A week in my life - Thursday

Chicken woke me up at 6am, she'd spent the whole night in her cot and was getting restless so I brought her in for a cuddle and she slept till seven, woo hoo!  I fed her and we came downstairs for toast (vegemite for both of us) and I started making our coffee.  Andrew spent twenty minutes on the phone to Sky TV trying to sort out our problem, it didn't work and I'm staying in tomorrow to wait for the repair man.

About 8am I took Chicken upstairs to get clean and the both of us dressed while Andrew showered.  I finished our coffee for takeaway because today E and I had to go to into London so we had to drop Andrew at work.  Normally it takes him 45 minutes to get to work but since it is school holidays we sailed there!  We headed home and Chicken slept and I listened to Radio 2.  When we got home I sat in the car and waited for E to wake up which happened about ten minutes later, half an hour is about normal for her first nap.

We came in and I did half an hour of my exercise DVD until Chicken got grumpy and I fed her.  I showered and got dressed and organised to go and meet my friend Alice.  We were on the road around ten to eleven.

The drive into West London took us around forty minutes, and Chicken slept and I sang along loudly to 1980's ballads on the radio.  When I left home it was tipping it down and the car temperature said 12.5c, thankfully in London there was no sign of rain and was 18c.  Alice and I work together and her baby is ten days older than Eilidh.  While we've been on maternity leave we've been meeting up regularly and last month we got to go to her wedding!  So so much fun!  We went for a short walk around a park and then headed to the cafe for lunch.  Lunch was in two stages, first stage for babies and second stage for adults, it took a while.  I had the most yummy ham and cheese toasted sandwich, and of course a coffee (can you tell I'm obsessed about coffee!?)  Al's husband Tom joined us and we had a good catch up.

About 2pm it started to rain, really rain, which meant we had to wait a while to get back to the car, we finally made it, which I was quite pleased about because Chicken had become that annoying shouty baby in the cafe, not good times!  Chicken slept on the way back home and was still sound asleep when we pulled into the carpark at our local(ish) baby store.  I again decided to wait until she woke up but this time it took over an hour, so I spent time on the internet on my phone.

Finally around 4:15 we headed into the shop to buy a few new toys, some stacking cups and noise makers, we haven't broken out the noisy ones yet but so far so good.  I ran into a friend and we discussed portable highchairs and stacking cups, highbrow conversation huh?

We then headed to the supermarket and I zipped around with the noisiest shoutiest baby ever!  She loves sitting in the seat in the trolley, but today it wasn't working, not even cheese snack things could distract her, so it was a quick zip around.  We left the supermarket about 6pm after having to run to the car in the pouring rain, Chicken did not enjoy that and went to pick Andrew up.  Chicken squawked for five minutes or so and then slept all the way home.

We got home to find out that because it had rained almost all day our cul-de-sac had flooded and we couldn't get to our house without getting her feet wet.  Apparently this happens regularly but thankfully a man had come to clear the drains.

Andrew and Eilidh played with her new stacking cups and had dinner while I got our dinner sorted.  She made such a mess that we took the whole high chair upstairs and gave that a bath too.  After a feed and cuddle from Mum Chicken was off to the land of nod.

 

We at dinner around 7:45 and we're now watching How I met your Mother and The big bang theory with a glass of wine.  And that was our Thursday.

PS All the photos were taken using the instagram app.

Friday Five - Things I've been doing instead of blogging

Well its been two weeks now since I last blogged, I just seem to be so busy lately, the older she gets (seven months now) the busier I get!  So I've decided to share some of the more exciting things I've been doing.




1.  Pick your own.  We've been to our local Pick Your Own farm twice to pick raspberries.  Raspberries are my favourite berry and these ones were huge!  Its so much more rewarding (and so much cheaper) to pick them yourself too.  Two good things about picking raspberries are that the canes are mostly at standing height and therefore the berries are easy to pick.  The other thing is that they don't (well these ones anyway) have thorns so no scratches or pricks!

2.  Scrapbooking.  I'm going to try and get my A into G (as my dad would say) and post some of my latest layouts because I'm quite proud of them.  I've scrapped my baby shower, Eilidh's birth story, a picture of our god-daughter Emma at our wedding, us at Andrew's work Christmas party two years ago, and us at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.  At the end of each year I go through all our photos and make a list of the layouts I want to do and then cross them off when done.  I try and make sure I scrap older photos and newer ones, otherwise I'll get behind on the old ones.

3.  Cooking.  I've been cooking meals for Chicken.  I've got a post coming tomorrow or Sunday about her food so I won't go into too much detail, but let it be said, that girl likes to eat!!  This weekend I'm going to make spaghetti bolognese, some sort of chicken dish, more rice pudding and a custard for her.

4.  Hanging out with my baby friends.  Usually the girls from my ante-natal group and I meet every Tuesday, but this week we went back to our tutors house for a pool party (the babies paddled and we held them)  and today we tried to go swimming.  I say tried because we got to the pool and it was shut so we went to an overcrowded playground and sat at an overpriced cafe (and didn't buy anything) and fed the kiddies.  My lovely friend Jo and her adorable son George have been driving us around.  Indecently George is Eilidh's boyfriend, she likes her younger men you see (G is three weeks younger than her).

5.  Saying goodbye to a good friend.  My lovely friend Michelle has left London after living her for nine years.  Michelle and I met at high school 15 years ago when we went on a school trip to Barcelona Spain.  We hung out there and then when we got home to NZ.  Michelle and our other friend Jonelle are some of my oldest friends, and I'm really going to miss her.  Eilidh and I went to Heathrow to wave goodbye as she left to start her new adventure in Hong Kong where she is going to teach in an international school.

So there you go, that's been my last couple of weeks, Eilidh is now in a more reliable sleep pattern in the day so I'm going to try and blog then, fingers crossed it works!

Friday Five - Things about me

I've had a rather big day today, I mean I had to get up at 6:30am!  Now I know for working people (and my mum and dad, and my brother) that this is quite late, but for us, well it was quite a challenge.  Today I went into my work to see my kid's assembly.  Kids you say?  Yep I have had for the past eight years, thirty kids.  Thirty kids in my class that is!   This week's Friday Five is not about my baby, or my brother, or my husband, what I've baked, or my latest scrapbook layouts, or where we've been on holiday but about me - five things about me.  Not that those aren't great things to blog about, must remember that for the future.




1.  I'm a teacher.  For the past four years I've taught seven and eight year olds in a school in London.  I love my job because I get to make a difference in their lives (well hopefully).  I really love teaching History and Design Technology.  Before I taught in London I taught eleven and twelve year olds in New Zealand, quite a different story to the younger ones!  I have a funny story about one of my students, lets call him Steve.  Steve had a habit of saying what he thought out loud without thinking about he consequences.  One day I came to school looking particularly rough, I'd had a cold and was very tired, and I had no make up on.  Steve asked me (very innocently)   Miss C, why have you got pen marks under your eyes?  I raced next door to the mirror to check, and what did I see, just my dark circles!  I made sure I was wearing make up the next day!

2.  I like old school crime novels.  My favourite series is Agatha Christie's Poirot, and I'm also partial to the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, and the Alphabet series by Sue Grafton.  I like these books because while you have to think about 'whodunit' there isn't too much gore or scary things, I'm not a fan of scary things.  I also looooove Poirot on TV, there is no better way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  Any by Poirot I mean David Suchet, not that Peter Ustinov guy!

3.  I spend far too much time on the internet.  Now this is probably to be expected, I mean I (try to regularly) write a blog, but there's so much more than that!  I read lots of blogs, food blogs, mum blogs, scrapbooking blogs, photography blogs and travel blogs.  I also tweet, check three email accounts, read two New Zealand newspapers, spend far far too much time catching up with friends stalking people on Facebook, and then there's my Cityville game, and people.com.  Sad, sad, sad.

3.  I quite like the idea of gardening but never really get round to doing much.  I'd much rather leave that to Andrew, he used to be a gardener in a former life so is much better qualified, and then I don't have to get dirty!  When I do garden however, it seems to be the destructive type.  I'm quite good and pulling out things, or cutting things back, but I certainly don't like cleaning up the mess, that's a boys job!

4.  I played football/soccer for nine years.  From 1994 to 2004 I played soccer in New Zealand.  I started off as a goal keeper, and then moved up to right defender and finally ended up as right midfield.  During my first two years we lost every single game, talk about character building.  During the five years I played in the field I scored two goals, yep only two goals.  I'm sure I helped set up a lot and save a few even.  When we moved to the UK in 2005 I was sure I'd be able to find a team here, it is the home of football!  But no, it wasn't too be, there was no team in my area.  Never mind, I'm sure I'll get to play when/if we move back to NZ.

5.  I used to live in the Scottish Highlands.  In 2005 when we moved to the UK we stayed with friends in Dundee, Scotland for a while.  It soon became obvious that while we loved staying with our friends, Dundee wasn't the place for us.  Andrew found a job as a gardener on Attadale Estate in Lochcarron and I worked in the best pub in the village, the Strathcarron Hotel.  Lochcarron is a teeny tiny village on the west coast of the Highlands, about an hour and a half west of Inverness.  This was a very remote place, no broadband, no freeview TV, and not many people, about 1000.  We had the best time up there and even used a Highland name for our Chicken, Eilidh.

So there you go, five things about me, happy Friday everyone!

So there you have it