I’m trying to get more organised with my poor neglected blog.. I quite like this new design although its far from perfect.

I’m really enjoying settling back into our winter routine.. baby R has lunch and then goes down for a nice long 3 hour nap where I ignore all housework and productive tasks and snuggle on the couch under my nice knitted blanket and catch up on quality TV, knitting and blogland. Ohhh its hard being me some days.

I’m updating my links and hopefully soon my recipe index… I like this whole being organised thing for a change. It’s nice. In the mean time.. check out my blanket I made.. I love it..

[raveled here]

I always have so many amazing ideas about making all these incredible presents for everyone and wowing everyone with my DIY skills, unfortunately every year my DIY efforts are more like DIYfails…

This year I’m as un-organised as ever (if not more so) and frantically knitting away some Christmas stockings, baking like a crazy woman and trying to cross things off my list.

That’s my token (yet unfinished – how timely for this post) gingerbread house for this year, next year – use a template! Cut more carefully! I’ve finished a ginger and cherry panforte and need to complete the white chocolate fig version as part of my handmade Christmas efforts. Then, some jarred mincemeat and mince pies…… oh yeah, need to buy presents too!

I’ve had some of the best two weeks of my life. I feel so blessed to be in New Zealand with my baby, relaxing, catching up with old & new friends and generally just loving my life. Time passes so quickly especially when you have a baby and responsibilities and it’s too precious not to love every moment of it and everyone in your life.

This face. I love. So much. What a freaking cute boy.

Mine started out fab. Reuben & I had breakfast, he had a huge nap, I drank lots of coffee and did some knitting, we went out to browse a knitting shop and have coffee with some gorgeous knitty friends and gorgeous babies,

happy happy

and then

get home, Reubey is playing so happily, I’m knitting in the lounge and he crawls off into his bedroom and I stay put, can hear him crashing around with his duplo and stuff… 20 mins or so later he crawls out all smiley

and then

OOOOOOOOhHHHHHHMMMMMMMYYYYGOD there is POO EVERYWHERE. He has somehow managed to undo one side of his nappy resulting in complete poomageddon. Did you read the bit above where he had crawled from HIS BEDROOM TO THE LOUNGE??? yeah. with half a nappy on. And poo everywhere. Ohh. Funn. Then it dawns on me that this is my child… and I’m the one that has to clean it up. Haha. Glorious Mum moment.

So shower/bath/30 mins later OKAY So he’s clean. Back into his room, try not to cry while seeing poo smushed into new carpet … room looks like some kind of crime scene with duplo covered in poo…  he had obviously taken his walked and rolled it back and forth over the poo.. anyway.. I digress from the next moment in my day… So I plonk him onto his change table and unwrap the towel from around him…

Reubs is coooooooovered in  rash. Slight panic.
/skip the boring trip of my day/
MEASLES.

Oh joy. That was a surprise. I like to think I’m pretty in touch with how wee man is feeling etc as we are quite joined at the hip for a good portion of every.single.day.. and he hasn’t been acting terribly out of sorts. Last week I had to go to hospital after I had a miscarriage (that’s a story for another day) and then again for an oral surgery appointment for my jaw so we spent a good amount of time in that disease ridden place…. and I’m sure he picked it up from there. Apparently 7-14 days from infection to rash so that would work out.

Sigh.

Trap him in a corner of his room behind the couch while I deal to the aftermath of poomageddon…. except I hadn’t trapped him, he had crawled off and slithered out into my bedroom.. prceeding to empty everything from 2 drawers of a bedside table.. containing all my makeup.. yay!!

Carpet is clean. Room no longer smelling 110% of excrement. Now like 50% poo 50% wet carpet. Go baby hunting… aha! Reach for baby and step on a square jar of moisturiser and roll my ankle, almost fall onto squishy baby…

and so on and so on

rah rah rah.. day didn’t get much better for me or reuben poor boy developed a bit more of a fever and spent a lot of time snoozing on my tummy in the evening. oh well I ate lots of cake……. wait that’s not a good thing either :<

but seriously, at not one point in this day did I feel unhappy or despair (until my husband got home, but thats another story .. f**king cricket) .. because I love my sweet little poo making baby.. and I feel so bad for him that he’s all uncomfortable with the measles… If I could have it for him I’d do it in a heartbeat.

Loving on my stinkster squiggle machine…….. Lau x

Its been a long long time since I have updated. I’m so slack. I don’t even have a good excuse.

I’m still a long way from the lovely country I call home, New Zealand. While everyone there enjoys stunning summer days and long evenings, we have rain, sleet, snow, and darkness at 4pm.  The last 6 months have brought an entirely new way of life for me, and one major unexpected change.

You know that saying about plans going astray, well, yeah, I can verify that is true Still, my life is very nice right now, just a bit different from our plans of just a few months ago. We always had planned on coming to London for a few years to work. We planned on having a baby at some stage and coming back to NZ to settle. Little did we know that I was already pregnant when we left glorious New Zealand! So that was one small spanner in the works. I looked for work solidly for a few months once we arrived, but there was just no software development jobs going. In hindsight I should have given up looking a lot earlier and worked in a cafe, but I didn’t, and well, then it became too late because I sprouted a somewhat huge baby bump. Thankfully my husband landed a sweet job very soon after we arrived (and they love him, he has just had a promotion!), otherwise we would have been on the next plane home.

on the tube, blissfully unaware of the baby growing in there

So, here I am, jobless, and growing a baby in my belly. People ask me what I do and I have a hard time answering – what on earth do I do? Well, I spend a lot of time on eBay, that’s for sure. Having a baby has increased my addiction even further and opened my eyes to the designer baby second hand clothing market. Thankfully we also bought a car that turned out to be a piece of crap, because I spend lots of time fixing it or visiting our mechanic, who I am getting to be quite good friends with haha. I go for walks, I go shopping and have hot chocolates, I cook and sometimes I even clean.

Yeah. My life is pretty sweet. And on top of this I seem to have been blessed with the worlds easiest pregnancy. I haven’t had any morning sickness, or anything weird like that, and I’m only just getting to the uncomfortable stage where I walk the poor baby into door frames and stuff.

31 weeks pregnant!

What else is going on….

I’m so itchy. I don’t know what causes it, although I do have a general idea of what trigers it – water, or more specifically taking a shower. Generally I can minimize the itching if I just jump in and out very quickly and then slather some moisturizer on my legs. But – sometimes a quick shower just doesn’t cut it. Like right now. I really needed to wash my hair, and as you probably know, my hair is really, really long. This means it takes me a few minutes to shampoo and condition it, plus shave or whatever else I gotta do, and by the time I get out my skin is crawling.

I literally scratch to the point where I am covered in red marks and lines. It usually takes about half an hour for the urge to scratch to disappear and then about half an hour after that I feel like I can function normally. This has been going on for years and years, and I go through periods of months when I am fine and some where I am not.

I think maybe I have some kind of liver problem, or food allergy. Its getting to the point where I really need to do something about it, because its getting damn hard to scratch certain bits now I’m pregnant! Plus the thought of having a little baby and one hour of itchies freaks me out.

Yeah apart from that not much else. I feel my next few posts will be baby stuff related.. so please forgive me xx

Because we don’t have our own place or any jobs yet I’ve been thrifting it up a bit in the kitchen. Otherwise known as cooking like a povo/1940s housewife. The food I have been making is weird to me and to be honest I’m a terrible cook so a lot of it has been very average. I wish you could just bake everything.

I made the weirdest sauce ever to go with this roast chicken last night. All I have is wholemeal flour, rice, pasta, tiny bit of butter, milk and some vegetables and meat. So I did the roast with some roast carrots, haha, and it was looking pretty disturbingly bland. So I thought I would make gravy, but I couldn’t because a) I hadn’t made the chicken stock yet and b) wholemeal flour does not a good gravy make. So I did white sauce with wholemeal flour lol – I liked it, tastes like a mix between bread sauce and white sauce haha both of which I love but have never made myself.

What other weird things have I done… oh yeah.. hot chocolate with wholemeal flour – HAHA – do not recomend, rice pudding with evaporated milk, porridge with evaporated milk, and washed so many freaking saucepans because there is no dishwasher and no microwave, ahhh, so not used to having to actually do this stuff myself lol.

Anyway most people would probably be a bit disturbed at what I have been cooking but Jonnos pretty good and takes it in his stride although I do wonder what he is thinking haha. I have done some baking and did a batch of cocoa brownies with a layer of ganache which were proclaimed the best ever, made with wholemeal too although you couldn’t tell.

Oh yeah I have been epicly sick so been in bed all day, browsing ASOS.com, learning ASP.NET, reading food forums, deafening myself with dance music, you know the usual. I really need to find a wallet and I am scared of how cold it is going to get and how little warm clothes I have. Never fear. I will survive.

xx L L

1. Microplane – WTF, how do I not have one of these yet? I’ve been making lemon stuff recently and this would make my life a lot easier haha. Every time I go to someones house that has one I am amazed at how great they are. However, I just really don’t want to pay the $20 or $40 or whatever it is for a grater. Come on, this cost like $1 max to produce.

2. Ice cream scoop.. one of those ones that have the self release handle thing. These are so good for cupcake batter, basically it allows you to get absolutely even portions in each case with no sticky mess of using 2 spoons or your finger or whatever. The only reason I haven’t bought on of these yet is simply because I have never actually seen one to buy. Maybe millys has them, or a catering kind of place, normal shops only have the basic scoops that don’t have that lever thing.. and I already have 2 of them and they don’t do the business..

I know there is heaps more, like another cupcake tin, a huge circle tin for wedding cakes, a cooling rack.. I could go on, but I gotta find these two in the next little while.

Bye bye to my work and my workmates.. it has been cool working with everyone from BCM.. I certainly have learnt a few things that I will take with me .. hehe… I will miss you all.

I don’t really have anything new to post but I just thought I would share how super cool and cute this JellyBelly dispenser is!!

My hubby put one in my bag to surprise me (yeah, I know, so awesome) and it is super cute. I have always loved Jelly Belly’s (especially the flavour that most people hate: buttered popcorn) ever since my trip to America when I was about 10.

So no new baking for now, I spent a few hours on Sunday making a huge brownie platter for an event we went too, 2 batches of regular brownies, 1 batch of caramel brownies, whipped cream and a rich chocolate sauce.

There was less than 10 people at the event and about 2/3rds of the brownies got eaten so definately a success, pretty much my backup plan when I need to bring something sweet and I don’t have much time or energy.

Ok so this is a little embarrasing because I have to admit that I have only just discovered Mountain bread. I can’t express my love for it in a non creepy way but it really is one of the greatest things to happen to me food wise in a long time ha ha. I lovvvvve wraps/tortilas all that kind of stuff, but I always restrict myself from eating them because most of the brands you buy have around 200 calories and 20-30g of carbs.

These have 60-70 calories (depending on which type you get) and around 10-13g of carbs. ZOMG. So good. So my stand by dinner is:

1 piece of mountain bread
100g (approx) of chicken or 2 tenderloins
Iceberg lettuce shredded
Carrot grated
Shallot grated
Fresh herbs (parsley, corriander)
Capsicum or tomato

add mustard, shredded cheese (tiny amount) or sour cream and roll up. OM NOM NOM. Bring on healthy dinners/lunches/whatevs.