It was just a little Latte...

I am wired, revved up, boxing, dipping weaving and feel as if I am on top of the world and can do anything and all because …I had a latte this morning.

I have achieved incredible things today which normally would have eluded me. I have completed the laundry, washed the floors, gone to the bottle bank, paid my bills, done three interviews, gone to the DIY shop, sorted the tyres on my car, dealt with the builders, ordered lights, sorted downstairs loo problem all by myself, picked up the boys without being late, cooked a hot supper, read to my boys, done the chickens, sorted the dogs, cleaned the cat litter, washed up AND put away, tidied my room, and am now able to write.

I feel like Lynette Scavco in that episode of Desperate Housewives in Series One where she’s struggling to cope with her four children until Preston and Porter are prescribed medication for ADD (attention deficiency disorder). After hearing from another Mum how these little pill are “mommy’s little helpers” she decides NOT to medicate her kids and takes them herself so she can make the costumes for a school play and be hailed as Super Mom

Like Lynette though I know I will collapse in a heap due to being over stimulated by coffee but boy what a ride!

You might be thinking why on earth a little Latte should have that kind of effect. You might be thinking was there more to this Latte than meets the eye? But honest it was a perfectly  normal latte, the reason for its amazing effect on me is that I have stopped  taking caffeine in any form for a few months now.

II have been left a little shaken by the strength of the reaction but it only goes to prove that caffeine is probably the only reason why half the things get done in this world! I also wonder if I managed to get all that done in the space of four hours today what I might have achieved if I had had a double expresso….

Not worth thinking about really as I have yet to come down from the Latte!

I hate men. I do! I do! Ido!

I hate men, I do I do I do. They never clear up after themselves and they are so uselessly impractical. Really they are. God in heaven why aren’t women in charge. Life would be so much simpler really it would.

I know not ALL men are like this and yes I know there are exceptions but in a general way men drive me to distraction and I have to deal with three of them in my personal life and God knows how many outside that, I gave up counting years ago. I mean Men are everywhere aren’t they?

Ooooooooohhhhhh!!!!!!!

OK I had better put you in the picture. Today was meant to be a perfect day. I got up at 6am. I sorted the laundry and laid the table, the dogs were let out and fed and I beat the cat to her new morning ritual of peeing on the table cloth by a) not laying the table the night before and b) forcing her into her litter tray to get reacquainted with it this morning (the cat is going senile and we are learning to live with it; just please bear with the smell of cat pee until May when she will be able to go outside for her ablutions). I was feeling pretty good, the boys were up and I even managed a cooked breakfast.

We bundled ourselves into the car and trugged off to school but all was not well. There was a soft whumping sound and the car was slightly off kilter: a puncture.

My thoughts directed themselves at the builders and the fact that they had been playing about with nails and work saws and the like outside the back door where I park my car. They had obviously failed to clear up after themselves!

I whumped home: furious as the morning started to unravel.

Boys placed in front of the TV, I surveyed the problem. I needed to change the tyre. So I looked for the Jack but no there is no Jack in this car because of course the system one is meant to use requires no Jacks. All you have to do is squirt some foam into the tyre and pump it up with a nifty cigarette lighter powered pump. In theory it all works great that is until you realise that you totally destroy the tyre in doing so which can be costly.

Ever looking to save money I had bought a proper spare tyre from the garage that sold the car to me but the blokes there had failed to give me a Jack or even the spanner so I could undo the nuts. That is of course if I could shift the nuts in the first place as they were machined on. Obviously MEN don’t get punctures!

I think the word I issued was F**K and I repeated this quite a few times with the words F*****G MEN attached to it. Luckily the boys were oblivious as they watched Dick & Dom’s Wild Adventure. I scowled at the TV. “I’ll give you wild mate!”

Of course the end of this tale has to be resolved by a man but I won’t go into details. The tyre has been changed, new ones ordered and life is back to normal….though my tail is still twitching….

Retail therapy: don't knock it

OH. MY. GOD. I have a waist! It’s brilliant. I’ve not had a waist for years and now it’s there. I can’t tell you the joy. I can actually go shopping for clothes again. You know clothes that are pretty and dare I even say it frivolous!

For years I have dreaded shopping for clothes and avoided it at all costs because invariably I would come home in tears. Every time I’d go in a shop I would see beautiful things and then try them on only for huge disappointment; those beautiful things did not look beautiful on me. It got to the stage that I just didn’t bother with things like skirts or dresses. I avoided all clothes that were short in the body as these would never cover my fat tummy and I avoided low slung jeans. Not for me the straight leg or slim fit.  Not for me a crop top or even a jumper that was not deliberately baggy. I craftily covered up my shortcomings with gillets, big jumpers and long shirts.

I dreaded the warm weather when people started to uncover. My legs certainly never got to see the light of day and as for me wearing a T-shirt please with my body! I used to say I didn’t feel the heat and would have the air con in the car at full blast so none of the Mummies at school would have a clue.

I blended into the background all 11st and 5ft 3 inches of me ashamed, saddened and ever so slightly envious of all those leggy things.  Those Size 12s and Size 10s who all looked so happy and pretty and ever so stylish.

I started to notice  my turkey neck and all those grey hairs as I became more and more critical of my looks or lack of them. And I felt old so very very old. Probably whay I decided to try ThinkingSlimmer. It has worked on my weight but although I could see it coming off I couldn’t see any changes so to speak…

So on Friday I got dressed in crumpled clothes and hid it all under a coat for my trip down to London for a lunch with work colleagues, a rare treat for me. I arrived an hour early so decided to have a look round the shops, a glutton for punishment.

I trip trapped my way to Hobbs on Regent Street, as in the distant past before children and before living in the countryside had taken its toll, Hobbs had served me well.

My heart sank a bit on entering but just as I was about to make a hasty retreat I looked at myself in the mirror and realised with a sudden horror how awful I looked. There was no way I could possibly go out to lunch looking like that!

A dilemma.

Humiliate myself in front of yet another load of unspeakably glamorous shop assistants or humiliate myself in front of my work colleagues.

I chose the former reckoning that if I did humiliate myself at least I would never ever have to confront the shop assistants ever again because the likelihood of me even setting foot again in Hobbs let alone the Regent Street store would be exceedingly slim if not impossible.

I was approached by a softly spoken lady asking if she could help me and she said it so sincerely and was so gentle that I blurted out my fears and begged her to help me. An outfit for lunch; for today.

But no short skirts above the knee…

I glanced dubiously at the serried rows of impossibly chic clothing. Rack upon rack of it and nothing looked comfortable and none of it looked remotely as if it would suit me.

I tried to enter in to the spirit of things and was offered clothes that were silent in soft grey and navy blue. No shouting these. Understated one might call them safe may be another word. And then my eye was caught by a little animal print top and a heavenly green skirt. I was expecting disaster but when I was taken into the changing room something amazing happened. I had a waist. It was really there and I didn’t look half as bad as I feared. I tried on a few more tops, things that clung to me accentuating my long forgotten form.

I ummed and awed.

Then I was shown a dress, a wrap-around animal print dress. Surely a step too far!

It felt like a bit of heaven. I stepped out of the changing room and had a look at myself in the large mirror on the shop floor. I put my hands on my hips and turned this way and that and out of the corner of my eye I spotted a fabulous bright green scarf. Grabbing it I draped it over my shoulders and took another look in the mirror. The image looked back at me and smiled and well it was perfect. I looked good. Really good.

I left the store feeling a million dollars, a lightness in my step that I had not felt in years. And do you know what: Retail therapy: don’t knock it….

Is this the end of the road for me and chocolate?

Chocolate and I may never be together again; an impossible thought I mean, I love chocolate, only good chocolate mind and the darker the better. It has to be smooth though not too bitter but with those deep undertones – and when I am feeling very naughty yes I do eat the milkier kind Galaxy and Green & Black’s Almond one.

But I don’t think I should be eating chocolate because it is bad for me, at least I think it is bad for me. Sometime ago now I read an amazing book on Depression called: Beating Stress Anxiety and Depression by Jane Plant and Janet Stephenson. In it there was a great discussion on controlling these three bug bears though nutrition.

So I took that on board. The most notable stimulant that increased anxiety and stress was caffeine so I cut it out. Caffeine occurs in all sorts of things and I successfully removed all coffee, tea and fizzy drinks such as Coke and Pepsi from my life. I also removed Dairy from my life because it clogged up the free movement of electrical pulses through my brain but there is always chocolate.

Chocolate contains only very small amounts of caffeine so technically I could use it as a very occasional treat on the caffeine side of things but on the dairy side there would be more problems. However, I am a resourceful person and I tracked down dairy free chocolate Moo Free and I still allowed myself dark chocolate: all should be well. But it is not.

Every time I start to eat a little bit of chocolate I get massive cravings to eat more and being a weak willed person I do and then it happens I turn into a monster and snarling snapping monster.

I thought at first it must be because I ate too much chocolate and was poisoning myself and then it dawned on me. It’s not the caffeine in chocolate nor is it the dairy in chocolate it’s the blooming sugar….

So I need to find a sugar free dairy free chocolate and guess what? They do one for all us chocoholics out there who can’t eat dairy or sugar: Plamil.

Now if this doesn’t work I really will know that chocolate and I will just have to part the ways…

Is the medical profession losing its humanity?

Of all the people we come across in our lives probably the ones we hold in most esteem, in awe even are those who dedicate their lives to keeping us alive. They are positively venerated and in many cases are held in high – they are almost godlike.

They see us at our most vulnerable and see much of us that others will only ever guess at, in fact probably only want to guess at, but like the man who works in the abattoir because he sees so many of us the enormity of his task means that he becomes desensitised without ever realising it.

No-where is this more apparent than when dealing with the harsh facts of nature’s ruthless efficiency; in fact one could say that man has become but a tool carrying out its job with more alarming cruelty than even nature intended.

And that is where danger lies.

I sometimes feel that we are not yet ready emotionally for the technological advances that are on offer to us and it behoves the medical profession to understand this and to look at the choices not from omnipotent ability but from the point of frail humanity.

I heard that a friend of my sister’s, whom I happen to have known for many years, has just had an abortion on the grounds of medical necessity. Not because her life would have been in jeopardy but that the 22 week old foetus she carried was extremely likely to die shortly after birth or even before it reached full term. The professionals in charge knew this thanks to the amazing pre natal screening now on offer to the vast majority of the population.

I have no doubt that every woman should have the right to choose what happens to her what I have issue with is the way in which the choices are portrayed. I have an awful feeling that the medical profession in this country is a tad too efficient for its own good and I begin to feel that there is less humanity as technology advances.

My sister’s friend was told heart breaking news; news no expectant mother ever ever wants to hear. My issue is why was she “persuaded” to have an abortion.  When she was told the news, her baby was alive; there was a 'chance' it could have been born alive. Yes, there was a 'risk' it would die before it could get to full term and it was highly likely it would never have survived even being born but why did it have to be killed off at 22 weeks gestation? Could not nature be allowed to take its course? Could my friend’s sister not have a 'chance' to have a live baby even if that baby was likely to die within hours?

Instead she had an abortion, and then was given the tiny frail little body to grieve over knowing that she had killed it herself. It is bad enough surely to have a still birth but the added guilt piled upon this woman for the sake of medical necessity is barbaric.

What need was there for all this? For she had not asked for an abortion on hearing the news, she was told it was a choice she could take, that it would be better; it begs the question better for whom?

It was certainly more convenient for the hospital, probably more cut and dried and cheaper than going for the rigmarole of a ‘proper birth’ and all the attendant bureaucracy. But I think it cruel and unnecessary.

Five years ago I came under tremendous pressure to "make sure" that the foetus I carried did NOT have Downs Syndrome (click here to go to post) even though the consultant knew that with my medical history I had a greater risk than average of miscarrying  a perfectly healthy baby. It was a risk the hospital was willing to accept, luckily not one either  my husband or I were prepared to take. 

Some will say because of that experience I am biased, perhaps I am but look at the words used: there was a "risk" my child would have Downs not a "chance" but a "risk". Funny that I am,  I percieve that 'risk' is far more threatening than 'chance'...