the secret boy in the cupboard

Hamish has started climbing into cupboards and closing the door behind him. He did this in the living room while I was out last night and Stevie said he just closed the door of the sideboard and then happily sat in there in the dark until he opened the door, apon which he just laughed. He tried it again this morning and I decided we would need to put a stop to it in case he suffocated himself in some cupboard or something, so I took the door lock off the kitchen cupboard that he never bothers with and put it on in the living room. So of course then he tried to get into the cupboard under the sink...

a box of baby books

I finally gathered together my baby books in order to sell them on one way or another. I had a look on ebay to see how much they might go for, and it looks as though you might not even get a pound for them; people just don't seem able to sell them. Anyway my sister had suggested I do a car boot sale, and to be honest when I did one just before I had Orla I did really well with my books. I sold them at 50p each, but quickly realised by the fact that my stall cleared in about 10 minutes that I was under-selling. Still, as Orla was sitting on my bladder at the time I was just happy to get out of there as quickly as possible.

This time round I think I might price more accurately. Who knows how much I have spent on baby and pregnancy and toddler books, but lets put it this way, I have 18 of them. A bit excessive, but how I enjoyed them! I am keeping back a couple of the toddler ones for the moment, but the rest have to go. I am slowly but surely clearing my over-flowing shelves and I like how they are starting to look.

I have also made enquiries into selling at the next NCT sale in Mickleover. I have tons and tons of toys and clothes and equipment to get rid of so hopefully I will make a nice sum of money from that too while giving something back to the NCT.

And finally, I have started watching some Phil and Ted's prams selling on ebay to see how much they go for. I am uber-excited about selling the pram! I am hoping to get around £200 for it even with its shopping basket damage. I am not looking forward though to sitting of an evening and sewing the hole up. Next week maybe...

it's all about the square metreage!

Yea! good news! I have used some time I would normally be wasting on Facebook to measure this house. Admittedly I did cheat a little by getting the house details out from when we bought it which handily had some of the room measurements in metres so really I only needed to measure the width of the hallway and have done a little adding up to get the full width and length of both downstairs and upstairs.

Why? Well, we started looking at apartments in Berlin a few weeks ago and were getting a bit worried about how little space we might be getting for our budget. Of course it didn't help that neither of us seems able to visualise in square metres and had no concept of what we were looking for really. I am far more used to seeing room measurements in imperial measurements.

Anyway, we had thought we were looking for 125ms, and looking at some photos online we were thinking that was going to be a stretch - some of the bedrooms have looked utterly tiny! Now having measured our house I feel like one of those people on 'Escape to the Country' who walk in to a kitchen about the size of a football pitch, and say "hmmm... I don't really think there's enough room in here for the two of us". Ah, the luxury! We currently have 96 ms and we both had started having slight second thoughts about the move if it meant having to live in an apartment much smaller than where we are now. This has been weighing on my mind quite a bit. But why has it taken me so long to get round to checking the size of where we are???

Probably the whole chicken pox nonsense. That seems to have taken up quite a lot of my time and I have been surviving on very little sleep so getting through the days practically like a zombie.

So I have sent the good news to Stevie by text - wait and see, how long will it take before he says we should just look for 100ms and not 125ms. I wonder ... a day?

Hiding from the day

It's now been three long days and itchy nights of chicken pox and I am struggling with the lack of sleep. The kids seem intent on playing up. Within the last two lines Hamish has thrown a chocolatey hand on to my trousers and then thrown himself to the ground by tripping over a fire engine and now is having a good cry. I am counting down the minutes until Stevie comes home and just wish the kids would watch tv and not make a mess...

I n e e d m y b e d

the itchy twins

The itchy twins have both got chicken pox. The spots started coming out on Friday morning while I was busy laughing at Aelish for her attitude towards people who take their children out while they have chicken pox, and lo and behold, you couldn't wipe the smile off my face quick enough as Aelish spotted the first spot on Orla's back. Hamish meanwhile was busy secretly coming out in spots under his clothes at nursery.

So we have had a very tiring weekend with very little sleep for all of us. My children seem impervious to the sleepy effects of Piriton. Why are we so unfortunate??????????

Take your tablet

Woo-hoo! I dragged my ye-olde wacom tablet out of the drawer it's been in for the past 3 years, and started using my lovely Christmas present -Photoshop. Have had loads of fun, and just been playing around getting to know the features again. Am looking forward to doing some proper work now.

Berlin, here we come! (at least for the weekend)

We have booked a weekend in Berlin for the end of the month. I am both thoroughly excited about going and breaking my heart as we are going with keine kinder! (look at that, I am practically fluent, and here was me about to order the Michael Thomas cd's, pah!). I am trying not to think about being away from the kids as it sends a shiver down my spine and hideous thoughts of 'what-if-we-die-in-a-plane-crash-I-don't-want-stevie's-parents-brining-up-the-kids' into the forefront of my mind. Not that I am a pessimist but 2 days will be the very longest I have been away from them, and it makes me feel ill. (on the other hand, I am looking forward to 2 nights of excellent uninterupted sleep)

scaling mount everest

It's getting worse. Hamish is climbing on everything and I can't turn my back for a minute. Just a moment ago he had used Orla's cooker as a step and managed oclimb on top of the big toy box and had stood up and was ready to launch himself on to the toys scattered all over the floor. Stevie thinks he will do these things once and that will be it, as i see this every day I can just see him doing more and more dangerous stunts. My nerves, already in tatters, have no place further to go.

blueberry intolerant

Today is also the day I discovered that both my children are blueberry intolerant and both managed to be sick from one blueberry each. I bet they wouldn't if they were ensconced in muffins.

New Years Quest No.1 - get Hamish to eat fruit and veg.

New Years Quest No.2 - get Hamish to put his own cars back in the car bin before I utterly cripple myself in bare feet. Pick-up trucks are the devils work!

New Years Quest No.3 - don't be too disappointed when the first two quests don't happen. (sigh)

Tiredness kills!

I am just off the phone with my mum and am left feeling a bit gloomy. I happened to mention the problems I have come across looking into Orla's school application (should we be in Germany at the time we need to apply) and it launched her into a big thing about change not being good for kids and how she doesn't think that Stevie can understand how people can be brought up in a place and just settle there - or words to that effect. Anyway, it seems obvious that she is trying to say that she doesn't want us to go. But in real terms it won't make a whole lot of difference to our families as we will see them just as much from Berlin as we would from here. And, it would take about the same amount of time to get to them from Berlin as it does here!

The problem is it just seems far away. Well there's that and the fact that there is no way my parents would get on a plane to come over. But the way she conveyed this was more like we would be doing terrible damage to our children by taking them to a foreign country and potentially sending them to school there, away from all their friends and things they know. If we had announced that we were moving back to Scotland (away from all their friends and things they know) it of course wouldn't be a problem at all. Ok, so possibly they wouldn't have the language barrier to contend with ... but I don't think that's such a big problem when they are still just 2 and 1.

Meanwhile, I am getting quite into the idea of Berlin. I have stopped reading my 'living in Berlin' book - primarily because Hamish has hidden it somewhere, and am now on to my Berlin guide book, where I discovered that there is a Frank Gehry building near the Brandenburg Gate. I have also been reading about all the galleries and shops and that has got me even more excited!

Hamish has been helping with the list of things to throw away by becoming really destructive in the past 24 hours. I have been sellotaping books and fixing toys like never before. I think it is the tiredness as well. We have had 4 nights of truly rotten sleep with him waking up every 2.5 hours and then wanting up at 5.30 am every day. It's killing us. This morning though Stevie flipped and gave him Calpol and stuck him back in his cot and lo and behold he slept until 8! I think the problem is that he is just getting too much day time sleep. Some days he would happily sleep for nearly 2 hours in the morning and the same again in the afternoon and for his age that's possibly quite excessive. So today given the 8am get up time I cut out his morning nap so we'll see if that has an impact tonight at all. Though I still let him have an hour and a half this afternoon cause I just wanted a break.

the lists start here...

So it seems to have started. I am in the throws of list-writing. I am going to have lists for everything from 'things we will sell/take with us/ throw out/ give away' to 'the bare minimum of things we'd need to buy apon arrival if we go literally just taking big suitcases'(Stevie's idea cause he could probably manage to live there with just the contents of a small rucksack, and is not like me who needs 'things'). This will be my favourite list; it's like a great big shopping list. I'm starting with an allen key, as I reckon we will need to go from the airport straight to IKEA.

Last night we went through all our (ok, 'my') CD's to decide which we wanted to keep for the car/throw away/sell. Stevie pronounced that all mine are crap, but I am not the one who owned quite a few Erasure CD's when we met. I have surprised myself by being quite happy to get rid of pretty much everything. I thought this was going to be really difficult (especially when I get to my list of things I really cherish that I absolutely have to keep/take with me/cherish in Berlin). Onwards and upwards!

I finished my picture for baby Lucas's christening this weekend. I am quite pleased with it, though afterwards I thought I maybe should have added a little blanket to hang down his left side and am not sure that Aels will like the red lettering. Carmella thinks she'll like it and is sure that Aels has some red in Aidan's room. I also started my pottery class again last night. It was the first time that I went and had no ideas about what I wanted to do. Normally I feel like I am brimming over with inspiration, but the overwhelming tiredness that we are both suffering from at the hands of the kids is to blame I think. Anyway, I think I still had the last Twilight book in my head so I made a bowl from a mold and decorated it as a dog (wolf) in a forest. I think I might give it to Carmella when it's ready.

Is it the fridge that is keeping me here?

Grrr....we had a long chat last night on Skype with our friends in Berlin. We had some questions and they had loads to tell us and it was quite an eye opener. I came away from it feeling tired and a little bit more worried about the move. Stevie of course just sees the positives and I think that might be making me look at all the negatives more. So I went to bed feeling a bit sad and annoyed and confused with Stevie bombarding me with questions about whether it is the wardrobe and fridge that are keeping me here!

It's not as funny as it sounds. There are things that have a lot of meaning for me and things that we worked hard to get and things that I thought I'd keep forever. I feel that Stevie is happy to just walk away from everything and plans that we just go abroad with one suitcase each and pretty much start from scratch. Ugh! Anyway I am going to write a list of all the things that are dear to my heart and take it from there. Let's hope it's not more than a suitcase-worth...

new year, new start?

I decided that I wanted to get a diary this year and record things that the kids did and the changes in our life over the course of a year, but realised that I'd started enjoying reading other peoples blogs and how much it sometimes feels like reading diaries. How nice... a guilty pleasure! Anyway maybe just maybe I'll kick a habit of a lifetime and manage to keep this blog habit up, cause I have never been that good with keeping diaries going any longer than January. Plus this way I get somewhere to stash a few photos too.

This year seems like a good year to do this. We are looking at moving to Berlin in the next few months, and the kids are at a stage where every day they are changing, developing, and saying funny things. I hope 2010 is a good year for us....let's see!