House number nine

Way back when we started thinking about moving a house we really did meant for it to take three months to find a new house. We planned on being less in "shopping mode" and more in "browsing mode". Fast forward exactly one month an we think we found The One. Yes, I know, we really are not to be trusted in these matters. Honestly though I really have no idea how that happened. We've compiled a very long and detailed list of things that will make everyone feel happy about the house, and after Hidai said I can't just store it in my head but we have to write it down, he made me break it down to "must have" and "nice to have" and we called it in the apt name "list of demands" and sent it to all the realtors around. It is a very long list.
In the end we've seen a grand total of nine houses in real life and (dozens more on the internet), and house number nine won us over.

House number nine

The thing is, house number nine is... Well, it is a house. We have never lived in a real house with three floors and cracking floorboards and what people around here like to call "character" or "period features" and we usually call "uninhabitable" (yes, renovated was one of the must haves). We have no idea how you live in a house? Ever since we moved in together all those years ago we lived in flats, and though our first one was over three floors, it wasn't a house and it wasn't on the ground floor but a part of the weirdest apartment complex you have ever seen.
We loved the control and closeness an apartment gives you - for better or worse there is nowhere to run in an apartment, and when the boys were tiny it is exactly what we wanted, to able to know what they are doing and where at all times. It kept the scribbling on the wall to a necessary minimum. But now we found ourselves having our Weekend lazy coffee and cake sitting on the floor in our bedroom because the boys are a) watching a movie or b) playing something very loud on the xBox or computer or iPad or c) running around in some sort of weird pretend-play.

Coffee and cake on the bed, because this is how we roll

And as fun as hiding on the floor with cake sounds, the penny finally dropped on the day I found myself hiding under Ron's bed (he has a raised bed with a very nice reading / hiding corner underneath) while the kids invaded the living room with their loud noises and electronic games. They can sit there together, Yon with the iPad watching YouTube movies about his favourite games (Infinity and Mindcraft) and talking back at it, while Ron is playing his Fifa on the xBox with that annoying soundtrack and shouting at the screen and all the while music is blaring in the background. So I did the only thing possible - I hid under the bed. In my defines we have heated floors and that spot is the best in the house, but still. So we decided it might be time to expand, and have the boys banished to a floor of their own where they will get one bedroom for beds and quiet reflection (also known as reading time) and the other for more physical activities (also known as playing football in the house) and electronics (as in breaking our own rule and kicking the xBox from the living room ), while we get a floor of our own and we all reconvene around mealtimes in the lower floor. We are willing to let them pass through the kitchen not on mealtimes on sunny days to release them in the garden for a bit of outdoor football, but that's it.

Hiding under the bed

The problem with the whole thing is that I never wanted to live in a house, I have never thought of myself as a house person, as "house material" and now I found that I stopped looking at apartments completely. I guess it is the natural order of things, and I guess the majority of the ten people who will read this post live in a house anyway and won't understand how people can raise a family in an apartment.
I can explain about my bad knees and (very justified) fear of falling down the stairs, or the too many horror movies and TV dramas where the people get killed in a HOUSE, or the fact that I don't do well with gardens, or insects. But the truth is it is the stereotype, the one I have in my head after too many years of lousy American TV and too many romance novels - the suburban wife/mum stereotype. And I am really worried that I will become exactly that.
But on the other hand, that is all it is - a stereotype. And it is a big step for me in letting the boys grow and starting to let them go. So we decided to treat it as "a house adventure", after all in the past five years, living life as expats, we learned to look at most things like that - a two year adventure and then we'll see.
We decided to take the boys with us to all the viewing, so they could get a "feel" of the houses and we could see how Yon is managing the stairs, because we were and still are to be honest really worried about how he will handle it when he is hurrying or when he, as usual, goes around without looking (yes, friendly stairs were a must have). They loved it in house number nine, didn't want to go home in fact, and Yon ran up and down the stairs without fear (he did went down on his bottom and held the rail on his way up, but he did not let it ruin the game for him).
And that is what won us over. Yes the house ticked all the must have's and most of the nice to have's, but so did other houses we've seen. The thing is that house number nine has something that the others didn't. It has the love-in-first-sight and that all important x-factors that makes a house into a home.
House number nine is the first house we've seen that actually made us want to live in a house, and hopefully it won't take us long before we embark on our very first two year House Adventure.


I am linking this post with #MotivationalMonday over at Pinkoddy because... Well because this house motivates me to move on and to let my boys grow. And with #MagicMoments over at The Oliver Madhouse because it was a magic moment for us to feel the possibility of living in a house!




I hope you enjoyed reading the post :) I would really appreciate two minutes of your time and a vote in the writer or family categories in the Bib blog awards - Just press the photo and copy in my URL - http://londondegani.blogspot.co.uk Thank you very much!
 

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Coffee break

Some people say that material things don't matter, and that in the western world we accumulate too much unneeded stuff, and that people put too much emphasis on owning things and not on spiritual things. Me, on the other hand, I am a firm believer in that the more you buy the better off you are. No, not really. I am just kidding, But I do have to admit that I really like my material stuff. I get unhealthily attached to my prized possessions. Take my rolling pin for example. I have four rolling pins. My oldest, and favourite is a traditional wooden one that I've had for about 12 years and moved it 3 countries before it handle broke a few months ago. Do you think I threw it away? No, I did not. I keep it in the cupboard, with the other three rolling pins thinking I might use it without a handle. I don't, but it's still there waiting for me, and every time I need a rolling pin it breaks my heart to see it there all sad and broken.
Yes, I am weird, but that is hardly news. At least the rolling pin doesn't have a name, which I can't really say about most of our other possessions. A few weeks ago my friend Izzy wrote a post about naming things, on which I commented with an "of course we name inanimate object, doesn't everyone?" Like Roomby which we treat in a combination of a third child love and a sweatshop slave driving but is in fact our iRobot vacuum cleaning robot that we've had for the last three years (and two countries), and Cici, the last car we owned, when we were living in Gibraltar (still, after two years, I can't get used to the whole driving on the opposite, not to say wrong, side of the road here. The bus driver does it so much better than me), which was a Citroen C3 (I know, you couldn't have guessed that one) and which was the cutest most adorable car we have ever owned. It had kind of a gender crisis since Hidai and Ron refused to drive a female car, and I said something that cute can't really be a male car, but we'll ignore that for the moment. Then of course you have the iPhone which doesn't have a name but is never more then 30cm away from me at all times (yes, even in the shower), and my wonderful new Macbook which I keep patting whenever I see it, to the point of Hidai looking at me weirdly. I have no idea why. It is after all, totally normal.
But nothing is more precious to me than my Nespresso machine. Let's put it this way, if the house was on fire, the Mac and the Nespresso will be the things I will run back inside to save (kids, Hidai and iPhone come first obviously). I bought my first Nespresso machine in 2007, as a gift to myself after I lost all the weight I gained during Ron's pregnancy. My excuse was that Weight Watchers said you should buy yourself something small to congratulate yourself for the achievement. And a Nespresso machine is quite small in its dimensions. This past October, with no relation to Weight Watchers, I decided it is time to indulge again and also the machine started making weird noises instead of coffee, and I bought myself a new Nespresso Lattissima, and life has never been the same. I know that I really should try to migrate more towards drinking tea, at least for as long as we are living in the UK, that this is not a coffee-lover country but I am a coffee person completely, and the only times I drink tea is when I am ill. And even then I put three spoonfuls of sugar in it. That is why Hidai is in charge of the tea drinking in this house, and since moving here he has even discovered the adding of milk to his tea, so at least one of us is being more in line with the UK life.

So back to coffee, the last two weeks, as I have already mentioned, were not all roses and sunshine. Especially in the one night when at about two in the morning Yon decided to start throwing up and we spent the rest of the night running between the toilet and the watching machine. It was one of those night when you tell yourself - wow, I am old, I really am not up to any more babies. We don't do lack of sleep well, and now that the boys have grown, we don't do lack of sleep at all. I guess every once in a while you have to go through one of these nights that reminds you why you really don't want to go through any more of those nights. What does that has to do with coffee? No, we didm;t give Yon coffee the next day, but after having a night like this, the best gift you can get (after time to catch up on sleep and chocolate - because chocolate is always the best gift you can get) is an enormous black box filled to the brim with coffee capsules.

Carte Noire sent me exactly this box, because they had both a new range of coffee and a sixth sense that I will need a huge amount of very strong coffee if I am to get through a day like that. Carte Noire makes coffee capsules that are compatible with Nespresso machines* and they have a new range of four flavours that differ in their intensities. Now, you might be new to this blog so you don't know this, but this is a very serious blog (not really) and I usually don't do reviews around here, in fact I can count on one hand the number of reviews I've done over the past year and a half of writing this blog. But this is coffee, and therefor second only to chocolate, so I couldn't really say no, right? The best thing and the worst thing about Carte Noire is rolled into one - each capsule is wrapped individually. The bad - It is very annoying after a night of little to no sleep to try and wrestle with the wrapping. The good - the smell. I have no idea how they've done it, but once you open the wrapping you get the most deliciously intense smell of raw coffee. I am not ashamed (ok just slightly ashamed) to say that I stood in the middle of my kitchen and just sniffed the wrapping for a few good minutes before I even put the capsule in the machine. I did think at first that I was extremely lucky, or just hallucinating, but every one of the capsules, in all the flavours, had that same wonderfully intoxicating smell of coffee. The coffee itself was, well, coffee. It was strong and hot and kept me alive for the day and without harming young children, so I definitely recommend it for times of sleep crisis. Other than that, when I tried it again on a day where I was actually conscious, I found that it worked wonderfully with my Nespresso machine, and that you could really distinguish between the tastes and strengths of the difference kinds. If, like me, you have a tendency to not look which capsule you are taking from the box and just like being surprised, than you'll love the fact that all of Carte Noire capsules look the same, and if you tear all their wrapping in advance and stuff them in a single box you won't be able to distinguish between them by look. And also you will lose that fab smell. But on the other hand, you won't find yourself ripping viciously at a small wrapper with eyes that are half closed. The coffee itself was really good, and after trying all four flavours (more than once. Just to be sure you understand) I preferred the stronger tastes while Hidai liked the less strong ones, and the kids loved the big black box it came in.
I know I turned out to be a real coffee snob / weirdo in this post, but the truth is only one of those things is true. To risk becoming an even bigger weirdo, the real reason I even drink coffee is because coffee, for me, is really the excuse for cake (and sometimes a very necessary energy shot), and seeing how the last few weeks were filled with hard times, they were naturally filled with cakes, and because you have to drink coffee to not feel guilty about eating cake (it really is how my mind works) - they were filled with coffee. Mainly Carte Noire coffee, so I feel like I am a good authority to tell you this - Carte Noire coffee works fabulously with all kind of cakes.

This is a sponsored post, though all opinions, craziness and cakes are definitely my own.

**Nespresso® is a registered trademark of a third party without any link with Mondelez International group. Compatible with all Nespresso®* machines bought before July 1, 2013. After that date, compatible with most Nespresso®* machines bought. For additional information regarding compatibility, please see UK: www.CARTENOIRE.co.uk/compatibility
Want to know more about Carte Noire?
The new range of capsules will be widely available in UK supermarkets making them a convenient and affordable way for coffee connoisseurs to create an extraordinary espresso at home.

The new range of capsules features four distinct flavours and each espresso comes with its own special character.  Some are accompanied by subtle fruity notes, whereas others offer a more complex chocolaty or nutty aftertaste. What’s more, there are a range of intensities so the higher the number, the higher the intensity, providing real choice whatever the mood or occasion:

·       N°3 Élégant is an exceptional pure Arabica coffee with a smooth and subtle taste enhanced by cereal notes.

·       N°5 Délicat is a pure Arabica coffee with fruity notes and a silky texture

·       N°7 Aromatique is an aromatic pure Arabica coffee with delicate hints of cocoa

·       N°9 Intense is a rich, intense blend of pure, darkly roasted Arabica coffee

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Taking that next step

For Jewish people Tuesday is a lucky day. It is supposed to be doubly-good (I really have no better way to translate it). I wish my Tuesdays would get the memo. I had a horrible day, where things continued to overwhelm me and I was looking at all the tables in our house trying to find one I could crawl under. In an attempt to relax and take my mind off things I did laundry. How pathetic is that? Obviously it didn't help but at least everyone has clean sheets and I had the perfect hiding place - under the laundry. 

But you know what they say about finding the silver lining and all that so this is not another dark hopeless post but one about the pots of gold I found today.

The first one was all those comments I got which, together with massive amounts of chocolate (I ran out of cake) got me through the morning. 

When I wrote on Monday about my anxiety attack and how bad I was feeling these past few weeks, for the first time since I started my blog I hesitated before pressing the "Publish" button. I know it's weird coming from someone whose blog is all about the most intimate things that happens in all our lives, but somehow that post felt so much more personal and private and publishing it felt like bearing my soul. I was worried people would laugh at me or belittle my feelings or just look at my post and say "oh, grow up already. Life is tough and it's past time you learnt it". To be honest, I am not really used to having people aside from Hidai and my parents who worry about me, and I was totally unprepared for the amount of positive feedback I got, and all the people who commented and wrote and worried about me. It helped so much, so I just wanted to say a gigantic thank you to everyone.

The second was Ron. Last week was a rough week for him in school with his one-on-one talk with his teacher going from bad to worse and our understanding that it is time to take him for a formal gifted-kids-assessment (also known as an IQ test) if we want to stop being "those parents". We had a talk with his head-teacher on Thursday about letting him go even more forward, and letting him prove what his limits are and fixing the fact that he got the impression the school doesn't care about him. I know it is going to sound silly, but we worry constantly about Ron's education. To be honest the school system isn't very helpful in that and gifted kids rarely get treated like SEN kids, though they are, and they don't get ELPs or professional advisors and meetings to discuss their progress. It is so hard to find teachers who understand gifted kids, who thinks of them as needing extra help and attention, because it is so hard and so important to keep them challenged and interested and prevent them from becoming underachievers. We are very lucky that our head-teacher sees things eye-to-eye with us and she set to fix what needed to fixing. As a result Ron had what he considers the funnest day of school - he got to do some level 6 maths tests from 9:30am till 2pm and in between tests he talked to the head-teacher about his goals for the next half-term. Add to that he got to participate in a special maths course that is being given in a local secondary school, and they had some questions from the Junior Maths Challenge and he got them all correct. You have never seen such a happy boy.

The third was Yon. When Yon got diagnosed I didn't have time to think or to feel or to do anything but try to accumulate enough material to make sure we are giving him the best help we can. When your child is diagnosed with a disability you go through the process of grief, complete with all the trimmings and stages. I have no idea what stage we are at now, most days it's acceptance with a dash of denial I would guess. But the thing I found is that no matter what stage you are on, you always have that one thing that bother you most, some tiny fear or anger or sadness about something he will never be able to do. It could be that he'll never play sports, or that he could never drive, or that he might need a cane. For me, it is that he won't be able to read. I love books, always have. Books, and love of reading, were the one most important thing I wanted to give both my kids. Ron learned to read when he was two years old, not because he enjoyed reading but because he enjoyed the learning process and the patterns he discovered within. I wasn't the one who managed to convince him books that are not about football are interesting, that honour is reserved to his last year teacher to whom I will always be grateful. Since he discovered reading is fun, he has become a regular bookworm and is now stealing my Kindle every chance he gets.

But with Yon it is much more complicated. How do you teach a child with 40% vision to read? How do you teach him to enjoy a whole book when you are not sure he can read a sentence? How do you teach someone to read when the letters keep moving in front of their eyes and they need to read each letter individually? Yon didn't want to learn. He is so different from Ron, and learning through visual aids is not his thing at all. But reading requires visual learning. Add to that the fact that he doesn't like to be taught at all, or being told what to do, and you get a problem. Yon taught himself the letters and sounds from listening repeatedly to songs on YouTube, and then over the summer I convinced him "to be like Ron" and do some workbooks which were mostly doodling and made sure he was prepared for reception.

What I wasn't prepared for, was how good his reception teacher is with him, and how much he came to enjoy learning to read. Today he came home from school and was so extremely proud of himself because he got his new reading book. It was an Oxford Reading Tree level 4 book (a year 1 book) and a note saying he is the most advance reader in his class.

Sometimes there are days when you look around and you ask yourself how am I supposed to go on? How am I supposed to climb this new mountain? Then you open your eyes and see a nine years old conquer every new challenge you put in front of him and a tiny not even five years old overcome blindness without ever loosing his smile, and you see a world full of people who care, and suddenly it becomes a bit easier to take that next step.

I am linking this post with the wonderful Small Steps Amazing Achievements linky over at Ethan's Escapades because I've missed it, and the Siblings linky because of this photo of my two dudes :)

I hope you enjoyed reading the post :) I would really appreciate two minutes of your time and a vote in the writer or family categories in the BiB blog awards - Just press the photo and copy in my URL -
http://londondegani.blogspot.co.uk
Thank you very much!

  

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Just breathe

Today is the first day in more then two weeks that I feel I can write, that I actually want to write. And still I am not sure how to go about it, like somewhere along the way I've lost my words or maybe myself. In the last few weeks it has become clear that we are on the verge of change (just to clarify - not pregnant and not moving country) and it has caused what I realised last night to be a mild case of an anxiety attack. For me, anxiety doesn't wash over you in one big wave of cold sweat. It creeps up, slowly, until you feel like you are drowning, like there is no more room to breathe. I didn't even notice it at first because anxiety has become a constant part of daily life these past few years, but then I found myself sitting in my living room just looking at the clock and waiting for the bad news to reach me. In my mind I had no doubt that there are bad news coming my way, that it will happen any minute now. Though nothing really happened I could feel my heart beating faster, I could feel myself getting impatient, I could feel the certainty of my life crumbling before my eyes.

Some of it, I figured out yesterday, is because of the waiting. We are on the verge, and some of the changes will happen in the next few months, while others will need more time to develop but has been set in motion. We have been inching toward those changes for months now, and it has been slowly driving me mad. I don't do slow or waiting very well. I like retrospect and talking about things to death like the next person, but long processes are not really my thing. Waiting is even less, and our lives are going in the way of no more swift changes, no more finding a house in two weeks, no more moving a country in ten days. I have tried doing it gracefully, I have tried embracing the wait, I have tried pushing it to the back of my mind and ignoring it. None of my carefully executed strategies worked. So I did the only thing I could - I baked. I decided to make a cheesecake, because a baked cheesecake is a good lesson in patience - you have to buy the ingredients (because who amongst us really keep in the house about a kilo of Philadelphia?), then you have to prepare it and bake it for almost 2 hours, then cool it, ice it, and put in the fridge for about 7 hours. There are no shortcuts, no way to cheat the system, no way to steal a little piece straight from the oven. It turned out perfect, so maybe patience is a virtue after all.
Some of it was the distance from Denial-Land. I do miss Denial-land so much. The older I get, the more I come to understand the guy in the Matrix who just wanted to go back to not knowing. Sometimes I wish you could un-take the red pill. Most of the time we live our lives in the sense that "it won't happen to me" - I will not be in a car accident, my house won't be burgled, I won't lose my job, I won't wake up one morning and discover my son is half-blind. After enough of these things happen to you, you stop saying "it won't happen to me", you just go with "I wonder which of these will happen next". Sure, you have to get back on the horse and all that, but how can you really stop being afraid you'd fall again?
Some of it was fear. Not the good kind of fear, the one that keeps you alive and unharmed, but the crippling kind of fear that paralyses you and stops you from moving forward. It's the fear of repeating the same past mistakes, it's the fear of the future, it's the fear of everything disappearing in front of your eyes.

I hate the word anxiety, it makes it sound frivolous or silly somehow. It makes me think of fragile victorian women who needed smelling salts. Somehow the word makes it to be something that you should have overcame by yourself, something weak people or childish people or over-dramatic people suffer from.
It might be true, God knows I told myself all these things on many sleepless night, when I couldn't see how morning will ever come. For me, anxiety gets worse in the night. Somehow, deep into the wee hours of the night when the house is eerily quiet, after the fifth time I checked the house is locked and the kids are breathing, that is when I can't control it anymore, when I can't tell myself that it really will be ok, that the voices in my head are just irrational fears that have no relation to my real life.

Anxiety takes everything that is bad, or hard, or uncertain and makes it ten thousand time worse, and when life keeps putting more and more hurdles in front of you it makes it harder to be able to distinguish between real-life problems to tackle and irrational fears. In the last couple of weeks everywhere I looked something was broken and needed me to fix it, or it was stuck and needed me to wait, or it was just soul-suckingily hard. Kids were sick, DLA and forms needed to be filled, money issues reared their ugly head, Ron had trouble in school, jobs were delayed, houses around here were expensive rubbish...
I felt like I was drowning. All I could do was keep my head above water and try to breathe. But I couldn't write, or smile, or see a way out. I lost my way and my blog. All I did for two weeks was played Candy Crush, knitted animals and baked.
Last night I told Hidai all of my fears. I just sat there and told him about the noise, and the anxiety, and the deep dark fears. I let him see inside the darkness of my mind. Hidai gave me hope, my little ray of sunshine and reality. He gave me, like always, his ear and his shoulder and way more love and understanding than I deserve.
And he helped me start to find my way back.

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Food for March

I know it doesn't look like it when you look out the window, but the calendar can't be wrong. It's March. I have spent the last weekend congratulating myself on surviving another UK winter, right before Monday arrived and I went to pick my boys up from school and promptly got caught in the biggest hailstorm we had all winter on the one day we were supposed to go check out some houses for our "how does it feel to live in a proper house" research project instead of going straight home. But if you ignore this freak-storm that lasted exactly from five minutes after I left home to five minutes before I got back, as most storms tend to do, you could look around and quietly whisper - it's beginning to look a lot like spring.

Trying to get out of school

And do you know what spring brings with it, other than flowers and sunshine and smiles? Food. Spring is, without a doubt, the season to be eating. It raises two problems - the first being that I still have 3 kilos to lose because unfortunately February was less than a stellar month in all areas of life, so it will come as no surprise to learn that what I thought of as a less than ambitious target of loosing 8 kilos and exercising 4 times a week was in fact too ambitious. The other problem is that spring is what comes before summer. And summer is the season to be showing off your diet's results. Well, the solution here is easy and clear to all - we live in the UK, we can always wear a coat under the pretence that "a summer coat is so in this year". And until we move to the suburbs were people actually have dress codes (or so I hear), we can always wear whatever we want under the label of eccentric rather then just plain weird.

Truth is I planned to get right back on the diet-horse on Monday, it's just that I didn't have a set Monday in mind and so I found myself last Wednesday when it became apparent that Monday has already passed, making an apple crumble. Apple crumble is the best cake ever, because it's a guilt free cake - after all, it is mostly apples. If you just ignore the sugar, flour and butter of course. But why would we want to be so petty? But then came the text message from school - we have moved year 4's cake sell to this Friday. Please bring your cakes on Friday morning. Ha, I thought to myself, here is my chance to get out of making a cake for school. I hate doing anything just because I have to, and baking is no different, but Ron looked at me like I ran over his puppy and told me he promised the whole school I will bake them cupcakes. 

I tried explaining that I don't have time on Thursday, I tried explaining that I don't have the ingredients needed for 40 cupcakes just lying around the house, I tried blaming it on the school. We all know what happened next don't we? I got him to compromise on a cake. Now that raised another dilemma - if you bake a chocolate cake for school, are you supposed to not bake one for yourself too? After all, how will you know if it's any good? And also it was my mum's birthday on Sunday (happy birthday mum!). And the fact that we live in different countries should not mean we don't deserve to enjoy some birthday cake. Yes, I baked two chocolate cakes, with chocolate icing, and sprinkles on top. 

It was the best decision ever, as I don't even dare trying to buy anything in the school bake sale with all the people fighting there for every cake, and Yon, who lives for chocolate cake, was devastated when he discovered that the cake is going to school and not all intended for him to eat.

Apparently, and not that I'm bragging or anything, my cake was the first one sold out, and it went for the highest price per slice :)

Cakes on their way to school

But that is not enough, because on Friday I decided it is high time to get some Jewish food supplies. I go to Golders Green about every three months to get some real hummus, pittas (don't get me started on what goes for pitta bread around here), wine and sweets. So we had more cakes. With chocolate. I am just thankful that Yon is even a bigger chocolate crazy than me. Makes me look so much saner when he runs around the house yelling "chocolate. My precious..."  (he does an excellent Gollum). 

Yon really likes pancakes

And then somehow we got to today, Tuesday, and though I told myself again, that I will get back on the diet-horse on Monday, we somehow stumbled upon Pancake Day. And you know I am not one to give up a good excuse to celebrate a holiday, regardless of its relation to me, if it has good food. Right after Pancake Day we have Purim, which you don't know about unless you are Jewish and why would you want to be Jewish? There really aren't a lot of reasons, but Purim is the main one. It is, after all, the candy holiday. Very diet fitting.

Purim food

After that Ron and I always celebrate St. Patrick's Day, for one reason alone - we get to eat mint-chocolate. Hidai doesn't like it and he always looks at us funny when we eat it, so I don't get to eat it a lot. Why on St. Patrick's Day you ask? The answer should be obvious really, because it has a green wrapping of course. And green is the colour of St. Patrick's Day. I expected you to know that.

That is followed by Mother's Day, or as I like to call it - Only Mummy Gets The Good Chocolate Day. After all, nothing says we love you mummy more than not eating my fancy chocolate, right?

Is it flowers or is it really.... You guessed it ;)

Hey, it's not my fault. I wanted to diet, I wanted to exercise. It's not my fault I opened the mailbox and discovered a box of chocolate from Hotel Chocolate last week.

At that point I decided to look at it as fate's way of saying - lose the diet, embrace the spring!

I hope you enjoyed reading the post :) I would really appreciate two minutes of your time and a vote for Best Writer (and best blog if you are so inclined) at the MAD blog awards -
Just press the photo and copy in my URL - http://londondegani.blogspot.co.uk
Thank you very much!

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