eBaying my life 7 items at a time

So following the Valentine 'lie' thing (not exactly an incident, though it's tempting to call it such) I was standing at the sink washing the non-dishwasherable dishes when Stevie lovingly suggested "Shall I help you get things on eBay?". - This is because with the decision to move to Berlin I need to get rid of the mountain of clutter that I have accumulated and which makes me feel like me. Admittedly, the Avent bottle bag and the 2 juicers don't really give me that warm sentimental fuzzy feeling inside, but you get my drift. Stevie after 8+ years together is still the minimalist I met, and I am still carting around a transit van of 'personal belongings' (and I'm not even allowing myself to think of the personal attachments I have to some of the larger pieces of furniture).

- So, where was I? Yes, 'Shall I help you get things on eBay?'. For once, I actually took a moment to think about this one, and my first response was "Mmmm, that would be great. You can write the descriptions!", to which he said "Oh well, I'm not very good at that kind of thing". "Ok, well why don't you take the photos?". "Well, you're better at that than me". You can see I was starting to run out of tasks for 'getting things on eBay'. I KNEW IT!

Why does he do this? I utterly despise when he speaks to me like I am someone he is 'project managing' at work. It's not like I am not familiar with the techniques required to get people to do things that they don't necessarily want to do with a little gentle persuasion - my day job is getting toddlers with wills of steel into trousers that they do not want to wear when we have 10 minutes to get to an appointment. So, yes, there was no intention on his part to help it was just his way of telling me to do it. Why can't he just ask me straight? Well, I asked him that and he said that he doesn't like to because I am always on his case. He wants to just come home and have an easy time of it, and he thought I would complain if he asked me straight. So I won't go into all the boring bits but it boiled down to that in actual fact he wants to do what he likes and not have me say anything about it, while he is free to say anything to me and I should not complain, question, or anything - just do what he wants.

Now it's not like he wants to go off to the pub the second he comes home or stay out all night with strange girls, nor do his requirements of me extend to being a mousey little housewife who has the place neat as a pin and his dinner on his table for him coming home. No, no, no, what he most desires to do is leave the toilet seat/lid up and the door unlocked so Hamish can go fishing with his bare hands and post my make-up to the sewer system; and leave toothpaste all over the sink upstairs. For clarification it is Hamish, not Stevie who wishes to drop my make-up down the toilet. As for what he wants me to do with out question or complaint, well, he would like me to put the washing out and not leave it to him all the time.

It sounds really petty, but aren't these the things that drive you mental? Anyway, that was a big digression. So I have started the mighty eBaying task. I am getting as much as possible on on a Wednesday and covering 2 weekends with a 10 day sale. Unfortunately though I am only able to get 7 things on a day so it will take me forever to get rid of everything I need to. I also had made enquiries with the NCT about doing a sale in March in Mickleover and I only managed to get on the reserve list! I have so much baby stuff to sell our house will look empty when its all gone. I am starting to realise just how lazy I am too. I thought I should add the baby monitor that we have not used for at least a year into the pile of things that must go, and it was still plugged in. Admittedly I have been tired over the past nearly 3 years, but too tired to even unplug something we haven't bothered with for a year??

n.b. Don't read this if you are particularly 'green', but I have just realised we also have a Humax box that doesn't work still plugged in and on in the living room. Right! I am off to sort it out, possibly get side-tracked by a child and end up doing something else entirely leaving the Humax box where it is guzzling electricity and only able to entretain us with its little blue LED display.

Boys will be girls sometimes

On our trek to the Disney Store to purchase a special present for our girl who is now amazingly potty trained (honestly, could I be more proud, or Stevie happier that we've halved our subscription to Pampers) I pointed out to Stevie a poster in a card shop window advertising Mothers Day. I'd like to think I saw a look of shame coming across his face following the Valentines Lie debacle, but I fear it's wishful thinking. Anyway, I let him off the hook and said he can add the cost of his 'make-believe' present to my all-very-real expensive camera fund which I shall be cashing in in Germany.

I really want to be able to take nice photos and capture decent light without everything else going fuzzy. Admittedly my 40 photos of the kids a day habit is only going to get worse, but at least they'll hopefully be nicer then the 20,000 I've already taken.

Going back to our trip to the Disney Store, the surprise was how much Hamish liked it. I wouldn't say I am a particular Disney fan, so I think we have only been there maybe once since we've had the kids, but Hamish really loved it. Plus, it restored Stevie's faith that Hamish is not actually a girl in disguise watching him shouting 'car! car! car!' and 'Manny!' and showing great desire for all manner of boyish things. After a morning where they fought over who was wearing the pink sequinned beret on our walk round to the butcher's shop, this settled Stevie more than you could imagine.

We (I say 'we' but possibly mean 'I') have never had an issue with Hamish's love of girly things. Certainly Stevie is not at all bothered by Hamish playing with the little pink pushchair or sucking a pink floral dummy, or even wearing Orla's old pyjamas (unlike other parents we know who just would not tolerate it), but his forays into wanting to wear beads, clasps, hairbands, pink Peppa Pig socks, and wear mummy's make-up I think have him a little more concerned.

I don't think it is an issue at all. He just really admires Orla and wants to be like her, and he is so boyish in other ways and I see Orla wanting to be like him so what's the difference. As for wanting to 'help' with my make-up, he also likes to 'help' unload the dishwasher, and I am certainly not going to stop him from doing that! Or the hoovering which I have worked hard to make it seem like a coveted task. Ha ha!

Sex, Lies, and Valentines Day

It may be a few days since Valentines Day, but it's taken me this long to get over my gift. I have to say from the off that I did get a box of chocolates and a bottle of cava, so he's not that bad, but my main present, wait for it, was a lie about a hair appointment.

How crap is that? He told me he had booked me in to Tony and Guy at 3pm on Friday afternoon with someone called Rachel. I knew as soon as he said it that it was a lie, but he insisted that it wasn't. Why bother??? When I asked if I phoned them to check or if I turned up on Friday would I make a complete fool of myself he was adamant that I would not, but he started having to hide a smile, so that fully confirmed it as a lie. He just cannot keep a straight face when he is lying. The rotter.

So in fact I felt annoyed with him in the end, when really he should have just said nothing and things would have been much better.

I am going to get him a lie about a Porsche and an unbooked trip to New York for his birthday...

Back from Berlin (a few weeks)

We've been back now from Berlin for ages but I've been so busy with the kids I have hardly had time to think about it properly. We had a lovely time with our friends, but it has made the decision-making process even harder - not easier.

I came back feeling all enthusiastic about Berlin, loved the shops (in particular), the whole concept of Kindercafe's is fantastic, the buildings are 'mostly' beautiful (aside from where we were staying which was a bit grim), and in general it just seemed like a really nice city to be a part of. Plus of course it seems like an ideal city for me with so much going on creatively. On the other hand I woke up with a jolt in the middle of the night, wondering why on earth I would want to move the kids into an apartment in a city where they would have no garden, when surely most people move away from city centres when they have children!

When we got back we decided that the best thing to do would be to err on the cautious side and see if we could go over on a 6 month secondment with RR and see if we liked it enough to stay for longer. That would save us from having to sort out renting our house, and RR would pay for all our belongings to be shipped across which would make life a lot easier.

We had 3 potential routes through RR but with the current financial climate we weren't so sure that any would come through. To date we are waiting to hear from the last prospective route, and it doesn't seem like it's going to happen. So we think we will know by Monday, but we are going to chat about it over the weekend and make our final decision about Stevie leaving RR and going sub-contract. AARRGGHH!

Stevie is pretty much putting the decion on me by saying he is happy to try anything and it's down to me as I will be the one who will be spending my day-to-day time in the community and will have greater need to learn the language etc etc, where as he will just be going to work! And an English speaking office at that!

I feel like we have made our decision already anyway. In my mind we have always been going and my view is that if we don't do it now when the kids are young, then it will be much harder if we want to do this once they have started school and feel settled. So why not? It's not going to hurt!

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?