babelfish just won't do

Can anyone please translate the following from baby to adult for me, please?

"Bee bah bah! Dadadada duh. Buh buh buh buh buh BAH. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! Aye-eeee ah."

Jack's been saying this to me for the past couple of weeks, with a very serious look on his face. I think he's trying to tell me something important.

not even worthy of the bird cage

The Independent published this rather pointless article about blogs today. In a nutshell, it says "There are a lot of blogs out there. Here are some excerpts that we've copied from a few 'quirky' blogs, with links to the sites. We can't be arsed to a) write a decent article that actually makes some sort of point, b) inform the authors of these blogs that we will be quoting them, or c) inform the authors that we will include links to their sites that our thousands of readers will click upon, thus eating up the blog's entire bandwidth quota in the span of an hour." Or words to that effect.

Unfortunately, one of my lovely bloggy friends has been included in this article and had to remove her blog as a consequence (she is in the article under the baby blog section). To quote from her site (and thus saving her some more bandwidth by not encouraging readers here to go there directly):

This site is offline until further notice.

The Independent newspaper decided to publish an entry from this website today. Obviously they do not have to ask permission being that the internet is in the public domain, but it would have been perhaps courteous to have notified us, if only for the sudden increase in site traffic that it generated.

This website was decided as a slightly humorous method of letting our friends and family know how our much-loved baby is progressing in the world. As anyone with children will know, these first few months pass by in a whirlwind and it is hard to remember when milestones were reached and cherished moments happened, so it was also a way for us to keep our own record of our baby's development.

Unfortunately, as a result of the Independent article, a number of people commented slightly unsavoury remarks about the content and style of the site. Again, we realise that the site is in the public domain, but it was a harmless site with no offence caused to anyone - or so we thought. To discover links to photos of our son, with insulting comments about us as his parents, was hurtful to say the least.

So for the time being we are taking the site offline. As the saying goes, today's news is tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper, but until that happens we don't want people being able to abuse us or our child.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank those that did visit our site regularly and who enjoyed its content.

The Site Owners

This was a sweet blog written from the point of view of a (rather cute, if I do say so myself) baby boy. It was totally harmless, lighthearted, and like my baby blog, a means to keep track of the millions of milestones and to help keep family and friends informed about the baby. She wasn't vying for the Pulitzer Prize for literature, for Pete's sake. Yes, blogs are in the public domain and you can't stop people from using material from your site in whatever manner they want. Should a newspaper like The Independent know better? In my view, yes. I think it's a bit pathetic to take the piss out of a blog like baby Matthew's. Go laugh at my dog blog (it's been done before), or have a giggle at the latest celebrity blog, but when someone feels that they have to stop blogging because of undeserved harsh comments, something has gone terribly wrong. This argument that "everyone has a blog and they're all ridiculous" misses an important point - we should encourage anything that gets people to read, write, think, and interact. No matter how banal someone may think it is.

spin me right round, baby

2.57 pm:



2.59 pm:



He never does this when anyone's actually looking.

edible ponderables

I don't understand artichokes. After you peel off the tough outer leaves and dig out the choke, you've got something the size of a sugar cube on a stem. Don't get me wrong, I really like the taste or artichokes; I just suspect that you're getting ripped off when you buy them raw. Since fresh produce tends to be charged by weight, I think you should be allowed to bring in the edible bit of artichokes after preparation and pay accordingly. Same goes for asparagus - snap off the woody ends before you get to the checkout. Might as well shuck fresh peas, take the stone out of avocados, and take all the wilty bits off heads of lettuce before you pay, too. Um...but you didn't read that here. *wink*

After watching a program on channel 4 about the dire conditions in which our livestock is kept, I was reminded why I became a vegetarian 18 years ago. Obviously I had forgotten about these chickeny horrors because I started eating meat again, but now I feel the need to be more responsible for the food I ingest. I will not go vegetarian again, due to the fact that one cannot live a life free of any animal cruelty simply by not eating meat. Well that, and I really like meat. I have, however, vowed to buy free range and organic when I can. After seeing the segment about "hock burns" on chickens (the ammonia from their waste leaves a mark on their legs when they become too lame to stand) and actually seeing these burns on row upon row of chickens at my local Tesco, I quickly ran for the organic section. I used to joke that free range meat was crueller than factory farmed meat because killing a happy animal was just mean. ("Have a beautiful meadow to frolic around in, some lovely food, clean water, all the space you want - and then we're going to kill you and wrap you in clingfilm.") Now I do see the point of eating something that had a decent life and was kept in humane conditions.

Of course the true key to living a happy life free of cruelty is to stuff your face with chocolate and Green and Black's ice cream. Obviously.

abs of jelly

I had my first pilates class yesterday. It was a beginner's class, mostly comprised of mums and people over 70. Feeling confident that I would be able to keep up (if old people can do it, surely I can too), I got my yoga mat and settled myself in. It's been so long since I've taken a fitness class that I had forgotten about horrifying things like wall-to-wall mirrors. It was like a traffic accident; I truly did not want to look at myself struggling to bend to one side while all my fat gathered itself up like a doughy accordion, and yet I couldn't turn away. I was fine with the stretches and surprised myself at how flexible I still am, but when it was time for the serious pilates work, I made a terrible discovery: doctors must have stolen my abdominal muscles when they removed Jack from me.

I tried to curl myself up using my stomach muscles, but the only way I could do it was by using my neck, shoulders, and legs. It wasn't like my abs were struggling to do the exercises, it was like I had no muscles there at all. On the other hand, I must still have something there because my stomach is killing me today.

No one's going to be bouncing a quarter off my stomach anytime soon, but it's nice to finally get back into classes again. I don't feel strong enough to return to yoga yet (don't be fooled - it's a lot harder than it looks), so I'll just stick to pilates for the time being. And hope that the old people don't laugh at me.

day 67

So, Orlaith "Look At My Boobies" is gone and has been replaced by Kinga. One question: why? There are two weeks to go, she is never going to win it, and she is unbearable to watch. She makes you plead "Keep it on! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE KEEP IT ON!" We all breathed a sigh of relief when Makosi chose not to bring Kinga into the house a few weeks ago, and then we let out a collective gasp of horror when we saw her in the diary room about to enter the house last night. Oh, the humanity.

A lot of Big Brother is making me cringe and turn away from the television like I'm witnessing a really bad first date. In the outside world, Craig would be drugging Anthony and keeping him in a secret room in his basement. Instead, we are forced to witness the poor lad endure daily maulings by a deranged hairdresser (who surely must be making the gay community cringe as well). Derek is becoming cattier by the day which might have been entertaining, but sadly he is also becoming more boring. As more housemates are evicted, he may have to resort to bitching about the garden gnomes...to the other garden gnomes. Eugene is so painfully geeky that he makes Bill Gates look like Samuel L Jackson. Makosi's weave is turning into a demented tribble and her "look at me, I'm going to pretend to cry now" act has become tiresome.

But will I stop watching it? Goodness no. How else will I feel superior about my own life if I can't mock those on reality TV?

tickertape parade

Some of you may have noticed that I added a weight loss ticker below Jack's age ticker. I promise not to litter my page with dozens of countdowns to things like holidays, birthdays of obscure relatives, or Jack's next poo (if you're curious, that should be today). I just like having a visual reference to see how much weight I've lost and how much I've got left to lose. I'm a simple gal - I need big, colourful pictures in my life. I've managed to lose almost all the pregnancy weight (which, surprisingly, was only around 25 lbs. and 14 of that came off the week after Jack was born), now I've just got to lose all the weight I've put on since meeting Paul. Yerrrs.

On Saturday, I had a lovely conversation about our babies with a friendly mum, and after a few minutes I decided to introduce myself. I think I may have committed some sort of Mum Faux Pas because she looked a bit startled, quickly gave her name, and the conversation ended shortly thereafter. We met a lot of really friendly people on Saturday, but I still have no clue who any of them are. I know everything about their babies, how they were born, what the babies are eating, and their sleep patterns but ask me who X's mummy is, and I haven't the foggiest.

I know all the names of the babies in our swimming class, but I have no idea what any of the mums are called. I am "Jack's Mummy", and likely will be until he leaves home. I remember a friend of mine saying that she rang another mum and had to identify herself as her child's mummy, because the other mum had no idea who she was based on her first name. I suppose this is preferable to "that mad Canadian woman who keeps trying to be friendly with the English", and to be honest, I'm more than just a little bit proud to be Jack's Mummy.