.... random rants and rambles. no agenda. yet.

You know it's time to update your blog when you get an irate comment from your (lovely) mother-in-law. Oops. So here goes, T!

I'm writing this on the playmat in the living room, with, of course, The Boy sitting in front of me, playing with the mounds of brightly coloured plastic that Every Baby Must Own - you can avoid it, but it will find you in the end - occasionally shouting his favourite new word; "AAAAH!" Because that's what The Boy loves to do; shout. Without warning. I think he may have got that one from his Mummy J.

I do have a good reason for not blogging, however. We've all had colds, which has meant The Boy's sleeping pattern has been downright weird, which, coupled with the fact we have a lot of work on at the moment, has been knackering. I salute the inventor of the snot sucker, however. Yes, there has been screaming, but without it, there would have been more screaming and more blockages than we knew what to do with - and all the mummies we've told about it agree. One said that when she asked for one in a chemist, the bloke who worked there looked at her funny and said, "Ooh, I don't think you should be using one of those. They sound dangerous!" Please.

BUT *I* know where you can get one, and when I told another mummy, she rushed off immediately with a determined look in her eye, declaring that she was going to get one "straight away." I felt like some kind of illegal arms dealer or something, not a mummy from Mytholmroyd who feels sorry for babies because they can't blow their own noses yet.

In other news, yesterday we went to The Evil That Is IKEA, where we rushed around frantically trying to find things to buy before The Boy had a meltdown (he didn't, as it happened, and we only didn't find one item, which is probably a record - and that was because it only exists in my imagination and not in real life). This frantic rushing involved using those shortcuts that IKEA helpfully lays out between "zones" - but my excellent spatial memory does not work properly in IKEA because everything looks the same, so we kept running around in circles, with C pushing The Boy in his buggy and me purposefully leading them through corridors and secret doors, only for C to look confused and ask me, "Haven't we been here already?"

It was kind of like groundhog day, except we were surrounded by sofas.

Afterwards, I realised that I've never been to IKEA without getting lost.