That's it. I'm giving up...

Lent starts tomorrow.

I know this because the Boys insisted on pancakes this evening - and because I am, in a slightly woolly, pick and choose sort of a way, a Roman Catholic.  This time of year brings back memories of interminable weeks of Denial as a child: denial of  whatever treat it was that I had decided to give up, denial that I had in fact given up on Denial and sneaked whatever treat it was I was supposed to have given up (for some reason dark chocolate Bounty bars spring to mind here), and denial that the distinctive red and white wrappers in the kitchen bin had anything to do with me once they were discovered languishing at the bottom of it.  (Quite why I didn't dispose of them elsewhere I have no idea.  Must try harder on the subterfuge...)

So the thought occurred to me; should I give up anything this year? And if so, what? My life is quite sick-makingly boring in many ways at the moment;  I don't drink alcohol (most) Monday's to Fridays (and although all bets are off at the weekend, the drink-driving laws here make having even half a glass of wine, if you're planning on getting behind the wheel within 24 hours, a bad idea), I don't smoke, I scratch cook, I try and eat/drink my 5 a day.  Yes, I have a chocolate habit but even that's been curbed significantly in recent years, due mainly to the fact that nowadays I have decided life is too short to eat bad chocolate.  If we were living back in London then of course that would probably not impact significantly on my consumption levels, but here in Moscow the subsequent supply problems - not a Green & Black's 70% bar to be purchased for love nor money, for example - do rather put the stops on my galloping addiction...

Of course, there is always the polar opposite approach, that of doing something extra like, say, walking for an hour every day, or offering my services to carry a babushka's shopping across the road, but I think in the latter case I would probably end up being arrested, and in the former wasting so much petrol driving through the traffic to somewhere different each day to take the walk, that both seem counter productive.

So.  That leaves me with one thing.  One glaringly obvious thing I can try and do without for the next 40 days.

I am going to try and live without Diet Coke until Easter Sunday.

What - you didn't think I was going to give up the blog, did you? You should be so lucky...

May I just say; this is no small undertaking. I have been known to speak directly to my cans of Diet Coke in the past (usually to tell them that I don't need them and they shouldn't get big-headed about their regular 11am appearance in my day).  In fact, I actually don't expect to manage it.  The problem with leading such a boring lifestyle is that the 'little' indulgences like dark chocolate - which, by the way, was never under discussion as a potential 'giving up' target, since I have it on good authority that in (cough) small amounts, it's actually good for you - and Diet Coke assume a wholly disproportionate level of importance in your routine.

Quite how I'm going to manage without my daily fix of it remains to be seen, but I suspect that my parameters on what constitutes 'bad' chocolate may be about to change somewhat.  Dark chocolate Bounty bar, anyone?

Silent Sunday

When you know you're doing something right...

After school today, Boy #2 and I were waiting for his brother to arrive before heading home.  One of Boy #2's classmates was also there, waiting to be collected.  They were shooting the breeze about how Classmate had just been given the i-phone 5 by his mum (note: this is not impossible, even for a 6 year old, in Russia) when Boy #1 arrived.

Boy #2 to his brother: "HIIIIII."

Classmate:  "Who's that?"

Boy #2:  "That's my brother, Boy #1."

Classmate:  "Oh.  I thought he was your friend."

Boy #2:  "He is my friend."

Classmate:  "But I thought he was your brother?"

Boy #2:  "He is my brother."

Classmate:  "But you said he was your friend?"

Boy #2:  "He's my brother, and my friend."

Obviously, they were still niggling each other and wailing loving remarks like 'don't look at me!' all the way home.  But it was glimpse, and that's enough for now...

Reason why I love blogging #83

From time to time I post videos on 'The Potty Diaries'.  Not because it's lazy blogging (although, over 1100 posts in, I think I might be allowed a little leeway on that), but because I think they are funny, of interest, or just, well, why the hell not?

This one definitely fits into that last category.

And thankyou, @taracain of the Sticky Fingers blog, for pointing this out on twitter yesterday evening.  Because every woman deserves a bit of LA sunshine and - ahem - eye candy on a Wednesday night / Thursday morning / whenever you get the chance to take a look...

(Oh, and by the way; that 'click here to view the collection' at the end - are they CRAZY?)

Am I Cruel Mummy? Boy #1 thinks so.

I don't want to come across as Cruel Mummy but...

I don't let my children sleep in the marital bed.

Does that make me nasty?  Boy #1 thinks - sometimes - that it does.  Mainly he thinks this when his younger brother waves the fact in his face that twice in the last 4 months, he (Boy #2) has snuck in - unnoticed by me, I might add - in the small hours and managed to stay put until morning.  Smaller than his brother by 2 years, Boy #2 took advantage of my natural defense against the freight-train style snoring from the other side of the bed; namely that of shifting as far away as possible from the source of the noise and clinging there, albeit still asleep.  This of course leaves a Boy #2 sized-space down the middle of duvet, which he exploited on these two occasions before bounding back into his own bed at dawn and trumpeting his victory to his furious older brother.

Siblings.  Don't you just love them?

We've been had reasonable luck with the Boys' sleeping patterns so far.  Certainly whilst they were still tiny we suffered the 1 / 3/ 5am wake-ups for breast and bottle feeding, the pacing backwards and forwards rocking a seemingly inconsolable baby in our arms wondering if we were ever again going to get a full night's rest, and the rushing in at 2am to calm a child shouting in their sleep.  In fact, now I come to think of it, that last was almost a nightly fixture for 4 long years; Boy #1 did it from ages 2 - 4, and then just when he stopped, Boy #2 clocked in with his own version until he hit 4 himself.  But nowadays they are good; they go to bed when we ask them to, and they don't wake up much before 7am, which personally - needing my own sleep - I call a result.

Even from the first, when they were only tiny scraps, I was never any good at co-sleeping with them.  At the beginning it was quite simply that I was worried I - or Husband - would roll over and squash them.  And yes, I know instances of this are extremely rare, but try telling your exhausted hormone-buzzing just-given-birth psyche that at 3am.  It just didn't work for me; I would lie there, rigid with panic, unable to sleep myself, next to a gently snoring husband and baby.  So we put each of the boys in a cot next to our own bed - and then after a couple of months, moved them into their own room.  Then, when they were toddling around, they were just too restless when asleep, both of them capable of moving from one end of their cot and back again  between checks, to convince me it was a good idea to have them with us.

And so we settled into a routine where they slept in their beds, we slept in ours, and everyone had a good night's sleep.  I saw no reason to change that as they got older.  Sure, we have Sunday mornings when they bounce all over us and put toes cold from half an hour of playing with toys before we wake up onto our warm hands and legs, but as for spending the night in the same bed - well, I just don't encourage it.

Don't get me wrong, if they're ill I will get as close to them as I can, and if I'm not actually sleeping on their floor I might as well be for the amount of time I pop in and out of their room to check on them.  But aside from the fact that I operate much better when I've had a proper night's sleep myself, it's always seemed to me that Husband's and my bed is just that; for Husband and I.  There is one room in the house that belongs exclusively to us, and I want to keep it that way.

I don't think that makes me a bad mother.  Despite what my son might say...

Silent Sunday

Trip trapping across that rickety bridge; the perils of sharing online

It's a funny old lark, this blogging game.  I've been very fortunate here on 'The Potty Diaries'; in the nearly 6 years I've been writing it, I have had only a handful of visits from those poor individuals who live under bridges and who make it their raison d'etre to spread pain across the internet with cruel and personal remarks in the comment box.  Oh, there may be people who comment elsewhere what a waste of time it is to visit here, but I don't seek such threads out (if they even exist).  Why bother, frankly?

Thing is though, 'The Potty Diaries' is not the only place I write.  A post I put up elsewhere recently attracted a damning remark about how mundane and boring my life is, with the inference being that I really should sort myself out and make my life a little more 'out there', entertaining, and frankly interesting to read about.

I won't lie to you; all my principles about not engaging in conversation with such people were put to the test.  This remark stung.  Well, no-one likes to be told that they're boring, do they? But I sat on my hands, and haven't responded, and don't plan on it; the more time passes, the less I'm bothered by it, and the further I can rise above it.

What I would have liked to say, of course, was "If you find my writing dull, please; feel free not to read."  But I managed not to do it ('Never engage, never engage, never engage'), and am instead quietly smiling to myself on the irony of the situation. This person clearly has no idea of how hard Husband and I work to fill our family's life with the peace and calm that she chooses to interpret as mundane and boring.  Life here could be frantic, fraught, filled with insurmountable stressful problems, twice-hourly injections of cortisol into my over-active brain. I could be writing black humoured desperate 'I'm so unhappy' 'This place saps the soul from you' 'I can't take another tangle with bureaucracy / the militia / that sour-faced bxtch at the checkout / other drivers' type posts, but guess what?

It would drive me as crazy to see the world through those glasses as it would you to read about it.

And as for the stuff that really does happen here but which I would be sticking my head far too high above the parapet (in a not-totally friendly environment) if I wrote about it, I put my family's well-being way above any need to entertain online.  So I think I'll stick with the 'mundane & boring' for the moment, thank you very much - and save the anecdotes about meetings with gun runners, the run-ins with oligarchs wives, and the discovery of listening posts in neighbours' houses and such-like for my memoirs once we've left...