Wednesday 24 October 2012

Stuff and nonsense as per usual

I wish I could lie to you and tell you that the reason I haven't been in touch for so long is solely due to the children and tiredness and illness etc but actually I can't lie, it's also because of the Real Housewives of New York City. I have become obsessed with the ladies. One happy afternoon the four children were playing together upstairs and Cybil needed a feed so I sat down with the remote and happened upon them. It has changed my world. Two hours a day, every week day, my Sky Plus records a little bit of happy for me. So whenever I have some time I sit and feed Cybs for far longer than necessary and sit and watch these skinny women flit between The Hamptons and NYC and occasionally St Barts acting as if they are incredibly important people.

I don't have an awful lot in common with them. In fact I would say there are two things - all but one of them have children and they are all women (I am watching it from the very beginning so I am going on the original crew). Oddly, I am not even jealous of their lifestyle - it is way too high maintenance for me and a few of them have that 'hungry' look about them which I can't stand; (there is a very fine line between skinny and looking like you might suddenly crack from hunger and start devouring small children and babies). Also I would be a social pariah out there because of my weight. Especially now. Not even the bathroom mirror is being lenient - it shows me exactly how fat I am. My stomach has taken on a very peculiar consistency. It is a bit like what happens when you add cornflour and water together. When I lie down it looks like it might be solid, but the minute you move or touch it, it wobbles and moves like a liquid. In fact if you push your hand down on top of it, it sinks convincingly beneath the waves of fat and you can easily lose a finger or two under the liquid fat. It is odd, I'm sure I've never had liquid fat before. It has always had a firmer consistency. I wonder whether losing the weight before I got pregnant made all my fat cells really saggy and when they filled up again they are so droopy and lack lustre that I am now left with a cornflour and water stomach. It is a tad on the depressing side but it isn't forever and I am close to thinking about dieting again. I don't want to rush in to anything. I'm not over my chocolate and cake phase yet. I'm sort of on the cusp - half of me wants to rapidly lose weight and get 'my thin' again (it's relative obviously so I have to call it my thin and not thin. The RHONYC would still view 'my thin' as 'fat') and half of me yearns to just eat myself so fat that I become one of those bed bound people that can't do anything apart from eat, use a remote control and press the button that moves the bed up and down so I can sit up to eat. Sometimes I look at these people with a strange envy. I think it shows a great deal of balls to eat 10,000 calories a day until you get to a point where someone has to wash you and cook all your meals etc. I don't have the balls to do it, even though I know I could eat all day long, I know that people think I exaggerate but seriously, I could. It is only vanity and the need to look after the children that stops me. I don't have anyone to take over from me so if I got so fat I couldn't move, K would not take kindly to having to look after the children, or buy my food, cook it for me and do the washing up afterward. And I think having to give me a bed bath and clean in between the folds of my fat would tip him over the edge. Not that we can afford for me to get that fat at the moment. At the moment I am cold and hungry and we have no money for food or gas. We are slap bang in the middle of birthday season in this house and every penny has gone on the presents and parties. We literally have no money for anything. Mercifully a cheque clears tomorrow so I don't need to suffer for long. Fear not.

Anyhoo, where were we before the RHONYC? Hmmm. Oh I was ill. I have only just started to feel better - Thursday will mark the third week anniversary of my cough. I have become quite attached to it actually as it sometimes gives me that husky, deep voice which sounds so much more exciting and sexy than my squeaky, high pitched prim and proper voice, although, after four children and a lack of self discipline on the pelvic floor front, a very heavy cough is really not ideal. However after a hideous week or two with no sleep - the pinnacle was a 4am start - I finally seem to have sleeping children again. It has literally been a life saver. I was concerned that that was it and my life would never be 'normal' again but things seem to have finally turned a corner. Plus I've got my staycation at mum's to look forward to as Friday marks the start of Half Term. Thank the lordy lord.  Free food and the closest I'll get to my dream of lying in bed all day getting to weigh half a tonne. I still have to do stuff, obviously, but she does the lion's share of everything and I can spend more time than I rightfully should, sat on my expanding arse being fed. Plus her house is always very warm.  And the cups of tea just keep on coming. She is so overly attentive to a breast feeding mother, her concern for my thirst is unparallelled. She brings me more tea and glasses of water than it is possible to drink. I can't wait.

How I wish she was here now. We are so short of money that I couldn't afford to replenish the tea bags today and I am incredibly partial to a cup of tea. Luckily I was clever enough to ask K to 'borrow' some bags from work before he left so I will be able to enjoy a cuppa in the morning. It was a master stroke on my behalf, I might get him to do it more often to save money. When I used to work we never bought loo roll. I saw taking a loo roll home in my handbag every few days as a sort of 'corportation tax'.  I worked as a fairly lowly person in the PR world so I was paid a total pittance, and not wasting money on crap (ha ha) like loo roll all helped make the pittance go further. In fact, the way I played fast and loose with the petty cash to help me pay for the train journey home on a number of occasions, could potentially fall on the 'theft' side of things but it was a jolly long time ago so lets just gloss over that. Still, one of the advantages of having children relatively young (again, I wasn't a teenager - on some estates in the UK I would have been quite old having my first at 25 but I was the first of my circle of friends to have a child by quite some years), is that K and I have NEVER had money so we haven't had to adjust our lifestyle or expectations that much since having them.

I have relatively little to tell you about actually. Life is incredibly uneventful. Bea has had her birthday, birthday tea party and official birthday party (you can see why we have no money) and K and I attended his cousin's wedding in Essex which was very enjoyable, especially as the children were not invited so it was just us and Cybs. The wonderful Replacement turned up bang on time on Saturday morning and I basically threw her two children and told her where to pick up the third from, before we ran off to get to the church on time. The Replacement was, as usual, totally unfazed by the whole thing and set about making chocolate cornflake cakes and doing puzzles with them. And doing a load of washing so that they had sheets to sleep in. She really is quite legendary. And this is where you are going to disagree with me, so be prepared. I know that since I last wrote, a man has fallen to earth from space and lived to tell the tale but to me, this is not something that amazing. To be honest I think it's selfish. I know I know, it furthers mankind etc etc but I hate all this radical stuff. Take Ellen McArthur and her solo trip around the world. I don't see the point. She put her family through all that worry and trauma, she went through all that worry and trauma, plus she could have died on numerous occasions and all so she could end up where she began - not to mention the huge sums of money both stunts cost and really what for? For some reason these acts of severe selfishness are revered and celebrated. The man that fell to earth could have died from so many different things -  in particular, his blood could have boiled - I cannot even imagine such horror and his whole family where there watching. Plus, as far as I can see it was all a huge publicity stunt for Red Bull which doesn't seem worth dying for, but K assures me it was a huge leap forward for mankind and scientific discovery, plus he broke some records. Big whoop. Anyhoo, my point is, there are rather wonderful non-publicity seeking selfless people all over the place who are far better than Ellen and Felix Baumgartner. I hasten to add I am not one of them, I am deeply selfish. I have had more children than the world needs or than K wanted just because I wanted them. That is the most obvious example but I know there are loads more. I don't want to put you off me by listing them all now.

I've gone off on a tangent and I'm too tired to get back from it. I have to go.  Let's reconvene after the half term when I am refreshed and refuelled and reheated.

Arrivederci

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



1 comment:

  1. Grinning as always. Thanks Darling xxx

    ReplyDelete