laurasaur

My baby turned 8 months a few days ago and wow how time has flown. I keep meaning to update my blog but basically I’m too lazy. Anyway… Reuben is now “crawling” (body still on the floor but getting where he wants to go pretty quickly!) which is so exciting, I love seeing how determined he is to get places.

He still is such a good natured baby, always happy and relaxed and just goes with whatever is happening. He still is a great sleeper – although we have had many disruptions recently (to be expected – we are in New Zealand with my parents) – but on the whole fantastic he still sleeps 11 or 12 hours solidly at night and has 2 naps of 2-2.5hours each. I am in the process of weaning him from his third nap although I’m not too sure how ready he is for this yet.

His eating is going well – he has a very large appetite and I nurse him 4 x a day with 3 solid meals. I have struggled while on holiday to prepare homemade baby food like I normally do and we have resorted to using too many jars of organic babyfood. Oh well there is time to fix that.. A sample meal routine/menu for him is something like this:

Breakfast: Breastfeed & Oats/Fruit/Water blended/mashed. Sippy of water
Lunch: Breastfeed & Vegetable/Rice, sometimes fruit/oats
Dinner: same as lunch
Bed: Breastfeed

I pump almost every night before bed too which has been great as his grandparents (my parents) have enjoyed being able to feed him and I have enjoyed having such wonderful babysitters!! I want to write a review on my pump soon because it is AMAZING. But for now it is called Avent Isis iQ duo – Double electric pump – learns your rythm.

Rueben is a very curious and easily distractible baby so our nursing sessions are about 5-10 minutes long now. I haven’t had him weighed properley since we arrived in NZ but I took him on my parents scales and he is over 10kgs now (over 22lb).

All in all I love him an unspeakable amount times a million plus four and I hope he reads this one day and knows how much I love him

One of the major downsides of moving countries is the whole temporary redecoration thing. When we arrived we needed bed linen etc.. and I find it really hard to spend money on things that I know we will not be able to take home with us. Bedding is one of those things that I think you should spend as much money as you can on because you spend so much time in bed and good cotton sheets just improve with age, they get softer and more comfortable the more you wash them. However the good ones are obviously going to be expensive. So we have ended up with some really dodgey sheets because I couldn’t get my head around spending the money. And a horrible polyester filled duvet which is really really not cutting it… sigh.

I love nice modern/contemporary soft styled bedrooms. Our furniture at the moment is a lot lighter than what I would ideally choose if I had disposable income – I picked up this bed off eBay for some ridiculously cheap amount- but its really a light pine not dark like in the picture and plus I don’t have the bed curtains.

We had a beautiful real possum throw that decorated our last bed – and now it’s approaching winter I am looking to get a throw or bedspread on the cheap – time to hunt down IKEA and eBay I think.

I love neutrals for bedrooms – so relaxing and romantic and I need to get some cushions that set the bed off. Watch this space – before and after photos to come eventually (I hope).

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….

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This was a cake for my friend Melissa who turned 12 years old last week.

Inside the cake was what I normally bake when I am not sure of someone’s preference, layers of chocolate and vanilla cake with a chocolate buttercream.

I have only been in London a few weeks and already I have hunted down two French patisseries for the sole purpose of buying macarons. Last week when we were in Canary Wharf for interviews I stumbled upon Paul and bought a giant macaron. Unfortunately no one was sure what flavour it was, and even after sharing it and eating it neither of us had figured it out. The texture however was devine and it was far richer than the Ladurée ones, but obviously very bland. I think the huge one from Paul was 2 pounds something, and roughly equates to 3 or so of the little Ladurée ones which were 9 pounds 80p for 6 + a pretty box. Ouchie.

After discovering last night that there are two Ladurée shops in London – First stop today was Harrods. Which of course is packed full, mainly with tourists, and looks to have quite a cool food court with people chowing into these amazing looking gelati/sundaes.  But I wasn’t there for any of that and in fact we made it through the ground floor in possibly record time to end up in Ladurée.

Hubby helped me pick out 6 little macarons – here is my verdict. (L-R in pic above)

Orange Blossom – hubby chose this flavour and although I wouldn’t have done so myself I quite like it. The green ganache slightly put me off but it does taste very floral.

Salted butter caramel – Third place? Almost sticky ganache, with a scorched caramel flavour.

Vanilla – rich with vanilla seeds, although tastes slightly pasty almost. On second thoughts the aftertaste is of an amazingly rich vanilla icecream.

Chocolate -Thick and rich with a nice deep ganache. I give second place to this guy. I think this may actually have been bitter chocolate, they didn’t have both available and this is light and not so sweet.. I wonder.

Rose – amazing rose flavour, super fluffy ganache almost like whipped cream, consistency too thin for my liking but still devine, strongly rose scented and tasting like turkish delight.

Pistachio – My favourite, densest and delicious, with a nice texture. Mmmm.

All in all amazing! If you want to make me happy – buy me macarons. Pistachio ones if you are too scared to choose

Is it sad that my goal is to try all the flavours? Haha. The berry ones, and of course lots more pistachio ones And to be fair, I must of course compare with all the ones from Paul and then Pierre Herme when in Paris!!