trench

Eagle-eyed Kristy spotted that, despite my whining on twitter about how I just couldn't find one that fits, I am indeed wearing a trench in this post

The thing is, it doesn't bloody fit. It almost fits*, but it's a 'petite' and despite being a skinny wench, I'm not petite. I'm 5ft7. So the waist of said trench sits up around my ribs, which is seriously uncomfortable. It also doesn't cover my butt and the sleeves are short. Which in my opinion does not a trench make.

("Why the hell did you buy it?" you may well ask, well I needed a jacket to brighten up a funeral outfit and I had all of 20 minutes to buy one. And despite it not really fitting, I kind of like it. But it's not a trench.)

A trench, since you ask, should cover your backside. Or possibly not, if it has full length sleeves. It should also button right up to the throat when necessary. When it is short and it leaves your arms and décolletage bare to the elements it does not make good rainwear, and that, my friends is the raison d'être of a trench. In Scotland at least.

In New York the point was just to stay reasonably warm on the chillier days and not wear grey for the entire trip. And so I wore it lots.

*of course now it doesn't fit me at all. Not one little bit.

{girl plus boots plus bag plus nottrench on the MET steps (yes, I might have been pretending to be Blair Waldorf, what of it?) by N.}

Spooked

To conclude Materialistic Monday, my best lady Celia emailed me:

'when i think of your house, i imagine it looks a lot like this.'

I wish.

One day, when we're done worrying if we're going to starve this winter, I'm going to buy this print and I'm going to stare at it all day.

{Spooked, by My Folk Lover}

Sylvester the cat

(I'm on a roll with the 'things I want to buy' posts.

Let's call it materialistic Monday shall we?)

N won't let me have a cat because they kill all the good things we want in our garden (we don't *have* a garden, but one day we will and then it will have good things in it) like birds that sing and voles that burrow and frogs that hop in ponds. Or if it were a cat anything like N's childhood monster (uh, I mean pussycat) seagulls and pheasants and the occasional sheep.

So I'm having one of these instead...

...because it makes me laugh (does that make me a big git?)

*Sylvester Bird Nesting Box, from Urban Outfitters, via The Scotsman newspaper.

Bunny bean

I'm not entirely sure what this* is, but I like it.

*it's called a miniature bunny bean. That's enough for me.

{image courtesy of ashleyg}

Two

Dudes, we're having two of these. TWO.

I think we're kind of lucky.

*photo by Lillian and Leonard Wedding Photography (uh...us) from Lisa and James' wedding which was full of killer kids. Break dancing five year old anyone?

tadpoles and toes

An aside from panics and fears and big stuffs.

Some pictures from a week or so in the life of me, him, them and the rabbit. Just to remind myself that life is really quite wonderful, however many panics and fears there are.

Duvet time with the wabbit. He looks like he disapproves but he loves duvet time more than carrots and cardboard boxes.

N tadpole spotting in our not-so-local-but-very-big-and-has-horses park. We go twice a week to see if they've grown legs yet. Legs seems like an awful big milestone and we don't want to miss it.

BABY CHINCHILLA!! No, not wild in our local park (we live in Scotland people). But there is a greenhouse with a selection of creepies and crawlies and scalies and one or two fluffies. I love the fluffies best.

The whole family (I'm wearing shorts, promise. You just can't see them over my great big belly). This sums up our little family at the moment; N looks serious while he researches something (wallpapering, plastering, tiling, pushchair suspension) on the internet, I contemplate how much longer I will be able to see my toes and the rabbit looks on suspiciously.

N and I got all fancied up (ie, we showered) last week to go for afternoon tea. We were given a voucher for a swanky cafe for our first wedding anniversary. It's about 8 weeks from our second.

It's been so warm and stuffy and our tap water is coming out at room temperature so every night I've been filling a glass bottle with water and putting it in the fridge. Last night I could smell fresh mint in the kitchen so I shoved some in. Then I thought some lime would be nice with that. It was only when I was checking to see if we had ice cubes I realised I was subconsciously trying to turn my bottle of water into a mojito.

Panics/Fear

Trust Meg to say it best...

"I've been having The Fear lately, which I find is quite different from The Panics. The Panics just make me run around, "Ah! Ah! Ah! What if! What if! Shaky hands! Shaky heart."

But The Fear is a real b*tch. It just sits there in front of your path like a boulder, and says, "I'm not going to move AT ALL, because god only knows what's on the other side." So then you just have to sit there, puzzling how to get around it."

Yeah, I'm alternating between both at the moment.

I'm writing a post just now, and it's the hardest post I've ever written. It's a Big Stuff post. It feels good. In the way that having a crick in your neck fixed by a large Swede with meaty hands and no mercy feels good, it hurts but you know it's worth it. That's when it's not giving me the shits.

I'd love to know if any of you have ever written a post that has terrified you? Or do you (very wisely) stick to a form of blogging that doesn't make you crap your pants?

I'm curious.

* photo courtesy of Crsan, via Flickr.

blue

Yesterday was shitty. Today, today is less shitty. But not totally shit-free.

I have The Fear.

I also have The Anxiety, The Panic and The Vomits.

This blue wall by Emma Case is valium for the soul.

Things I saw in the park this morning;

Things that gave me smiles;

a mouse washing his nose

two baby chinchillas

a troupe of circus horses

a purple bush full of fuzzy buzzy bees

a dog with one spotty ear

leaves.

Things that gave me the fear;

15 women in lycra,

mid jog,

with pushchairs,

discussing nappy rash.

Delusion

I don't know what's more embarrassing;

that I'm holding my jeans shut with an elastic band,

that I need N's help to get them over my arse,

or that I'm pretty convinced I can get another couple of months out of them.

New York, week 1

wanders and turtles and blooms and doughnuts and dogs and cupcakes and love.

flutter byes

This mobile is giving me all sorts of weird, crafty urges.

Must find fluff and butterflies and bugs and birds and glue and string and colour.

Must. Have. Colour. Now.

and not that wishy washy, faded, bleached colour I so love (hello blog). REAL colour. Real 'make your eyes tingle and your heart race' colour.

(wherever can I find me a giganterous big bag of colourful bugs and birds?)

mobile and photos by Color Me Katie, via Life, Love, Paper.

Widdle and Puke

More and more guests arrive, and with them came presents. Most of these were, from my point of view, useless, as they could not be adapted for natural history work. The best of the presents were, in my opinion, two puppies brought by a peasant family I knew who lived not far away. One puppy was liver and white, with large ginger eyebrows, and the other was coal black with large ginger eyebrows. As they were presents the family had, of course, to accept them. Roger viewed them with suspicion and interest, so in order that they should all get acquainted I locked them in the dining-room with a large plate of party delicacies between them. The results were not quite what I had anticipated, for when the flood of guests grew so large that we had to slide back the doors and let some of them into the dining-room, we found Roger seated gloomily on the floor, the two puppies gambolling around him, while the room was decorated in a fashion that left us in no doubt that the new additions had both eaten and drunk to their hearts' content. Larry's suggestion that they be called Widdle and Puke was greeted with disgust by Mother, but the names stuck and Widdle and Puke they remained.'

page 165, My family and Other Animals, George Durrell

So it seems I have a little clearing up to do. I gather, from some of your comments, especially the one that read;

(I laughed so hard that you have called them Widdle and Puke.... what did Puke do to deserve that?!!?)

that a lot of you don't have an clue what 'Widdle' means. Because really? Puke seems worse to you? And so I asked my twitterbugs and the answer was almost universal "I thought widdle was baby-talk for 'little'" Excuse me? Baby talk? Me? Here?

Bollocks to that.

Something that might go a little way to explaining my blog absence in April & May is that I spent weeks 6 through to 14 sitting either on the toilet or on the floor beside the toilet, widdling then puking. Puking then widdling. And so I started referring to myself as Widdle And Puke, the two aforementioned puppies from my favourite book in the world ever. And when we found it it wasn't one but two babies that were fucking around with my bladder and my gag reflex it couldn't have seemed more perfect, of course one was Widdle and one was Puke.

And incase you're still under any illusions:

Widdle

wid·dle [ wídd'l ]

noun (British)

an act of urination. This middle- and upper-class nursery term is a blend of wee and piddle.

You don't need me to explain Puke do you?

*image courtesy of Ashi

New York, the wedding.

Thank you all again for your sweetness, no sharp sticks for you girlies, just smooches. I'll be back next week with a little more W&P, but for now let me present......

Persephone & Fauxhawk, The Nuptials. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this for a long long time. I know because you keep asking me. So here you have it, some snippets of Persephone & The Hawk's wedding, the reason we were in New York in the first place.

These are just a few of my favourites but you can see the whole shebang on Lillian and Leonard:

{ part 1, the preparations}

{ part 2, the ceremony}

{part 3, the party}

* As I was putting together this post I heard Skid Row on the radio for the very first time ever! If you don't understand the significance of this it means you haven't been reading What Possessed Me closely enough. Which means you should have your internet connection revoked.

There's more...

Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and congratulations, they mean the world to both me and N.

So, when I said that I wrote the previous some weeks ago I wasn't kidding. I wrote it 13 weeks ago, when we thought we were having a baby. A baby as opposed to two babies.

Twins. Two. More than one. A litter.

Readers, meet Widdle and Puke....

That there on the bottom is Widdle and at the top (with the doughnut) is Puke. Say hello babies.

Of course they're quite significantly bigger now. Which is to say that they don't look like sleeping hamsters any more. They have fingers (ten each. Score!) and toes (we couldn't count those, they were moving to fast. Any number will do as long as the Peonies Family webbed feet don't make an appearance. You think I'm joking don't you?) and arms and legs and tiny flickering baby hearts.

Widdle likes to suck fingers and Puke likes to kick Widdle in the head.

Twins readers! Twins!*

*Appropriate responses to the news that someone is having twins include but are not limited to:

"Oh my God, twins!!!!!" , "Holy shitballs P! Twins!!!!" , "Twins! What a blessing" and chin wobbling happy tears.

"rather you than me" , "Oh my God, twins. (no exclamation mark)" , "double trouble" and "a woman in my office had twins, and well.... (raised eyebrows and small shake of the head)" are all shitbag things to say and will earn you a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

(We've heard all of the above so far. People are assholes.)

Some weeks ago...

Me: Do you feel differently about me since we found out?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: Like when you're walking across the petrol station back to the car and you're smiling at me and you used to be thinking "I'm going back to my Pixie in the car", today did you think "I'm going back to my Pixie and my bubba in the car"?

Him: I was thinking "Sixty bloody quid for a tank of petrol"

clarifications

We're just back from a long weekend Up North where we were visiting my family and helping my mummy move house.

For those who were following my twitter conversation with Lauren about the joys of Countdown, the aforementioned mother would like it noted for the record that when I say:

'every day forever my family have recorded it, watched it before bed & paused it when the letters appear til everyone has a word'*

by 'my family' I mean 'my Grandparents' and that she has never willingly watched an episode of Countdown in her life. She has however, as has every member of our family, watched many hundreds of them unwillingly.

I say 'unwillingly', but I kind of hate and kind of love The Countdown Routine. Yes, it's weird and slightly annoying and no, I would never watch it outwith my Grandparent's house, but it's our weird and slightly annoying thing. One of those Family Things that makes you want to hide your head under a sofa cushion but you're not sure if it would be so no one can hear you scream or so no one can see you laugh. Every family has one of those, right?

*(thus dragging the already tedious task of watching a Whole Damn Episode to epic proportions)

**said Grandparents and three eldest grandchildren (including one small blond me) circa 1987

Love you Chicken.

Does this mean I have to stop calling him Chicken* in public? And ohsweetjesus, what about him calling me Pix? Surely Pix** doesn't count?

*I don't do this regularly, but sometimes it just kind of slips out. But then sometimes it just kind of slips out when I'm talking to other people that I love and before I know it Soph is looking at me like 'you freak, you just called me poultry'. So that's not really a pet name, but rather my inner 80 year old breaking free, right?

** I don't think he calls me this when he's talking about me to other people, just when he wants me to pass him the sauce or not get run over and stuff like that.