ShowOff ShowCase: The One That Should Have Done Better

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This weekend is your opportunity to flaunt yourself in people's faces. That's not an offer that you get every day so I'd take me up on it if I was you!

I've decided to repeat the theme of:

The One That Should Have Done Better

Because actually we have all got those posts that just didn't get the viewings or the comments that it truly deserved. Don't leave those poor posts being teased and taunted in the corner of the blog-posts' playground by the stat-breakers. It's not their fault that they were published on a Bank Holiday or when people were experiencing blog-apathy. They don't deserve to feel inadequate, not when they've done nothing wrong.

This Saturday brush them off, stick my badge at the bottom of the post and show them off for everyone to see. Don't be ashamed of them, help them hold their heads high and shout at everyone: I SHOULD HAVE DONE BETTER!

ShowOff Showcase

Listography: My Wedding

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This week, Kate has decided to be slightly patriotic and commemorate the Royal Wedding by dedicating her Listography to the Kate that suddenly became a Catherine. In order to show solidarity to the lady entering the world of wife-dom, we need to share with the world '5 Things We Would Change About Our Wedding.'

Despite always saying that I wouldn't change a thing about my wedding, I can very easily think of five things. And they are not funny!

  • The Photographer

Our photographer was the same one that my sister had used six years before and her photos were amazing. Ours? Not so much. She got married in September with early-afternoon Autumnal sunshine; I got married at 3pm in late November. I've since come to the conclusion that the photographer could not have ballsed hers up because everything was handed to him on a platter. However, there was very little thought when it came to our photos.

We got married in 2001 before people were really using digital cameras and so his was a 'film' camera. He didn't wind the film on properly and all the photos taken before the wedding, of my husband and his family, and of my dad and I in the car and walking up the drawbridge, did not get taken. I found this out straight away and it upset me before I'd even walked inside the venue. The flash he used was too bright, resulting in an over-exposed foreground and a background entirely blacked out. In 90% of the photographs I am blinking because of the flash.

This year we will have been married for ten years and I still do not have a wedding album because the 'official photographs' upset me too much.

  • The Best Man

Absolute idiot. Let's just check here: is it acceptable to say "I don't know the bride at all but I can talk about the groom's ex-girlfriend"? Is it?! And it is acceptable to ignore the deathly silence? The only thing acceptable about his speech was when my new mother-in-law told him to shut up and sit down.

  • The Cake

My mother paid £200 for our cake, which back in 2001 was a lot of money. It was a beautiful fruit cake but the decoration was atrocious. I asked for white chocolate covering, and hand-made sugar flowers shaped like hydrangea flowers in a purple-blue sprinkled over as if they were falling down the cake. I got a white chocolate covering with icing piped around the join in the middle of the two tiers where she'd left the cake-board in (WHY?!) and pink daisies glued all over with silver dusting. I looked at it, said "thank you very much", got in the car and sobbed. We went straight home where mum and I prized all the flowers off. Too late, it was ruined. Thankfully one of the waitresses in the hotel had done a cake-decorating course and came in four hours early the next day to re-ice it whilst my mum contacted the florist who created a fresh-flower centrepiece.

  • Evening Reception

This is just a weenie after-thought here. We got married at 3pm, and because of that we sat down to eat at the reception at 5pm-ish. By the time people had eaten, terrible, awful speeches had happened (my husband wrote his that morning on a scrap of yellow envelope: I will never forgive him), toasts, and the magician (yes we did and he was brilliant!) had happened, it was 8pm plus. We didn't have a disco or a first dance, because we don't Neither do any of our family. However, this meant that it all basically fizzled out by 9.30pm which was a shame. I wish we'd had some form of evening entertainment and a small buffet. A friend of ours had bacon butties as the late-night snack which struck me as genius.

  • Preparation

We were fairly young when we got married, I was 23 and hubby was 26. Not having been married before, we didn't really think some of the things about the ceremony through, for example the actual service. Oh, we chose the vows, had readings (my sister forgot hers but I knew she would so had a copy ready) and got all the main bits correct. But I remember distinctly walking into the ante-chamber in the castle, looking at the registrar and saying "I don't know what to do!" Turns out that my husband-to-be had said exactly the same thing! We were living in Reading at the time, but got married in Cardiff mid-term and so couldn't get back to meet with her and discuss the service. We literally had no idea what the hell was going to happen! But we managed it, and yes, we both fluffed our lines.

Saying all of this above makes the wedding sound trouble-ridden. It was not, it was one of the best days of my life which I remember being distinctly happy and relaxed about. So much so, that my mother had to wake me up in the morning at 11am to start getting ready!

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Now pop over to Kate's blog to check out the other Listographies.

Igniting Passions…of Interest!

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I have been tagged in a meme created by the rather lovely Kerry, over at Multiple Mummy. The premise of this meme is that she had to go to a dinner party last week and, wait for it, wasn't allowed to talk about nappies or weaning. (I'm not sure that they actively banned her from that, but she did have to try and remember how to talk to adults about something other than her children.)

Obviously my family make my world go round, but remembering what things make me tick, ignite my passion, strive for more and give me confidence and self esteem is also very important. So what are they? What are my interests? I have found this actually quite hard. It is like writing that crappy bit of your CV when most people say things like they love climbing and then get caught out in interview, because they can’t name one other Mountain other than Snowdonia!

Ben Nevis, Sugarloaf, Scapell Fell, Mount Everest. Wahay! Go me, and I didn't need to refer to Google either!

Not the point here. What are my interests?

Ok, Here goes:

  1. Gardening: I'm pretty damn sure that the weeds in my flower bed would like to raise their leaves in protest at this point, but just because I don't have time to weed doesn't mean that I can't make things grow, because I can. My garden (when it's looking tidy) has lots of compliments from a range of people. When I look out of the back bedroom window, ours is the only garden that has had anything done to it. Other people have retained their uniform '70×30 foot rectangle of grass, concrete path to the end of the concrete washing line and nothing else' garden exactly as it was 50 years ago. The first thing we did was cut down the hedges, knock down the line and kango hammer the concrete path. I then drew a plan to scale, laminated it and within six months that garden had been produced.
  2. Photography: I know that I am not Annie Liebowitz or Lord Snowden, and that some of my photographs are a little like 'snaps', but when I whip out my Canon EOS 300D and actually concentrate then I can produce some photographs that I am really proud of. Like this one, or this one. Before The Boy, I had the time to experiment and understand the manual setting a lot more. Nowadays, I am confined to the restrictions of the automatic settings. Composition is something that doesn't take much effort though and stems from my next point.
  3. Painting: Specifically oils or silk. I did Art 'A' Level and it was my minor in my teaching degree. I get rather passionate about children being taught the correct mechanics of drawing, once they understand that, they then just have to battle with their natural ability. I used to love painting with oils and produced some decent paintings; my sister had one on her wall for years. Silk painting is something that is so effective and easy to do, everyone should try it. My number one medium though is probably pastels. My parents have still got my 'A' level exam piece on their wall, and I do feel a sense of pride when I look at it.
  4. Reading: I know, I know. It's the one thing that everyone puts on their CV and the one thing that employers groan about. I was going to say "I'm not that good at it", but that sounds wrong. I clearly can read, I mean the analysing of the text. Hence only getting a 'C' in my GCSE. However, I do enjoy a really good book be it Wuthering Heights or Divas Las Vegas.
  5. Blogging: I'm not entirely sure I'm any good at it but it's something I enjoy. My original purpose was to share a few stories and to create something for the future. However, through my reviews I've managed to gain some lovely goodies and share these with people in competitions. I've combining my love of photography in my 365 project, and I've come across some fantastic reading material (which is just as well since I've not finished my book that I started a month ago!)

This is not a tagging meme as Kerry has set up a linky on her blog for it, however I'm tagging in the hope of guilt-tripping them into taking part. Who do I want to converse with in my metaphorical dinner party? Lets go with these lovely souls:

Christine over at Thinly Spread

Garry over at The Blog Up North

Kate from The Five Fs

Helen from Jessies Crazy Kitchen

Lauren over at The Real Housewife of Suffolk County

Movie Meme: Horror Films

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Oh no! Quite frankly, NO!

Hannah, how could you? I knew it was coming sooner or later, but this theme is the worst one for me. I was quivering behind a cushion just reading your notification e-mail earlier. I am a big scaredy-cat. Years ago, a male friend and I went to see The House on Haunted Hill in the cinema and I spent the entire film hiding behind his shoulder. Six people got up and left the cinema because they found it so scary. He was a bit freaked out himself, and I had nightmares that night. For weeks after I had to sleep with the light on, and I still can't think of it without freaking out.

Hang on, I'll be back in a moment; I need to go and watch some Mr. Tumble to calm down…

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Ok, back now.

Right, having been reassured that I was allowed to just choose a film that gave me a surge of adrenaline, I am choosing this little gem:

The Frighteners

This has got to be Michael J. Fox at his best. He's not being a goofy teenager who thinks he's cool but fails miserably (Back to the Future, TeenWolf). This is him as an adult, acting an adult role of a man whose wife was killed in an accident when the car he was driving crashed off a road.

As a result of this crash, he was left with the interesting side-effect of being able to see ghosts and consequently has made his living since being a very overdramatic, and fake, exorciser of unwanted spirits. It's fake because there are never unwanted spirits, he enlists the help of three friendly ghosts to create the effects in the house. He's rumbled as a fake, and therefore has great difficulty convincing anyone of the true culprit of the murders which are prevalent in his home-town.

The only problem is that these murders are almost exact replicas of a murder spree decades before; the victimshave a number carved into their foreheads. The original culprit was convicted and received the death sentence.

So who on Earth is killing these people now?

You have to watch it!

Oh and it's directed by Peter Jackson, there you go: even more reason to watch it!

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Now pop over to Metal Mummy's blog using this neat little widget to check out the other entries! Please?

Fun on the Farm

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This is a short post and not at all witty, but we popped along to a lovely place today that I wanted to blog about so that I can remember it to use in the future.

I'm not sure if the Primary Times is a national free magazine, but it's something that we have in our area that is full of a calendar of family events, places to go, offers and shops that are suitable for primary age children, or younger. It's given out in primary schools once a term or so, and I always nab a copy because it's full of ideas for family days out and often contains coupons.

One of the places that I've seen mentioned for a while is Warren Mill Farm, near Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan. It's not too far from us and we wanted to do something today but only had about an hour or so before we had to be back home. The farm is quite small, nestled down in a little valley and situated alongside a fishing lake. It wasn't packed but there were a number of families that had obviously been there for most of the day, and I can see how that is easy to do. There wasn't a huge range of animals there, it's not a massive local attraction, but I was keen for The Boy to see farm animals as we had been playing with a little set that I'd bought in the nearly new sale a few weeks back.

We had a pleasant hour or two wandering in amongst the free-roaming chickens (whose eggs could be bought on the way out the door), and The Boy was fascinated with the warrens that spread all over the farm. He kept wandering up to them, squatting down and trying to find the 'sqwrels' that lived in there. He was wrong, they weren't squirrels, but they weren't rabbits either. Look at the photos and see if you can work them out!

How Egg-citing!

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Last year, Easter was a bit non-consequential for us; The Boy was too young to appreciate anything to do with it, besides not having any chocolate until he was one years old (something that didn't happen until June). Therefore this year was going to be different.

Hubby started the day well, he managed to take the hints from twitter and got me these.

I felt slightly guilty because he had a Mint Aero Easter egg in exchange. However, The Boy chose it by shouting "Daddy! Egg!" in the middle of Asda and reaching out and grabbing it. When this was explained, all guilt was instantly diminished!

We then gave The Boy his Easter egg, it was a Zigzillas one with a mini xylophone and a mini tambourine in. Not that that mattered, as you can see!

Having stayed up 'til half past midnight making the structure of The Boy's Easter basket ready for his Easter Egg Hunt, he helped me decorate it this morning before he went back for his nap.

Then after lunch, we had our Easter Egg hunt. It took a while for The Boy to get the hang of it, and actually resulted in daddy having to hide the eggs repeatedly throughout the remainder of the afternoon. However, we all had great fun!

Bouncy Castles v. Sand Castles

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Today we went to a birthday party. Little Miss Chatty was celebrating her 2nd birthday with soft play and then party food. When I was telling The Boy about this last night, he was able to tell me straight-away that you have cake and 'b(all)oons' at a party. We talked about the fact that there would be a bouncy castle there which he wasn't sure about, and that he'd give her a present.

As it so happened another work colleague was there with her little boy who is slightly older, Mister Rough and Tumble, and The Boy thought he was the best thing since sliced bread! Or since bubbles anyway, he doesn't really have an opinion on sliced bread. He followed him everywhere and had great fun trying to copy everything he did!

After he'd filled his Doodles with party food, we trotted off to Barry Island for half an hour playing in the sand building sand castles. It was a little parky and full of tourists. I think we'll be giving it a wide-berth on weekends until September!

Flashback Friday: The Enormous Bramble

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The past two days have seen me revisiting my old haunts in Reading, our home between 2001 and 2004. This was the place that hubby and I set up our first marital abode and I embarked into the world of teaching for the first time. My final year in my first school was a difficult one; the class had many social and emotional problems and were a real challenge, but I adored them!

We had a difficult first term which often saw me coming home and sobbing on hubby that I wasn't strong enough to win them over or 'break' their toughened exteriors, and my health did suffer with the amount of stress that I suffered in that year, but by the Summer term I had won them over. To quote one little angel (she really was!) who knocked on the staffroom door one lunchtime "I know we should have spoken to the dinner ladies, but they just shout at us. At least you listen first!"

That term to ease the flash-points I set up a gardening club to tackle the conservation area and reduce the incidents with the other children. We met once or twice a week and they adored getting to grips with the overgrown mess. It was a little metaphorical, but by the end of the year I had tamed them in the same way they had tamed the brambles.

So here they are working together as a team, and having a damn good laugh at the same time.

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Now pop over and check out the other Flashback Friday entries on Cafebebe's linky


A 'Good' Friday

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What better way to start the day than with a full English breakfast?

After a long night with one male snoring on one side of me and the other shouting semi-conscious demands of "up-py" (you work out which one was who), I was quite relieved to 'feel' the dawn break; sunlight peeking through the curtains, birds singing in the trees, silverware being delicately placed on the dining table next door to our bedroom. If the temperature last night is indicative of what the Summer will bring, I am moving to Alaska.

I've raced ahead, let me rewind. Yesterday we 'popped' up to Reading to see a couple of old friends; a few ex-colleagues of mine. We stayed with one of them in Thatcham last night having had a really pleasant evening consisting of a meal out at a local carvery (scrummy veggies galore), followed by red wine, nibbles and chat later on. The Boy decided that mummy and daddy didn't need sleep between 1.30 and 3.00am, which was marvellous because daddy had kepy mummy awake with his snoring between midnight and 1.30am. At 3.30 I fell into a state of comatosed delirium and woke at 7.25.

Once breakfast was troughed, the travelcot packed and the boot re-assembled we pegged it off to meet up with the other ex-work friend that I keep in touch with, at Beale Park. Beale Park is a fabulous wildlife park and gardens just outside Reading. It's great for children of all ages, but I think best for those under the age of 10 years. There's a selection of animals in really well thought out enclosures; nothing zoo-like, think wallabies, meerkats, prairie dogs, lemurs, storks, macaws, kookaburras, owls, etc. There's a dedicated safe area for picnic-ing in with a zip-wire for the older children once they get bored.

One of the best things about Beale Park is the train that runs around the gardens, the other is the Little Tikes Village, and the final one is the paddling pool found in the play area! This was the bit I was really looking forward to, testing out the all-in-one SPF50+ swimming costume that I'd recently bought for The Boy, and seeing him splashing around in the sunshine and having a good time.

People say that you shouldn't look back, and this is true. After we'd said our goodbyes we drove back past our old house (our first house) and the school where I first taught. On previous occasions I've felt a pang of, not remorse or regret, maybe sentimental what might have been. Not this time. I felt sorry that the residents of our old house don't care more for it, and I had a little wave of memories from my promising career, but generally I felt content. Happy knowing that moving back home seven years ago was the right decision; that the life that we have now is good and satisfying. I've kept in contact with the colleagues that matter and they have proven to be real friends, people who are genuine and caring. Everything happens for a reason, and our reason is The Boy.

Musical Memories: Sizzling Summer

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Clearly Sabina over at Deep In Mummy Matters has been getting all hot under the collar with this scorching weather that we've been having. She's looking forward (or should it be backward?) to the summer and remembering fabulous summers of the past.

So the theme this week is Sizzling Summer!  What tune takes you back to the summers of old?

I knew instantly the memory, or should I say memories, that I was reminded of. It was the summer that I first discovered my teenage freedom with my best mate (I was a late-developer). I can picture us now walking down the local country parks to spend the afternoon sunbathing, getting beeped at or a few glances from teenage boys. Ah, those were the days when my legs were decent!

The song was popular for more than it's original 1991 release date, I personally feel that it cropped up for most of the summers of the 90s, especially when I discovered public houses and their alcoholic contents!

So cast your mind back to the mid 90s when the singer/rapper was not the international film star that he is now; he was merely a gawky kid from Philly with a weird mate who didn't seem to talk. Go on, you know you want something to break the monotony. Maybe a barbeque that's starting at 4?

 


Fresh Prince DJ Jazzy Jeff – Summertime by oublierleracismeskyblog
Apologies for the rubbish quality, but Sony have forbidden Youtube to allow embedding!

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Now pop over and see the other entries on Deep In Mummy Matters where the theme this week is "Sizzling Summer"

Musical Memories

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