Death to the Starfish!

See, my problem is that I've always been a starfish when it comes to sleeping arrangements. Paul knows this and, as he snores like a wounded, asthmatic water buffalo, he puts up with it because quite frankly, being a bed hog isn't nearly as bad as being a snorer. So, over the past 12 years we've become accustomed to me star-fishing on 3/4 of the bed and him still having a nice quarter all to himself. It worked for us.

And then we had kids.

As any multiples parent knows, pregnancy with more than one is a special beast, and I soon outgrew our bed. There was no longer room for my husband, the cat or the dog and only one spot ideally positioned to starfish directly in front of the air conditioner clutching a bottle of tums in one hand and a bucket in the other while I slept for hours on end. So what did my brilliant husband do? He brought in a second queen sized bed, pushed it up against our usual queen sized bed and thus created "Super Bed". This was fantastic, we each had our own bed yet could still roll over and touch each other if we had wanted to. (We didn't want to. He may have, but I would have killed him) We got used to this, and life was good.

Then the kids came out, I lost half my body mass in the delivery room and we downsized to one bed, like normal people, and although the kids fit in the bed alright:

They turned out to be starfish, like their mother:

Battles were won and lost, compromises made, treaties were signed, tears flowed and I learned to cling to the side of the bed like a good, unselfish partner and parent should. I've fallen out a few times (Paul laughed) and he's fallen out a few times (I may have nudged him) but we both grew accustomed to our new sleeping arrangements with the cat, dog and occasional baby or two in the middle.

However, things have become much more complicated now that the girls are walking and can escape freely from their room to waddle up to my side of the bed (why is it always my side?!?) with their seahorse and an empty bottle to come for a cuddle, a bit of reassurance and to basically get all up in my grill and prevent me from sleeping for the remainder of the night. Paul seems perfectly able to sleep soundly through this, though he claims that he has no space on the bed. I beg to differ:

This is a shot I took in indignation at 4am last week of Paul, Lochie and Dermot all hogging up our Super Kingsized Bed when I was pretty much forced out of bed against my will. Look at him, all comfortable and asleep with all that room and all those covers. Comfy bastard tries to tell me he gets no room at night. Just look at that!

But then he presents me with this gem that he took at about 4am last night:

and I have been forced to concede.

Touche, Husband, Touche.

Roid Rage - My descent into becoming Jabba

So I've got this disease called Sarcoidosis. I'm sure I'll work up the courage to write about it one day (or when I'm really bored ) and to manage it I'm on more prescription drugs than Lindsay Lohan, including steroids.

These aren't the nice, Hulk Smash type of steroids but the other kind, the kind that make you ravenously hungry and eat away at your bone and muscle tissue (and apparently give you strokes. Thanks for that, steroids). It's all a part of suppressing my immune system so it will stop it's suicidal attempts on my life and limbs, but there are some rather unpleasant side effects.

The medical terms (seriously) are Moon Face and Buffalo Hump. And I have them. Both. A double whammy. FML.

My face has swelled and rounded, as has my neck. Wait, what am I talking about. What neck? My neck has disappeared. I have no neck. I've got a couple of chins now, but no sign of my neck making a comeback until I'm off the roids. I'm having a rough time with this because A: I miss my neck and B: I think I used to have bones in my face, but I'm not sure. I haven't seen them in awhile now. I miss having bones in my face.

I've been trying to lose weight ( as all women do ) but it's rough when these drugs make me so ravenously hungry that I find myself having to sit on my hands to prevent myself from eating something, anything.

Even more discouraging is that I have been losing weight, but because of the swelling and steroids while bits of my body are getting smaller, the most visible bits like my face, neck and hunchback (thanks again, steroids) are getting bigger and rounder and I just want to say feck it, what does it matter at this point anyway and order in a pizza. With ice cream.

So despite how hard I have been trying over the last few months, I'm still starting to look like this:

Sigh.

I used to be super fit and looked like this:

Also, I had great hair. Then, I went ahead and had kids (two at once, very efficient) and came out of the experience looking like this:

A bit bigger but hey, I just had two kids and at least you could still see bones in my face! (seriously. I miss having bones in my face). And now? Enter an autoimmune disease with steroids and epic swelling (fine, and a bit less exercise than I should. Fine, a bit more carbs than necessary...) and I come out looking like freaking Jabba.

Okay. Not the best picture, but I was changing my clothes in the car on the A40 to go for a walk with the family after work (that's healthy, right?!) and the meds have also not been kind to my skin. Seriously. FML.

Sigh. 

Well, the bright side is that the roids are coming down, slowly but surely, as my other meds go up. Those ones cause hair loss, but I'd take a wig over moon face right now, I think. Or one of those funky headscarves. 

I could totally rock a headscarf. Or a wig.

Detox Fail

Alright, so Day 3 didn't go quite as badly as anticipated. But see that up there? That's how I was feeling last night. Kind of like a snake that ate a goat.

The diet has been going alright, Paul has been very supportive and has been reducing his bread/pasta/grain/sugar/crap intake as well for the most part and we've been eating much better for the past 2 days. Only 2 full days so far, of breakfasts like this:

Lunches like this:

and dinners like this:

I've been feeling a lot like this:

Have I been hungry? Oh yes. A bit on the crazy side? Yep. But apparently it has been working to detox our systems because on Easter, we let it all go. We ate all of the kids' candy (ahem) with / for them, we had pizza for lunch, buns throughout the day and a big roast dinner with mashed potatoes, chocolate cake with ice cream and Doritos with Salsa oh, and pop. Can't forget the pop. We felt awful by the end of the day. Absolutely god-awful. And this morning? Oh, much worse. Much much worse.

At first we panicked, thinking that this was a return of the deadly Man Flu to the household, but then started to realise that one single day of craptactular eating (not even that bad, really, just to our normal level of craptactular eating really) and we could really feel it. We woke up with headaches, sluggish, bloated (like a snake that ate a goat) and exhausted. 

So after only 2 days of successfully detoxing our systems with this new eating plan we screwed it up royally. Good for us. 

So, in for a penny in for a pound, what's a girl to do but go finish off that cake so it can't tempt me any more!

My War on Food, or, Food's War on Me

So, like nearly every other woman in the world, I'd like to lose weight. Getting back down to my birth weight would be ideal of course so I could finally rock some hot pants, but I'll settle for 70 pounds or so. Making things even more urgent is this stupid Sarcoidosis (yes, the disease you've probably heard of on House) and the positive effect that losing some weight would have on my bones and joints.

Now, I've always had issues with food. An excessive love/hate relationship, if you will. While living in China I once took an 8 hour round trip hard seater train surrounded by gawkers, phlegm and the general filth that accompanies squat toilets and the absence of rubbish bins to eat at a Subway. And it was totally worth it. I even once flew to Hong Kong to eat at TGI Fridays. And in the UK I've driven 4 hours clear across London traffic to eat Taco Bell. (That one wasn't worth it.)

So adding my obvious unhealthy relationship with food to the steroids I'm on for my scallywag sarcoidies and I've become a ravenous, insatiable monster that wakes up at 3am craving a full English breakfast with eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, beans and toast.

This concerns me, as I'm a vegetarian.

So, in speaking to one of my consultants (dr) I raised the issue of my weight and how losing weight might effect my sarcoidosis and medication and she gave me some hard truths (see, it's fine to go along thinking on your own that you could probably lose a few pounds. But when a medical doctor points out that you're a fattie-fat-fattie the denial that you have been so happily living in dissipates and you're left with little more than an action plan and a non-existent sense of self-worth)

So my action plan consists of a Real Food diet - eating as little processed food as possible and a diabetic vegetarian diet (salad) and, here's the kicker, drastically reducing the amount of bread, pasta and grains that I eat. So kind of low carb, but without meat and with fruit.

We'll see how this goes, but I'm envisioning something like this by day 3:

We forgot Easter

This is our kid's second Easter and we forgot it. Again.

We started out with the best intentions - we talked about doing an Easter Egg Hunt in the back garden, we chose a big Easter present for them and we even planned to video tape their happy hunt to send to our family back home.

Yeah, none of that ended up happening.

It started with the need to buy the kids a log cabin windy house for the back garden - and only a log cabin would do. (our plan is to pop a full Canadian flag on it and call it an RCMP post). They're about £350 brand new (screw that!) but go for about £100 used online so it became Paul's mission over the next few days to get this magical log cabin - and thus began his dark obsessive spiral into the murky world of Ebay.

Ebay is fine and good if you're after something trivial, don't really care much and have a crapload of time on your hands. However, this was a log cabin and we needed it, which necessitated Paul entering 12 different bids and obsessively watching, waiting and strategising. He stopped eating. He set alarms throughout the night to check the bids. We mapped out bid locations throughout England, Scotland and Wales in terms of driving distance and gas cost on top of end price. We even factored in how many Burger King stops would be necessary on such road trips, and added the cost of these. We're down to 6 feasible bids.

Two full days we were at this, determined to give our kids the best Easter ever with the surprise of a glorious log cabin. Two full days of obsessively checking Ebay, not straying far from the house in order to maintain bidding position. Two days of googlemapping and cost analysis.

We were outbid on all 12. I don't know who these people are that paid upward of £160 for a log cabin made of cheap, faded plastic that probably smells of cat pee and homeless Eastern Europeans.

Thus our plan to give the girls a brilliant second Easter (and making up for having forgotten their first one) was already on a downhill slope.

Okay, that's fine. Easter isn't about presents. It's about zombies and chocolate, right? Well, we could at least get the chocolate right, and off to Sainsburys we went - coming home with £28 worth of chocolate goodness on Friday, and having eaten every last piece (don't worry, we shared with the kids. A bit. Well, they have small tummies and chocolate isn't very good for them anyway) by Saturday night. And all of the stores are closed until Monday.

Okay, so we failed on the chocolate front. It's a good thing, I guess, because with chocolate this:

Plus this:

Turns into this:

So we kind of dodged a bullet there.

Still, it's Easter, and Easter is all about chocolate ( they're too young still for zombies ) so Paul ran off to the store to buy at lease some Easter chocolate goodness for the kids (Aero bars) and we had the best intentions to wake up early before the kids to hide chocolate bars and a couple of their stuffies throughout the garden for the kids to find.

But it rained. And we slept in. And honestly? The kids couldn't have cared less anyway.

So for the kids' second ever Easter we spent it hanging out, eating omelettes, playing outside, eating Aero bars and having good friends over for a roast and veggies.

So despite our very best intentions, we failed at Easter as parents. But we don't have to tell them, in fact, maybe we can photoshop some nice Easter memories for the kids this year.

Parenting Win after all!

The Man Flu. It got me.

Alright, I'm feeling bad about giving Paul such a hard time about his Man Flu the other day - it's now hit me like a tonne of bricks.

Poor, deathly ill Paul and the kids picked me up from work and given that we were all so freaking sick (and traffic was a nightmare) we opted to go out to eat rather than attempt to cook and then, god forbid, clean, at home. So our eating out as a family routine  started in typical fashion with a debate about what to eat, going something like this.

The American Diner? Nope. Wrong way down the A40. Have you seen this traffic?
Chinese? No way, we're never paying for Chinese food as long as Xiaona lives with us. Her's is better. Chinese food has been ruined for us forever.
Indian? God no, are you insane? Lochie had 4 consecutive diaper changes in a 10 minute period after the last time. We're too low on wipes for Indian food.
Greek? Too slow to come out. Kids are starving. Plus, hummus is a bitch to get out of their hair.
French? Too posh.
Italian? Still too posh.
Polish? They hate kids and don't have high chairs.
Baskin Robbins? (he just gave me the side eye)

We figure that a Denny's would do wonderfully over here.

See, part of our problem is that we struggle to eat out with the twins. We feel as though taking the twins to nice restaurants is rude to other patrons - whereas in somewhere like a pizza hut I couldn't care less because hey, they chose to go to pizza hut. If an establishment has less than 4 highchairs we figure that it's out of obligation rather than actual acceptance of screaming, food tossing mini patrons that crap themselves at the tables. If an establishment has an army of highchairs right at the door and some sort of balloon feature we figure that we're good to eat there, guilt free. And we'll leave an ungodly mess as well.

But alas, there wasn't a pizza hut to be found and we ended up at a local pub on the lake. Very nice, and we managed to scoop 2 of their 3 high chairs. Our kids were covered in flu-snot, my husband was dripping sweat from his fever and I was coughing up a lung - along with Kaitie's death rattle cough/gasp - so we were quarantined to the back of the pub. We had a nice view -

of the ice cream machine

and it scared the freaking bejeebers out of all of us every time it came on.

At least it covered up the coughing, groaning, moaning, sneezing and hacking coming from our table. We hope.

Training the Dog, Part 2

Reclaiming the Sofa

Apparently, Huar Huar feels that because he uses the furniture like people, we're all his prison bitches. The solution to this, as was kindly pointed out to us again by Liane and Roy, is to either A: get him off the furniture or B: buy taller furniture. So for now, Huar Huar has entered phase 2 of our attempt at turning him into a normal dog, and he is no longer allowed on the furniture. Eventually we'll let him up on it by invitation only, but for now, no furniture for him.

In our new place it's been quite easy - the only furniture that he can reach downstairs is the sofa - 3 days of kicking him off repeatedly has paid off in that he doesn't really even try any more. Or, so we assume. I have no idea what he does at night while we're upstairs, but I'm sure I wouldn't approve. He's probably been making sweet sweet love to our shoes or something. I wouldn't put it past him.

Now that boundaries are being set, we're going to try place training him onto a mat by the garden door, and see how that goes.