heidi Swapp 's class with BPS. I've been thinking about gratitude. Things I should count my blessings for. I originally posted this as a comment on Ali E's blog but as we were instructed by Heidi to make our own lists for journalling, I figured I'd expand it here.

I'm grateful for the Heidi Swapp class and Library of Memories at BPS too, to brighten my Thursday. (Thursdays are my favourite day but today it's been raining and miserable and my little boy is teething, so not so good)
I'm grateful to my childminder for being so great with my little boy that I don't feel anything but 100% happy to take some time away from him and work.
I'm grateful for my husband who is just the most loving, supportive guy I've ever known.
I'm grateful for the company of my cats and the love and play they bring to my house.
I'm grateful to my parents for all they have done and continue to do for me and my brother, and I'm grateful to have my brother because he has become an inspirational young man of late.
I'm grateful to innocent smoothies for helping me get me 5 a day, even when I'm super-stressed and busy.
I'm grateful for the bbc radio player because it has saved my sanity on many a long evening or weekend on my own
I'm grateful for scrapbooking and all the delicious supplies I own and am yet to own
I'm grateful for my friends across the globe
I'm grateful for TV series on DVD so I can watch in whole gorged chunks, rather than weekly dribbles
I'm grateful to Lush for making bath products to make me smoother of body and calmer in mind
I'm grateful for digital photography so I can take as many crappy pictures as I want and capture the details of my baby boy's life
I'm grateful for the internet and all it has given people in the 21st century
I'm grateful for the the roof over my head, the peace around my home, the treasures within it and the fact that - despite all my gripes with the taxes, social care system, society in general and the government's foreigh policy - I live in a free and developed country.

I think too often I let stuff anger me or get me down or stress me out. I want most of all to remember that I can wake up each morning and make my own decisions, including what mood I am in and how things affect me. That's something many people elsewhere don't have and I should be grateful for it.

So, enough waffling. But go forth and be humbled by all the things you are grateful for. You won't be so bothered by the last biscuit being eaten (apparently).

Call the NSPCC

Toby portrait, originally uploaded by RellyAB.

... this child is the victim of abuse.!

I'll explain why my son is apparently one of society's underprivileged children in a minute. First, let me say this. Just as Sophia Loren claimed she owed everything to spaghetti, so I owe everything to the internet. So I'm not gonna be cussing that whole free speech thing (where it is actually free speech, or even if it should be is a whole other topic).

However, if I were to pay attention to some of the parenting advice liberally handed out online I'd be a very paranoid woman by now. I don't pay attention. Instead, I just get annoyed at the 'moral indignation of the idiotic' some people bring to the table.

Let's get this straight: my child often wears disposables, eats a lot of jarred food, watches about an hour of tv a day, sometimes has yoghurts with sugar in, has a dummy, drinks formula milk. This is probably average kid protocol. BUT I homemake some purees. I make a lot of finger food. Toby has worn cloth nappies and probably will again when we move and have a new washing machine. Often has just plain yoghurt.. Only watches baby and pre-school tv or tame nature programmes. Was breastfed for as long as was possible for me. I AM PLAIN FED-UP with explaining this. So, why do I? The first 6 statements make me some sort of lazy abhorent mother apparently.

I stumbled upon a breastfeeding 'support' forum not long ago where there was a thread about how members thought bottlefeeding in public should be banned and whether making a stand by reporting public bottlefeeders to social services would 'shame' them into breastfeeding.

That's so many shades of stupid I don't know where to begin and I'm not sure I can be arsed. I'd rather come out and say 'You know all those bad things that everyone says you can't do ... I do all of them!'
The trouble with the internet, especially forums, is you don't have to see the consequences of making such frankly FUCKING DUMB statements...  quick, report me to social services! I post to forums to ask for parenting assistance!  I abuse my child with a diet of organic food, milk, love and interaction! There are pictures of my child on the internet!

It's almost like they haven't considered it's the people who haven't got internet access, live in some poverty, don't ask questions about nutrition and aren't able to make decisions for themselves or their children that are a better use of the social services' limited resources?

Of course, if you think my son does look undernourished, disadvantaged, neglected and/or in serious danger you can always make the phone call to the authorities. It's your taxes that pay to help children being abused with formula milk, dummies and jarred food, after all.

Holy crap, batman, look at the calendar

I don't care what anyone else says, to me, spring is in the air. Spring is always really busy for me. Not for any particular reason but I think once I'm done hibernating for the winter (and I really hibernate, I've been known not to go out for weeks as I hate the dark and I'm not organised enough to get out when it's still light) I go a bit mental organising activities to do and accepting invitations.

This year spring cleaning is going to take on a whole new meaning as the house is being replastered and painted next week, so essentially I have a week to pack up our living room, bathroom, loo, front room and allow proper access through our hallway. As ever I'm faced with the packer's quandry. Do I pack it up properly and assume we won't need it until we move (which is the ultimate aim here) and store in the loft/wardrobes/under the bed - or do I just make a big pile somewhere?

I also need to strip the wallpaper in the kitchen, give everywhere a proper clean, hang all our clothes that are dotted about, finish the nursery decoration - and do all the normal spring cleaning stuff of cleaning curtains, carpets and repairing bits of damage here and there. Also, I have a ton of baby stuff to ebay that's clogging up the storage places.

And, of course, here's the kicker. The valuation is on the 1st March. The house will go on the market probably the same day. Paul and I leave the house (me to my parents, him to Texas) for a week, 4 days later. So that's a lot to do in not much time.

Suppose the first answer is to stop blogging about hor much I've got to do ... although I do love that procrastination in the Age of the Internet is so much more convincingly an 'important task' than the playing SNES of my teenage years.

Patience

knitted picnic, originally uploaded by RellyAB.

No matter how much Take That ask me, I have no patience. I am not a patient person. I find it hard to wait on stuff, I find it hard to accept that things can't BE DONE RIGHT NOW.

That's part of the reason I loved this knitted garden at the Brighton Craft Show so much. First of all, LOOK AT THE KNITTED BATTERNBURG! Then, once you've got over the wonder of that, consider that this is from a fullsize knitted garden. By fullsize, I mean the same square footage one would expect from a small terrace cottage but even the damn shed was knitted (click through on the picture to find the set and see more). This wasn't all done by one person but some of the individual contributions were pretty astounding.

I cannot knit. I've tried. I've failed. Same with cross-stitch. I mean, I haven't failed in the act - even a dumbo blondeass like me can put a needle through some holey wool and make a knot with it - but I have failed to enjoy it. I find the whole stitch, stitch, stitch very soothing but I can't keep count and before I know it I've just made the world's widest and shortest scarf. And then I lose patience with the corrections.

So, patience. The trouble is, as a mother, you're meant to have endless bundles of it. I think it comes in your hospital post-baby pack along with compassion and the ability to stand the smell of 2nd hand pureed banana without retching. I obviously left mine under the bed before I was discharged. ( I am neither patient nor compassionate about dealing with banana in any form, let alone 2nd hand).

About 4pm every day my patience begins to plateau around 'oh, for heaven's sake' and I need to take a compassion respite (this would be from the Mother's Gin Fund if it were not for the 'no alcohol' medication, dammit), usually a cup of tea, while ignoring the quiet yet insistent whinging of one baby, two cats and three rooms needing my attention.

Fridays are the worst. Fridays make me very aware that there is no 5.30pm clock-off for me. No start of the weekend celebrations. Why would there be? Tomorrow is the same routine. Neither babies nor cats acknowledge weekends. However come Saturday, my darling hubby is generally at home so that means I'm free to catch up on stuff I missed during the week. I don't mean the Eastenders Omnibus and all-evening drinks though. I mean washing, reading course notes and conditioning my hair.

This is what I'm losing patience with most of all right now. There's a lot of routine and not much breaking routine and having fun. I just don't think keeping my baby up for an extra hour and us sharing a can of coke is really going to cut it on the 'TGIF' scale.

Anyway, time to search for that patience again and clean up some of the 2nd hand banana waiting for me in the kitchen and, later, in the baby.

who'd have thunked it?

So, here I am, blogging from bed on my nintendo DS. If I had anything of burning importance to say in the middle of the night I suppose this could now be my mode of choice. For one thing, I need never again have that sensation of waking up from a really vivid dream and 5 minutes later not be able to recall the details. I can attempt to blog them. No more despairing at a loss of recall. It can be replaced with the despairing at trying to use a DS to log into typepad.

Did tvghome have a hand in this?

From the bbc one schedules ...

"Steal - A group of young and imaginative bank robbers pull off a series of heists using extreme sport skills to escape the clutches of the police. .."

... I was really expecting to see 'Screenwriter: Charlie Brooker'.

All the things I know about the internet in 9 easy-to-digest bullet points

All the things I know about the internet in 9 easy-to-digest bullet points

1. If it's spelled funny it's probably meant to be really hip and cool.

2. ...unless it's 'Goatse' anything.

3. Myspace is not really the internet. It's the 21st century version of the penpal/fanclub section in smash hits magazine.

4. On Youtube 'entertainment' has a much lower given value than in real life. Even guys crushing their nuts with a hammer becomes an acceptable thing to spend time on, even though if it was shown on cable you'd pass it by in favour of a repeat of Dynasty.

5. It's probably not possible to spen more than 10 minutes on ebay without finding something you never knew existed.

6. We are now mere days away from someone putting an ebay auction up for a template for 'an hilarious spoof auction guarenteed to get you minor press attention and 300 people in anyone lunchtime hanging on your every Q&A'.

7. Google is better than Yahoo! is better than Alta Vista is better than MSN is better than AOL. Anything is better than Google knowing everything about you. Google already knows everything about you.

8. Yahoo buys. Google makes. Microsoft wins by making sure Internet Explorer doesn't work with either.

9. Anyone who spends a *lot* of time writing content for Amazon/IMDB/Wikipedia/Digg/YouTube probably shouldn't form an opinion without medical help. Celebrations of the 'top 100 commentators' sort should probably be copied to the appropriate authorities as 'backup material' for the files.

My oz hideout.

Relly's Shop, originally uploaded by Pat Scullion.

Damn it. Pat and Squage have found me out. This is my second income - a cheap food joint in Tasmania. There go the tax breaks.

You Foolish Fool!

There are very few sites on the t'interwebs that I go back to for advice over and over but the Motley Fool is one of them. Back in the day, oh okay about circa 2000, I actually set up the Foolish Students board discussing ways of spending, investing, scabbing more cash and working part time as a student (a hot topic as grants had been abolished back in 1998). I'm delighted to see it still thrives.

Anyway, I get the weekly email from the Fool - although mostly it involves stuff that doesn't interest me - and I always look through the articles on homeowning, debt etc. Today's new article was about British Gas's hidden tarrifs for existing customers and about the ease of switching suppliers. Right now, I'm all about the jumping to new suppliers as our BT business contract is coming to an end and we are looking to save some cash on the phone/broadband/tv stuff. I figure in for a penny in for a pound and have been using uswitch and the Fool to find new suppliers of everything so this article was quite timely.

The Fool used to be about investing in the stock market but in recent years they have diversified a lot. Well worth checking out before making any decision involving money - from property, remortaging, shares purchase right through to shopping coupons and best deals on everyday groceries. The best bit I think is that the boards feature 'real' people. Not just geeks, hardened internet users or newbie baiters that seem to be on most other forums but everyday people who are pleased to have found a good deal or want to warn about bad customer service.

Go on, do something Foolish today.