You've got to be kidding...

I was just heading to bed when I saw the following question on the CNN news in regards to the Killer Whale who, well, killed his trainer.

They asked, in all apparent sincerity, if he was a, "Powerful Predator or Performer?"

Seriously?

Do you even have to ask?

I'm going to bed. My brain hurts.

News Travels...

I was pottering about online today when I decided to hit up my old friend e-bay for some pregnancy tests.

Before you break out the bubbly (or the straitjacket for that matter) I am not now (to the best of my knowledge) nor do I plan to be at any point in the near future, pregnant. Two under two is quite enough for the moment please and thank you.

So why, you ask, the pregnancy tests?

Three words. Peace. Of. Mind.

Seeing as to how I'm breastfeeding the two small demons, my monthly cycle has yet to return. This means I've no way of knowing for sure that all of my eggs are still in my basket and not out messing around with dear husband's super swimmers.

Being the frugal sort, I refuse to shell out ten euro for a single test at the shops when I can get ten test strips for four euro (shipping included) delivered straight to my front door.

Now for the funny part.

I paid for the pregnancy tests using hubby's pay pal account.

Hubby was online at the time.

Hubby immediately received a confirmation email detailing "his" (my) purchase.

I hadn't even logged out of ebay when the following message appeared in my g-mail...

"ARE YOU PREGNANT?!?!?!?"

Amazing how fast news travels...

Hope you're having a great day :)

I feel like Chicken tonight...

I have a serious case of the "I don't have a sweet clue what to feed myself for lunch or prepare my family for supper and to be quite honest, I couldn't particularly be bothered anyway." 's

I have a bag of chicken breasts, some brussel sprouts and some corn on the cob thawing away in the sink. There are potatoes and onions in the cupboard and carrots and parsnips in the fridge (do parsnips go in the fridge? I can never remember...)

There are a myriad of herbs and spices on the shelf over the counter and loads of goodies like garlic and flour living beneath.

Even as I type this, I can practically smell the gourmet creations that the culinary blessed amongst you would come up with. In my head, I know that the potential of a beautiful meal is all around me just waiting for skilled fingers to unlock their moist, juicy secrets.

If you are the owner of those fingers and have an hour or so to spare, please feel free to swing by sometime in the next little while to work your magic.

So long as you have supper on the table by six, I don't care what you cook.

Sunshine on a Cloudy day :)

Oh dear god! Thanks to a combination of sleeplessness and general mommy brain, I am horrified to admit that I've yet to say thank you to the lovely Young Mummy for the Sunshine Award she bestowed upon me last week in the midst of teething hell (still going strong thank you very much!) In fact, it was only just now, when the fab Last of the Mojitos presented me with the SAME award, that I remembered I had yet to accept the first. I also have a fave picture meme to catch up on as well...(no, I have not forgotten, I am merely sloooooowwwwwww)

Also, I have a few small accomplishments about which I'd like to brag this week!

First and foremost, after a year of wishing and hoping and praying for a regular, straight across the yard clothesline and not the piece - o - crap triangular one that came with the house, I finally wised up and realized that no amount of wishing, hoping and praying was going to make that clothesline appear. That if I wanted to not spend the next few months brushing spiders, their webs and their eggs (blech) off of the horrible piece - o - crap, I would have to do something about it.

So I did. Yesterday afternoon, while the Snot Queen slept, I popped the tiny one into her walker (hold thy tongues please and thank you) and we absconded to the back garden where I tied the clothes line I bought yonks ago from one end of the garden to the other.

Voila!

Instant clothesline. I am a domestic goddess.

I am also brain dead as I can't remember my other fab accomplishments. Sigh. Such is life!

Thanks for the Sunshine ladies, I'll be passing it along to;

The Potty Diaries Who today is searching for eye makeup remover in Russia. Apparently, not as easy as it sounds...

Hot Cross Mum who woke up one morning, "to find my two-and-a-half year old in bed beside me and my husband asleep in the two-and-a-half-year-old's bed. Nobody had any recollection of this bed swap taking place."

It's the little things
Because she always reminds me how much I have to be thankful for.

My Valentine

Right, in the name of love and in the spirit of the season (can you really call Valentine's Day a season?) I have decided to take a break from sleepless nights and snotty noses to tell a tale of love's young dream. A story so sweet as to give you cavities and so pure and true that if you listen long enough, you just might hear an angel cry...

And so, without further adieu, I give you the true life tale of "Myself and Himself: A love Story in Three Acts..."

Act One: We meet. It was at a Thanksgiving dinner thrown by a fellow Canadian in Ireland back in 2005. I'd love to say that the second our eyes met across a crowded room we just knew that we were meant to be and so rode off into the at that point nappy free sunset, however, that would be a big fat lie. For starters, I was sort of seeing another young Irishman and he was sort of seeing the hostess of the party.

Secondly, I found him ridiculously attractive and therefore would not under any circumstances talk to him until I mistook his (male) best friend to be his boyfriend, decided he was gay and therefore "safe" and thus set about having the funnest night I'd had since arriving in Ireland five months previously. At the end of the evening we exchanged numbers but never saw each other until...

Act two: Six months later, I was headed out for the evening with one of my housemates when we passed each other on the street. After a few hours frenzied texting, we agreed to meet up. It was six weeks before my visa ran out and I was due to leave the country. We became inseperable and when I left the following month, I lasted only a week in England before I was back to visit. He quit his job, left his house and together we headed to Scotland for the summer.

Our families were horrified. His parents were afraid he was throwing away his education for some tart (me) and wouldn't return for his final year of college. His Grandmother said I'd "whispered potions in his ear," and my mom was afraid I was going to get pregnant and ruin his (yes, his) life.

Well, he returned to Ireland for school in the fall and I returned with him, totally illegally of course.

Eight months later, we were pregnant on the Snot Queen and battling with the state to grant me permission to remain in the country. As we weren't married at the time (shock! Horror!) our union was not recognized by the state and it took another year, a second pregnancy and one verrrryy expensive lawyer to convince them we were committed.

Act Three: Four and a half years after our first meeting, in front of our family, our friends and our two beautiful daughters, we said I do. And we continue to live happily ever after.

Happy Valentine's day baby. I love you. x

A letter to my husband.

Dearest Darling Husband,

You may wonder why I am writing you in the middle of the day. I thought it might be best to warn you in advance.

I'm having one of "those" days.

If you check the time, you will see that it is currently naptime. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have informed the girls of this and instead they are wandering about the house dripping food onto the (freshly mopped) floors.

I am down to my last nerve and it is about to snap.

The house is a disaster. There is STUFF everywhere! No matter how much I clean, they are right behind me tearing papers out of drawers and toys off of shelves. My current dream in life is to vacuum the stairs and scrub out the shower in our bathroom. Somehow, I do not think Mr. Luther King would be impressed.

To make matters worse, the Snot Queen is insisting on feeding her sister chunks of turkey mince (she has no teeth) from a fork (she has no aim.) This is not good for my nerves.

The small one has discovered some sort of wormhole which she randomly reaches into and pulls out a handful of cotton wool which I end up inevitably fishing out of her mouth (along with the giant chunks of turkey mince.) I have yet to discover the source.

A bowl of spaghetti just hit the floor.

I want to cry.

Or move away. Far, far away. By myself.

The washing machine is still broken and the clothes are about to walk out of the laundry hamper.

The soundtrack to my day goes something like this;

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! MOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMYYYYY!!!!!!! (music in background: "...do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about...") "Ehhhhhhh Ehhhhhhhhhhh!" "AAAAAAAAGGHHHHH!!!!" ("...right leg in and you shake it all about...") "MOOOOOOMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYYYY" THUNK! CRASH! "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!" "NO NO NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! MOMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!" "GET OFF THE TABLE!!!!!" "NOW!!!!!" "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!"

The girls are covered in a disgusting mixture of snot and lunch.

Another bowl of spaghetti just hit the ground.

I cannot guarantee I will be here when you get home.

If I am though, tread carefully. Forewarned is forearmed...

Sincerely,

Your loving wife

Confessions of a One Time B List Movie Star...

My blog has been looking a little malnourished lately. I don't know why. I'm sure that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I've had to redefine my definition of "Good Night Sleep" to include "Night's where I only have to switch beds three times or less."

It probably doesn't have anything to do either with the fact that the not so tiny one (at eight months old she is weighing in at a hefty 23 lbs) likes to scream the house down every time I try and do anything that does not involve making her the center of my world. And the Screaming? It's not crying screaming, it's "giving out screaming." She also screams when she's happy, she screams when she's getting a bum change and she screams when her sister screams (a new favourite game of theirs.) It's her default setting. We've re-christened her, "The Loud One."

Therefore, I decided that this morning, come hell or high water (or screaming children with nasty nappies) I would blog, and not only would I blog, but I would blog about ME. Not my babies (the last two paragraphs don't count) not sleep, but ME.

So here goes... Ten things you've been BURNING to know about Moi.

10. I have a "thing" about fingernails. I used to work in a jewelery store where ridiculously rich women with ridiculously big hair, came in to buy ridiculously priced jewelry. One fine summer's day, one of these charming specimen's came in and started trying on several of our gold rings. She had what could only be described as dragon nails. Long, red talons that curled at the ends and looked as though one good swipe couldeasily take out an eye. Gross, but nothing I hadn't seen before. Then she turned over her hand to check a price tag and I almost vomited on the spot. The underside of each of her blood red talons was caked with, thick, black dirt. Seriously, this woman had apparently never heard of, much less used, a nail brush, or for that matter anything to gouge the disease infested crud from under her claws.

Since that day, anything to do with fingernails has made me just a little bit queasy...

9. I hate housekeeping. Which is unfortunate on several levels; First being that I do not function well in a cluttered environment and so cannot relax until the house is tidied from top to bottom. Secondly, I have small children which means that as quick as I can fold and put away the laundry, all the books have been pulled from the shelves and somewhere in the distance is the sound of a drawer being emptied. It's a vicious cycle.

8. I am just a wee bit competitive (and a tiny bit impatient.) When the snot queen was 9 months old and still not crawling, I rigged her up in a harness and put water bottles under her belly to "encourage" her. It didn't work.

7. When I was thirteen years old, I used to steal romance novels from the public library and hide them out back, buried under the big rock and wrapped in a plastic bag for protection so I could read all the really smutty parts without being discovered. I used to dog ear any page that made reference to tingling nipples, surging members or hot, moist, places. I had friends who did the same and we'd pass books back and forth like pervy trading cards. I almost wet myself when I discovered V.C Andrews a.k.a "All of my books involve incest on some level."

6. I once starred in a b-list independent, horror flick. I was chosen not for my raw, shining talent, but my ability to fill out a red, vinyl catsuit.

5. I HATE spiders! Except hate isn't really the right word as I've no problem with spiders themselves, it's just coming across them in my house that I can't stand (or on my clothesline...) Even at that, I can handle the small ones, but tend to go into some sort of cardiac failure when presented with one of those big, black crunchy looking specimens with the thick looking legs and visible hairs (shudder)...

4. As much as I know that TV is a terrible, terrible TERRIBLE thing and that it kills off a billion brain cells a minute, I loooooooooooove trash TV. Last night was like some sort of bonus outpouring of fabulous filth for the mind as I watched a special on kiddie pageant queens all grown up on 3e followed by Canada's Next Top Model on Livingit which clashed with America's Next Top Model on Living1 (thankfully I'd already seen that one!) and the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show which I flicked over to every now and again. I'm also a huge fan of those extreme weight loss shows like the "Biggest Loser" and the Irish Equivalent "Operation Transformation."

3. I'm really flexible. I can lie on my stomach and pull my feet over my head to touch my nose.

2. I am pretty crap at bedtime routines and tend to feel extremely inferior to parents whose children are in bed at 7:30 on the nose without fail, every night. It doesn't matter how shit of a parent you are in other respects. If you can get your child to bed at a decent hour on a regular basis and enjoy a few hours of "grown up" time each night, you are obviously a better human being then I am.

1. I'm a big believer in laughter, excercise, fresh air and good nutrition. There's not much they can't cure between them :-)