And then there were...four!

So it’s been very busy and I haven’t had a chance to catch up with you all recently.  We of the rabbit variety are very very busy over the festive period.  It is a little known fact that we are key elements of the STPT (Santa’s Toy Preparation Team) and work closely with his elves…well what did you think we did for the rest of the year!?  Easter only takes up about six weeks!  Any who, I've taken some time to recuperate only to find that my sister and I are no longer the “Little Lady’s favourite toy”.

This is an outrage.

We have been usurped by two other, and need I say, inferior toys. 

This is Jelly Cat:

And this is the aptly named Smedward (short for smelly Edward):

These two have usurped mine and Josie #2’s place in the sucking order.  We are the last ones needed for comfort and a good old night time chew.  We are devastated.  We have spent the last two weeks moping around, buried at the bottom of the toy box despite Mummy’s best efforts to get the Little Lady to play with us.  But then came a moment we had lost all hope of:

I must admit it felt like a beautiful moment of reconciliation and also a moment when I could see beyond mine and Josie #2's bright pink fur and look at the bigger picture.  We all must be friends, a team, a family willing to look after the Little Lady when she needs us.  It also means I don’t have to spend too much time lost under a pile of dirty washing or be hung up to dry by my ears…which is much more painful than you humans can appreciate.

Then we all received some wonderful news and we’re really looking forward to the opportunities and challenges it will present for our little furry family of four…

The Little Lady is expecting a baby brother or sister!!!!

So really it’s a good thing as our furry family has expanded because our human family is expanding and I’m sure our furry comforting skills will be needed more than ever by July 31st!

A Tiny Talker at heart...

So I started a new kiddy class today.  The Little Lady and I have hung up the Tiny Talk hat and have put on the Tumble Tots t-shirt…quite literally you get your own t-shirt…well the Lady does anyway. 

Good Bye Tiny Talk classes :(

I was feeling fine about the change at the end of last term.  We had our final class, handed over a thank you card to the lovely Claire whose class we've been going to since April and said our good byes.  But today as I went to a different class I realised I’m actually really sad about leaving Tiny Talk behind. We have absolutely loved Tiny Talk!  It’s been brilliant to learn the sign language and all the songs and I’ll never forget when the Lady did her first sign.  

At the end of last term she got her final certificate to say she was using 45 plus signs by 17 months and that she was an extra-ordinary communicator!  And I really think she is.  We have conversations about what we see when we’re out for a walk, she tells me she can see buses, Lorries and dogs.  She can put two signs together now, she does the sign for “where” and then “Daddy?”.  She asks where Daddy is all the time (even if he’s just gone upstairs)!  It’s SO cute.

The signing is helping us get used to the idea of potty training as the Lady can tell us that she’s doing a little something special for us in her nappy… now we just need to get her to do it on the potty! But the point is she knows what she’s doing, she signs for potty and  she signs for wipes…even though it’s occasionally on the late side. She understands so much of her world and  it’s all because of Tiny Talk.

I was really grateful the other day when I hadn't noticed the oven clock alarm sounding to tell me my cakes were ready and the Little Lady waddled over to me and signed “I hear a noise!” and so off I went to rescue our cakes. What a star!

Although last week it made me a little bit sad as her nursery worker told me she signs for Mummy a lot when she’s at nursery and the old mother’s guilt crept in…

Hello Tumble Tots!

But today we braved it to Tumble Tots. And we had a great time.  The Lady soon got the hang of the circuits and was crawling through tunnels, doing forward rolls, sliding down slides and jumping on mini-trampolines.  At the end of the session there’s a challenge on one of the apparatus and if you complete it you get a star stamp on your hand.  The Little Lady completed it three times and got three stamps!

And after each stamp she looked at the instructor and signed 

“thank you”. 

We may not have been at Tiny Talk today… 

but we were there in spirit!

Pizza Thief!

So like many people over Christmas I over-indulged and so since then I have been on a mission to be a bit more careful with what I eat.  My new year’s resolution was not to add salt to my food either in cooking or as seasoning afterwards (apart from on chips because, let’s face it, they’re chips), so far so good.  I've also been trying to watch how much sugar I eat which, considering how many boxes of chocolates I got for my birthday and Christmas, hasn't been easy…

…plus I’m not helping my own cause as I baked flapjacks today. They are basically heart disease and tooth decay in cake form.  455 Calories per slice! But boy are they GOOOD.   They are still sitting on the cooling rack waiting, begging me to eat them…but I will resist as I have already had four jaffa cakes today and a hot chocolate, and yesterday I ate a whole packet of strawberry laces and hid the evidence down the side of the sofa.

I've also been in the habit of eating half a pizza. Well the hubby and I share a whole pizza it seems silly to leave a random slice especially as the husband doesn't like cold pizza and I’m forgetful and would inevitably find the slice buried at the back of my fridge weeks later so furry I’d have to consider naming it.

But I thought I’d be good tonight, so I saved my third slice with every intention of taking it for lunch tomorrow. I left it unattended in the kitchen and thought “there is no need to tell hubby not to eat it because he doesn't like cold pizza”.  Wrong. I return half an hour later to find a giant bite mark in my good intentioned work pizza.  How infuriating.  So I ate the rest in anger.

And I've just been and eaten a flapjack in anger too.

Considering the small insignificant pizza eating crime that had been committed against me I was dis-proportionally angry…it’s no surprise that the bible talks a lot about anger, especially when we are all prone, myself included, to become angry very quickly over the slightest of issues.  The bible describes God as slow to anger and I am so grateful that he is!  Mine and my husband’s transgressions against him are so much more significant than pizza stealing or angry flapjack eating and yet God is so patient with us.  I may not be a pizza stealer today but every day I am a glory stealer.  In my actions, thoughts and words more often than not I am seeking to rob God of the glory he deserves as my Lord and King and give it all to myself.  And yet every day God is waiting for me to see the folly in my actions and remember his mercy, steadfast love and faithfulness towards wretched pizza stealers and angry flapjack eaters let alone a glory stealer like me.

All that… from pizza…!? Sorry.

Proverbs 14:29

Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.

Psalm 86:15

But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness

Choc full of chocolate

Well you may have noticed that I’ve not written a blog in nearly two months.  Beyond the excuse of Christmas and a round of various illnesses including the dreaded Noro Virus (and an evening where I had too many chips and dips) and a crazy time at work I am sad to have had such a hiatus.  So much has happened in the last couple of months I wouldn’t know where to start. I really should have kept up the blogging in the first place… I need to trawl through tones of photos and finish tidying up then maybe I’ll have my head around the fact that it’s 2013 already!

Anywho before I get round to that I thought I’d share a little recipe with you all.  Some of you may still be on your festive holidays and I bet you’ve got lots of Christmas chocolate lying around. I got a tin of Roses, a box from Thorntons, a box from Hotel Chocolat and two boxes of Lindt.  You know if you eat too many carrots you can turn orange?  Well I'm sure I'm looking a bit tanned after all the chocolate I've eaten…Anyway wondering what to do with all that chocolate…? My lovely hubby made me a chocolate cake for my birthday last week and it was incredible so I thought I’d share the recipe with you all.

I know many people will have started New Year diets but this cake contains a whole orange…literally a whole orange- peel and everything- so if you eat the whole thing in one go at least you’ll have had one of your five a day!

Ingredients:

1 Orange

3 Eggs

10 oz caster sugar

8.5 floz sunflower oil

4 oz dark or milk chocolate, broken into bits and melted

1 oz cocoa powder

9 oz plain flour

1.5 tsp baking powder

How to bake:

·         Stick a skewer all the way through the unsuspecting orange and boil in a pan for half an hour.  Blitz orange whole in a food processor or with a stick blender (I’d be lost without mine…it got me through weaning not to mention many litres of soup!) make sure you get rid of any pips!

·         Preheat the oven 180/Gas 4/160 fan oven.  Butter and line a 9inch tin.

·         Beat the eggs, sugar and oil and gradually beat in the cooled orange and cooled chocolate.

·         Add all the other ingredients I haven’t mentioned yet.

·         Shove the mixture in the tin and bake for about an hour or until a skewer comes clean.

·         Cool for a bit and the turn out on to a cooling rack.

Now the exciting bit

Ingredients for the ganache:

8 oz dark chocolate

8 floz double cream

What to do:

·         Melt the chocolate in a bowl I prefer to microwave my chocolate but keep a close eye so it doesn’t burn.

·         Boil the cream, pour in the chocolate and blend till smooth…which you can only truly tell by tasting some…

·         Cool in the fridge for a hour until it’s matte in finish and smooth.

Spread the ganache all over your cake and eat the rest!

This cake has been a winner in our house, the lady has in particular enjoyed several slices…I tried to take a photo but it was gone so quickly I barely had time to find the camera.  But here's a picture of how hubby decorated it before we mauled our way through it.

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Tummy to everyone else...let me know how they turn out...send me a picture...or you could send me a sample...!

Seriously.