My Son Is A Hamster And Other Suspicions

Right.  I've blummin' well had enough now. The husband has legged it to his annual jolly (or 'sales conference' as he refers to it) and, whilst he is building camaraderie by walking up snowy mountains in Canada, I am going quietly mad trying to feed his offspring.

This is how every mother is in the kitchen, isn't it?

I had hoped that, by now, both Caitlin and Ieuan would be vacuuming up food to nourish their ever increasing frames. To be fair, Caitlin will try most foods and is pretty good at eating - as long as you have about 90 minutes to spare for each meal. Ieuan is STILL vegetable averse, although he claims to eat carrots and broccoli in school and has developed the trick of hiding pieces of food in his cheeks to make it look like he is eating. Last week, I presented him with a plate which had a microdot of cucumber and a slither of greenery and he promptly burst into tears. Hamster-boy will eat fruit till it comes out of his ears but we have got into the bad habit of designing meals around what he may, or may not consume. This makes meal planning nigh on impossible unless we eat pizza or curly pasta on rotation.

A temporary lull in tea time hostilities

Caitlin has a fear of peas but will eat olives. Ieuan's food of choice would be Quavers. Now I know you are all probably tsk tsk-ing at this point, but short of sitting on them and feeding them intravenously, I am a woman short of a strategy. Some would make them sit there until they eat and reserve the hated dish for each subsequent meal. Some would just remove the uneaten food but offer nothing else. I find myself worrying that they may starve or wake up hungry, ignoring the fact that they are both already so tall they reach my chest.

I watched the BBC's Eat Well For Less programme recently which featured various families and looks at how they can reduce their shopping bills whilst not compromising on the taste and quality of their food. I was transfixed not by the advice being handed out (although I recognise I have a weakness for a BOGOF and yellow stickers call to me from miles away), but by how the children ATE ALL THEIR FOOD. Not only did the kids eat but they managed to do so in about 30 minutes - not the hourly endurance test the Husband and I have to sit through.

The Husband finds it equally hard to deal with and after half an hour of cajoling, threatening and pleading, resorts to shouting "eat, eat" like a malfunctioning robot.  I caught the kids shouting "eat, eat" at one another behind our backs the other day which adds fuel to the Husband's suspicion that, as usual, we are being "royally played".

Still, I'm not giving in. I have just bought Nadia Sawalha's "Fabulous Family Food" and will be trying out old fashioned cottage pie (Ieuan hates mashed potato - go figure) and other family favourites because our current family menu plan is duller than a rainy bank holiday Monday.  

I'm not expecting them to turn into foodies overnight but, since Ieuan is given a pot of strawberry jam for his chicken nuggets when we go to Cafe Rouge (as bribery so he'll eat them), something needs to be done.

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Primark SS15 - Favourite Pieces

Primark SS15 - Favourite Pieces by linda-hobbis on Polyvore

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Water Way To Spend A Day With Brecon Carreg

To celebrate the launch of their new kids pack, we had a fun time yesterday with the lovely team from Wales' favourite mineral water, Brecon Carreg, learning how to be eco-friendly and crafty with our used water bottles. 

Brecon Carreg are doing their bit by making slimmer, lighter bottles which use 24% less plastic and are reducing our carbon footprint by 450 tonnes per year.

Since restocking the kids' craft supplies is currently costing me enough to refinance a small nation, the chance to be creative with something that is generally just thrown out into our council's delightful recycling bags was welcome.

Ensconced in the warmth and culinary happiness that is Waterloo Tea, we were fed and, erm, watered and then it was over to Caitlin and Ieuan and the lovely Amy from @ScienceBurp to unleash our inner Mr Maker.  

My own inner Mr Maker has sadly transmogrified into Anne Teak from Gigglebiz but still, I gave it a whirl.

The suggested brief, which was of course swiftly overridden by the male contingent of the party, was to make an animal.  

True to form, Caitlin chose to make a puppy.  

Ieuan, egged on by The Husband (whose birthday it was, and who was clearly remembering a childhood now in particularly dusty and far off hills), decided to make a robot.

Here's what they both used:-

- two water bottle ends (just cut the bottoms off carefully, and under supervision)

- sticky tape

- double sided tape

- coloured paints

- googly eyes

- coloured card

So you need to:-

1. cut the end off two same sized bottles

2. create a hinge between the two bottles using sticky tape so that one end will sit on top of the other

3. stick on your googly eyes (we used double sided sticky tape for this)

4. cut a tongue shape from red card and, using double sided sticky tape again, attach it to the inside of the lower lid by creating a fold so that the tongue sticks out.

5. paint the inside of the bottles and leave to dry.

Let the creation begin...

Assembling the body

Making a puppy

Not entirely sure of the breed though...

The fearsome Stewart

And, voila, introducing Lucy the Puppy and Stewart the Robot.  

Ieuan had a lovely time racing Stewart around with his fellow crafters' creations and The Husband was particularly proud of the antennae he'd fashioned out of green card. 

Caitlin was just happy to be 'doing crafts'.  

Puppy Lucy and Caitlin

It was a great way to spend the afternoon.  

Big thanks to Brecon Carreg, Waterloo Tea, Science Burp and Brighter Comms (who I suspect had more than a hand in the mayhem).  

The finished creations

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Silent Sunday - 25/01/2015

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Date Night With Christian Grey & Bonprix

Now a date night with Christian Grey is highly unlikely to arise (cough) on the grounds that I'm not sure Mr Hobbis would be too happy about it, but if I were to embrace my inner ingénue / floozy, and being a budget conscious gal, I'd definitely visit Bonprix for inspiration for my date night with Mr Grey.





The faux leather shift dress  £49.99 features a nipped in waist and flattering cap sleeves whilst the Metallic Glitter Party Sandals are a bargain £19.99.  

Add in a stylish metal link watch at £29.99 in case you get unavoidably tied up and a simple but elegant clutch £19.99 and you'll be good to, er, go. 

The total value of this lovely outfit is just under £120 and I like to think it combines just the right mix of sophistication and naughtiness.  

Bit like me really.

So there you have it.  50 shades of wa-hey!

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Tit-ter Ye Not Page 3 Haters - No Nudes Ain't Necessarily Good News

Much has been written today about whether The Sun newspaper has finally put the vest back on its dubious tribute to the female form and scrapped its page 3 glamour photography.  Feminists have been celebrating.  Glamour girls have been decrying this slur on their profession.  

Source:  beforethedot.co.uk

On the face of it, the removal of the embarrassment of having to explain to junior why Titania has been photographed in just her pants, and the risk of shocking the more puritanical amongst us on the train in the morning by forgetting to turn straight from the front page to page 5, can only be a good thing.  I make no comment here about the quality of the paper's journalism, nor its prurient enjoyment of all things knobs, knockers and salaciousness because, sadly, most of the British Press is happily cantering that well worn path these days.  The Daily Mail is rapidly becoming the Daily Kardashian and its website's side column is a paeon to a bunch of American celebrities that I have neither heard, nor care about.

Isn't the truth here simply that Page 3 has lost its ability to shock?  That the amount of exposure breasts get is so great that interest in them has faded to a certain extent.  Are we more, thanks to the Kardashian clan, more interested in bottoms now?  Is The Sun about to launch "Arse of the Day" instead? Here's the lovely Stephanie aged 23 from Staines showing us how to park a bike?  Mind you, I can think of a much better use for a column named thus - particularly in the run up to the General Election.

In a more disturbing vein,  the increased availability and consumption of pornography thanks to the internet is a more probably cause of Page 3's possible demise.  There are thousands of sites offering far more disturbing and exploitative pictures of women, all easily accessible via mobile technology.  I am not suggesting that those who enjoy glamour photography are teetering on the edge of subterranean perversion.  I am suggesting that there seems to have been a sea-change in our views about sex and nudity which seems to be removing us farther and farther from the bedrock of culture and morality we used to have.

In comparison to some of the material which passes as daily newspaper fodder, the page 3 photograph has almost an innocence about it.  And that, as a mother to a 7 year old daughter, does concern me.    

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Caring For Poorly Little Ones - This Nurse is Terse and Worse....

We have not got back into the New Year groove.  

No sign of the smooth running routine we usually carry out on autopilot, hindered only by my odd peri-menopausal brain farts where my memory is blanker than Perez Hilton's fan book. 

Cuteness abounds - but not at 3 am

And, of course, we have "the bug" - a random collection of germs, possibly viral, probably bacterial and symptoms that would challenge Florence Nightingale who Caitlin is currently learning about in school.

Almost every night at 3 am since the new term started, I have been woken by shouting and muttering (Ieuan), wailing due to a bad dream (Caitlin), sore ears, sore tums, and a gushing toilet flush which the Husband has finally agreed to mend after approximately a month of asking nicely (obviously this has been interpreted as nagging). 

There are bottles of Calpol and Nurofen littering most surfaces.  

We have no less than 3 digital thermometers - none of which I can hear due to my reluctance to wear my hearing aids.  

In fact I now have more plastic syringes than cutlery.  

Ieuan has been running a fever and Caitlin, after we applied Hello Kitty eyeshadow yesterday to which she had an allergic reaction, now looks like she's about to attend a Venetian masked ball. 

When I haul myself yet again into the early morning darkness, I know I should be as I imagine Florence Nightingale would have been - crisply efficient and able to administer comfort and loving calmness.  

In reality,  I find myself a charmless harridan in a blue dressing-gown on the look out for acting up and attention seeking.  

For the first few times I am able to smooth brows and rearrange bedding, to offer water and, if needed, brandish the plastic syringe.  

By the fifth or sixth disturbance I am like a mad, sleep deprived woman who would probably tell you my bank details and sort code if you asked and likely to tell the children to "just ruddy well go back to sleep". 

In the morning 'mummy guilt' strikes and I wish I could have been more Florence.  

The Husband does not do illness.  

He is of the staunch 'no pain, no gain' crew who, deciding they won't be ill, just aren't.  

He also says that the kids play me royally which doesn't help when I'm trying to assess what kind of mother I'm supposed to be and how deep the well of sympathy should be.  

For those parents dealing daily with serious childhood illnesses, I can only stand and marvel in admiration at their fortitude. I wish I had more of their strength and courage.

Everything seems clearer in the morning, doesn't it? 

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