The Great Car Hunt

If you’ve got me on Facepoop or twitter, you’ll have seen my recent car-hunt adventures. It’s surprisingly hard to find a car that is both small (physical size and engine) but also big enough enough to hold a rear-facing car seat.

In 2010, we made the decision to keep Isabel rear-facing for as long as possible, and bought a rear-facing “Volvo” (re-badged Britax) seat. It’s a fantastic car seat, but as with the majority of rear-facing seats, it has a bigger footprint than a forward facing seat:

As my completely unscientific diagram shows, FF seats fit with the shape of inner car seat whereas RF seats fit almost at opposites, requiring clearance in between the back seats and front passenger/driver. Also, in the event of an additional support leg (which the MultiTech we bought has), that’s another bucket load of space required too.

So anyway, faced with this quite specific requirement, I got a lot of questions on why I don’t just buy a new seat and turn Isabel around. *headdesk* I have no idea how to begin explaining why keeping my daughter 5 times safer is important to me.

Anyway, so after much trawling of second-hand cars on the ‘net, local dealerships etc we settled on a Skoda Fabia. It’s an older version but with a 4 star Euro NCAP rating for passengers satisfies my safety-conscious side. It’s in fantastic condition, full service history, low tax (compared to Karl’s), yadda yadda yadda. Most importantly? It fits all the major rear-facing car seats. Rock on!

Posted on: January 27, 2012 · Category: Misc

What do you want to do?

Just saw an interesting thread on one of the forums I visit, “what do you want to do?” So I had a think about it, and here’s my list (in no particular order):

Have more children (at least one), keep chickens, become more self-sufficient, work for myself, ride the world’s biggest rollercoasters, visit Egypt, finish one of my many(!) crochet blankets, climb a mountain, cook a perfect treacle sponge pudding, ride in a hot air balloon, visit the Ice Hotel, donate breastmilk for premature babies and complete my breastfeeding peer supporter training.

I will probably think of loads more as soon as I hit publish, but what do you want to do? :)

Posted on: January 12, 2012 · Category: Misc

No wonder we have a debt crisis

I applied for a credit card today, and on the form was asked my job:

It’s no wonder there’s a global problem with debt if school-aged children can apply for credit.

Posted on: January 12, 2012 · Category: WTF

On “Mommy Wars”

So, I’m reading this post where one mum rants about the reaction another mum got for admitting she’s letting her kid “CIO” (cry it out).

I’ve talked about CIO and sleep training before, you know I don’t like it, so I won’t go over old ground. However, as Isabel gets older I am becoming more “live and let live” about parenting and so even if I personally wouldn’t do something, I try not to let other people’s choices bog me down. I don’t have the time or energy to be worrying about someone letting their toddler wail. I certainly don’t see the point in spewing hate-filled vitriol across someone’s facebook page about it.

All’s well that ends well, we all agree.

Except that obviously something has sparked me off ’cause you know I wouldn’t just be writing this post to agree that a) mommy wars are stupid and b) if some random blogger wants to let her 1 year old cry that’s her business.

Indeed… and here lies my problem: not the original post, but the responses. Responses like the one from the mother who let her 10 month old cry so much he hyperventilated and vomited all over himself. Again and again. Responses like the one from the parent who let all her kids cry it out from 12 weeks old because they clearly had no physical needs and were just trying to control her. Responses like the one from the mum who “let her boys cry it out” so they’d sleep through by 8 weeks old.

And do I then want to spam someone’s facebook page or start a ‘mommy war’? No, I want to shed a tear. I want to hug those poor little buggers tight and apologise to them because SOCIETY has such fucked up views on parenting and NORMAL baby behaviour that some parents feel the need to leave tiny, tiny babies to cry themselves to sleep and then brag about it — what a fucking awesome decision it was — on some random blog. On a blog that other mum’s are going to see, that other mum’s will then use to compare to their infants who are (quite normally and naturally) waking every couple of hours or more, and maybe even use as a starting point for a decision that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Does that make me judgemental? Immature? Am I contributing to the “mommy wars”? Probably. But there has to be a line. A line drawn in the sand where we say to people: beyond this, it’s just not fucking acceptable. And if you’re still counting your kids age in weeks or mopping up their vomit because they’re so distraught? That to me crosses the god damn line.

Posted on: January 11, 2012 · Category: Interwebs, Parenting

My cheaty leftover-lamb curry

I will start this post by warning you that I make my curries by throwing lots of stuff into a pan until it tastes vaguely like a curry. You could quite easily add/take away from this without it having a massive effect (e.g. I add mushrooms to my curry where most people wouldn’t) but this is what worked for me.

Also, I’ve called this a ‘cheaty’ curry because I’ve not properly prepared any spices or anything; I couldn’t even be bothered to chop up garlic. This is because after a crap day at work, the last thing I want/need to be doing is arsing about in the kitchen for hours. Anyway, on with it…

Ingredients

  • 1 large onion
  • big handful of mushrooms
  • 2 big handfuls leftover lamb roughly chopped into chunks
  • 2 tsps curry powder (I use mild because I’m a wimp.. adjust to suit)
  • glug of Linghams Garlic Chilli sauce
  • 1/3 of a tube of garlic pureé
  • small tin of Heinz curry ‘beanz’
  • 1/2 cup lamb gravy (t’was a bit of experiment adding leftover ‘proper’ gravy, but it boosted the flavour wonderfully; if you don’t have any you might want to use a stock cube + extra water?)
  • cup of water
  • big glug of olive oil for frying + optional butter

Instructions
Put a big saucepan over a medium heat on the hob and and add your big glug of olive oil (I also add a small knob of butter when I’m using mushrooms as they fry better, but this is optional). Chop your onion and mushroom and add it to the pan, frying gently til lightly golden then add the meat chunks.

After a minute or so of gentle frying, turn the heat down low and add the curry powder, Garlic Chilli sauces and garlic pureé and mix well. Leave to fry for a little longer, stirring regularly so nothing sticks.

When everything looks all curry coloured and all the flavours are intermingled etc, add the leftover gravy and water (or just water if you’re minus gravy… in fact, a nice alternative to both would be a tin of chopped tomatoes, which would add another veg portion I reckon). Add the tin of ‘beanz’ (another portion of veg plus fills it out a bit) and then leave to simmer for as long as you can be bothered to wait. I left mine for 20 mins on a medium heat which got rid of some of the excess fluid, but I’d generally leave a curry for at least 30 mins.

Serve on a clean plate with some microwave rice (ha!). Should serve 3-4 but it depends how much of a fat piggy you are.

Posted on: January 10, 2012 · Category: Home & Garden