What’s that noise I hear? Oh it’s just my illusions shattering all over the floor

Last night I realised that while I may think that Jackson shouts for “Mummy” when he wakes in the night, he actually shouts for “ummy” aka “dummy”.

And there you go.

In other news…don’t be waiting up for us, because a five star hotel on a tropical paradise island is our home for the next two weeks.

Jealous much?

Enjoy the internet without me, dudes.

The many faces of Jackson

Saturday night, post bath/pre bed, watching Monsters Inc, eating a bowl of CheasNaks (SO not my spelling).

And here they are in no particular order…

[Semi-smiley]
[Semi-surprised]
[Intense]
[Unfortunate]
[Chewing]
[Ohm]
[Not sure what this face is...maybe STOP TAKING MY PHOTO RIGHT NOW AND LET ME WATCH THE GODDAMN MOVIE]
[Pouty]
[Shifty]
[Blokey]
[Concentrating]
[Disgusting]

Open letter to my son

My darling Jackson

This is just a quick note to say that I do not think that 5.40am is an appropriate time to get me out of bed on a Saturday morning.

Especially when I had only gone to bed at 1.00am.

As much as I love you and want to spend all my time with you, if you could wait just one hour more next time, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

Your ever-loving

Mommy.
x

Here is Jackson ‘helping’ me make pasta for my Friday night dinner feast. I took it with my video camera so the quality isn’t the best. There is a video clip too but it is ultra-messy, so I’m hanging onto it for my video montage that I WILL finish one day, swear to all that is holy.

[Is it just me, or does Jackson look like he's rocking some amazingly bushy eyebrows in this photo?]

Will all the tall skinny women, please exit my changing room NOW

So we’re off to Mauritius next week and instead of figuring out how to lose 7kgs in the next five days, I decided to invest in a new swimming costume instead.

Yesterday evening, I found one that I fell in love with – a sort of semi-modern take on an Esther Williams classic, kind of like this, but with flowers instead of sparkles…

I guess alarm bells should have started going off when the very tall, very skinny, Very Pushy Sales Assistant asked me what size I was and when I said 12, she looked me up and down and said: “Hmmmm…I think I’d better bring a 14 as well, dear.”

But anyway, I was suddenly reduced to insecure gawky teenager status, so I dutifully took both costumes to the changing room (thankyoudearlordinheaven the 12 was perfect, even, dare I say it, a tiny bit loose) and I’m busy trying it on when the very tall, very skinny Very Pushy Sales Assistant asks: “May I come in, dear?”.

WTF??? NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

Now, I don’t know about you, but in my book trying on any kind of swimming apparel is an INTENSELY private thing, however instead of telling her WTF??? NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, I hear myself saying: “Oh, okay then.”

Double, triple WTF???

We then spend the next ten minutes having a verbal wrangle IN THE CHANGING CUBICLE about whether I have a lovely figure (her) or whether I am a huge elephant after just giving birth to my baby (me. And yes, I made like Jackson was two months instead of 20 months old. I am not ashamed).

And then, just to top off my humiliation the very tall, very skinny, Very Pushy Sales Assistant says to me (while airily wafting her skinny hands all over her skinny body): “Well, you are lucky dear, you’ve just had the one baby, when you’ve had three like I have, you’ll look like this.”

The whole experience was completely, totally and utterly mortifying, but, I love the costume and, even though it is so expensive it makes my eyes bleed just to look at the price, I decide to take it anyway. So I get dressed, gather up my shredded dignity from the floor of the changing cubicle and go to the counter to pay, where…

…MY CARD WAS REFUSED DUE TO INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.

Making the most of mornings

Everyday at 6.30am, I get up and make a bottle for Jackson and a cup of tea for me. I then fetch Jackson and take us all back to my bed.

Jackson cuddles up to me, puts his head on my shoulder and chugs back his bottle.

Then we spend half an hour or so discussing very important things like “light on” or “light off” and that “ummies [dummies] are for sleeping”.

Then we get ready for school/work.

And, you know what, even though I am SO not a morning person, that half an hour is my most favourite time of the day.

I’m just saying.

I’ve been updating my flickr site and finding all these cute photos just stashed on my computer, so this one is from November last year.

That’s hot

The best website EVER?

(Holy crap, I’m finding Jackson blogging hard at the moment. I am going to post about my cat next.)

I knew that having an English major would come in handy one day…

I found this yesterday on Exmi’s blog.

‘Someone’ reckons that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far.

The rules are:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Highlight the ones you still want to read but just have not had a chance yet.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.

So get this…I am a single Mom, I’ve never been married, I’m kind of dysfunctional when it comes to relationships, I work for my Dad and probably will for the rest of my life, but BY GOD I have read (or read most of) nearly all the books on this list. You see, as well as studying English at Uni, I also studied the Art of the Russian Novel, because dudes, that was really going to set me up for life.

Anyway, here goes…

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
5. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) – Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm – George Orwell
25. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
27. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
30. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses – James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
46. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
51. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch – George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
60. Emma – Jane Austen
61. Persuasion – Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
66. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement – Ian McEwan
70. Dune – Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
83. Dracula – Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal – Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession – A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

[This was taken in June last year, thankyousweetjesus that he's finally grown some hair.]

Second post of the day, don’t go getting used to this okay

I don’t know why I ALWAYS get surprised when I do these photo comparisons, because newsflash Rebecca, babies grow.

But I do, and so here you go…

April 2007
July 2008
And this, my friends, is what an exhausticated child looks like, like five seconds after you get in the car to leave your cousins’ house after spending ALL day playing with them at the expense of your much needed afternoon nap.

Well, where would you stand if you were a dog?

Rabobie, the cousins’ dog, spends a lot of time glued to Jackson’s side whenever he comes to visit.

And now you can see why…

A thousand words

Australia 16 – South Africa 9