philosophy is the talk on a cereal box

i’m on a diet. it’s official: prêt sandwiches and buses into work = 3lb increase over 3 months. and i’m a bridesmaid in about 6 weeks; arghhh! the other two bridesmaids are child free, hence not only do they have the benefit of not looking like a now empty giant seed-pod; they also have plenty of me-time to dedicate to sport and activity; and don’t face the trauma of needing to eat fast calorie intensive snacks in order to muster the energy to manage the bedtime process.

so today i had mini shredded wheat for breakfast; a banana for snack, a coffee made by me rather than a deluxe fatty latte, a floppy ham sarnie for lunch (with some school fete chutney for taste and hopefully no bogies) and am now crunching away on apple rice cakes that i’ve stolen from the children’s snack cupboard.

and i also have my, gulp, running stuff with me. my plan is to factor sport INTO my daily routine rather than trying to wedge anything else on top of it. so at the moment i have a rather arduous trip to work involving driving the kids to nursery, driving to a non-parking metered zone of the city and getting a bus in to the centre. today on the way home i plan on running, or rather gently jogging, back to the car. no doubt i’ll be so starving i’ll have to stop to gorge my face with a pastry but i’ll let you know how it goes.

i had a funny seagull moment the other day; it sounds quite philosophical so please do bear with me on this one. i was sitting in a deckchair at home, a rare moment, wearing my sunnies and trying not to sneeze every nano-second due to hayfever being a total nightmare this year. i was somewhat frustrated, albeit guiltily, with husband (#1…) because despite the huge amount of domestics needing doing he was watering his veggie patch. (i know; i was lying in a deckchair, but i HAD just hung out washing...). as i sighed and stared into the blue sky i spotted two seagulls flying; they were in perfect synch, close together, swooping and turning in the late afternoon sun. shocked at their ability i blinked and two became one as i realised a mixture of suncream and blazing light had created this illusion from one solitary gull. and it was a pivotal point of self-realisation because i realised that of course two gulls can’t fly that closely together. if you try to enforce a closely synchronised flight like that all it would take was one piece of independent thought and a shift in direction and a crash would ensue. whereas if you fly close-ish but with room for manoeuvre then you can have a life where two gulls happily glide with fewer crashes but both enjoying the same view. so this is my new take on life: try not to hold everyone too close and force them to take my route because a clash is inevitable. let everyone have room to breathe and manoeuvre and that way we’ll all get there in the end!

i know; most people got there way before me; everyone else sometimes seem to exist in a much calmer state of harmony than the constantly pushing style that i seem to favour; but it was quite an epiphany for me. it reminded me of another morning when, on the bus, i glimpsed a poster for robin hood that i genuinely mis-read as “the untold story behind the leggings”.

talking of which daughter #2, aged 2 ½, has becoming very bossy on the clothing front. she picks out things that have to match; leggings are very IN but have to be in the right colour. trousers are OUT, skirts are a must-have if the correct colour and if the design is not for babies, just for big girls. daughter #1, aged 4 ¾, wants me to predict each nursery morning, with unerring accuracy, exactly what her best friend will be wearing and how her hair will be styled. when i mis-predict it’s not a good day. the morning nursery run is currently accompanied by a lot of black-eyed peas music and i’m not allowed to change the cd. this is an improvement on abba gold that previously dominated the sound waves which had itself been a welcome relief, replacing the Disney princess cd. however that being said, it did have me weeping occasionally during the hard first few months of daughter #2 (particularly the song about being a caterpillar, crawling about in the mud, stuck there, but knowing that you’ll eventually turn into a butterfly and fly around....)

i need to crack on; processes to map and risks to identify. i didn’t get any comments posted last week: have you all gone off me? did i neglect you for too long?! sorry …. i promise to be better!