Tagged: food

Mine

I try to be a good mother. I really do. It’s at the top of the list of things I’d like to be able to do properly, like ride a horse and sword fight at the same time, and knitting. I keep The Moo warm and dry, and make sure she has nice clothes to wear so that she can look fly when them fashion bloggers snap her street style, innit. I also endeavour to keep her fed and watered, and to change the straw in her cardboard box every now and again. See? Good mothering, for the win. Go me! Yay me!

Only there’s one thing I’ve noticed happening which is starting to piss me off a bit, and it kind of gets in the way of this good mothering business, cos it makes me not be a good mother very much at all.

Moo keeps nicking my food. MY FOOD. Mine. She STEALS it. Right in front of my face. Just HELPS HERSELF like she has higher authority over me, or summink. I mean, hello? It’s not like I eat a lot anyway, but when a baby-faced criminal is swiping the good stuff from my very plate without even so much as a ‘please may I taste your hummus, oh darling mother of mine?’ then BAM I find myself lying in bed at 3am with a growling stomach and a simmering resentment to my only child. Egad.

Apples. Biscuits. Crisps. Sandwiches. Alphabetti spaghetti. Yoghurt. Chicken goujons. Toast. Lettuce. Cucumber. Chips. Broccoli. ALL FOOD WHICH HAS BEEN STOLEN FROM ME IN THE LAST FEW DAYS. That’s not a bizarro shopping list. That’s a farking CRIME SCENE, mate. She is having a laugh. I give her exactly the same food as me, on one of her special plates, and still she half-inches my grub. Even if we’re having a cuddle on the sofa and I’m sipping a cup of tea, she’ll be like, ‘Tea! Tea! Tea? Tea! TEA!’ until my head explodes. But I ain’t that stupid – she ain’t nabbing my cuppa. No way, no how.

This is just a precursor to when she’ll be nicking my clothes and make-up and giant lasers, isn’t it? I’ve tried firmly discouraging her from grabbing my food, but I usually end up saying, ‘No, Moo, that’s mummy’s cake. That’s your [much smaller] piece there, on your plate. Eat yours. Not mine. No, not mine. No, Moo, NO FOR THE LOVE OF JEEZUS JUST EAT – oh, you’ve eaten mine. Oh great’ ad infinitum.

Am I being a tad over-sensitive with this? It’s OK to NOT share your food with your kid, isn’t it? Or should I just accept that what’s mine is hers from now until the end of days?

Hair

Gave myself a bit of a squeaky-bum moment t’other day upon lifting the lid of the toilet and discovering there what I thought to be a GARGANTUAN SPIDER but was, in fact, some plughole hair that I had deposited within after my shower earlier that morning.

It really did look like a spider. Why there’d be a spider in my toilet, fark knows, but ne’ertheless, I did shriek a bit and flail momentarily before realising that yes, it was just HAIR. My hair. There’s no one else here, so it has to be my hair. I doubt Moo has been shedding copious amounts of spindly dark hairs, unless she has been secretly collecting them for her amateur voodoo, so – with my marvellous powers of deduction – t’was my hair.

Aside from it being plughole hair (which we all know to be the most heinous and foul-smelling hair in existence) it just struck me exactly HOW MUCH farking hair I appear to lose on a daily basis. I seem to empty that plughole almost interminably. I am AMAZED there is any hair left on my actual head. Seriously, that follicular Shelob was FARKING HUGE. Like Godzilla’s hairball. Godzilla was hairy, right? Right? No? Shit. Well, anyway, if Godzilla had been hairy, its hairball was sitting in my loo yesterday. True story.

My hair is very fine. It doesn’t look it, cos it’s wavy and somewhat wiry, and sticks out from my head at all angles, but I don’t have a lot of it, which means that from some viewpoints I can look a bit patchy on the ol’scalp. Has always been this way. Years ago I went to my then-GP and tried to convince her I was going bald but she laughed in my face and told me to come back when I had a real disease. Now I refrain from googling ‘female hair loss’ cos I think WE ALL KNOW what happens when I google symptoms. Yeah. Can everyone say LUPUS? I reckon if I google ‘help-me-for-the-love-of-Jeezus-I-am-losing-all-my-GODDAMN-hair’ then I will just end up convinced I have diabetes, alopecia, scabies or Tropical Ooga-Booga Monkey Virus – or all four – like I did all that time ago. And I don’t have those things. I just have fine hair.

Usually it does not bother me so much. I have accepted the fine hair burden. I adjust hair styles accordingly. Although I WILL NEVER HAVE A FRINGE *sob* which is a shame as I love fringes. When I was preggo, it was GREAT cos my hair was temporarily thick and lustrous. Then it all dropped out. Then it went back to being fine again. Now it’s dropping again. I have not had another baby. This is not fair.

Why is my hair dropping out? Why do I have hair-spiders dabbling in my toilet bowl more often than not? Is it my shit diet? Not that I eat shit. You get me. If so, what do I eat to stop the madness? And, most importantly, will you still love me if I’m bald?

I would just like to ascertain that hair seems to have NO TROUBLE WHATSOEVER growing ELSEWHERE upon my body. FFS.

Asda

Me: ‘I just need to stock up on some nappies. And baby wipes’

Ex-husband: ‘OK, let’s go to Asda’

Me: ‘Cool’

[we go to Asda]

Me: [frequently] ‘OMFG IT’S ONLY A POUND’

So I come back with:

nappies

wipes

cheap shoes for me

socks for him

sanitary towels (erm, for me)

razors

bubble bath

cocoa butter

biscuits

more biscuits

bread

cheese

ham

salad in a bag that’ll last about five minutes before turning brown and creepy

strawberries

apples

blueberries

more biscuits

baby food in pouches in case I feel too lazy to feed Moo properly

pesto

rice

tuna (me: ‘OMFG it’s so CHEAP! Is it on offer? For the love of Jeezus, BUY ALL THE TUNA NOW’)

and finally, the most essential…

plastic bat and ball. For Moo. It was only a pound. Honest.

I should not be allowed in supermarkets. Esp not cheapo supermarkets. That’s almost SEVENTY POUNDS worth of ‘cheap’. FFS.

What was the last thing you bought that you didn’t really need?

 

 

Sugar

Sugar. The white stuff. The devilish, dastardly, bastard sweet white stuff. I can’t get enough. I love it. I’m addicted. I knock it back in shots. I smoke it in roll-ups. I inject it straight into my veins. I’m hooked up to an IV of the stuff right now. I rub it on my teeth to get that sugary hit. I even snorted it once, but that melted my septum and now my face has collapsed.

I exaggerate. But yeah. Sugar. Farking evil buggering shite. Where did it come from? Is there such thing as a sugar tree? A sugar bush? Actually, sugar bush would make a good stripper’s name. Sweet and hairy. Sticky and tickling. I’m rambling. I’m rambling in a nonsensical manner cos I’ve had some sugar contained within some biscuits and it’s befuddling my brain cells. This is what sugar is doing to me: it makes me talk arse. It rots my already fragile and decaying teeth. It makes my skin so sensitive that if I am scratched my flesh goes all red and warm and bumpy, like I have the Red Warm Bumpy Plague or something. It clunges up my scalp and makes it go all flaky and weird. It makes me use words like ‘clunges’ which aren’t real but kind of are. Sugar is nefarious.

‘Give it up!’ I hear you cry. ‘Just cut sugar out of your diet! It’s really easy to do that. And you’ll feel so much better. Your skin will unclunge itself.’

Yeah yeah, smart-arses. ‘Unclunge’ is so not a word. And, seriously? Sugar. What the actual fark? It’s in EVERYTHING. Even bread. And bread is savoury. I swear I saw sugar listed on the ingredients of some hummus. Bastard hummus makers. It would not be a simple thing to remove sugar from my diet. My diet consists of: biscuits, bread, chocolate, and fruit. Except for the fruit. Which is SUGAR anyway, just a fancy form of it with a scientific name. Wait – WAIT A FARKING MINUTE – is there sugar in GIN??

People who don’t eat sugar are weirdos anyway. They are usually the ones who don’t let their kids eat cake, or play with toys made out of plastic. But maybe they have a point. Maybe they know something we don’t – maybe the sugarless freaks will smugly inherit the earth, and live in yurts and wear hessian robes, while all the sugar addicts dissolve into a gargantuan puddle of sticky viscous flesh. I am getting slightly paranoid now. This is also a side-effect of sugar consumption.

OK so I need to cut down on the sugar. I need motivation. Determination. Self-control. And for someone to remove all the sugary stuff left in the house before I hoover it all up through my nose like a desperate starving addicted sugar-obsessed hobo.

My nutritional health is in the balance. How can I cut the crap?

And – seriously – is there sugar in gin? Cos I am in real trouble if there is. *frets*

Lunch

I love and hate Cbeebies in equal measure.

I love that I can switch it on and instantly calm The Moo into a state of bog-eyed wonderment which totally distracts her from the tantrum she was having, or while I’m changing her nappy, or from poking me into consciousness while I try to sleep off a gin hangover on the sofa. I love the number raps that Sid and Andy do. I kind of love Abney and Teal, and Charlie and Lola. I also love trying to guess which of the presenters is going to mentally crack and go on a frothy-mouthed gun-toting rampage first (money’s on Katie).

I hate (this list is longer but I’ll refrain from going into full detail right now) farking Balamory. I hate the repetitive trailers, which means I now hate ABC by the Jackson Five, which is a crying shame, cos it’s an ace song. I hate the RELENTLESSNESS of the programming and the SHEER PERKINESS of the presenters. Do they ever have a bad day? They would if they ran into me. I would crucify them. Bastards.

But most of all, I do hate… the lunchtime song.

Aficionados of Cbeebies know what I mean. ‘Is anybody hungry? It’s time for LUNCH’ pipes the irresistibly chirpy Cerrie as a montage of impeccably behaved children flit across the screen, washing their hands – MADNESS! Who ACTUALLY gets their kids to WASH THEIR HANDS? – and then eating everything placed before them with gooey smiles on their darling faces. All to the bumpy, rhyming, happy-sappy lunchtime song.

LIES. That is not lunchtime.

THIS IS THE FACE OF LUNCHTIME:

Stare into the face of lunchtime doom and despair...

Obviously, I have totally mistreated my daughter, which will account for the expression of direful banality on her precious face. Obviously, providing a lunch of falafel, cheese, grapes, tomato and cucumber has been a terribly upsetting experience for her in every way. Upsetting enough that she felt THE NEED to toss it all on the floor, in violent protest at my meagre offering, no doubt. I mean, Jeezus, what is wrong with me? I thought I was providing a healthy, balanced lunch. One that the Cbeebies team would be PROUD to farking sing about. But no. NO NO NO. The Moo is not happy. THE LUNCH HAS BEEN REJECTED. I am a bad mother, clearly.

So the opening bars of the Cbeebies lunchtime song kind of fill me with an icy dread… and then it’s farking Balamory so really, I lose on all counts. Turn off the television? Well, I would, but you see, it’s become this little ritual now that I flog myself to desperation with, kind of like picking at a scab until it becomes infected and then your leg falls off.

I am really really really hoping Moo is not going to be a fussy eater. Fussy eaters, in my view, end up the subject of programmes on Channel 5 where the title is something like My Baby Will Only Eat Crisps! or Look At My Farking Obese Child! This Is A Result Of Her Refusing Her Lunchtime Falafel When She Was A Baby, Y’Know! Or something similar.

How can I get Moo to eat something at lunchtime? She invariably gets hungry a bit later and grazes on fruit or raisins or cheese or, damn it, cake. Am I doing something wrong? She throws her food about and eats mere morsels whether we’re out somewhere else, at home, or even if it’s earlier or later than usual. I’m starting to think it’s the damn high chair. THE IKEA HIGH CHAIR OF DOOM.

Or am I destined for my days to be punctuated with…

‘It’s time for LUNCH’ and then…

Oh the HUMANITY

*hysterical weeping*

 

 

Excellent Cooking Skillz

It’s no secret that I am an excellent parent. This has been said to me on many occasions, usually by the voices in my head, but they’re very supportive so I tend to listen to them wholeheartedly.

I have recently been inspired by another truly excellent parent and inherently-skilled crafter, the uber-magnifico SAHDandproud. He’s been posting photos of the wonderful creations he and his son have, um, created together in the last few weeks. The castle they made is a thing of pure beauty and, at the same time, exquisite terror. You can see it here if you have nerves (and bowels) of steel.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own skills. I have several. Unicorn rearing, gin quaffing and muff taming are some. But – and you may not know this – so is COOKING.

Yes, I am an excellent cook. You have only to look at the sheer joy on Moo’s face when I present yet another delicious concoction for her delectation to know that I, indeed, have cooking skillz.

So with some latent force of magnanimity, I am SHARING my skillz with you folks. It may become a series of awesome kick-ass recipes, but, to be honest, if you do this recipe every day for your child for the rest of their lives, they will thank you for it, and stare at you with eyes shining with tears of happiness from now on. I guarantee.

Seriously. It’s easy. It’s quick. It’s nutritious. And approved by blind Belgian nuns. And what higher accolade than that of Sister Annunciata’s? I don’t know. I hear even the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is a fan of this recipe. And I only served it to him because he begged me.

Have I bragged enough? Are you champing at the proverbial bit to see what Moo – the lucky, lucky Moo – gets to eat for lunch every day? I bet you fecking are.

Here it is, my SPECIAL COOKING TIME RECIPE, entitled, simply, ‘Crumbs of Glory’:

(colour added for verve and excitement, like what they do in Good Food magazine)(allegedly)

If you want to recreate this at home, you need the following:

  • falafel crumbs
  • cheese crumbs
  • chipstick crumbs

And that is all. To cook, place all ingredients on high chair tray and watch as baby demolishes everything without eating a morsel. Applaud self for maximum effort with minimum fuss. Go sit on sofa and watch TV.

Finished!

So simple, so fulfilling, so excellent.

You’re welcome.

Beetroot

The beetroot glistened in the candlelight. She gripped it within her fist and ran her tongue slowly across its tangy surface. ‘I love beetroot,’ she breathed. ‘I love to taste it.’

The breath caught in his throat. ‘How does it taste?’ he managed to say.

Her mouth closed over the beetroot and she mmmmed softly in reply. A bead of sweat appeared on his brow and traced down his stubbled cheek. ‘Oh. My. God…’ he groaned. The beetroot was a brilliant, shiny red, like a precious jewel. She held it firmly.

Then she took a huge bite out of it and swallowed. ‘Yeah, it’s all right,’ she shrugged, and popped a Twiglet in her mouth. ‘I fucking love Twiglets, though.’

Fecking heck, that's sexy

Christmas by Numbers

1 Christmas tree

5,000,000 pine needles on the floor

3 missing baubles, suspected consumed by baby

16 dirty nappies

0 nappy bags

34 carrots on the floor after Christmas lunch

0 parsnips eaten

1 turkey, decimated

52 turkey sandwiches wrapped in foil, to be eaten

17 boxes of savoury crackers for cheese

0 cheese

2 bottles of gin

0 tonic

20 dodgy green triangle chocolates left in the Quality Street tin

100 plastic ball pool balls

0 ball pools

78 plastic ball pool balls that won’t fit back in bag, of which

23 ball pool balls stuck under sofa

67 new noisy toys, of which

34 don’t have OFF switches

3ft sq of floor space left empty and toy-free

387 TV programmes watched, of which

2 were OK

89 times the Cbeebies panto was watched

1 relative successfully avoided

23 relatives unsuccessfully avoided

9000 shoppers successfully avoided during Boxing Day sales

1 new pair of boots needlessly bought cos they were IN THE SALE

0 amount of pounds left in back account

2 cheques sitting around till banks open again

£1.35 scraped together so we can buy some bread

0 bread in shops

20 bits of plastic cutlery from IKEA scattered on floor

50 bits of plastic fruit scattered on floor

2 pink glittery wellies scattered on floor

2 slightly fuzzy-round-the-edges parents slumped on sofa

1 manic baby

some of these amounts are approximations

 

If I Wouldn’t Be Judged Harshly, I Would Say…

If I wouldn’t be judged harshly, I would say [...] out loud.

MAHAHAHAHA oh, BritMums, what a rather large can of worms you’re opening this week! I really LOVE this blog prompt. I’m so going to write something controversial and totally certain to get me judged harshly. Which is why you did it, really, innit. You sly old blog, you.

So what can I say? If I wouldn’t be judged harshly, I would say that I give Moo cake – and I mean proper cake, with sugar in it and everything – probably every day or so, and I DON’T CARE WHAT ANYONE ELSE THINKS, out loud.

She likes cake! Any sort of cake. She likes pasta and vegetables and fruit and cheese as well – she just most definitely likes cake the most, definitely absolutely. Her eyes light up at the sight of it. She makes a weird keening noise until we give her a bit, then shoves it in her mouth as if WE’D NEVER FED HER BEFORE, EVER. I realise this might alarm some people, who are now convinced I am somehow harming my child by letting her become dependent on cake, like a drug-addled fairy sponge junkie, but please – before you call social services – let me reiterate: I do not give Moo a lot of cake, and more often than not, it’s part of something that I am eating, and frankly, if you think I’m going to give a significant amount of my cake to a baby, then you are ridiculously insane.

I happen to think that my baby should be allowed cake/chocolate etc, in moderation and as long as they do not have it morning, noon and night – and brush their teeth, obvs – than be denied something that they will inevitably encounter later in life and, probably, go bat-shit crazy for. When I was younger my mum had a weird hippy friend who gave her kids carob. CAROB. Fecking CAROB! And carrot sticks as ‘treats’. Mahahahahahaha! And now her kids have grown up to be slightly unhinged adults. My brothers and I were allowed cakes and sweets and chocolate, and we turned out all right. Well, apart from that brother but there’s no helping him, dear lord.

So judge me harshly ALL YOU LIKE – when your child comes back from a friend’s house whizzed out their brains on some illicit sugar rush, because you’ve never exposed them to this EVIL SUBSTANCE before, I won’t say a word.

Apart from ‘tthhhhbpt’.

*waits for harsh, judgemental comments to come rolling in, and eats more cake*