This whole having two blogs and a business to run and a small fund raising mission to complete is all a little time consuming, so this will be brief.
Following on from my last blog post about random conversations with 5 year olds, here was a snippet from today's lastest conversational masterpiece:
"So boys, what do you think daddy will see in America?" (their father's gone there for business this week)
Three year old hears the word America and a lightbulb goes ping in his brain and says: "that man who was the first man to rule America."
Five year old sagely nods, while continuing to shovel dinner into his mouth: "He means Barack Mobama."
"Well remembered both of you," quite gobsmacked that they can remember this, then again they were denied Cbeebies for a full afternoon as I watched the inauguration ceremony so it's probably imprinted on their brains. I do wonder whether Barack Mobama would like to grow a moustache in deference to his new name.
"Can you remember what he's called - what his job is?" I ask.
"He's the president of America," says five year old.
"Well done, yes he is. Do you know what we call the person who runs our country?" I ask ("besides twat," I say under my breath)
"Can't remember," he says.
"He's the Prime Minister. And do you know what our Prime Minister's name is?" I ask again.
"Ummm, no, I think I know but I can't remember," says five year old.
"It's Gordon Brown," I say.
"Oh!" says five year old. "I knew that name, but I thought he was the vicar!"
So there you have it. Based on my son's last conversation about marriage and the fact that God and the vicar get to choose who you marry, it follows that Gordon Brown - being the vicar - can now choose your spouse for you. Now that's what I call a nanny state.
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Monday, 2 March 2009
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Where were you when....
Where were you when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? er, not born
Where were you when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison? In our family room in South Africa glued to the TV. *more on this later
Where were you when you heard Princess Di had died? At a friend's birthday party. It kinda put a dampener on the occasion.
Where were you when the first black president of the USA was inaugurated? At home. Trying to watch the tv. While being pelted with stickle bricks and whacked on the shins with Ben 10 toys to the background strains of 'TURN IT OFF MUMMY. TURN IT OFF. IT'S SO BORING I WILL DIE IF I HAVE TO WATCH IT. WE WANT CBEEBIES!!!!!'
I knew it wasn't going to a unanimous vote to watch Barack Obama become president but I feel I watch enough Lazytown to justify the odd momentous occasion to flick to one of my channels. But my children were very, very unhappy with this turn of events. Trying to explain why it was important was as effective as explaining about starving children in Africa and why they shouldn't waste food.
It ended up with one of them on my computer playing Cbeebies and the other put into the hallway with the door shut on him, while he methodically kicked the door with ever increasing screams until it reached an ear-splitting crescendo. I don't really know what the man said. The snatches I heard sounded good. But at least I can say that I did watch it. I was there in spirit.
Sigh. Can you tell that my day hasn't really improved since this morning? I'd love to tuck into a bottle of wine but I refuse to become a statistic. A statistic that says statistically yesterday was the day we will have given up on our new year's resolutions. I have lapsed a bit. Quite a lot actually on the exercise front due to poorly health. But I did attempt a 'heat in your feet' latina-cize video this morning which almost made me put my hip out, such was the gyrating fiesta. But I am clinging onto the dieting/sobriety wagon with white knuckles bared and the odd tumble taken now and then. I will not be a resolutions casualty.
Anyway, onto different issues altogether. Welsh Girl tagged me in an honesty thingy where I have to list 10 honest things about myself. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of this and think I might just limit it to five as I'm lazy (you can count that as one) -here goes:
1. There was a song called 'Solid' (don't know who sang it) that we had on one of the Now that's what I call shit music (or similar) when I was a young teenager. Anyway, the actual lyrics are:
And for love’s sake, each mistake, ah, you forgave.
And soon both of us learned to trust
Not run away, it was no time to play
We build it up and build it up and build it up
And now it’s solid
Solid as a rock
That’s what this love is.
Except that the bit I've put in bold I used to sing as follows:
Started, started as a rock....
I used to belt it out until someone in my family noticed the error of my ways and they all fell about laughing wondering what I'd progress to if I started as a rock. A small boulder perhaps? I've hated that song ever since. I didn't 'do' being laughed at very well.
2. Now here's a telling example of what it was like to grow up in Apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990. I was in my final year of high school that year (17 years old). The first time I EVER heard of Nelson Mandela was midway through 1988 (a mere 18 months before he was released). Even then, it was a passing comment that the cleverest girl in our class made about 'whether Nelson Mandela should be released from prison' and we collectively went 'Who?' I am very embarrassed about this complete and utter lack of awareness of the world around me. While people around the world were campaigning for his release, I'd never heard of the man.
3. I'm impatient, short tempered and quite bossy. (Please let my husband not read this. He will feel smug and vindicated). Although I know these things about myself, I still quite often feel that I let myself get railroaded by people instead of standing up for myself. I honestly believe that I'm quite malleable. When I revealed this deep insight to friends one drunken evening, I do believe their drinks actually came spurting out of their noses such was their mirth. They've now taken to calling me 'Malleable Mel'.
4. Almost every meal I make contains Mrs Balls' Chutney. This is my secret ingredient. I shouldn't be proud of it. It's not what the top chefs would use, but it works every time. Oh, and for added crunch on lasagnas or cottage pies, I scrumpled up corn flakes. Again, not something that will see me into the late stages of Masterchef but it works.
5. I bite my nails. Always have. Always will. Saves me a fortune on manicures.
That's my honesty quota reached for the day. Might I suggest Susanna at Modern Mother and Ali at Callapippa Tree take up the honesty baton?
Where were you when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison? In our family room in South Africa glued to the TV. *more on this later
Where were you when you heard Princess Di had died? At a friend's birthday party. It kinda put a dampener on the occasion.
Where were you when the first black president of the USA was inaugurated? At home. Trying to watch the tv. While being pelted with stickle bricks and whacked on the shins with Ben 10 toys to the background strains of 'TURN IT OFF MUMMY. TURN IT OFF. IT'S SO BORING I WILL DIE IF I HAVE TO WATCH IT. WE WANT CBEEBIES!!!!!'
I knew it wasn't going to a unanimous vote to watch Barack Obama become president but I feel I watch enough Lazytown to justify the odd momentous occasion to flick to one of my channels. But my children were very, very unhappy with this turn of events. Trying to explain why it was important was as effective as explaining about starving children in Africa and why they shouldn't waste food.
It ended up with one of them on my computer playing Cbeebies and the other put into the hallway with the door shut on him, while he methodically kicked the door with ever increasing screams until it reached an ear-splitting crescendo. I don't really know what the man said. The snatches I heard sounded good. But at least I can say that I did watch it. I was there in spirit.
Sigh. Can you tell that my day hasn't really improved since this morning? I'd love to tuck into a bottle of wine but I refuse to become a statistic. A statistic that says statistically yesterday was the day we will have given up on our new year's resolutions. I have lapsed a bit. Quite a lot actually on the exercise front due to poorly health. But I did attempt a 'heat in your feet' latina-cize video this morning which almost made me put my hip out, such was the gyrating fiesta. But I am clinging onto the dieting/sobriety wagon with white knuckles bared and the odd tumble taken now and then. I will not be a resolutions casualty.
Anyway, onto different issues altogether. Welsh Girl tagged me in an honesty thingy where I have to list 10 honest things about myself. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of this and think I might just limit it to five as I'm lazy (you can count that as one) -here goes:
1. There was a song called 'Solid' (don't know who sang it) that we had on one of the Now that's what I call shit music (or similar) when I was a young teenager. Anyway, the actual lyrics are:
And for love’s sake, each mistake, ah, you forgave.
And soon both of us learned to trust
Not run away, it was no time to play
We build it up and build it up and build it up
And now it’s solid
Solid as a rock
That’s what this love is.
Except that the bit I've put in bold I used to sing as follows:
Started, started as a rock....
I used to belt it out until someone in my family noticed the error of my ways and they all fell about laughing wondering what I'd progress to if I started as a rock. A small boulder perhaps? I've hated that song ever since. I didn't 'do' being laughed at very well.
2. Now here's a telling example of what it was like to grow up in Apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990. I was in my final year of high school that year (17 years old). The first time I EVER heard of Nelson Mandela was midway through 1988 (a mere 18 months before he was released). Even then, it was a passing comment that the cleverest girl in our class made about 'whether Nelson Mandela should be released from prison' and we collectively went 'Who?' I am very embarrassed about this complete and utter lack of awareness of the world around me. While people around the world were campaigning for his release, I'd never heard of the man.
3. I'm impatient, short tempered and quite bossy. (Please let my husband not read this. He will feel smug and vindicated). Although I know these things about myself, I still quite often feel that I let myself get railroaded by people instead of standing up for myself. I honestly believe that I'm quite malleable. When I revealed this deep insight to friends one drunken evening, I do believe their drinks actually came spurting out of their noses such was their mirth. They've now taken to calling me 'Malleable Mel'.
4. Almost every meal I make contains Mrs Balls' Chutney. This is my secret ingredient. I shouldn't be proud of it. It's not what the top chefs would use, but it works every time. Oh, and for added crunch on lasagnas or cottage pies, I scrumpled up corn flakes. Again, not something that will see me into the late stages of Masterchef but it works.
5. I bite my nails. Always have. Always will. Saves me a fortune on manicures.
That's my honesty quota reached for the day. Might I suggest Susanna at Modern Mother and Ali at Callapippa Tree take up the honesty baton?
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Momentous decisions (interspersed with the odd bit of vom)
I am back from my brief blogging holiday. Much has happened since I was last here. In fact I have a surfeit of blogging material which is almost worse than having nothing to blog about. What makes it worse still is that I'm trying to blog to the background strains of the Shiny Show (Give yourself a shiny!) because son 2 is poorly. This means hot and cold running television for him, and lots of being a slave to his whims for me.
So let's start with the aforementioned poorliness. Son 2 woke up yesterday a with a horrible cold and cough. By late afternoon this had morphed into a delightful vomiting thing. In fact yesterday ranked up there with my top favourite parenting days. Those occasions where you really wish there was more than one version of yourself or that you have several sets of long elasticated arms. Son 1 was bored, bored, bored and wanted to be entertained because he is apparently incapable of entertaining himself. Son 2 was poorly and wanted to be held. I had chores to do. It all reached a delightful crescendo at around 4.45pm where son 1 was yelling loudly that he was hungry while son 2 wanted to be held. I tried to make dinner while running back and forth to comfort sick child.
It quickly became apparent why he wanted comforting when he suddenly yelled: "Sick! Sick!" and did a gigantic projectile vom all over the rug. In a less than loving way, I pushed him so that he could continue to spew on the wooden floor instead. I asked son 1 to run and fetch a cloth from the kitchen. On his way to the kitchen he hit his elbow on something. I then had two screaming children, puke dripping off every surface in sight, stir fry burning and rice sticking to the bottom of a pan. It became a war zone triage scene. Attend to the most pressing things first. I raced to the cooker, hauled the pans offs, turned the plates off, grabbed armfuls of towels to mop up the vom, rubbed son 1's elbow on the way past, wiped up small sick child, mopped up floor, grabbed a bowl to catch further sick and sprayed liberally with dettol spray to avoid the rest of us getting sick.
I eventually managed to feed son 1 and get him into bed, I lay with son 2 catching vom for most of the evening and spent a sleepless night next to a small boy wanting a 'brink' (i.e. a drink) every few minutes. This morning he has managed toast, juice and medised and kept it all down. Hurrah. Meanwhile I've returned son 1 back to school and the all powerful lure of gogos has returned.
We spent the half term in Ireland. Thanks to my sister for having us. Ireland was sunny, windy and very, very cold. My children did their best to destroy my sister's house and we enjoyed several days on the beach bundled up in a billion layers of clothes. I used to find going to the beach wearing all of your wardrobe quite bemusing. Now I think I'd find a beach in which you wear only a swimsuit an incredible shock - and indeed revealing all of my copious volumes of flesh would be a shock for everyone else on the beach. So it's a good thing that we live in this less than tropical climate.
Two important things came out of our brief sojourn to Ireland. a) It has confirmed that I need to go on a diet and do more exercise. My sister who is part human, part stick insect makes anorexics look large so I looked like a small woolly mammoth in her company. And the fact that my trousers really don't do up anymore was the incentive I need to de-lard myself before the re-larding of Christmas begins. But this led to the second important thing b) I need to spend less time working and more time living (which includes having the time to exercise).
This is a biggie. And it might get all deep and introspective-like, but I need to get this down for posterity so that when I start to get sucked back into the work vortex, I can revisit this blog post and remind myself of what I'm really on this planet for.
You see since setting up my business, I've been trying to grow it. That's normal. That's how businesses become successful. But I've now asked myself, why am I working? What's it for? Part of the reason is because staying at home with small screaming children didn't hold masses of appeal and I wanted to do something other than wipe bottoms. And I wanted to make a bit of extra cash to spend on the occasional Emma Bridgewater teapot. But doing a good job on a few clients would give me that. Why do I have this feeling that I need to do more? I posted recently that I feel like a failure unless I'm pushing harder to achieve the next big thing. That's because I've been judging the successfulness of my life on how well my business is doing, rather than how well my life is going.
The things that are important to me are my children, my husband, my family, my community, cooking, writing, having time to exercise (even just stomping across the fields behind our house) and seeing friends. Running a global PR empire has never been a goal of mine. I'll readily admit that when I see other entrepreneurs featured in papers I feel pang of envy mingled with the inspiration to be like them. But I now know what it takes to be like that and it means sacrificing lots of the things that are important to me.
It's going to be hard to realign my brain so that I don't continually feel that I need to do more, and instead, do the things I want to do without feeling guilty about it. But I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to continue to work - and hopefully do a great job for my clients - but I'm not going to take on too much. I'm not going for global domination anymore. I'm going to attempt to reclaim my life. And that's quite a big goal for a grey Wednesday morning.
I only have one other thing to add to this convoluted blog post. Hooray for the American people finally getting it right! I've had my children glued to BBC News 24 (in between snatches of Cbeebies) as the US Presidential Election has run it's course, trying to explain to them the importance of Barack Obama being elected as the first black president of the USA. I've never explained the concept of race to my children. It's quite a tricky thing to do as children don't seem to see different races. People are just people to them. Which is lovely. And I feel awful for even making them aware of the differences. But one day they will be able to say that they watched as the first black man came to lead America. OR perhaps they won't remember it anymore than they will the delights of the Shiny Show. But at least I can tell them that they did.
So let's start with the aforementioned poorliness. Son 2 woke up yesterday a with a horrible cold and cough. By late afternoon this had morphed into a delightful vomiting thing. In fact yesterday ranked up there with my top favourite parenting days. Those occasions where you really wish there was more than one version of yourself or that you have several sets of long elasticated arms. Son 1 was bored, bored, bored and wanted to be entertained because he is apparently incapable of entertaining himself. Son 2 was poorly and wanted to be held. I had chores to do. It all reached a delightful crescendo at around 4.45pm where son 1 was yelling loudly that he was hungry while son 2 wanted to be held. I tried to make dinner while running back and forth to comfort sick child.
It quickly became apparent why he wanted comforting when he suddenly yelled: "Sick! Sick!" and did a gigantic projectile vom all over the rug. In a less than loving way, I pushed him so that he could continue to spew on the wooden floor instead. I asked son 1 to run and fetch a cloth from the kitchen. On his way to the kitchen he hit his elbow on something. I then had two screaming children, puke dripping off every surface in sight, stir fry burning and rice sticking to the bottom of a pan. It became a war zone triage scene. Attend to the most pressing things first. I raced to the cooker, hauled the pans offs, turned the plates off, grabbed armfuls of towels to mop up the vom, rubbed son 1's elbow on the way past, wiped up small sick child, mopped up floor, grabbed a bowl to catch further sick and sprayed liberally with dettol spray to avoid the rest of us getting sick.
I eventually managed to feed son 1 and get him into bed, I lay with son 2 catching vom for most of the evening and spent a sleepless night next to a small boy wanting a 'brink' (i.e. a drink) every few minutes. This morning he has managed toast, juice and medised and kept it all down. Hurrah. Meanwhile I've returned son 1 back to school and the all powerful lure of gogos has returned.
We spent the half term in Ireland. Thanks to my sister for having us. Ireland was sunny, windy and very, very cold. My children did their best to destroy my sister's house and we enjoyed several days on the beach bundled up in a billion layers of clothes. I used to find going to the beach wearing all of your wardrobe quite bemusing. Now I think I'd find a beach in which you wear only a swimsuit an incredible shock - and indeed revealing all of my copious volumes of flesh would be a shock for everyone else on the beach. So it's a good thing that we live in this less than tropical climate.
Two important things came out of our brief sojourn to Ireland. a) It has confirmed that I need to go on a diet and do more exercise. My sister who is part human, part stick insect makes anorexics look large so I looked like a small woolly mammoth in her company. And the fact that my trousers really don't do up anymore was the incentive I need to de-lard myself before the re-larding of Christmas begins. But this led to the second important thing b) I need to spend less time working and more time living (which includes having the time to exercise).
This is a biggie. And it might get all deep and introspective-like, but I need to get this down for posterity so that when I start to get sucked back into the work vortex, I can revisit this blog post and remind myself of what I'm really on this planet for.
You see since setting up my business, I've been trying to grow it. That's normal. That's how businesses become successful. But I've now asked myself, why am I working? What's it for? Part of the reason is because staying at home with small screaming children didn't hold masses of appeal and I wanted to do something other than wipe bottoms. And I wanted to make a bit of extra cash to spend on the occasional Emma Bridgewater teapot. But doing a good job on a few clients would give me that. Why do I have this feeling that I need to do more? I posted recently that I feel like a failure unless I'm pushing harder to achieve the next big thing. That's because I've been judging the successfulness of my life on how well my business is doing, rather than how well my life is going.
The things that are important to me are my children, my husband, my family, my community, cooking, writing, having time to exercise (even just stomping across the fields behind our house) and seeing friends. Running a global PR empire has never been a goal of mine. I'll readily admit that when I see other entrepreneurs featured in papers I feel pang of envy mingled with the inspiration to be like them. But I now know what it takes to be like that and it means sacrificing lots of the things that are important to me.
It's going to be hard to realign my brain so that I don't continually feel that I need to do more, and instead, do the things I want to do without feeling guilty about it. But I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to continue to work - and hopefully do a great job for my clients - but I'm not going to take on too much. I'm not going for global domination anymore. I'm going to attempt to reclaim my life. And that's quite a big goal for a grey Wednesday morning.
I only have one other thing to add to this convoluted blog post. Hooray for the American people finally getting it right! I've had my children glued to BBC News 24 (in between snatches of Cbeebies) as the US Presidential Election has run it's course, trying to explain to them the importance of Barack Obama being elected as the first black president of the USA. I've never explained the concept of race to my children. It's quite a tricky thing to do as children don't seem to see different races. People are just people to them. Which is lovely. And I feel awful for even making them aware of the differences. But one day they will be able to say that they watched as the first black man came to lead America. OR perhaps they won't remember it anymore than they will the delights of the Shiny Show. But at least I can tell them that they did.
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