Who Said Life Was Fair???

My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for about 5 years,  it's weird but until we got married I thought my "baby making" days were long past me, with two boys hitting their teens I really did think I'd done my bit for the continuation of the species and I was done with all that.   But getting together with Pie and seeing what a great stepfather he was and how much he missed his own children it reignited in me the desire to go through the hellish experience that is pregnancy.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy, pregnancy never is for me, but I did think it was possible and I thought it would be worth it.  But I didn't think it was going to be this hard.  When we started trying I thought we had lots of time but it's amazing how fast that time slips away from you and suddenly you are 5 years down the line and it's pretty much too late.

After seeing Mr Shehata in April and discovering that my problem with getting a pregnancy to stick was killer cells I was prescribed steroids to surpress the killer cells, aspirin to keep my blood thin and high doses of vitamins.  I came away from that appointment feeling so positive,  at last there was an answer and a possibility of having a baby.  I'd been getting pregnant regularly so I didn't doubt that we could do it again.

But here we are, the year is coming to a close and we still aren't successfully pregnant and it appears that the very drugs that were meant to help me stay pregnant may have ended my chances of getting pregnant at all.   Since I started taking the steroids I had noticed that my cycle had changed radically,  I had gone from a strict 26 day cycle to a 35 day cycle and then experiencing mid cycle bleeding as well. Using ovulation sticks every day it also appears that I am no longer ovulating, the first month I thought ok maybe I screwed up the tests and I missed the day but after 2 solids cycles of testing I know I didn't miss it, it just isn't happening.

So how do I feel? I can't honestly say yet,  I don't think it's actually sunk in quite yet, the part of me that should feel sad is so numb at the moment it isn't feeling anything, but part of me feels guilty for feeling relieved, I haven't had to make this decision myself my body has done it for me, my body has quit on me!  

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Soft Play Purgatory

Recently I had my first re-experience (hmmmm is that a real word???) of soft play, you know,  those indoor playgrounds that are full of climbing frames, ball pits and slides etc. Oh good god the torture of it.  My boys are 17 and 14 so it's a very very long time since I have set foot over the treshold of one of these places and I had forgotten totally what they were like. The first thing that hit me was steam, I mean I know it was raining outside (really heavily... in fact I was at that point considering googling plans on ark creation) so I guess an element of the steam might be kids and parents coming into this hell hole slightly damp but I think also that the steam might have just been the sweat off the kids and the constant CO2 created by their open mouths as they screamed.

And scream they did!!!

We were there because my stepchildren were down visiting us during the school holidays and at 7 and 4 they are a lot younger than my boys so I am having to re-learn how to entertain small people again... not easy I can tell you, but probably good practice if we ever do achieve our aim of having a baby.

The second thing that struck me was the wall of noise.  I am wondering is tolerance of softplay venues, parks etc something you get an immunity to?  I ean when my boys were small I remember taking them to these softplay places and sitting quite happily with a book whilst they ran themselves into exhaustion and the noise never bothered me, yet here I am a few years later and it was like being locked into a room with 100 howler monkeys all screaming at the top of their lungs and it was absolutely excrutiating.  I looked around and there were all these other mums sitting quite happily chatting with each other and yet I could not even hear myself think!!!

I ended up digging into the bottom of my handbag and fortunately found some earplugs which I gratefully shoved into my ears... trust me you could still hear the screaming and shouting... and crying as little Johnny bashed some other kid or vice versa... it was just now at a reasonable dull roar.

I did have a genius thought though if the armed forces ever decide they need new methods to extract information from detainees they could always tie them to a chair and stick them in the middle of the ball pit and just let the kids have fun throwing those plastic balls at them and let the detainees endure a few hours of 100 howler monkeys... oops I mean darling children... a few hours of that and they will be begging to tell what they know.

Good Read - Kill For Me by Karen Rose

After finishing the last Karen Rose novel - Scream For Me, I just could not wait to get into this one,  it had been sitting beside my bed gently taunting me, whispering ... read me... read me... you know you want to... do it... give in.  So I did!  Am I ever weak when it comes to a good book.

Considering that in a good killer thriller the writer has to have all the characters in the novel from very early on, Karen Rose really does do a good job of keeping you guessing.   I mean it's really not fair on the reader to have them get to the last chapter and then spring the murderer on them as being someone that hasn't been involved in the plot from the beginning... that's just cheating!  So Karen doesn't cheat!  The buy guys are there right from the beginning right under your nose but you just don't know it... that's how cleverly written the book is.

One thing I didn't like was how many law enforcement officers bit the dust, as the body count racks up quite a few of them are the good guys.  Now I am not an idiot, this is how life works, the good guys don't always come out in one piece but it still made me a bit sad nevertheless.

The romance in this book was a little bit more muted, it definitely took second place to the killer thriller part but it was definitely a page turner and the plot twists just kept mounting.

I read the book in 3 days... bit of a clue as to how gripping it is.

Herby Roasted Sweet Potatoes

I am really really into sweet potatoes... I never really had them before I had to think about the sugars in my diet. Apparently having PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) often means that sufferers have insulin resistance which means weight gain is very likely.  The only way I have found to control weight as a PCOS sufferer is to try and keep sugar (carbohydrates) to a minimum which isn't easy as one of the problems of having PCOS is an extreme sweet tooth... how unfair is that then???

So avoiding foods like pasta, rice, bread and potatoes is really important as they are quite high on the glycaemic index (lots of sugar)  who knew?  Not like they taste terribly sweet, ok well bread can if you smother it in jam...mmmm jam... no stop don't get me started.

Anyway a good alternative to potatoes and rice is sweet potatoes, the name is a bit misleading, even though they do have a slight sweetness to them, they actually contain a lot less sugar than potatoes and are much lower on the glycaemic index.  Nature is well weird.

One way of cooking sweet potatoes is to roast them, you can actually cook them almost anyway that you can cook a potato, roast, mashed, chipped or boiled (although boiling isn't as nice) and you can't really do them like a baked potato, well you could but the skin is quite tough. You can even make really healthy sweet potato crisps and they are just yummy. I may do a recipe for that....can you bear the suspense?

Anyway enough of this onwards to the recipe.

Ingredients (serves 4 people)

2-3 Large Sweet Potatoes

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

Pepper

Salt

Mixed Herbs

1 Teaspoon Medium Curry Powder or Tikka Spice (optional)

Peel and chop your sweet potatoes, give them a rinse under the tap and then pop the on some kitchen roll to let them drain for a few mins whlst you make the coating.

In a bowl mix, the 2 tablespoons of olive oil, grind some pepper, salt and a couple of pinches of mixed herbs as well as a teaspoon of Medium curry powder or tikka spice.  Stir it together well.

You can just miss out the curry powder, it gives a nice spice but if you're having something like roast chicken with the sweet potatoes you might not want spicy.

Toss the sweet potatoes in the coating, making sure all the potatoes get a thorough coating.

Lay your sweet potatoes onto a tin foil lined baking tray.

Cook your sweet potatoes in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees for 20 mins, it's a good idea to turn them over 10 mins into cooking to make sure both sides get a chance to crisp up.

You can serve these with any meat you like really but works especially well with roasted chicken.

I served mine with oven cooked pork loin chops and mixed veg and lots of gravy... YUM!!!!

Good Read - Scream For Me by Karen Rose

I bought this book because it was cheap and the write up intrigued me, I do like crime novels and this one was written up as a crime romance. Hmmmmm thought I, might be a bit different. I'm a huge fan of the Bones series and it seemed to me that this book might be along the same lines.  

Oh boy was I ever suprised when I started reading this book, after reading the prologue and the first chapter I found it impossible to put the book down.   I didn't know that the books was actually the 2nd book in what amounts to a trilogy, so I have kind of started this series in the middle, but I can definitely say I will be reading "Die For Me" and I don't think having read the 2nd book first will spoil that for me.  As this story really does have it's own legs to stand on.

The story is really very very complex and Karen really does keep you hanging until the very end of the book with lots of surprises along the way, just when you think you've got it all sussed out, bang you get smacked between the eyes by another twist that just  throws you completely off track and back at square one having to re-assess all your assumptions again. 

I found the main characters predicaments really quite sad and I found myself rooting for them both having had such a dreadful early life it's actually quite surprising that they are as grounded and sane as they are!  

It does have to be said that a lot of the events in the book, although essential to the story, are really quite graphic and if this book ever gets made into a film it will be a pretty heavy duty movie.

If you are a fan of crime novels, crime romance then definitely give this book a whirl, I read it in 3 days as I just could not put it down and it was a rollercoaster ride that I loved every second of, even the hard bits, even the sad bits.

Hols in Weston Super Mare - July 2010

Two firsts for me on this trip,  I'd never been to a Pontins and I'd never been to Weston Super Mare... so that's another two things ticked off the list.

I have to say when we arrived at the Pontins I was a bit shocked, it was like walking onto the set of Hi de Hi and not in a good way. 

The point of this trip was really to meet up with our friends Natalie and John Milne and their daughters.  We'd been looking forward to this trip for months so even dodgy Pontins wasn't going to spoil it for us.

I did almost rethink that thought however when Natalie showed us to our "chalet" or "shitlay" as I renamed it. It looked somewhat different to the pictures on the Pontins website and we found ourselves faced with either sleeping on the worst sofa bed or two of the smallest single beds I have ever seen in my life. Hmmmmm decisions, decisions!

We opted for the sofa bed which in itself presented us with some major problems.... whoever had used it before us had put it away so badly that I almost broke Pie's fingers when the two of us were trying to yank the bed part out of the sofa.

We'd taken a bit longer to get to Weston than expected due to a slight detour, Pie's fault... don't ask!

So by the time we got there we had missed dinner and had to settle for some fish and chips (me) and sausage and chips (him). It certainly wasn't cordon bleu but it was hot (burnt my tongue) and filling!

I slept surprisingly well on the demon sofabed, mostly due to alcohol anaesthetic, that and the major dip in the middle of the sofabed which meant we both ended up snuggled up quite intimately... it was either that or tie ourselves to the sides of the damn thing to stay in place.

The weekend itself went too fast, spending time with Natalie, John and the kids was so much fun, we went to a funfair and had a wander around a market and played Rock Band late into the night... fueled but the copious quantities of alcohol that Natalie and Pie had seen fit to bring on the trip.  

I haven't laughed so much for a long time... and can't wait to get together again. By the time Monday came I had become quit fond of our "shitlay" having spent time naming all the fleas... actually that's really unfair, although the "shitlay" was quite run down and in need of refurbishment it was spotlessly clean and there were no fleas... I promise.

The other thing that was quite impressive was the food at the restaurant within the Pontins, well cooked, good portions and really nice, friendly staff who obviously worked very hard and enjoyed their jobs.

More Pictures

Little Miss Bizzy

The funfair a short walk away from the Pontins Park

The Girl Racers!

Getting some body Art

Pretty!!!

Who can resist that face?

Lolly and her deserts

Time to Rant - Politicians

There are few things in this world that are guaranteed to get me riled up and ready to rant than career politicians. (ok that's a porky pie, there's plenty of things)  I don't mean Joe Bloggs, the man/or woman off the street who decides to stand up and be counted and represent their community... I mean the people who come from (in the main) quite privileged backgrounds, who trot off to University and study politics for years and then come straight out of university and go straight into their jobs of "Politician".

Why does this cause me to have a rant, I hear you ask.... well... think of it this way, if you are sick and you need someone to diagnose you, would you go to you MP's surgery to have them diagnose you?  Or would you take yourself off to your GP, someone who has had years of training in medicine, to work out what is wrong with you?  If your car is broken down, do you go and see your MP or do you go and see a mechanic?

Why then do we trust career politicians who have no had any experience of running companies, who have never worked in the NHS, who have no medical training or business training to run as big a company (and don't be fooled, the NHS IS a business) as the NHS? How... exactly.... are career politicians qualified to decide how money should be spent within the NHS, where is their business qualification?  Where is their medical experience and qualifications? What makes them think they know so much better how to run the NHS better than people who have been working in the field for their whole careers?

The latest comical plan by the Conservative Party to reorganise the NHS is just laughable, especially since the current structure of the NHS was initiated by the Tories in the Thatcher years. It's so easy for them to try and palm the blame off onto the last government but we're not all as stupid as the Tories think and some of us were around when they were last in power and remember what they did.  The Tories were the instigators of the endless league tables and beauracracy.  

If the Tories are serious about reorganising the NHS in a way that a) will work and b) is cost effective then really the Career Politicians need to get out of the equation altogether. Bring in people who actually know what they are doing. As much as they would like to blame the NHS's situation on "Management Overload"  They are wrong, management is essential within the NHS, it is a given that, thanks to the Tories, management is top heavy and could use some pruning, but without good management the NHS would fall to pieces, everyone has a role to play, doctors do the doctoring, nurses do the nursing and the management and admin do the boring paperwork and gruntwork that keeps the NHS ticking over.

What makes me so angry is this stupid assumption that reorganisation is the way forward... we're in a recession, wasting £1.5 billion on reorganisation is not only insane it's wasteful and insulting to us, the taxpayers.   People are worried about whether or not they are going to have a job tomorrow, whether or not their children will be able to go to university or even whether or not they will be able to eat and our Government thinks it's ok to throw around £1.5 billion on reorganisation of an institution that they reorganised the last time they were in power...

I guess it is really easy to sit in a protected ivory tower, where you know your job is safe for 5 years and chuck around sound bites and taxpayers money.