Keep plants where they belong

I finally got out into the garden yesterday to tidy up a bit of the boarder and introduce H to the delights of eating grass and daisies.You will be pleased to know that the magnolia has performed right on cue and the bargain bag of daffodil bulbs Steve purchased from Wilko's last Autumn has not disappointed - I can hardly see the lawn for yellow, and mowing is completely out of the question (shame!)

I note also that many of the patio pots are looking really, really ill. This is actually a good thing as they contain out-sized houseplants that I have been trying to kill for some time. The Mother-in-Law's Tongue, which indoors was so successful it burst out of its pot like some kind of tryphid, is looking decidedly dead and the weeping fig has wept its last. Unfortunately the Aloe Vera (kindly donated by my mother-in-law, incidently) has revived like a phoenix from the flames. Tempting as it is to douse it in lighter fuel to see if it will survive further torture, I'll resist. It's in quite a big tub and is rather too near the patio door, although if I no longer had a house I would not have to worry about disposing of its flora...

What has become of my life?

I think Steve realised that there is method in my madness when I suggested he aimed to leave the house at 10.15 to make it on time for the 10.45 jamboree that is Tiny Tune Time this morning. The venue is a 10 minute walk away, but when you have two essentially helpless people (one more deliberately so than the other) to escort, it is amazing how the 20 minute buffer time goes. They arrived just in time and Steve's comment - which I shall take as a compliment - was, 'I am amazed that you ever leave the house.' Thank you, darling, just call me Wonder Woman.

I had promised someone I would write about my weekend away. Think about weekends away pre-children: Too much to eat and drink, talk late into the night and recover with a long, slow and late Sunday brunch over the papers with the Archers omnibus gently playing in the background.

The new horrors of the weekend away: Someone falling out of bed and insisting on not only sharing a bedroom but a bed with you, an argument in hushed whispers over the folly of the weekend away to fill the 2 hours it took to calm down the faller-out-of-the-bed, repeatedly feeding a baby who every time she wakes up is confused about where she is and panics (loudly).

To cap it all, I was wiping breakfast off the floor by 7am. In the end I locked myself in the bathroom with the Saturday Guardian.

A night away with your small people? Don't do it folks!

Enjoying becoming middle-aged

It occurred to me recently as I wandered through Oxford that I wanted to ram into female students with my over-sized pram, knock them to the floor and yell at them, 'You are so young, so pretty and you look so b****y miserable!' And then I realise that I have come to understand the adage 'Youth is wasted on the young'. Having worked through some of my anger issues (!) and come out the other side, I now conclude that however old you are, you will NEVER be this young again. Call it a mid-life crisis, but I have bought a denim mini-skirt and have taken to wearing it as often as possible because, hey, one day I'll be 73 and will want to stop thirty-somethings in their tracks with a carefully placed walking stick and yell at them, 'You are so young, so pretty...'

How did that happen?

We appear to be a week into the new year already. I thought about making new year's resolutions and was quite keen until about 10pm on 31st Dec when I collapsed into bed exhausted, realising that all my resolve had already gone.

Ho hum, my major achievement of the year is that, rather than picking food off the carpet after every meal, I have removed the patch of carpet underneath Ibby's highchair. I had hoped the surface below would be easi-wipe, I had not, however, accounted for how securely the foam from a cheap carpet can adhere to floor tiles...

Perhaps I have merely replaced one problem for another, but then that's life all over, isn't it?

Feliz Navidad

We flew to Spain on Christmas Eve morning and are spending a week slumming it in my parents´b&b in the mountains. All rooms en suite, all meals provided and more babysitting than anyone can reasonably expect. Their place is on the church square and the current village problem is the church clock. It was put right again this morning and is now more than ten minutes fast - it may as well bong randomly for all the use it is. The first night we were here the call to mass began an hour before midnight, so the bells were tested to the max. Unfortunately, we had just drifted off to sleep. Etholle couldn´t sleep through them (reasonably enough) and having said I was too tired to attend mass I felt that my penance was delivered immediately.

Today we have been to the snow, soooo pretty and sunny. A shame we had to come down the windy (long i) road home. Three of the passengers were ready to vomit by the time we got back, and I´ve had quite enough of that recently...

I´ll add photos when we get home.

What haven't I cleaned vomit off this week?

The doctor asked me, 'What makes you say it's bile?' I replied innocently, 'It's green'. Perhaps I should have added that it looked just like it would emulsify fats nicely and aid the absorption of lipids in the duodenum - but probably at 6.30 on a Friday evening the last thing he needed was a facetious answer from someone who has not had opportunity to flex their biochemical muscles for a while...

There is not much to say this week because all I have done is wipe up sick and do laundry. I believe I have written extensively enough about the latter, and the former - well, let's not go there.

There are no pictures in this posting for obvious reasons.

Keeping warm in winter

A few weeks ago our boiler started making a weird clicking noise so I phoned 'Boiler Man'. I exagerate my efficiency; I ignored it for a couple of days and then phoned someone who is organised enough to keep BM's details somewhere accessible. The last time BM's services were required, Steve had stuck his card on the front of the fireplace to remind me to ring and I don't know what happened to the card after that. It probably got removed in an attempt to 'depersonalise' prior to trying to sell our house (we didn't sell!) Anyway, after several calls and messages to BM he turns up on our doorstep at 11am one Saturday morning just as we are about to leave to go to a wedding. Now, Steve promises me BM did nothing other than take the cover off the boiler and note down a secret code on the back of an envelope, but he must have looked at the offending clicking part in a very stern manner as it has not been badly behaved since. The thought does cross my mind that maybe the cover of the boiler was loose...

Steve decided last month that we should have new radiators downstairs because the old ones were not 'strong' enough to heat up our living area. He duly went and purchased two double finned radiators (as if I know what that means) and stashed them behind the sofa until he had chance to fit them. He was, in fact quite efficient and on two successive weekends fitted them both. He nearly came unstuck when the shops of Didcot failed to yield a radiator key, but I dashed over to a neighbour who has brand new central heating and they were able to supply him with the correct tool. (I was completely unable to describe the radiator key so there was a lot of running up and down the road in the pouring rain...) For want of anything better to do with the old radiators, Steve added them to the pile of disposed of armchair and old sideboard in our front garden. It was a kind of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' mentality to the collective scrap heap that is the front gardens of Queensway. Who needs a skip when you have got a bit of hard standing? I was rather glad of the rain as it prevented us from being tempted to go the whole Didcot hog and set fire to it. The heap has now been removed and taken to Drayton dump. We are only left with a few paving slabs that have been there since May 2001 when I removed them and planted a hedge. Not all of the slabs remain, some are outside a friend's house (who has since moved) and another is in two pieces in front of our fire place in lieu of a proper hearth.