Let the celebrations commence!

5 is a magical age. To say it's been longed for is an understatement. And so, the celebrations have begun. Up at 6:30am, a frantic ripping off of paper, a quick, reluctant breakfast, dressed for school, and off! Then back home and time to play, rollerskate, fall, fall again, fall some more and nearly twist ankle, Skype the grandparents, and dinner, cake, and bed.

Is it just me, or does she suddenly look a year older? I think she does and she thinks this is marvellous, but if it happens to me too on my birthday next month I won't be happy.

Other people's birthdays take their toll on some people. It's hard when everyone else seems to have their birthday 'first'. Especially when you suspect that your sister has managed to sneak in two birthdays since your last one. It's enough to make you take to your (mother's) bed for a little sulk. - Not that he didn't fair well out of it. He is the owner of a terrifying pair of rollerskates too (remind me to ask my doctor to up my blood pressure medication).

But he did help make Orla's second birthday cake. Oh how I long for Tesco. I made a cake for her to take to school two nights ago, then another for her actual birthday for candle blowing out purposes, ad today I start making cakes for her birthday party tomorrow. I think I may have burnt the *actual* birthday cake because I was daydreaming about just handing over my cash to Tesco for something that takes much less effort and looks more professional.

And so, with that reminder, I must get on. There are rooms to be cleared, shopping to be done, balloons to be modelled, cakes to be made and decorated, brand new pirate outfits to be washed ALREADY, and apartments to be cleaned and decorated before tomorrow's big party. (And I might eat the rest of those Smarties)

Choices, choices, everywhere, and not a Cheerio in sight.

So, I suppose I could now call myself an 'Expat'. Without looking it up in the dictionary I suppose the definition is 'someone who leaves their home country and moves abroad to live.' However, I think more accurately it might be 'someone who moves abroad and on discovery of products (any) from their home country whoops with glee (inwardly)'.

I am intrigued by the whole consumerism thing I've decided. It came as a shock to me how little the german supermarkets had changed in 30 years compared (probably) to how much ours have grown and expanded in terms of choice. When I was looking for pasta sauce in a jar, I was, I'll admit a little horrified that there was little choice beyond choosing between one with basil, the bolognese one that actually includes meat (! that just seems wrong to me when it's not refrigerated) and another one that I didn't recognise. When I'm in the UK why, we literally have shelves, if not a whole half aisle or more of choice. There are probably a dozen different brands and these days even the supermarkets own brand is usually 3 brands where you have a premium version, a budget version, and a something in the middle version for those who are not feeling extravagant or miserly. But why do we need so much choice? I'll admit I am a bit brand loyal in my pasta sauce choices, but sometimes I do think 'mmm.. actually I might go for that one cause I fancy something that is a bit more basil-ly/ garlic-y/ etc'. But more often than not I either stick to the ones I always go for or go with what's on a special offer. But despite this, I am still a bit shocked not to have the choice at all. I'm beginning to suspect that I might actually be expected to make the stuff myself in order to tailor the basil/garlic/etc ratio to my requirements. I mean good lord, I've come here to cook? Not just stir?????

It's not just the pasta sauce section that suffers from such limited choice. Take bin bags. First off I struggled to find them. Initially I put it down to the fact that they do a lot of recycling here, so maybe they just don't have as much stuff that just has to go in the normal bin as we do. But then, I noticed that there are lots of places that sell bins, indeed I have spied quite a lot of very attractive, brightly coloured bins that take my fancy, but I've just not been able to find the bin bags. So then I discovered a shop that sells bin bags. One kind. I don't even know what kind they are yet, but I just bought them anyway, so pleased was I to have just found some. Maybe you don't spend too much time thinking about bin bags, but I seem to have tried nearly every kind you can get. In my not so big Tesco where I used to live we had a bother with their standard 'tie-top' bags in that they were too thin and would rip every time we took them out of the bin full. I also tried their standard 'drawstring' top ones and didn't like those either. Then of course their are the ones for all the different types/sizes of bins, the recycled ones, and our favourite, the somewhat sturdier 'heavy duty' bin bags. Occasionally I would forget this was the one I was after, and would purchase the 'garden' ones, or even sometimes the 'rubble' sacks. When they are all black(or sometimes green, or white), and the Tesco labelling not really that different between them apart from the name it's hard to tell, and you can't really unroll them and hold them up to the light to see how thick they are like a pair of 40 denier tights.

I've talked to Stevie about this whole choice thing. He is not really the ideal person to talk to about this as he is perfectly suited to the way of life here and I think is somewhat odd in that he has very little brand loyalty to him. "Oh, I just need shaving foam. Anything will do.", but he does understand that he lives with a person that spends a couple of minutes examining bananas before making a final choice because of their need to have them perfect. This often means we have no bananas or very expensive bananas. Now we just have bananas - with marks, bruises, and other bits and bobs that I don't like, but I'm still working on the German that will allow me to say "Hold on Mr Stallholder, let me have a look at those ones 3rd row from the back, 5 bunches in....nah, they have a black ridge on them. Wait, what about the ones 2 down from them and 4th in from the right? mmm...maybe not, they have too many dots, but keep them aside just in case they're the best you have". No here, I ask for bananas, he picks them up, and I just have to say 'Great, thanks'. Ha, ha, ha, I know, I probably sound mental being so pernickety about bananas, but it's just one of the many things that make me the lovely person I am. Oh, woe is me on the banana front....

Stevie thinks the way it is here is right. That we don't need endless choice, that life is simpler here, and maybe they've got their priorities right; that instead of wasting time weighing up which cornflake might taste better, they just buy THE cornflake, and stop thinking about consumer products the whole time. But me, I always quite liked that about food shopping. I'd get a little 'ooh!' of excitement when I'd see that there was a new brand of yoghurt, or that a brand I was already familiar with had now branched out into a slightly different area with a couple of new products. Have you seen the new Cadbury's chocolate cheesecakes and things? That was the last one that made me go 'ooh!'.

So here I am, where the only area of massive choice seems to be in Paprika crisp world. Why? Why? Why? I treid a different supermarket yesterday, called 'Neu und Gut'. I didn't hold out much hope for it. It had all the glamour from the outside of a pop-up flea market shop. The doors looked rickety, you could see toilet roll just piled up in the window in a scabby manner, but in we went. And I kind of fell in love with it a little bit. They had some British goods. A whole display stand of 'boxed' McVities Digestives, Milk Chocolate Digestives, and Hob Nobs. I stood in front of it and more than likely chuckled out loud. I bought some digestives and some milk chocolate digestives. I'm not that fond of digestives, but the kids might like them, and I would rather have had plain chocolate digestives than milk, but I was not leaving that shop without them. God knows, they probably cost me about 16 Euros, who knows, but what price is a little taste of home?

Sshhh! Loose lips, and all that malarky

Let's just all have a nice cup of tea and forget about it.

I think it's fair to say that most women don't always tell their partners everything. I'm sure I am not alone in taking 30 - 50% off of the price of fundamentally everything that I buy, and then can't explain why I have no money left. See the Tesco-no-money-to-pay-scrabbling-around-on-floor-behind-till-for-pennies blog entry.

Sometimes it just makes life easier. There's no moaning, no shouting, no harking back at the past for misdemeanors thought long forgotten. Sometimes it's better to just not say anything at all and everyone's happy.

Could you imagine what someone might say if they knew that you had been out at the shops in the morning, and then maybe later, say 6-ish hours later, your neighbour came to your door to tell you that you had left your car with the rear passenger door wide open and the whole thing unlocked, and a whole bunch of stealable things inside??

I imagine that their first comment is not going to be "Wow! We must really live in a great neighbourhood that nobody has touched a thing.". So I think we should maybe just keep this between ourselves, ok?

If something has to go wrong today, please let it be...

...my bankcard getting rejected at Tesco with a massive queue of people behind me including a mummy from the playgroup who will no doubt pass on this little incident to all the others when we as usual don't make it on Wednesday. Ok, check.

There is no joy to be had in this situation, especially when my only other 'form of alternative payment' was scrabbling around in my coat pockets and purse to find £30 in change and having a shopping bill of £55. Yuck.

I had the pleasure of having to unpack the bags to find things to go back. All with a background chant of 'I want my daddy' sung in tears from Orla who wanted me to get the red nail varnish, not the green and this caused a 20 minute chanting meltdown. Well, I wanted daddy too, cause he always has cash and multiple forms of alternative payment on him, and then I wouldn't have to put the green nail varnish back along with the cake (even though I was thinking I'd need some of that when I got home to recover) and multiple other items that I quickly deemed as non-essential.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it was a breakthrough moment for me. I have often felt that I am surrounded by a peculiar bunch of people for whom nothing ever goes amiss (in the day-to-day-things-that-just-generally-are-quite-rubbish-and-embarrassing category). These people fit into my venn diagram titled I CAN'T QUITE RELATE TO YOU, and often share a little segment with the people who have perfect children who look blankly at you when you mention lack of sleep as though this is an unknown concept for them.

Now the ones that I really have no clue why I am even friends with them are the ones who fit into the even smaller segment which includes both these categories and the additional section for those who have children aged 3 and under and manage to straighten their hair, have perfect clothes and make-up, and be places for 9am. How do they do that??? The only way I could manage that is if I gave each of my children half a bottle of Medised and stuck them in the car at dawn so that I could get myself ready without 2 people helping me to lose my makeup, burn my hands as they tug the cable of the straighteners and if I wasn't a magnet for childrens food. Actually, in order to be places for 9am the kids wouldn't be eating breakfast so my clothes might be ok.

So my breakthrough moment: I started reading mummy blogs and discovered a world where people have crap things happen to them that are just like (if not worse than) the crap things that happen to me. So in Tesco I remembered that this situation happens all the time and wouldn't even make for a unique or funny blog and I thought 'ah well'. Still wish I had held on to the Madeira cake though.

P.S. the children were not dressed as elves (thankfully) during today's trip to Tesco, but it is my only Tesco-related photo, and I like it!