The one where we buy new wardrobes for our bedroom

Tonight we go to bed with the smell of sawdust in our lungs.

After almost eight years in our house, we’ve had some new wardrobes fitted in our bedroom. They’re called Sliderobes. I mention that because I’m not sure if that’s a common name all over the world.

When we first moved in, it was a new build house and we had a lot of furnishing to do. So we spent a lot of money on a lot of cheap self-assembly furniture. It looked okay at the time, but over the years a lot of it has started to look rickety.

So Lisa and I decided to start working on the house room by room. One room roughly every six months. But doing what we didn’t do first time round – we’re concentrating on getting the standard of finish really high this time round. Getting the woodwork perfect, accessorizing the room and getting a tasteful colour scheme established.

The first task was to replace our wobbling wardrobes. After pricing the official “sliderobes” providers, we got in touch with a local company through a family friend who quoted a really competitive price.

And today, braving the treacherous Arctic conditions Northern Ireland is facing, they arrived to fit the new wardrobes. We swiftly pulled apart our old furniture and dumped it (saving a few bits for a cosy evening fire). The guys showed up around mid-day and went to work. They might have left the front door open one too many times, letting in icy air and the possibility of a few rodents (hope not), but they worked solidly and by about 7pm we had some shiny new wardrobes!

This new installation runs the whole length of one wall, with four subdivisions – lots of hanging space combined with drawers and shelving, and all of it behind sliding mirrored doors. It makes the room look infinitely tidier. Next on our decorative checklist is getting wallpaper for a feature wall on the opposite side of the room. And then maybe some matching curtains/bedding/soft furnishings.

Let’s try this again…

Oh dear. 2010 hasn’t been a great year for prolific dad blogging, has it? Neither was 2009 for that matter. Or 2008. Or…you get the idea.

Horrible things my wife has done to me: Selling my mobile phone

I’ll admit it – I don’t use my mobile phone much. When you work from home, you’re never more than a few feet from a landline. The only time my mobile gets dusted off is when I’m going out for the day – and even then it’s only as a precaution in case the car breaks down, or I’m running late.

Still, when I was heading out the other day, I couldn’t find my mobile anywhere. Strange…it was on the charger the other day. And with that thought in my head, I popped my head into the living room and asked Lisa if she’d seen it.

Then I remembered. Pennies dropped. Things clicked into place.

“You sold it!” I spluttered, in a J’accuse stylee.Her face froze for a split second, not sure how I was going to react. Then she just burst out laughing.

It turns out that she’d sold it four days before. I’d worked out that the last time I saw the mobile, it was charging on the kitchen counter. Except I wasn’t charging it, Lisa was. We’d joked at the time about how I might have missed a few messages from my best friend…O2 Alerts.

And why? Well, it seems Lisa’s found herself a new alternative to eBay – Amazon Marketplace. After trialling it a couple of weeks ago with some random electronic items, she decided that anything electronic and unused was fair game. Hence the great mobile phone sale. And various other items. It’s all in a good cause though – she’s saving the cash for Christmas presents.

What’s funniest of all is that she knew me well enough to know that she could sell my mobile phone without telling me and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

A sample 7-day healthy eating diet.

We’re always saying that we should start eating more healthily, but the biggest problem from my point of view is actually choosing foods to replace the unhealthy stuff with. Luckily, I have a fitness freak sister-in-law who took it upon herself to free the thin person within me – and came up with this sample 7-day menu plan.

Aren’t I lucky?

Now, I tried it for a week, and it was tough going at first, but I got used to it. And having a list of ‘approved’ foods means you’re less likely to slip into your old bad habits. I’m sharing it here – mostly as a reminder to myself, but possibly because it might help other people. Naturally, there’s the usual caveat about consulting with your doctor before beginning a new diet. You – like me – choose to use this information at your own risk!

Monday

• Breakfast: porridge
• Mid morning: fruit / 2 rounds brown toast
• Lunch: soup and a roll yogurt
• Mid afternoon: yogurt
• Dinner: chicken fajitas (no cheese)
• Exercise: Take a reasonably long fast walk (choose a route and stick to it) and time it. 30 pressups with wide arms standing up holding kitchen counter and 30 with arms closer together and elbows close to body

Tuesday

• Breakfast: cereal
• Mid morning: cereal bar
• Lunch: 1 wholemeal pitta with low fat Turkey, lettuce, 2 cherry tomatoes and a yogurt
• Dinner: grilled chicken breast with Rosemary and thyme, broccoli and carrots
• Exercise: Same route but jog slowly and time yourself. 30 sit ups and 30 squats.

Wednesday

• Breakfast: 2 slices wholegrain toast and 2 eggs
• Mid morning: 1 banana
• Lunch: cold veggie pasta salad
• Mid afternoon: 4 crackerbread
• Dinner: grilled fillet steak with spinach and grilled tomatoes. Fruit salad
• Exercise: 25 min bike ride

Thursday

• Breakfast: Cereal
• Mid morning: 1 apple 2 crackerbread
• Lunch: wholemeal bagel with low fat cream cheese and cherry tomatoes
• Mid afternoon: 1 yogurt
• Dinner: oriental chicken noodle salad (1 chicken breast, soy sauce, garlic, seasame oil, noodles, mange tout, bean sprouts, carrots)
• Exercise: jog route and time it. 30 press-ups, 30 sit-ups, 30 squats, 30 lunges each leg

Friday

• Breakfast: 1 toasted bagel with low fat spread
• Mid morning: 1 cereal bar and 1 fruit
• Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich, apple
• Mid afternoon: Yogurt and 1 fruit
• Dinner: 2 chicken breasts grilled with tomato salsa, lettuce, cucumber, broccoli, roasted cherry tomatoes
• Exercise: 1 hour bike ride

Saturday

• Breakfast: 2 weetabix, 1 yogurt, 1 slice wholegrain toast
• Mid morning: 2 crackerbread 1 apple
• Lunch: 1 sweet onion chicken terryaki Subway with no cheese on wholemeal roll – NO CRISPS or COOKIES
• Exercise: Swimming

Sunday

• Breakfast: 1 scrambled eggs, 1 slice wholegrain toast, 2 tbsp grilled mushrooms, 2 grilled tomatoes
• Mid morning: cereal bar
• Lunch: omelette (2 eggs, non stick pan, spray oil, 2 slices lean ham, chopped tomatoes and side salad)
• Mid afternoon: 1/2 bagel and yogurt
• Dinner: spaghetti bolognese (wholewheat spaghetti, lean mince, onion, carrot, chopped tomatoes, mushrooms, basil FRESH, dried oregano)
• Exercise: rest day

So that’s it. Some of the exercise seems a bit punishing for sedentary types like myself, but I think the idea is to start off light and work up a bit.

Also, from looking over this, it seems a key component is the “eat little, eat often” method where you’re eating smaller snacks between meals to stop yourself from being so hungry you’ll go for the fastest and unhealthiest options!

Divorcing Mother: When your mother lets you down

What do you do when your mother is a disappointment? It’s not especially something you see covered in blogs or writing. Mothers are supposed to be practically perfect. Hold on, that’s Mary Poppins…

Sadly, I’m at the point where I’ve had to throw my hands up and admit that my mother has been a disappointment. This is not new information. In fact, when I left home for university back in 1995, it was mostly to escape her and the small town mentality that she represented.

When I was a child, she was quite wicked. Nothing I could do was ever good enough. She frequently compared me to a cousin (who ultimately ended up mostly failing at life), and had an endearing habit of beating us with wooden spoons when we got out of line. I distinctly remember wooden spoons actually breaking as the blows rained down on me.

Things changed after I went to university. It wasn’t commonplace in the extended family to go to uni, so it was a matter of pride that I’d got in. But not so much the notion that I’d moved away from home.

And eventually my mother effected an image shift from being bitingly cruel to being this dotty old grandmother figure. If you’d met her after I went to university, you’d have encountered a slightly vacant woman who seemed to thrive on embarrassing her son. And that was fine for many, many years.

The serious bit

Everything changed last year within a couple of months of my father dying. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll be familiar with the story.

Sadly, things quickly turned to crap. In hindsight, if I was able to go back to the graveside and tell myself one thing, it would be “Run. Run like hell.”

I’m not gonna go into the whole mess of a situation that arose. A family member (my sister) began acting out in a big way and caused a whole lot of trouble. I spoke to my mother and other sister about this, and urged them to deal with her behaviour. They didn’t, and she continued to cause problems.

The bottom line is that the person in question was becoming dangerous, and for the protection and safety of my family, we decided that we couldn’t visit my parents’ house in future. I’m not saying this lightly – ‘loose cannon’ doesn’t even begin to describe my sister. I could tell some horror stories, but that’s not the point of this post.

This decision – corroborated by doctors, solicitors and even a bereavement counselor I briefly consulted with – was not taken lightly. But it was met with hostility from my mother, who had slowly reverted to the bitter, sharp tongued woman I knew growing up. She alternated between feeling sorry for herself and being hostile towards me for taking this decision.

I’m painting a very vague picture here, but that’s a deliberate decision on my part. I couldn’t convey in a handful of paragraphs the pain and frustration my mother and sisters caused in the wake of my father’s death. It made an already sad situation needlessly worse.

The letter

So I wrote her a letter. She – and my younger sister – had taken to filling up my answerphone with messages asking us to get in touch. For the last fortnight. But the damage had long since been done.

Tellingly, these were not messages to say “We messed up. Sit down and talk with us and we’ll try and work this out.” They were “Poor us, how did we end up with this awful schism in our family?” And my answer – delivered in glowering mutters to the answering machine – was “Because you did nothing to stop a bad situation becoming worse. You simply pretended it wasn’t happening and then allowed the troublemaker back into your life without dealing with her.

I decided to write a letter. That letter said we can’t be a family anymore. You let us down. You let me down. And somehow you still don’t acknowledge your own part in the events leading up to this. You’ve let someone disrupt your family for 20 years. Someone who actually pushed my wife down stairs when she was pregnant and punched her own sister in front of two toddlers over a remote control.

I won’t expose my children to that ever again. And I can’t forgive my family for allowing those events to unfold and cause the pain that they did. You know what it is? I can’t look my mother in the face again for the betrayal and hurt that she caused. And yet she still perceives herself as a victim of circumstance, which makes me even angrier.

Why I’m writing this post

I’m sorry this post is so frustratingly vague. My reason for writing it is that the vastness of this episode in my life overshadowed everything else.

There have been events in my life that I want to write about, but I needed to get past this. Bloggers out there will understand that I needed to exorcise the demon before I could move on. This was a horrible, stressful, painful time in my life, and it hurt me more than I could ever express in one post. There’s a book’s worth of material in this. One post could never do the last year justice.

So I’m writing this to draw a line under a horrible chapter in my life. It’s over. It might seem harsh and melodramatic to tell your own mother never to call you again, but sadly it’s necessary.

On the plus side, there’s nothing like nastiness and adversity in others to make you realize how much you love your wife and children. They’re really been the most supportive and loving people over the last year, and I’m so glad to have them around me. The next post will be a glowing post about the children, I promise…

Happy Birthday Jakey! (or Seven Years Gone)

I have hazy memories of the day Jake was born. Most of it centers around me, in the afternoon, walking out of the hospital to a nearby KFC to get something to eat. Bizarrely, I can’t remember whether he was born at that point or not, just that the darkening skies chose that point to open. As I returned to the hospital, lightning flashed across the sky above the building, and heavy, warm rain started to descend on me.

I think I was wearing a white shirt, which implies that I’d gone to work that morning. Had I? I can’t recall. It’s shockiing how quickly the details start to get blurry.

It reminded me at the time of that episode of Only Fools and Horses where Del’s first son was born and Rodney was convinced that he was the devil. Especially when they called him Damien.

In the maternity ward, a photographer often comes around to take pictures of the newborns for their parents. In Jake’s first picture he looks like a little tough guy, eyes seemingly squinting up at the lens. Funny, that’s not how he turned out at all – he’s a sweet kid who’s battling what used to be a crippling shyness. He’s smart, funny, affectionate and handsome as hell. He’s absorbed with arts and crafts and every single day last year he returned from school with some paper invention he’d created in his breaktimes.

He’s just gone to bed, but he’s had a great birthday. On his second birthday, Jake actually hid under the dining room table and cried when his cake came out and friends and family sang Happy Birthday. That’s the kind of shyness that’s been typical of him up to now. But he’s becoming more confident, finding ways to make in-roads with new people and not being frozen in fear when he encounters new people.

This year, he was happy to be the center of attention and relished it whenever I bounced downstairs this morning and sang Happy Birthday to him. He even asked Lisa for an encore performance later in the day. And why not, it’s your day Jakey, you’re a wee sweetheart! Happy birthday, son.

Spain: Stranded in Alicante!

We just got back from a two-week holiday in Spain. I’m planning a full write-up of some of the stuff we got up to on holiday, but first I want to share the biggest disaster of the holiday.

We’d hired a car for the fortnight. Driving in Spain is pretty straightforward, and I really enjoy being able to go further afield from wherever we’re staying. Renting a car is the smart thing to do, and we’ve done it about four times now.

However, on this occasion, we’d decided to head for the town/city of Alicante. It was the biggest thing on all the road signs where we’d been travelling, so we figured that there must be something worthwhile seeing there. Sadly, when we got to Alicante, we followed the signs for the Gran Via, assuming it to be the city centre. Disappointingly, there was nothing notable to see there. Nothing at all. It was just a big, hot built-up city.

After getting frustrated about our inability to find anything remotely interesting, we stopped at a service station to refuel. We both did a double take at the pump to make sure we were choosing the right juice for the car – we were worried about putting the wrong fuel in and wrecking the engine.

So, you’ll appreciate the irony when we drove out of the station, got down the road and conked out at a roundabout. Hmm, first time I’d stalled a car in ages. So I tried again. The engine started just fine, but conked out when I tried to put in in gear. Tried again. And again. It kept conking out.

We eventually managed to get the car to move long enough to get it into a side street. So what’s wrong? Did we put in the wrong fuel after all? Not possible. Let’s check the obvious stuff – what about oil and water? Well, that was easier said than done – could we find a switch to open the hood? No. And the instruction manual was in Spanish. But after a while, I found a diagram showing that the lock was actually hidden behind the Ford logo.

Once I’d gotten the hood open, it didn’t take long to realise that it was out of water. But…we were in the middle of a residential neighbourhood, and it was siesta time.

Hold on! There’s a fountain at the roundabout nearby! We can get some water from there!

So, off I set to the roundabout armed with a small water bottle, and a beach bucket covered in sand. I skipped through the afternoon traffic and filled up at the fountain. Even that wasn’t enough to fill the water levels up enough. We’d discovered by that point that there was a Chinese restaurant nearby, so I went there for more water. Thankfully, they were open and they spoke English! I can speak un poco de Espanol, but not enough to explain car faults.

In the end, we got the engine running again. Hooray! But we’d seen enough of the tower blocks of Alicante. And in fear of our car letting us down again, we decided not to go back into the city, just to drive back to Villamartin where we were staying.

And to this day, we don’t know if we actually missed out on a golden opportunity in Alicante. Did we? If you’ve holidayed in Alicante, why not tell us what we’ve missed.

Connections, Reconnections

It’s been a funny old week in our house. We’re got a house guest, we’ve had a very uneventful 10th wedding anniversary and we’ve attended an old friend’s wedding.

Incidentally, for those of you approaching a 10th wedding anniversary, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s known as the “tin” or “coal” anniversary. Nothing more prestigious that that. Sorry.

Since I’m not a fan of birthdays, anniversaries or other ‘special’ days created to sell greetings cards, I don’t get into gifts and cards the way I’m expected to. Saying that, at least I remembered it this year. We both have a habit of forgetting our wedding anniversary, so when I reminded Lisa at 3pm on the 1st July, she was raging with herself. Yes, she’d been hoping to catch me out, but had forgotten as well!

The very next day we had a wedding to attend. It comprised a crowd that we haven’t hung around with much since our carefree university days. We kind of drifted away from them. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but as one of the first couples in that group to get married, we quickly arrived at the “dirty nappies and sleepless nights” stage. Those things that the still-carefree friends couldn’t really relate to.

Now and again, we’d end up at an event with some of these people and reconnecting with them would be great fun. They’ve kind of aged in a different way to us, and they seem in the main to be quite a warm, tight-knit little community. It kind of makes you yearn for the same thing.

At the wedding reception, Lisa and I fluttered around chatting to people, rediscovering our inner social butterflies. If there was a buzzword of the night, it was “Reconnection”. You do end up with the warm and fuzzies when alcohol and light hearted banter collide to make a fantastic night. And before we even talked about it the next day, Lisa and I had decided individually that this time we needed to maintain those connections. Not just let the moment pass.

Maybe it’s the timing – family has proven to be unreliable over the last couple of years. We’re probably both at the stage where we need to expand our social circles and invite more people in. By a strange co-incidence, we had a visit the next day. And though we were hung over in a serious way, we invited the couple to stay on and share a Chinese with us.

The end result, as the weekend draws to a close, is that we both feel tremendously positive and dare I say it, even a little bit younger. When we come back from holiday, we’re going to make an effort to maintain some of those connections and see what happens. Why not?

The Summer Holidays Have Begun

Yes indeed, the Summer Holidays have officially begun.

Do you remember when you had that last half-day at school? The teachers are busy tidying things up and the classroom looks bare with all the posters and paintings taken down and sent home. Instead of lessons, there’s a video to watch or you just idle about chatting with the handful of other pupils who’ve bothered to show up.

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Colonoscopy

You know how old stand-up comedians used to start their routines with “A funny thing happened on the way to the theatre…”? Well, a few weeks ago, a funny thing happened me in the airport. I took a quick trip to the bathrooms and was alarmed to discover quite a lot of blood on the toilet paper when I was finishing up. (Oh yeah, this post might ick you out a little bit.) There was more blood on the bowl, the sight of which made me the tiniest bit dizzy. Nothing like being in an airport, on your own and bleeding profusely from the back passage to cause a mild panic.

The thing is, it had happened a couple of times that week already, but this was by far the most frightening experience. And after all that’s happened in the past year with dying parents and cancer-stricken in-laws, I decided to take the sensible route and go see the doctor about the problem.

Beyond fart jokes, I’d imagine most guys don’t like talking about medical problems with their backsides. So doctors be warned – if we show up asking for you to check out our rectums, then there’s a fair bit of anxiety lurking in the background. Otherwise, we’d just shelve the problem and ignore it.

Luckily, my GP decided my symptoms were serious enough to warrant a rectal examination. Which was uncomfortable for all concerned. On reflection, I’m glad I didn’t make that quip about “Now you’ll have to marry me!” when he withdrew his fingers. Why? Because he asked if I’d been having the bum sex. Er…no mate, I’m married. With kids. “Oh well, we have to ask,” he waved the topic away. But now I’m paranoid. Do I have an ass that looks like it’s being penetrated by beefy blokes on a regular basis? Oh dear.

Anyway, this leads me swiftly on to a colonoscopy. Just to be on the safe side, the GP referred me to another doctor. We took it private and the consultant recommended a colonoscopy for piece of mind. And about £1,400. Ouch. Thankfully we have insurance we’ve been itching to spend on buttcams.

The prep was worse than the actual procedure. Not only did I have to go without food since lunchtime the previous day, but I had to take this formula which turned me into a walking human power-hose. It was horrible, and I effectively lived on the toilet for almost a whole day. Not fun.

Luckily, and to wrap up my grossest post ever, the whole procedure was over in 15 minutes, with a clean bill of health. As uncomfortable as the camera bit was, I was facing the screen, so I could see all the hot intestinal action. I did wonder for a minute before the procedure if I swallowed a tiny sign saying “You are here”, would it get far enough down to be seen on the colonoscopy!

I’m only a tiny bit miffed they didn’t offer me a DVD of the buttcam footage.