Welcome!

Welcome to my blog.  I barely have time to keep my home afloat - the childcare, the laundry, the grocery shopping, the cooking, the laundry (does it ever end?) – let alone write a blog – but I suspect that anyone with small children, a home, no job*, and not great delegation skills (thus, most stay-at-home mothers) is in the same boat, and so I will persevere.

This blog is about food and children.  Not necessarily food for children – in fact any food-related postings are likely to be easy 30-minutes-fridge-to-table recipes for grown ups – and not even about children as food (although a recent visit to the zoo and a toddler’s temper tantrum near the lions' enclosure  raised the fantasy);  but generally separately.  Some days I will just want to unload about the horror of dealing with a boisterous not-yet-2yr old and his sweet – but vocal and demanding – not yet 2-month-old sister.  Other days – when the rarely-sighted beast that is a stretch of sleep exceeding 5 hours has raised its head – I may extol the virtues of a quick and easy fridge-clearout dinner I’ve made, which has the added benefit of leftovers for the constantly hungry toddler.

Because with two under 2, I don’t actually get to leave the house that often – and definitely not to do anything amounting to me-time.  I haven’t yet practised going out with the two of them; we still have daily help with the newborn, but that’s about to come to an end.  And as winter nudges in (yes, it’s only September, but  a London-September is so far a portend of the horror that will be the never-ending London-Winter) I can’t imagine leaving the house other than to go foraging for food, once or twice a week.  In Sainsbury’s. 

Unlike other food blogs, where farmers’ markets, and the practice of pottering about therein, are seemingly normal – nay, necessary – activities, the reality is that it’s really not that possible for me.  For starters, there are no such markets in this part of SW London.  And if I had the time and energy to bundle up two children and go pottering about food stalls, chatting to the producers and trying to hide my astonishment at the SHOCKING COST of the apples / cheese / bread, then surely I should use said time and energy – and money - to take them to a class or visit a friend – anything really to expend some toddler energy and lessen the daily guilt of being a Bad Lazy Mother.

So food postings will be larder-friendly food, quickly thrown together to provide easy dishes that wouldn’t embarrass you (too much) if for some reason hungry visitors turned up at your door unexpectedly (any visitors at my door would stay there, knocking until the end of time).  Child-postings will be rants and decompressing devices, and occasionally – hopefully – the odd amusing observation (such as yesterday’s, which was that apparently I say “oh Christ” when I drop things enough for the Boy to add it to his repertoire of, oohh, 17 words. [Of the other 17, 3 are Bad Words already picked up from, it appears, me...]).

Finally, the name.  I didn’t know what to call this blog. I needed something which summed up my life. Willitevergetbetter.com  was already gone, as was WhatthehellwasIthinkinghavinganotherchild.blogspot; Thisfuckingsucks seemed a bit too blunt (plus it doesn’t always suck, and when it comes together and I feel like I’ve earned my nightly glass of wine, the world seems an ok place, and the 3am feed a doable chore).  But the wine enjoyment is always always tempered by the knowledge that, no matter how much housework I’ve done that day (usually very very little, I am fast veering from house-wife to house-slut) there is inevitably laundry to be done. It never ends. It piles up while I sleep, while I shop, while I type.  There is little I hate as much as laundry  - the gathering, the sorting, the hanging, the re-sorting – and don’t start me on ironing – yet in a cruel twist of fate, it is laundry which is the one constant in my life. Why can’t Green & Black’s Almond multiply over-night?  Or a nice Meursault?  Or good behaviour from the Boy?  Instead, it’s the milk-sodden babygros, the manky muslins, the weetabix-encrusted pyjamas... I no longer wear clean clothes, and yet I go through a large container of washing detergent every week.  Never-ending-laundry sums up my life – and yet simultaneously sounds like a song from the 80s (whatever happened to Limahl??) 

And so relentlesslaundry it is.  Welcome.

(*sorry, that should of course read “paid employment” as anyone who even hints that I don’t have a job is welcome to step into my 6am-to-midnight-with-a 3am-feed life and then repeat their “no job” assertion...)