Is this me?

I saw this on The Natural Blue and since Mr H is something of a Simpsons fan (and fast converting the munchkin!) I thought I'd give it a go...

You Are Marge Simpson

You're a devoted family member who loves unconditionally. Sometimes, though, you dream about living a wild secret life! You will be remembered for: your good cooking and evading the police Your life philosophy: "You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head."

The Simpsons Personality Test

What a week!

I was hoping to find time to blog before this, but no chance. I've been so busy! Tidying, cooking, cleaning, entertaining the rellies plus trying to keep the munchkin calm amid the chaos. Her baptism service was really nice, the vicar was lovely, everyone arrived and got home safely and lots of food was eaten. Thanks Carmelo for the idea of veg sticks and dips....they went down really well. The munchkin's cake was slightly stressful as it didn't rise much though it was very light and tasty, a bit of umming and ahing over how to decorate it and it went immediately....has given me a bit of a bug for cake decorating though.....will have to make another one soon....next excuse for a cake I can come up with is Valentines...hmmm....sorry sidetracking...

Somehow it didn't seem too crowded with 17 of us here on Sunday, we just seemed to spread out around the kitchen and living room. At least we knlow we can do it again should we need to.

We had a great night out with Mr H's family on Saturday while L babysat for us. It was really nice to get to know J's fiancee a bit better and to spend time with the family, we haven't had a get-together since Christmas over 2 years ago. We see my family a lot, but the distance betwen north scotland and the south west of England is a long way, we'll see them all again for J and S's wedding though in April.

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My challenge now is to keep the house as tidy as we made it for Sunday, managing ok so far (but have had Mum here to stay until this morning and she's helped a lot). I really hope I can do it, it's much nicer living in a tidy organised house rather than our usual piles of chaos.

Further thoughts....

Thanks for you comments Caramaena, I have thought about becoming a librarian, sadly there are no jobs opening up around here for that either, I guess I just need to keep looking out for them, hopefully something wil come up soon. For now I'm just busy thinking about the munchkins baptism on Sunday.....there are now 17 adults coming for lunch....we'd forgotten about some old friends of Mr H's mum (almost surrogate grandparents to Mr H), when I spoke to them this morning they were actually about to call us to find out where the church is...ooppss!

So now I need to decide what to feed everyone, and make sure that there is food for the two dairy intolerant folks coming.....I think we may end up having a fruit salad as a pudding option as all the other desserts I can think of are creamy!

What food do you like to eat at a buffet? So far we're definately having sausage rolls, salad and cold ham (ooo the excitement!).....any more suggestions?

Hmmm...

Your Career Type: Social

You are helpful, friendly, and trustworthy. Your talents lie in teaching, nursing, giving information, and solving social problems. You would make an excellent: Counselor - Dental Hygienist - Librarian Nurse - Parole Officer - Personal Trainer Physical Therapist - Social Worker - Teacher The worst career options for your are realistic careers, like truck driver or farmer.

What's Your Ideal Career?

Ideas...or maybe telling me what I know....

More thoughts

Thanks to Carmelo for your response to my last post....in reply to a couple of your comments....supply work is all well and good if you can either drive to the school or live somewhere with a good enough puplic transport system to get you there, I'd love to have a scooter, used to be a dream of mine, but the oulay would be at least as bad a learning to drive so it's a non starter (plus it wouldn't give me the freedom to takle the munchkin to other groups). Shift work is something I need to think more on, but like I said I need to get a lot fitter before I really look into police work so the munchkin would be older.....

.....Argh! I don't know....just about to have a nosy at the local rag and see if there's anything in there

What early night?

Mr H and I attempted to get an early night last night, but ended up lying in bed discussing what to do about my loneliness. Thanks to being unable to drive and a dire lack of baby/toddler activities locally I've been seriously lonely since we moved down here. I survived initially by finding amy possible excuse to hop on the train back to Cambridge and meet up with my friends there, but now finances, and one of my best friends moving to deepest darkest Suffolk mean that it's not really an option except for the occasional visit. The only social interaction I have with other adults is the Wednesday baby group, for the rest of the week my day-time conversations consist of confusing conversations (of sorts) with the munchkin.

(Warning...confused outpouring of thought coming!)

Our only solutions were me learning to drive so I could get to other groups (at an outlay in excess of £400 for lessons not really an option) and getting a part-time job somewhere. I don't really want to go back to teaching, full-time teaching would leave me with no time for the munchkin and Mr H (thanks to planning and marking etc.), and part-time posts are hard to get hold of unless you already have your foot in the door. I had arranged a 60% timetable with my school in Cambridge had we stayed up there, but there's no way of doing that down there.

So that leaves me with a career change....so what do I do?

I very nearly applied for a paediatric nursing degree rather than education (I only settled on education a month before my application to Cambridge had to be in) and in a way I regret that. With a degree in maths and education I can be a teacher or.....a teacher, I'm not qualified for anything else. I could work in primary schools, but I really struggled with teaching literacy on my placements and didn't enjoy that at all. With mursing there are so many branches and areas I could have gone into....I'd still quite like to go back to university and re-train, but it's not something I could do living here, I'd need to live nearer the hospital(s) I'd be placed in, the local hospital is not involved in training and being unable to drive means that I can't commute anywhere else. It is something we could look at doing in the future, as we'd have to move house, but not at the moment.

What else is there? I have considered vetinary nursing or the police force. There is a vetinary practice locally that trains vetinary nurses and I may be able to get a post there, but could I do that part-time as I don't really want to work full-time when the munchkin is small.... I'm definately not fit enough to join the police at the moment, 2 1/2 years ago I suffered from a post viral illness that left me with a lot of fatigue, I'm basically fine now, but when I get any form of bug I'm knocked out for a few days and it takes me a couple of weeks to get my strength up to even walk the 2 1/2 miles into town and back. I'm trying to get myself fitter, but at this time of year as soon as I start getting going again, I'm knocked back down with another cold, I guess I need to just keep working on that one. I've also thought about becoming a librarian, I love books and reading and would like to encourage others to read more, but there are no jobs coming up locally there.

I'm left with going for any type of admin work going, I have had the odd look at the local paper and job websites, but there's been nothing part-time that I could get to (either by public transport, on foot or on Mr H's route to work). I guess I just need to keep looking.

Anyone reading got any ideas for lines of work for me? :-)

Good intentions....

I started the year with good intentions for the diet and, thanks to PMT and a rotten cold, they've already gone a-stray. I've spent the weekend eating junk and more junk and lots of milk chocolate orange.....ooppss. I need to get myself back on track...I do want to lose some more weight before the munchkin's baptism on the 21st. Stressing about our families coming up for that isn't helping matters.

Having planned a nice dinner on at Saturday night for all those of our generation coming down (Mum and Dad are taking the grans out for dinner) Mr H's siblings had other plans. Despite me texting to see if they'd be up for a murder mystery a week ago we only found out last night that G doesn't fancy it so they all (D, G, J and S) decided they'd go to the pub instead! Thanks for telling me! Not to worry that I spent ages on Saturday wandering around Cambridge trying to find a shop that stocked the dinner party kits and then forked out for one, and that I'd been planning what to cook. My fantastic sister (I know I don't say that about her very often!) has now offered to baby-sit for us so that Mr H and I can go out with his family since we don't see them very often and the last time we were all together was over 2 years ago. I just wish that D&G had told us they didn't fancy a murder mystery and then we'd just have had a young ones dinner. Don't get me wrong it will be nice to go out with Mr H's family, I just wish they'd talked to us.

I still need to work out what we're doing for food after the baptism. Everyone is definately coming back here (hmmm...15 adults in our small house...) and we're having some form of buffet, but apart from that I have no idea. We still haven't finalise the cake....fruit or sponge? I don't eat fruit cake, but a fruit cake will go further than a sponge cake....decisions!

Anyway, this post has taken about 1 1/2 hours to write in between cooking up veggies for the munchkin, feeding her and putting her down for a nap and it's my turn to eat now. Bye!

Looking up!

Sorry about the negativity in the last post, I'd just had enough and was using my blog as a bit of a vent. Things are looking a bit better today. We've had a look at finances and worked out that we can absorb most of the cost of the repairs to the car relatively easily (phew!). We've also had a good think about meals and shopping, browsed Sainsbury's online (internet shopping definately has it's benefits!) and worked out where we can save money on our weekly shop. It'll probably end up with us going to both Aldi and Sainsbury's but they're close to each other not too far away. It's a shame they're not in walking distance of us as that'd help the weight loss too. Mr H had to do some shopping after work yesterday (no fruit, veg or milk in the house!) and managed to spend far less than he normally does when he pops in mid-week.

The munchkin is being her usual charming self apart from throwing up all over me and her and the bath mat just as I was about to do her teeth last night (she's been fine in herself ever since though!) and tearing up a book just after I repaired it from when she last got hold of it (I really need to lean how far she can reach now as I thought she couldn't get it).

She found yesterday afternoon a little hard however, the leisure centre where we hold baby group was closed when we all got there (despite telling me that we could re-start after the Christmas break on the 3rd) so since I live so close I invited everyone round for a cuppa....oopps... When I said this there were only three of us with one more expected....2 minutes later another three drive up and there ends up being seven adults and nine children (7 babies/toddlers and the older 2 of one mum) in our living room! It all got a bit much for the little ones and some of them got very grumpy, but it was good to have some adult company in the daytime for a little bit.

Now I've got the gloomy job of getting the Christmas decorations down, I love having them up but need to get them down by twelth night, and we're out on Saturday so I won't be able to get Mr H to help then. I think I'll have a hunt aound for a nice plant to put where the tree was so it's not going to seem so empty when it's gone.

Happy New Year! (or not!)

We're starting the new year with a huge bill from the garage for the bloomin' car. That's all our Christmas money gone and more. Mr H drove it to the garage, got a flat just as he was getting there and then got a phone call at work to say that the spring (?) and tyre would cost £300. We're barely living within our means as it is, the only holidays we had planned for this year were cheap Travelodge deals or camping, but even they are looking hard to finance now, all our Christmas money was going to go towards them....argh! Mr H will have to bike to work a lot more to save on Petrol money and I'm going to have to look into budget dinners that are diet friendly (i.e. not the cheapest mince/cuts of meat.....Mr H is too much of a carnivore to go veggie and he won't eat baked beans!)

Sorry for the whinge...not really how I want to start the year, at least the munchkin is making me grin (see below) even if she's decided that since going up to see L&T sleeping through the night is a bad idea!

Hmm....starting early

This is the book that the munchkin decided to remove from the bookcase and read this morning! She's spent the past 10 minutes flicking through the pages of it!