Sausages: half a syn each (Sainsburys BGTY Cumberland) . Eggs done in fry light, leftover potatoes with bacon and mushrooms done in the actifry with a squirt of fry-light. So 1 syn in total.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Long day
I really respect stay at home mums, it’s a job and a half. Yesterday I was given leave from work but I don’t think I stopped. With hubby’s various illnesses sometimes I feel I have to do both jobs…full time mummy and earn money. So yesterday started at 2am when little one work up with a dirty nappy. By the time I got everything together from downstairs and changed him I was wide awake. Tried to go back to sleep, by the time I did, hubby woke me up getting up for work at 4am. before I know it it 6.30am wake up time. So up I get, and get 9 year old’s school things ready. I do one breakfast for me, one for the 9 year old and one for the 2 year old. 2 year old wants what his brother is having, I get him some cereal. Now he wants something else and the cereal is forgotten. We get out the house and drop the 9 year old at school. Then it’s story time session with the 2 year old, who repeatedly escapes and why does it seem he’s the only one doing it and the other kids do as they’re told? I get a text from my mum. She’s bored waiting for her carpets to be put down can I pop round after story time? So I do, which involves chasing the 2 year old around the house so a. He doesn’t escape and b. So he doesn’t bother the carpet man….all between sips of tea. I go home and make lunch for us both. Hubby is asleep on the sofa so nothings been done. So I tidy the kitchen and wash up as nothing was done the day before because I was at work all day until 7 o’clock. I start preparing the tea for tonight because we’re going to be late in. After lunch I drop off a parcel for my sister and then go into town to get the things hubby forgot to buy yesterday when I was at work. I come home, have a quick cup of tea and then drop the 2 year old at my mums, while we pick up the 9 year old from school early. We walk to the hospital because neither of us drive and wait 30 minutes past our appointment time. We then have to take him for an x-ray on his stomach and book in for blood tests. When hubby suggests a taxi home, I don’t say no. We pick up the 2 year old. I make tea, do the pack ups for tomorrow and run baths. By the time I sit down it’s 8 pm and I pretty much ready for bed. It’s a good job that I go because the 2 year old got me up at 4 am this morning. So when people say mums sit at home watching Jeremy Kyle all day, they don’t in my life. But it’s a life I wouldn’t swap. I have two beautiful boys and a crazy kind husband.
Changelings
Back at work today and to be honest it was a relief. I can see where the stories of fairies coming and swapping children for changelings comes from now! Little one is going through the terrible twos. The fact he was such a good, sweet natured baby makes me look at him now and think “who are you?!!!! and what have done with my child!”. I sit in the computer chair unable to move, even for a pee because I know as soon as an opportunity opens he’ll be on my chair and doing things on the computer that even we don’t know how to do. he manages to set himself on youtube and watch angry bird videos. He’s obviously a genius like his mummy. We’re attempting potty training but since he discovered he can make fountains it’s not going so well. Maybe I can rig something up so it becomes a peeing version of angry birds? Instead of birds you pee on the pigs to knock them off….ignore that it could get messy, messier even. He’s also an incredible escape artist. We have to barricade the escape routes wherever we go. When I visit my mum it involves locking the doors, turning the chairs over and turning off the cooker to make it baby safe. But the tantrums….he screams in anger, tenses his body up….he’s just so angry. We seemed to miss the terrible twos with the 9 year old. The fact that in small ways he’s made us pay for that ever since stopped us from too much smugness. Little one is going to put us through it but I do hope my lovely little boy comes back soon. I just don’t remember it all being so much hard work! Maybe I’m getting too old for this.
Tomorrow, the 9 year old has his referral appointment at the hospital checking to see if he has Crohn’s Disease. Fingers crossed it’s something else. It would terrify him having the same condition that nearly killed his dad. I hope his problems are something easy to fix because Crohn’s Disease is a life sentence of uncertainty, pain and discomfort that I’ve watched his dad go through and I don’t want to watch my son go through the same process.
I love free stuff!
120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Carrying on (a little) from my last post about spell work made me think about how similar it is to cosmic ordering. I sometimes feel cosmic ordering is a way of people doing magic without commitment or without the, I suppose, stigma of being a fluffy bunny of a witch. Anyway, I used to work for this fab lady in Nottingham who used to tell me to give up what I want to the universe and it would be dealt with that just have to trust you deserve it (this was before Noel Edmond went all cosmic and new agey). It’s all going off on a tangent……
So I took the 9 year old to school. He was having a nervous breakdown as his best friend (who he’s only known for two weeks) has dumped him, so while I pretend to listen to his woes I see a little boy of about two on his smart trike. I thought how much my youngest would have liked one but how it would have to be Christmas as we can’t afford it at the moment (because I’m having my tattoo finished next week like the responsible mother I am). On the way home I spot a little trike outside someones house. It’s with a load of other stuff that look like it’s ready for the rubbish heap. The trike is in perfect condition but there’s no one around. I walk past because of course they wouldn’t be throwing it out. Then I thought what would hubby do? He’d knock on the door and ask, so I did. Yes, they were throwing the trike out, the last tenants had left it and I was doing them a favor by taking it. Yay! I don’t know whether the universe heard my wish or whether it was just a lucky coincidence but it made me realize how much free stuff I’ve gathered over the last two weeks. I’m not a crazy cat woman hoarder (I only have three cats) but I’m a massive advocate of freecycle and freegle groups. There is so much waste that I think it encourages such a sense of community to share what we have, what we don’t want but someone else needs. For example it was through free-cycle I met one of my neighbours who was having a baby and although someone had already claimed what she wanted I went round with lots of other baby things I had no more use for. It made her day and it made me feel good.
When I had my first baby I bought everything new but the second time around and a lot more sensible I tried to get as much as I could free or cheap. It’s amazing and a bit of a geeky thrill to see how much you can and how much people throw away. I got a blue velvet immaculate silver cross pram for £20.
I thank the universe for my sons trike (which he’s thrilled with) and I recommend supporting your community with sharing and receiving free stuff. Because free stuff is ace and seeing a little boys face when he gets a random present is priceless.
Spelling Test
Sick day
After being sent home from work yesterday with a bad throat, I’m feeling very sorry for myself. I’ve also discovered that with this blogging lark I now have far too much to read online and I will seriously become a computer chair potato trying to read, catch up with my competitions and Facebook. I can’t go the gym feeling like this because my legs are all wobbly but yesterday was a 100% slimming world day and I hope today will be too as long as hubby doesn’t come home with cake as I’m not sure I have the willpower. Even though I can barely swallow I still insist of squeezing food down wincing in pain with some kind of masochistic pleasure.
I’ve let my competitions slide for the last couple of weeks but having won a couple it’s reignited my interest. The theory is I’ll win everyone’s Christmas presents. So far I’ve won tickets to a gig we couldn’t go to, a meat hamper (which wouldn’t keep to Christmas and as useful as it is my mum would never forgive me if I gave her meat for Christmas), snoring spray (if it works it could save my marriage because poor hubby is banished to the sofa due to medication related snoring….it sounds cruel but he sounds like a warthog!), some Harry Potter bits which will actually be used for Christmas, and some film merchandise of a film I’ve never heard of but the canvas bag was useful.
What it all comes down to is avoiding things that I really need to do. This would be a good time to write my novel but once the nine year is at school I have to extract the toddler from dangling nappy-less off the desk corner before he destroys any chance of me having grandchildren. Then try to control his crazy curly hair with a hair brush as he screams “mean mummy” at me and brush his teeth. His dad usually gets him ready and I wonder if he ever remembers to brush his teeth. When I ask he’s always about to, but he has the same look on his face as when I caught adding extra oil into the actifry and it was my fault because I made him jump and the oil “spilled” in. I might just be being uncharitable but my mummy’s intuition is telling me otherwise. So I tell myself I’m far too busy to write but I have time to write this. I suppose at least I’m writing. Somebody I know recently told me they were writing a novel. I promised I’d read it and give feedback. But deep down there was that righteous indignation. That was my dream and she stole it, damn her. I told her that’s what I wanted to do if I wasn’t working last year. Then a few months down the line she’s following my dream. It felt like that moment when you find out your best friend stole your baby name….for their actual baby..the name you was going to name your baby when you finally get round to having one in maybe a few years. Because although technically you don’t own the name, its YOUR name and this was MY dream….for at some point in a few years when I get round to actually writing a word. I will do when I get the right laptop or maybe a tablet with one of those cute clip on keyboards and an office in my house with a walnut desk and book shelves…..then and only then I’ll be ready. Maybe.
Currently I still have 100’s of competitions to enter while watching my crazy haired toddler destroy the tivo box and put series links on for lots of random programme’s. I already feel guilty for being ill so he’s missed story time and he obviously destroying things through lack of stimulus (nothing to do with me being too lazy/ill to get out of the chair and sort him out). We did have a brief game of putting random items in a box to surprise each other, mainly the crocodile who’d then try to eat me. I felt for a few brief seconds like an old school uber mummy until he got bored and abandoned me for angry birds.
The curls of doom, that stop me from writing my novel.
Money, money, money…..
Sometimes it seems to get anywhere money makes life so much easier. And I don’t have any. The things I want to achieve:
- To live in a hobbit hole/house
- To visit Rome/New England/New Orleans
- Becoming a tattooed librarian
- To have the time to write my novel which hasn’t gone any further than half of page one at the moment.
- To train as an early years teacher as backup from the librarian thing.
It all seems to be so much easier if I had money. This isn’t really a post about complaining about money, because I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge and clothes on my back which is more than a lot of people have in this world and for that I am grateful. It’s actually heading towards talking about the frustrations of having a bi-polar husband and trying to save money. I think people (and this includes friends of ours) see successful people with bi-polar like Stephen Fry and think it can’t be that bad. Hubby lost £40 yesterday and it’s not a one off occurrence. He’s always losing money, he puts it down and forgets, he forgets he has to leave money in the bank for bills so gets charged, he forgets his wallet to put the money in so it goes in his back pocket and then it falls out. The forgetfulness is not something people tend to think about with bi-polar but it’s become a real problem in our lives. I’ve tried getting him a little note book to write things down he needs to remember. I write him little notes so he knows what he needs to remember that day. He forgets to write things down and he loses the notes I leave out. It’s so incredibly frustrating for me on the other side and worrying as he is responsible for caring for the children while I’m at work. What if he forgets to pick one up from school, or leaves the other outside the shop, or forgets to feed the little one (this has happened, luckily little one reminds daddy that it’s nom nom time). Yet I need to go and earn money. We have been refused DLA, and now my husband had a reduction in his hours which means we’re not eligible for child care help in our tax credits. If anyone out there has any tips on making things work I’d appreciate the suggestions.
It’s not just about the forgetting but also the spending. More people seem to associate the manic side of bi-polar with the spending but still try and explain that to the debt collectors. Yesterday, Hubby goes to the shop loses £40 and comes back with five packs of sausages. A couple of years ago I would have screamed at him for this but now I’m resigned to the fact that’s how he is. He gets paid and it’s like he’s some kind of billionaire, giving the taxi drivers or the waiter in Pizza Hut massive tips. He once went on a spending spree on Ebay and put bids on lots of the same item and then won them all….that was awkward. He’s suggested that I take over the finances. But there’s a part of me that can’t abide the thought of taking any this part of his independence. It seems so unfair. Also deep down I’m not sure I can trust myself. I see myself in him at times, the impulsiveness, the mania and while for the most part I channel mine into my work and my writing, which is something he can’t seem to do, because he has his problems…I worry about going to the doctor with mine. He’ll probably tell me bi-polar isn’t catching which I’m not saying it is but what if two undiagnosed people found each other as soul mates but only one was diagnosed?
Forgive me Slimming World, I have synned.
Feeling poorly today and it’s been reflected back in what I’ve eaten. Some days there seems to be no balance it’s on completely on the diet or off. Today was mainly off….ahem two cream cakes and a big bar of chocolate. It’s medicinal, I have a sore throat. I don’t even want to try and syn it. It’s harder sticking to slimming world for me at target than it was when I was trying to lose weight.
However I made an adapted slimming world recipe last night which was pretty good. Considering that hubby kept disappearing off to have a cigarette, which resulted in the children reverting to some kind of animalistic state. I could hear grunts, growls and squeals coming from behind the kitchen door. As long as there were no screams I reasoned then it was probably best to leave them be.
Anyway, the recipe….chicken tagliatelle 1.5 syns per serving. The original recipe was in this months Slimming World magazine but I made a few changes…that shouldn’t affect the syn value. I boiled the tagliatelle, oven roasted the cherry tomatoes for 15 minutes with rosemary because it was the only fresh herb I had….it was the day before shopping day. I diced up the chicken more finely and bulked it up with bacon with the fat cut off because I just thought that would quite a nice addition (and I didn’t have enough chicken). So I fried up the meat in fry light. I added mushrooms and peppers to the meat and cooked up. The recipe asked for courgettes but we don’t like them, they’d only be viewed with suspicion by the kids anyway. Then mixed all together with 75g of Philadelphia light with garlic and herbs. The mixing was harder than it sounded as tagliatelle is sticky and so is cream cheese and all the rest of the ingredients kept sinking to the bottom so I ended up having to dump the mix in a bowl and try to mix it together that way. It was a thumbs up from hubby. Baby refused to have it anywhere near his mouth. The nine year old viewed the tomatoes with suspicion as he only likes uncooked tomatoes so suggested that maybe he could put them to one side, having tried them though the tomatoes quickly disappeared. Oven cooking in this way with the herbs really added to their taste, which I wasn’t expecting as I thought it was just a ploy to make my life more complicated than it needed to be and make me look like I accomplished chef rather than a mother who was shouting and smashing her way through the kitchen, hulk like in a vain attempt at creating something that everyone would eat. It was nice, I’ll definitely cook it again. 
In the beginning
For quite a few years I had been coasting along. It was me, my husband and my 5 year old son. We were happy enough but then my husband got ill with a life threatening flare up of Crohn’s Disease and this was followed by a diagnosis of Bi Polar and everything kind of fell apart. What followed was debt and stress and worry. Importantly it also led to reassessment of where our lives were going. I started an inspirational board in the kitchen but really didn’t get far with it until recently. So I’ve started this blog in the middle of my journey, there’s still a long way to go but I can see things coming together.
So, the inspiration board I made up of who I wanted to be. At the time I was obese, unhappy, frustrated in my job as library assistant, bored, wanting another baby, and in debt. What I wanted and what went on the board was to be a kick ass slim, red haired, tattooed librarian. In reality I’m not very kick ass….more of a cuddly crafting children’s librarian type but a girl can dream of her comic book alter ego. My spirituality as a pagan had taken a step back as well as I just didn’t have time (or I didn’t give myself time) to focus on that.
Anyway, fast forward a few years and my husbands illness pushed me to get cracking at achieving the things I wanted. I was sponsored at work to get my MA and now I’m a qualified librarian. I still don’t have a librarian job as sods law would have it I qualified in time for the Tory take over and funding cuts. I joined Slimming World and lost 4 stone…now I’m just trying to keep it off. I dyed my hair red, then copper….then red but back to copper now. I covered an old tattoo I had done when I was stupid and sixteen to a Celtic raven to reflect my spirituality more as I find myself drifting towards heathenism and in the process of having a pin up witch on my thigh. I had another baby….one of my greatest achievements is writing my masters dissertation with a newborn baby in tow.
So here I am struggling to cope with my poorly husband and some days I just don’t know which of his persona’s he’s going to be. Trying to stay slim. Trying to be a good mum to my two boys, a nine year old and a two year old. I think I’m trying to be the person I used to be but without the broken bits. My kids helped fix so many things that were broken inside of me but now I have to be strong for them and hubby, while being trueto myself. It’s not always easy.
Off My Broomstick 