I love Ikea!

And I'm not ashamed to admit it! The latest edition of the Ikea Family magazine popped into our letterbox yesterday and I saved it all day to take to bed with me. As soon as I was securely snuggled under the duvet, I let the eye candy feast begin.

oooh, sleak kitchen....ooooh, yummy cushions....oh! look at that fabulous bathroom....mmmm, storage solutions....oh oh oh look at those scrumptious fabrics!

I will be headig to my local Ikea as soon as is physically possible to stock up on all the functional but gorgeous yummy products and I'll be giving their improved bathroom range a thorough inspection. We've been trying to revamp our bathroom for the past 18 months, but everything I fall in love with is just ridiculously expensive. I wouldn't mind so much if our bathroom wasn't the size of a broom cupboard. But I just can't justify spending thousands of pounds on such a titchy room. I mean, I want it to look good and I want it to be a place of peace and soothing sanctuary, but I don't want to break out in a cold sweat worrying whether Miniegg will chip the expensive countertop basin and wreck the wooden cabinet it is perched upon while giving his dinosaurs a bath. I have to be sensible (sob).

But that is the beauty of Ikea. You can have sensible (child proof) but lovely looking furniture. I don't care if it's been described as semi-disposable furniture by a certain generation X author. I love it.

I love looking at it. I love touching it. I love buying it.

And don't get me started on the meatballs...

Healthy living starts here

It's a lovely Tuesday morning, the sun is shining (for the moment) and from where I sit I can hear birds in the trees and see trees and pansies and all sorts of lovely plants springing to life.

Which means that Summer, the season of bare shoulders and legs (I don't do bikinis) is on it's way.

So I've decided it's high time to kick start the healthy living campaign. I've started off the day with a lovely homemade smoothie and intend to do a couple of days on smoothies/salad/soups. I need to lay off chocolate, bread, cake (sob), biscuits and everything 'manufactured' or full of refined sugar.

Hopefully, before long I'll feel less like a big fat frump and a bit more like the slinky vixen I know I am.

Here's my list of reason to be healthy (slim):
1. I want to wear dinky shorts when we go on camping trips
2. There are so many pretty little dresses to buy
3. I want to wear little dinky vest tops with my little dinky shorts
4. I have so much more energy when I live healthily
5. I sleep better when I live healthily
6. I need to set a good example for Miniegg
7. It's easier to waft around looking elegant when you're slim
8. I need to be as healthy as possible before they whip my tonsils out so that I can recover quickly
9. I need to make sure I'm in top baby-making shape for when we decide to plan a babyegg to keep Miniegg company
10. I want to feel gorgeous!

Anyone else out there embarking on a get gorgeous for summer campaign? Actually, why should it just be for summer? We deserve to be gorgeous forever! Fellow goddesses, follow me!

The Monday blues

Big sigh, this will probably be quite a self indulgent little post.

I have the Monday blues. Woe is me.

Over the course of the day I have procrastinated and back-tracked over issues so much that I am now completely and utterly fed up with myself.

I need to get rid of this feeling, so I'm typing it out to, well, get it out there I suppose!

I have not been very productive. I have eaten crap. I have not been drinking lots of lovely fresh juice and water to cleanse my overworked digestive system. The kitchen is a tip. And it has pissed with rain all day. So the bedroom resembles a laundry - a look I hate.

Grumble grumble grumble, moan moan moan, blah blah blah.

God, I'm even boring myself!

Right, time for a list of things I am grateful for as seen on this beautiful, uplifting blog.

Reasons to be cheerful
1. Only half an hour to go before I can collect the scrumptious Miniegg from nursery
2. My lovely husband is looking rather dashing at the moment with his sun-kissed tresses
3. Picked up some bargain camping kit today including a very funky yellow kit bag and some nifty saucepans
4. We had a gorgeous family weekend
5. Clever husband worked out how to recover all the photographs we thought had been deleted in error
6. The tonsils will be evicted in time for summer
7. There are still a couple of slices of Victoria sponge left over from the weekend
8. All this rain is great for the tatties and strawberries
9. We spotted a pair of bluetits scouting out our garden as a potential site for their love nest (pity the cat spoilt the neighbourhood vibe for them)
10. I feel a quick tidy-up while dancing to ABBA vibe coming on

So, no need to wallow in self-pity any longer.

Lets turn up the volume and belt out some ABBA hits!

Honey honey how you thrill me...

A perfect egg dip dip day

Bleurgh Monday mornings. We opened our eyes to sun and a slight chill in the air this morning but already it has turned rainy and grey. Such a contrast to yesterday...

For yesterday was a perfect egg dip dip day. We met up with some lovely friends and headed just 20 minutes up the road to lovely, splendid Chartwell. Home of the late Sir Winston Churchill. this is one of our favourite National Trust properties, mainly because it's so close to us. But also because it has a great picnic area with wooden benches and lots of space to run around and play chase or hide and seek.

The trees were still full of blossom and there were even some daffodils that still looked splendid. After a good romp around the grounds, including jumping a fence to run up the hill in search of the bluebells we could see peeping through the tress, we then indulged in some hilarious roly poly's down the grassy banks. If you haven't rolled roly-poly style down a hill or grassy bank for some time then I urge you to try it at the next opportunity. Who cares if you get grass stains and twigs in your hair? It's great fun and the kids think it's hilarious to see a grown-up do it!

Twigs removed from hair, it was then time to picnic. My mouth's watering at the memory - egg dip dip sandwiches, cherry toms and slices of Victoria Sponge that Miniegg and I had made the night before. All eaten in glorious sunshine with a glorious view and some glorious friends. I can't think of a better way to to spend a Sunday!

Oh, and I almost forgot - the tonsils have been served their eviction notice! They'll be moving out sometime in June I think. Looking forward to a tonsilitis-free future :0)

Out out out!

Well, it's a bit tense in the eggy household this morning. In half an hour I need to go and convince a consultant that I simply must be parted from my tonsils. They are no longer welcome in the eggy household. They are rude, inconsiderate, of no functional use, consistently inflict pain and heartbreak on me, give us no love whatsoever and can't even bake a decent rock cake. So I'm evicting them.

Unfortunately, I need the help of a nice friendly surgeon to serve the eviction notice.

There will be tears I'm sure. And pain. And weightloss (woo hoo!!). But it's for the best. We no longer have a mutually beneficial relationship. So be warned tonsils. Your days are numbered (fingers crossed).

Let the weekend begin

Fueled by my mahoosive pot of coffee, I managed a reasonably productive morning. So I've decided the weekend starts here.

I need to run around and make the house weekend-ready (in other words tidy up some crap so it's not still lying around come Monday morning)

Decide if I have time to go grocery shopping (I will if I get my arse in gear)

Pack a gym kit for miniegg and his first gymnastics class

Figure out what's for dinner (Greek salad? Fish? Hmm...Wine, yes or no?)

Collect Miniegg from nursery

Stop larking around on the internet and actually start Le Weekend!

Give me a prod if you hear me snoring...

I'm so sleepy this morning. Later than usual night last night with lots of lovely chat with my gorgeous hubby (why do we always start in-depth conversation jsut before we go to sleep?), on top of a busy, semi-stressful week, followed by Miniegg crawling in to our bed in the wee small hours and wriggling like a very wriggly thing.

Eventually convinced Miniegg his bed was far nicer than ours, but by then I was wide awake. I think I did fall asleep quite quickly but I had vivid dreams for the rest of the night. Can't remember what I dreamed about (dreamt about? dreamed about? dreamed sounds a bit clumsy no? dreamt feels more elegant to me), which is unusual. But I hate those nights where you think you're lying awake thinking a contstant stream of thoughts, but actually, you're just dreaming. Does anyone else do this? I'm sure I can't be unique.

Hey ho. At least it's Friday. Lots and lots of work to get through today before I take Miniegg to his first ever gymnastics class (looking forward to this!).

Need more coffee first though. Real, put hairs on your chest type coffee. Hell, let's go all out and make a whole pot of the stuff to keep me going. It is Friday after all.

What a crapola morning

Grrr. As the title says, what a crapola morning.

Got all dressed up to impress some fancy science boffins with the hope they would offer me a permanent job on a silver platter, but fear I may have fallen flat on my face.

Them: Have you ever written a clinical paper for a journal?

Me: Erm, no...

Them: Would frequent international travel be a problem for you?

Me: Erm yes it would actually I'm afraid. I'd love to travel and stay in swanky hotel rooms with mini bars and miniature shampoo I can pilfer but I have a Miniegg that needs his mummy to put him to bed.

Them: You have some very creative work, will you not miss that if you come to work here?

Me: Erm, yes I probably would...

So it looks like I'm probably going to be freelance for a wee while longer. Which is good really, as I love being freelance (in my mind freelance = free spirit. ha ha!). But given the whole global recession and all that jazz, just need to hope the work keeps coming in.

Bedtime battles transformed into sleeping cherubs

Oh my. The bedtime battles of toddlers and their parents. Sigh.

Ever since Miniegg has been sleeping in a proper bed (rather than a cot), we've endured our fair share of bedtime battles. I hate them. I hate that Miniegg might fall asleep not feeling completely loved and cherished. I hate that these tussles stress all of us out and often end in tears (not always Miniegg's). So we're trying to take more of a chilled out approach to bedtime.

Tonight nearly escalated into a classic bedtime battle. Mainly because Miniegg was exhausted and I was hungry. But I thought to myself, surely it's a nice thing that Miniegg wants to fall asleep knowing his mummy is close by, waiting to stroke his forehead to lull him to sleep? If that makes him feel safe and loved, then so be it. Boo hiss to all those know-it alls who talk about making a rod for your own back blah blah blah...

His beautiful little eyelids soon surrendered to the weight of sleep...and he started snuffling and snoring gently, cuddling teddy tightly. Is there anything more beautiful than the sight of your own child sleeping peacefully? Not many things.

I love watching Miniegg sleep and I love stealing kisses while he's sleeping in the hope they will be translated into sweet dreams for him.

Just remind me of this feeling next time a bedtime battle looms on the horizon.

Veggie pots

And now, a showcase of our vegetable pots! Above left are some sweetpeas we germinated inside over the winter. I think we waited a bit long to plant them out though as they've gone a bit mad and are resisting growing up the canes. Above right are our tatty bags. 2 seed potatoes in each bag, with the blue bag containing some very special seed potatoes all the way from sunny Scotland.
On the left is some spinach we're growing from seed - yummy with some pasta and pesto sauce hopefully. On the right are our courgettes plants. We've grown them from seed as well and with a bit of luck they'll be as successful as last year. Plan to put 2 of them into topsy-turvy planters (hanging-basket-type containers) and we'll have to find another home for the third one.


Above are our tomato seedlings - taken a while to germinate but they seem to be on their way now.






And our pea seedlings on the left here. This is the first time we've grown pea plants and I'm quite excited about it. I have fond memories of popping peas out of their pods and straight into my mouth as a small child! Hopefully Miniegg will love eating them as much as he enjoyed the tomatoes and strawberries last year.













And finally, on the right, our barely visible carrot seedlings! Not at all convinced how successful these will be as I think I sowed them too early. Ah well, we'll see how it goes and learn from our mistakes!

So that's our veggie situation as of today. Plan to start moving the courgettes and thining out the salad and spinach this weekend I think. Happy sunny days!

A wee distraction...

Ok, so I got distracted again! I remembered seeing this on the BBC website and just had to post it!

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ before those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

How many have you read?

x + 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings

x + 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

x 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

x + 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

x 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

x 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

* 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

x 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

x 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

x 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

x 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

* 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

x 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

* 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

x 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

x 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

x 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

* 29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

* 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

* 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

x 34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x

x + 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

x + 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

x 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

x 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

x 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

* 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

x 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

x 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

x 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

x 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

x 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

x 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

* 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

x 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

x 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

x + 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

x + 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

* 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

* 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

x 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

* 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

x 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

x + 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

x + 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

x 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total = 35. Not bad! Although I have to admit to not remembering the exact plot/storyline of many of them, even though I definitely read them! Honest! Guess that means I should go back and read many of the classics again. But some, I'll save to read with Miniegg. He's only 3 but an avid reader already.

Tra la la, hum de hum...

Another sunny day here, so if I manage to actually focus and do some writing of the type that pays the bills, I'll head out to the garden and take some photos of our vegetable pots. We don't have space for a traditional vegetable plot, so we grow everything in pots and big bags instead. We've also got some great topsy turvy hanging basket-type planters that worked really well for the courgettes last year.

So enough dilly dallying. Work now, play later.

The good life

What's on the menu?

This year, we've already started the veg growing project and we have:

Tomatoes (from seed and some bought plants)
Strawberries (from last year)
Courgettes from seed
Potatoes
Peas (from seed)
Spinach
Rocket

Will post some photos soon of their progress.

Egg dip dip

So what's egg dip dip all about then?

Well, egg dip dip sandwiches are essential for all our family picnics. Really, they're just your usual egg sarnies. But we renamed them egg dip dip some time ago. The name started off as an easy way to describe to our toddler the best way to eat a soft-boiled egg, and then it became the logical name for egg sandwiches too!

We can't go on any family adventure without egg dip dip sandwiches. It just wouldn't be the same with cheese or tuna. It has to be egg dip dip.

Yum yum.