Katyboo1’s Weblog

It’s Valentine’s Day, as I’m sure you are all aware.  My surprise today was that the girls weren’t half as enthusiastic about it as they were about the prospect of pancake day.  It just shows that they are indeed my daughters.  Way more excited about what they can stuff down their gullets than affairs of the heart.  Good on ‘em, that’s what I say.  One has to get ones priorities right, and filling your face is a pretty high priority item, at least it is in our family anyway.

They did get cards and a chocolate heart each, so they weren’t deprived of romantic treats, but they were more interested in the fact that there was still half a cheesecake stuck in the fridge, just begging to be eaten.  I caught Tallulah staring into the fridge hungrily, head on one side like a robin contemplating a particularly juicy worm earlier.  I asked her what she was doing and she said she was ‘just looking’.  I’m glad she wasn’t just looking at me like that…

I got much Kudos from Tilly today, as lunch crept up on me unawares and we had to go out before I could make something sensible.  This meant sandwiches on the run, and they got a bag full each with some crisps to munch as we galloped down the road.  I kept apologising, they thought it was the best lunch they’d ever had, and Tilly was particularly chuffed because I weakened and let her have jam sandwiches as a treat.  She has been angelic ever since.  Amazing what a bit of wobbly fruit can do for a person.

It’s been a very quiet day today, and I am incredibly tired.  So tired in fact that this could be the shortest blog entry that I will ever make.  I am finding it incredibly difficult to be motivated to write my blog at the moment, as I really want to just curl up and fall asleep.  Tallulah and I are reading Alice in Wonderland.  The chapter tonight was all about the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and I really empathise with the dormouse.  I wouldn’t mind someone stuffing me into a tea pot if it meant that I could drift off to sleep.  I imagine it would be quite soothing, warm, dark and tea smelling.  There are a lot worse places to be incarcerated whilst trying to sleep, some hotel beds being a case in point.

Jason and I rented a very chi chi house in Southwold one year, taking the kids on holiday for the week to the proper English seaside.  For those of you who don’t know, Southwold is a very fashionable East Anglian watering hole in Suffolk.  It’s quaint and old fashioned.  The pier has an amusement arcade with all the amusements being made by a local inventor.  There is also a fantastic clock on the pier in which a metal man pulls his trousers down and has a wee.  The children think this is hilarious.  It has a boating lake, and a putting green, and tea rooms, and is rather like being trapped in an Enid Blyton book.

I’ve been going there with my parents since I was a kid.  They usually rent a place down near the harbour, which has a garden that opens straight onto the beach.  It’s lovely, but the year we went, it was full, so we found somewhere else.  It was a delightful Georgian cottage, two minutes from the beach.  The only thing that wasn’t delightful about it was the beds.  They seem to have been specially stuffed with porcupine quills.  Jason was actually convinced that our mattress had armour in it.  We ended up sleeping on the floor, which at ridiculous sums of money per week, was not acceptable at all.  It’s all very well being wholesome AND fashionable, but not at the expense of the wellbeing of your spine and sleep patterns.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have one of those Tempur mattresses, which were invented by NASA, or something.  Jason loves it more than life itself.  The problem is, because he is now used to sleeping on it (it’s rather like sleeping on a giant, gelatinous marshmallow), he is absolutely useless at sleeping on anything else.  Consequently whenever we go away anywhere he has abysmally bad sleep, moans like mad about the parlous state of mattresses in general, and is desperate to get home.  I am already beginning to pray over our bed in Canada, and I haven’t even seen it yet.  Let’s hope Canadian mattresses are of a generally high quality, or there will be hell to pay. 

I am also getting twitchy about the fact that we are going away for the weekend to visit his mother in a fortnight.  Because there are so many of us to cater for, we always stay in a hotel in Norwich which has a granny annexe specifically for families.  It’s very nice and even has its own walled garden for the kids to run around in.  The only problem is the mattress of course.

Last time we went, Jason spent the night sleeping on the sofa for preference, bolstered by all the cushions, and nearly had a heart attack when the mirror in the lounge fell off the wall and shattered on the stone floor, inches away from his head.  I have to confess it made me rather nervous as well, but as I was upstairs in a large, comfy bed at the time, not as nervous as it made him.  We had to airlift the children over the shards to get them to the dining room for breakfast the next day, which didn’t do much for his back either.

The kids love staying there, despite the broken mirrors.  They think that staying in hotels is one of the best things in the world.  Their favourite thing about staying in a hotel is the breakfasts.  This hotel does a continental breakfast buffet, and a full English breakfast as part of their service.  The children are totally enthusiastic about this and stuff their faces to the gills, so that by the time we reach Nana’s house they can hardly move and sit round like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, rocking on their chubby little legs.  They eat everything.  Oscar had to be dissuaded from masticating the napkins and table cloth last time.  Tilly spilled half a ton of scrambled egg into her lap and ate that while they very considerately made her some more for her plate.  Tallulah generally eats vast quantities of cereal based cocktails that she lovingly creates, and then washes it down with a giant raft of toast and marmite.

They really are little foodies, as long as you give them what they like.  If they could live in a world of carbohydrates, with forays into the land of bacon they would be happy.  Live fast (and fat), and die young would definitely be their motto given half a chance.  Tallulah informed me the other day that if she was given the choice between a chicken nugget and a bar of chocolate she would take the nugget.  From a girl whose first coherent word was ‘chocolate’, and who used to shake with desire upon seeing said food stuff, I find this hard to believe.  I am going to test it out when I can bring myself to purchase the dreaded nuggets of doom.  Fifty quid says she betrays her chickenistic principles.  I’ll keep you posted.