*Furtive eye movement*

Ever since wifey went on a special course for parenting under 5 year old boys, we've been using some of the techniques to give us an unfair advantage when dealing with the lad. Well perhaps its better to say we've used some of the techniques to level the playing field a bit since neither wifey or I condone hitting, shouting or hiding under the dining room table as a legitimate response to discourse, that does put us at an immediate disadvantage at times.

I now kneel down next to the boy when I want to talk to him properly about something important. I put my hand on his shoulder and try to make eye contact. This is currently proving hilarious, it's as though he's perfected the sparkly eye technique from The Men Who Stare at Goats, and he never actually looks at you for more than a couple of seconds. In fact I've learnt more about how his cute freckles are coming out than I have about anything else in my attempts at discourse.

Occasionally the battle cry of "No! Naughty daddy, you're not allowed to look at me!" comes out, but more often than not we have our conversation whilst a brief wrestle occurs to keep him from scuttling off under the dining room table.

Still, it's a start.

Sometimes

When it all gets a bit too much and being a grown up sucks, I dig out my teddy and give it a jolly good cuddle. You can see from the photo that Ted is well loved- Ted was given to me on the day I was born and we were pretty much inseparable until I went to university.

When I went to uni, Ted was too precious to take, so I took Panda instead. He's now as worn out as Ted is. This past week has been one of those weeks and Ted has had a lot of attention. To cap it all I managed to wrench my shoulder getting the wee lass out of her cot this morning.

Sometimes I just wish it was all as easy as it seemed when I was little but now I'm the person who puts his arm round the shoulders of a little one and says it's all right, and you know, for them it is, because parents are magical like that when you're little.

Night all.

The mysterious disappearing posts

You may have noticed, keen eyed reader of my blog that you are, that a couple of posts from last week didn't survive the weekend. I thank you for your kind comments on them but given the subject matter, two deaths in the family, and given my mum's ever increasing ability with her netbook, after some reflection I decided to remove them.

Whilst I found the whole process of writing the posts cathartic, on reflection I decided it wasn't appropriate to have the subject matter in the public domain because of the distress it could cause others.

Next week will be a funny old week, it starts with two birthdays, continues with a couple of funerals and ends with our eldests birthday. It's going to be a long old week, perhaps wifey can bake me some more of her magically yummy cakes to see me through.

The dark secret of my watch

*Note to wifey: I haven't lost my lovely Fossil watch you kindly bought me for my birthday several years back, I just don't know precisely where it is. Like your passport that time, which I found tucked inside a book on one of our 8 large bookcases*

water resistant, not bomb resistant

I've had a Casio digital watch for about a year now. I've reached that age, my mid thirties, where blokes diverge. They either spend hundreds or thousands on a watch because their penis is too small or they feel inadequate in other ways, or they buy a cheap watch that does the job because they've got better things to spend their cash on. I'm satisfied with the proportions of my willy and definitely have other things I'd rather spend my money on, so I spent the princely sum of £6 on a Casio F-91W.

Although the watch looks like a classic 1970's Casio, it's actually of a more modern design, some point in the early 1990's in fact and just made in a classic styling. My buddy Miles has a similar concept watch, based on the Casio calculator watches some brainiac at school would always have, so he could prove that his mental arithmetic wasn't up to much. Cost him more than £6 though. A piece of completely untrue and spurious maths on my part that I've just spent about 30 seconds making up, makes the current inflation adjusted value of a late 1970's Casio digital watch about £12,000, which makes the £6 I spent on this awesome value.

The watch does however have a dark side. It's beloved of terrorists the world wide apparently. It's used as the timing mechanism in bombs by crafty cowards who don't have the courage of their convictions to blow themselves up. According to this list, every detainee at Guantanamo was checked to see if he was wearing my very watch.And a chilling number of them were.

I would like to say to my readers I am a law abiding, peaceful, watch wearing person who holds no truck with detonations, either remote, timed or by manual means and would encourage any other Casio wearers to adopt a similar mantra to this: "My watch is for telling the time. And reminding me of when the Goonies came out at the cinema."

Gents Clothing at K&Co- guest post

Back in the dark days when all people used to buy online were CD's, DVD's and video games, the idea of clothes retailing online would have been an anathema. Most of the point in buying clothes involved trying them on and ensuring they fit (i.e. they don't make you look fat) and the hassle of sending them back if they looked daft or didn't fit made the idea of ordering them online seem daft.

Thankfully in today's world of high speed broad band and free deliveries and free returns, retailers like K & Co give a much more persausive argument for using the internet and not traipsing outside.

K & Co has it's genesis in those catalogue mail order companies that your parents might have used a few years ago and indeed still offers weekly payment plans- it's site proclaims you can have a new shirt for 75p a week but whilst it's nice to know the options there, I tend to like to own the shirt on my back and there is no problem buying the stuff outright.

In terms of mens clothing, they stock all the usual brands like Diesel, Fred Perry, Bench and Firetrap that you'd find in a high street department store, without the aggravation of having to rummage through the rails in store, only to find that they've got what you want in the size that would fit a scrawny 12 year old but nothing bigger. There is also the added bonus that your better half can't divert the womans department of whatever shop you're in and spend a small fortune on clothes for herself.

So he's dead as well then

This week has not gone well and it's only Thursday evening. On Tuesday my half brother Russell was found dead and this morning the nurses found my Granddad has passed away in his sleep overnight. The fact that nurses found him might suggest to some that he was old (he was) and decrepit (well he was in his 90's) but the old fella was about as stubborn as anyone has ever been. When my Nan passed away 6 years ago, it was in many ways a surprise that she went first. She did has osteoporosis and was about 4 foot nothing but that wasn't what finished her off. She was diagnosed with lung cancer and a brain tumour and it turned out to be a very fast race to see which one finished her off first. Granddad was actually fairly ill at the time it was a bit of a surprise that he outlived her to be completely honest.

Over the next few years he was in and out of hospital but as recently as a couple of months ago he was up his ladders cleaning the barge boards on his bungalow. He still kept his metal turning lathe in his garage running and I've never met a man so good with his hands.

During the war he worked for De Haviland,  which folded into Hawker Siddley in the 60's and then BAE. He worked on a lot of precision engineering projects and this was reflected in his hobbies. He built model railways which he kept in his loft. And by built, I actually mean built. He made the model trains, using his metal working tools, from scratch. I remember him showing me a few the last time I saw him, seeing them for the first time as an adult and appreciating the skill that had gone into making them.

He was a curmudgeonly old sod at times too; he sent the Boy a Christmas present but not the wee lass because he'd never met her. I'd talked with mum over the last couple of months to arrange a joint trip down where I could bring both the kids so he could meet Fifi. I guess this is never going to happen now.

I'm going to miss him a lot. The funny thing is I'm not really upset at the moment, I'm emotionally drained this week and it hasn't sunk in yet.

My poor old mum has been put through the ringer this week, her first born and now her Dad suddenly passing away within a couple of days of each other. It makes me want to hug everyone in my family and never let go but the kids don't understand and they didn't really know either of the late parties.

Lets hope nothing else goes wrong this week, I don't think I could cope :(

Talking turkey. And then eating it

Sadly one of the things you won't hear the late Bernard Matthews saying is his trademark "bootiful", on account of him being the late Bernard Matthews. Whilst the passing of the great man is something we all noted with sorrow, his titular company, Bernard Matthews Farms, is still going strong and has embarked on a campaign that shouldn't be described as "a turkey is for life, not just for Christmas" since it does involve eating the bird but the sentiment is pretty much spot on. I happily scoff pigs in blankets all year round and have never been afraid to pick up turkey instead of chicken whatever the time of year but there does seem to be such a mind set on only eating turkey at Christmas that Bernard Matthews Farms have drafted in the eccentric but rather awesome Marco Pierre White to help people turn on to the idea of using turkey in cooking for 364 other days of the year.

As well as the fact that turkey is often a cheaper alternative to other meats, which in this time of economic peril is always handy with a family to feed, it's also a pretty tasty and healthy meat too. True, when I scoff pan fried turkey thighs in a parma ham and blue cheese sauce, I'm probably not extending my life by much, but in comparison to using other meats, in more sensible cooking, turkey fares pretty well. If you take a look at Change Your meat not Your Menu, you can see the incredible difference that doing something as simple as putting turkey in your spag bol rather than minced beef in terms of the saturated fat you consume makes. With two small kids in the house, we try to have a varied diet but we are also conscious of the amount of fat and red meat that they eat. We eat a lot of poultry and oily fish, and with chicken now often costing as much as steak, we're increasingly using turkey when it comes to cooking at home.

Mr Pierre White has come up with a few recipes of his own you can use, should inspiration abandon you. From reading through them, they're of a level that a kitchen novice like myself can manage too. I guess his input is in the creative side, ensuring that the ingredients complement each other and give an overall pleasing taste. This would be in complete contrast to a friend of mine who once substituted Weetabix for oatmeal in a recipe and didn't tell any of us. I wandered around with what felt like half a ton of concrete in my stomach for days after that.

Variety is the spice of life and next time you think about bunging some chicken nuggets in the oven, try something a bit different instead. Cooking your own food isn't exactly onerous, even posh people find the time to do it (and you don't get much posher than Nigella Lawson, she seems to never be out of a kitchen) and there's really nothing very daunting about it. In the time it takes to warm those saturated fat filled nuggets, you could have made stir fried turkey with ginger and let me tell you, if I'm coming round for dinner, I'd know which of the two I'd prefer!

 

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Partage propulse par ebuzzing

Daddy Blogging

It's been a couple of years now since I started this blog about my journey into the uncharted realms of parenthood and it's been an interesting one. Along the way I've written about the pang of returning to work after paternity leave for the Guardian, far too many posts about poo and an exceedingly large number of posts about being up at the crack of dawn.

Even though I've only been at it for a couple of years, I've seen the landscape change. I wasn't in the first wave of daddy bloggers, let alone the first wave of mummy bloggers this side of the pond but I've seen the numbers swell almost as much as my missus has and she's been at it over twice as long as me. There are a lot more dads writing blogs now, so hopefully not as many blokes are getting told to be a real man when they get upset over something that's happened to their kids, as though expressing emotions makes you some kind of sissy.

I remember the exceedingly tall, bearded and charming Tim who writes Bringing up Charlie winning all sorts of awards at last years MADs and thinking well done to him at the same time I was thinking a small element in his victory was probably the fact he was a bloke and that got all the mums to vote for him as they were too competitive to vote for each other :)

I even remember being top 50 briefly in the Tots 100 before 1,000's of people registered and I dropped to a more respectable hundred and something. I like to be part of parts of the parenting community you see but there are some aspects of it I tend to avoid. I don't like the endless memes that have proliferated. To me they miss the point of writing a parent blog (although I dallied with them briefly I'll admit) because they're so many of them now you can do a post a day for a week without having to have an original thought in your head. I see so many comments on twitter about people wanting to write about this or that or whatever that I think do it! stop faffing about participating in other peoples things and do your own thing! Write for yourself not for your audience. Content for contents sake is a bit pointless in my book, if you've got nothing to say, say nothing. I always have something to say though.

I'd much rather read one original thought that ten cribbed ideas. Even a post that's a response to someone else's idea is better than doing something by rote. You might as well still be at school doing homework in my book.

I've seen stats recently that show us dad's are still in a tiny minority when it comes to parent bloggers, so perhaps there's still more a community feel between some of us than there is in the mummy world. I dunno, it probably helps that chaps almost always have used the internet for years before moving into the whole blogging realm, whilst it isn't necessarily the same for mums. I'm fond of saying when it comes to virtual willy waving that I hand wrote my first website in HMTL back in 1994 while I was a student at university. It was a site that reviewed student music gigs called Swing Your Pants and it used the command almost as much as a Geocities page would have. 

Still, it's changing, even for us dads. Cision have a Dad's top 10 (I'm in it), and there are even some Brit's attempting to infiltrate American top 25 daddy blogger lists (Tim beat me there again!). As parenting blogs have gone more mainstream, the dad's have become the niche that mums were a few years ago. I think this is terribly ironic.

I saw the dot.com crash and saw a load of websites I used and knew people at fail  and know that trends change and parent bloggers won't be the flavour of the month for ever but you know what, I do it for the blogging, so I don't care!

So he's dead then

Yesterday I found out my half brother Russell had been found dead in a caravan he's apparently been living in. My mum left this piece of information for me in a note which I spotted and read before she had the chance to leave after she'd been looking after the boy. She'd found out the day before when her other granddaughter phoned her in tears to tell the news.

At the moment that's it, there's no further information, whether it was murder, suicide or a terrible accident, only the cold hard fact that he's dead.

I didn't know Russell really, I have faint memories of a boy dressed in unfashionable clothing (unfashionable by today's standards but obviously quite in at the time which would have been the late 70's) when I was little. My mum had him when she was very young and didn't have me until a good ten years later I think. I don't know for sure, it's somewhat of a mystery since it's never something my mum has particularly wanted to talk to me about so, being a bloke I've never pushed. In fact, I think she's mentioned more in passing to wifey over the years than she has to me really. Perhaps talking to someone you haven't brought up yourself is easier.

I do know from snippets that my mums first husband wasn't very nice to her but that's about it. Certainly, as far as I know, aside from the few fragmented memories from being properly little myself, I don't think there's been much contact between us as a family and Russell until fairly recently. I have no idea why, and perhaps in her own time my mum will want to tell me.

Some time in the recent past though Russell wanted to get back in touch with us all. He had several long conversations with my mum and expressed an interest in meeting me and my brother, as well as wifey and the kids. At the time I was ambivalent to it all. Although he was blood by dint of a shared mother, was he really a relation to me in any other way? I didn't think I was particularly interested in meeting him, after all I have met quite a lot of extended family at various events and it's always been a bit awkward.

Which makes it odd that the first thing I did once my mum had left yesterday was promptly burst into tears. It turns out that maybe at some point in the future I did want to meet up with him and find out about him on my terms. Perhaps I wanted to see how much of my mum went into him and whether we were alike in any ways I could attribute to a shared mother. Unfortunately it took the possibility of this being taken away from me to realise what I wanted, which just goes to show what a blooming stupid bloke I can be at times.

Of course there are real people out there, his Dad, his kids and his ex wife for starters, as well as my mum, who have all been much more affected by this than I have but I still can't but help feel upset by it all.

I need another cuddle with my teddy....

Guerrilla warfare

It's been about 5 or 6 months since the Boy's war of attrition started. It was one of the reasons we decided to let the kids swap rooms and give the wee lass the larger of the two rooms. Every night without fail we have the "But I don't like my room" moan and he tries to bed down for the night in our room.

We've tried everything from leaving his big main light on to giving him books and stuff to read, all to no avail. On the nights we manage to get him to stay in there, it's often a case of dumping him in his bed and legging it to the door before he escapes out of the room (he's a very speedy chap). After ten minutes of wailing and crashing about he often climbs into bed and goes to sleep.

On the times he doesn't go to sleep and carries on shouting and banging around for half an hour or so, we end up putting him in our bed until he's sound asleep. When he's sound asleep, he's really asleep and I can just pick him up and carrying him to his own bed.

Just as an indicator to how deeply he sleeps, when he was coming up to 2 years old, I popped in to check on him before we went to bed ourselves. He was asleep but a poorly fitting nappy meant his sleep suit, cot and duvet were soaking wet. I managed to take him out, give him an entire outfit change, remake his bed with fresh sheets and get him back in without disturbing him. Thats a heavy sleeper.

It's not the ideal situation but in cold weather it is handy since it means my side of the bed has been warmed up a bit.

Having said that, if he could explain why he doesn't like his room, it might help. We're in the process of redecorating it and I had a bit of a spooky incident whilst painting it the other night. It was about 11pm and I was slapping paint on with the roller and having a merry old time but I got the distinct impression I was being watched. Nothing. It got so bad my shoulder blades were itching and I had to finish the painting looking at the corner of the room where the feeling was coming from. Probably spooked myself but it was completely different the following night when I did the second coat. Perhaps there is a very good reason why he doesn't like his room...

And then I got a hug

I had a couple of traumatic conversations with the boy while I was away at the Shell V Power Network of Champions event. It's really the only time in his almost 4 years where he's gone to bed and woken up without me being there.

The conversations went something like this:

Me: Hello M'laddo
Boy: I want you
Me: I'll be home in a couple of days. Love you.
Boy: I really want you
Me: I know but I'm a couple of hundred miles away
Boy: I really really want you
Me: What have you done today?
Boy: Daddy?
Me: Yes?
Boy: I really really really want you. Now

Well you get the gist, and it didn't really happen that quickly, it took almost an hour. All I could hear from Fifi were exclamations that she had a football sticker- she occasionally grabbed the phone and shouted excitedly down it at me but that was it really.

When I got back to sunny St Albans on Saturday lunch time I had to stroll in the bright sunshine down to the museum because there was a fossil handling session for kids which wifey was running, with the assistance of the two little ones.

The boy played it nonchalant but Fifi bounded over to me and gave me a massive hug and said she loved me. That was magic because most of the time I only get the occasional mum's-not-here-so-you'll-do attention from the wee lass, so to actually get a really fierce hug was spesh.

I did manage to give wifey a furtive hug as well, which was no mean feat given the large number of kids causing merry bedlam around the place.

Away for a Bit

I don't think I've technically spent more than a night away from since the boy was born nearly 4 years ago. And if I've spent a night away, he was too small and runny at both ends to notice. Still, here I am sitting in a room on the 5th floor of a hotel in Bloomsbury laughing hysterically at the thought anyone would pay £8.50 for soup on room service. I'm sure some people do, but that's their problem not mine.

Pizza for dinner has I've been told mollified the two of them somewhat but it's still not going to be normal to bunker down for the night without slightly holding my breath that the two of them are going to wake up at any moment. Big thanks to wifey for holding the fort in my absence.

So what am I doing at the moment? I've done the where but the why is a little more involved. A couple of months ago I was contacted by the PR agency working for Shell (or perhaps better, Royal Dutch Shell Plc to give the group it's proper name) and asked if I'd like to take part in a programme they were going to run called Shell V-Power Network of Champions.

Shell are running a social media campaign and looking to engage certain groups from their 4 biggest markets- the UK, German, the Netherlands and the Philippines. I've spent the day sitting in a room full of people I'm slightly in awe of. One chap has over 200,000 followers on Twitter, and James Allen, the chap leading the UK contingent even has his own entry on Wikipedia. And it's mostly true. Pretty much everyone else involved is from a motor blogging/journalism background and looks very professional and then there's me, a parent blogger, feeling somewhat out of my depth and in need of chocolate*.

I think this is a real opportunity to engage one of the worlds largest companies with the concerns of our community. Okay, I will be asking them what stuff goes really really fast, and whether they reckon Jeremy Clarkson has to be stitched into those Levi's nowadays but lets face it, there are more parents in the UK than there are F1 fans aren't there? Personally I want to know about fuel economy, whether their fuels are better for my car than just filling up at the supermarket and the whole ethical philosophy of Shell. We all need petrol/diesel if we have a car, it's not something we can really avoid is it?

I'm off to their research facility tomorrow, so if you have any questions you want me to ask them, leave a comment, follow me on twitter and ask, drop me an email (address is in the sidebar) or have a look at our hashtag. Shell have promised they are going to be honest with us all and I'm certainly not going to accept no for an answer, I have my C grade at A level chemistry to see me through!

Wish me luck people, I'm going in...



*although I am resolutely holding to the recommendation of Mr J Allen who said he's never met someone who talks more than him until today and that I should start a podcast. Wait for the 1st episode of the "Officially Endorsed by James Allen Daddacool's Audiorrhoea podcast"

Parrot Fashion

This weekend past was a weekend of little note, other than a rather long attendance on my part at the #stalbanstweetup. I got home rather late and was kindly allowed to sleep in rather late (until half past 9!) but I was a little disheveled for the rest of Saturday.

Still a couple of hours of stout gardening in the afternoon sorted me out. I hadn't really quaffed a tremendous amount of ale but the approach of 4am by the time I clambered into bed had taken it's toll you see. What I noticed through my bleary eyes on a rather sunny Saturday afternoon was quite amusing though.

You see this weekend Fifi basically followed her brother around, which in itself made a pleasant change from clinging to a parental leg and whining, and basically repeated everything he said and did. When he went for a wee his proved problematic but fortunately I was able to dissuade her before she got her tights down and nappy off.

There's nothing better post hangover to have an irate almost 4 year old shout, "Naughty Daddy! You get on the naughty step!" only for it to be parroted complete with annoyed hand gestures by a two year old seconds later.

In fact the only piece of original Fifi behaviour during gardening episode were the squeals of terror whenever she spotted a ladybird. Apparently she doesn't like ladybirds...

The Secret Life of Boys

I said boys dammit

We had our first parents evening last night at the boys nursery school. It was certainly eye-opening because the most we ever get from him when we ask him what he did at school is "Not anything." and then a rapid change of subject.

Like a lot of boys, he's always been a fan of Bob the Builder so it did come as something of a surprise to see him standing next to a real life digger in his school newsletter when he hadn't even mentioned the excitement in passing to us at the time.

It was pretty much like that at his parents evening last night. The teacher told us all sorts of things that he's been up to, showed us his learning journal with pictures and notes in and generally bamboozled us with all the things he's been up to but hasn't deigned to tell us about.

For instance, when he took his favourite book in last week, the rather wickedly awesome Aliens Love Underpants, for the nursery's World Book Day thingy, he dutifully told us it had just sat their until we collected it. His teacher paints a slightly different story, a story that includes the boy sitting down with her and reading it to her (or rather describing what's going on from the pictures and discussing the spaceships since he can't read yet) and laughing all the while.

To say he keeps his cards close to his chest would appear to be an understatement!

The Co-operative approach

The Co-operative isn't particularly a name you'd naturally associate with Rochdale. In fact there aren't any names I'd particularly associate with Rochdale but everything has to start somewhere and that's just where the Co-operative movement started, way back in 1844. Men wore hats at all times back then, often complimented by a moustache and women always seemed to be doing washing.
Maybe you saw the advert on Monday (7 March) about the Rochdale Co-operators and the revolution they started over 160 years ago. Of course today's Co-operators don't wear as many hats or moustaches, times have changed, but the heritage is still there and still very strongly thought of by the current crop.
Especially in terms of ethics. You may remember Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken's Out campaign from a couple of years ago, well it was no surprise that the Co-op were one of only two supermarkets that properly engaged with the campaign and actually had the best ethical treatment of chickens out of all of the supermarkets from the start.

The Co-operative Community Fund is funded by the money that members agree to donate from their share of the profits. In 2010 their generosity allowed the Co-operative to make 1319 awards to local community projects.

For example, Play Montgomeryshire provides families with free or low cost activities that give children greater opportunity to learn through play. One of their services, the Machynlleth Toy Library, came under threat of closure when its existing funding was cancelled. The library is a well-loved part of the local community, and Mieke and the Play Montgomeryshire team were determined to save it. The group approached The Co-operative and secured a donation of £2,000 from the Community Fund. As a result, they are now confident that the library will continue to serve local children. And in the current economic climate of cuts, there are going to be plenty more Play Montgomeryshires who will have a funding gap.

in fact if you're involved in setting up or bridging a funding gap for a community organisation or project, it may very well be time for you to join the revolution and look at what the Co-operative and it's generous members can do for you - and what you can do for your community!

If you want to find out more, you can have a shufty at the Co-operatives Facebook page, which has a wealth of details about what the business is up to, as well as information on it's rich history. Just don't expect too many photos of men in hats with tremendous moustaches.







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Up and Down the Stairs

For no good reason I have a splitting headache tonight. Perhaps it's lack of sleep or something else equally unimportant.

Still, giving the psychic ability of the Boy, it's no surprise at this moment he's sitting up in our bed, reading a Ben 10 book. I've been called up to assist in visits to the toilet 3 times so far. If he has another go, he's liable to sprain something to get enough wee out to make it plausible.

It's going to be a long night.

Introduction to school playground politics

On the odd occasion I've dropped the boy off at nursery I've been routinely ignored by most of the mum's. I think I've even bloggged about it, concluding that my coat doesn't look expensive enough for St Albans.

A school playground. Obviously

This morning however I have had my first proper experience of the kind of crappy behaviour some parents seem to think is acceptable. Last night the school emailed out a list of birthdays to enable parents to ensure that parties they organise for their kids don't clash.

The boy's birthday is 5 weeks away, longer notice than you'd formally give for a wedding (according to etiquette guides at any rate) and he's lucky enough to have his on a Saturday this year. Some yucky mummy saw this email last night and as a result this morning rushed out her daughters invites for ten days after her daughters birthday, on our lads actual birthday.

I'm a mixture of angry and sad. Angry that she's done it and potentially caused some upset for our lad, sad that we've now got to sort something out for the boy, who really really wants his little friends round on his actual birthday and sad for this woman's kids growing up in a house with such a selfish woman for a mother.

I'm sure she has an expensive coat which just goes to show money doesn't make you.

Stealth Dinner

Some times you just have to roll with your children's dining room habits and hope they'll grow out of them. It's that or take pasta off the menu forever...

Thanks a bunch Peppa Pig

As Fifi was up very early and wifey wasn't very well (probably a result of Fifi not being very well herself the previous day), I took her downstairs at 5ish this morning.

Cbeebies and Milkshake hadn't started so I put a Peppa Pig DVD on. I have now spent the entire day singing the Bing Bong Song at work, much to the amusement of everyone else.

Well if I have it rattling round my head, so should you: