I am busy.

I have taken up this project and its tak­ing way too much of my nightly time, but I have high hopes it will turn out nice, so I will share when its done.

Its also the buzzing time of pre-birthday activ­i­ties. As men­tioned, the theme for Miss Fab’s party is Japan and for exam­ple tonight we were look­ing at Tokyo street fash­ions to get some inspi­ra­tion for dress ups. And is there some! If you are not famil­iar with what youth in Tokyo wear, do look it up. Its fun!

So we dug out some clothes, dug through wardrobes and hid­den places, for­got­ten stashes of shoes and its fair to say we have Little B sorted. Not just sorted, she is a fine Shinjuku girl that will make me proud to take her out in the streets of Japan, baby. Then we sorted Mr.Blab with a kimono and sumo hair. This is so much fun. I have an idea for myself, I just have to fix a top I bought years ago that is like a half kimono. The Popcorn and Miss Fab will need a visit to the opshop to fin­ish them up.

My cam­era snap­ping fin­ger is tin­gling with excitement.

I had an idea for the cake, but I am not telling, cause Miss Fab loves this blog and is known to read it on her halftop (aka. her half of my lap­top). I aint spilling beans, my dar­ling, you will have to wait…now go do the laun­dry or maths, whichever appeals to you most.

So I am busy. That means this place gets for­got­ten and you for­get to visit me and I miss you and all sorts of other hor­ri­ble stuff hap­pens. To coun­ter­act my blog absent mind­ed­ness for the next week or so, I am will­ing to bribe you. Yep, I have no scruples.

Every day I dont write a post, I will post a pic­ture off of a preg­nancy shoot I have done for a friend of mine,  if you keep on keep­ing me com­pany — com­ment, visit, whatever.

Deal?

I have reached the stage of self over­load­ing loathing.

My body has slowly turned into a blob the last year. It kind of hap­pened almost with­out me know­ing. Its a lie, I knew things were going down hill for awhile, but have been too lazy to do any­thing about it. I refused to admit that the weight has been going up, maybe because I cant quite see where its gath­er­ing strength — I dont eat crap and I dont eat too much. So I excused the num­bers on the scale as a fluke. The thing needs bat­ter­ies after all.

But there comes a time when one can­not con­tinue to hide behind made up blind­ness. Its not just one sign that woke me up. Its the thighs that rub together when walk­ing, its the belly that pokes it head above the pants that used to fit nicely, its the legs that dont cross eas­ily any­more with the top one kind of awk­wardly hangs for dear life…its the jig­gle, people…the jig­gle when I walk. Its gen­tle and hid­den like, very dis­turb­ing, very. But most of all, the thing that snapped me out of my dazed state was when I real­ized that my butt has a life of its own. Its not part of me any­more, other than the fact that it hangs from my body. Its an entity of its own. Its independent!

Gulp.

I am about as heavy as I have ever been and there is no deny­ing it. Its time for action, because as I get older this body of mine takes longer to snap out of the wob­bly slump.

I have two plans. One sim­ple, the other — not. I am still not sure which road to take.

I will let you know when I decide.

*jig­gle, jig­gle — she walks away*

I have to say that this week went much bet­ter, smoother and eas­ier than I antic­i­pated. Its pos­si­ble that because I had the night time on the com­puter to catch up, the with­drawal was not really strongly there. Maybe next time I will try to cut that off too, although I dont really see it as necessary.

What hap­pened? Nothing big changed, but there were a few lit­tle things that I could say were prob­a­bly related to the experiment.

- I read more books

- Mr.Blab joined in the evening activ­i­ties much ear­lier and was at the din­ner table on time with­out a fail

- We lis­tened to a lot of music, both CDs and radio

- Miss Fab started saw­ing by hand the last two days out of the blue

- The kids didnt ask to play on the com­puter even once — that was refreshing

- Mr.Blab cooked dinner

What didnt happen?

- More cleaning

- More laundry

- More tidy­ing up

I feel bet­ter now, as I used to beat myself up that the house will be spot­less if I dont read so much on the net. Now I know that is not true and no amount of free time will make me love house­work more.

The ver­dict is that we loved it. Even the kids are opened to doing it again in the future.All in all I think our lives were not that much dif­fer­ent though, so that is a relief too. I guess the TV and com­puter are not as influ­en­tial in our days as I thought.

The first two days of this week we have kept on most of the rules going. I espe­cially love the radio while I am cook­ing dinner.

Now its your turn

Lets con­tinue with the answers to your questions.

Next, we go with the win­ner, Alex, as it seemed to go best with the pic­ture I had on hand

My ques­tion: how did you come up with the names of your chil­dren — I love know­ing where people’s inspi­ra­tion for baby names come from and what dri­ves peo­ple to choose par­tic­u­lar names for their kidlings!

Miss Fab’s name has been on my mind since for­ever. It has mean­ing with it — it kind of trans­lates from my name and my name is the name of both of my grandfathers…but really, I just liked it. Mr.Blab agreed. We didnt set­tle for it though until she was 2–3 weeks old. I guess we wanted to just feel that it fit her.

Her sec­ond name is my mom’s name, but again, even though I like the con­nec­tion, the main rea­son is that I just like her name.

With Little B we started from scratch. We went through all the books and two names seem to catch our atten­tion. We didnt decide which one it will be, again, until the birth. We dont argue, we dont fight, we dont have any prob­lems between us as far as the names are con­cerned. We seem to like the same things.

Her sec­ond name was an inter­est­ing turn of events. We wanted to maybe con­tinue the now going tra­di­tion, but we didnt think that Mr.Blab’s mom’s name fit. That is until the truth was revealed that she is using her sec­ond name as her first one, because she didnt like the orig­i­nal one. And lo and behold we loved her actual name and it became the sec­ond name of our sec­ond daughter.

When I got preg­nant the third time we were pretty sure it will be another girl. We were pro­fes­sional girl namers by now and her name was planted pretty quickly. It had a Bulgarian twist as well, which sud­denly was some­thing I wanted to do. Her sec­ond name was going to be Eve — no, no reli­gious over­tones, it was in honor of the night ‘she’ was con­ceived — Christmas Eve. So, Malena Eve was it.

That is until we were pre­sented with the third leg of our daugh­ter star­ing us on the screen of the ultra­sound machine. I will lie if I say I was not shocked. I had always seen myself as a mom of boys. Its not that I didnt want a boy. I just didnt expect to ever get one at this point.

And we sucked at boy names, as we dis­cov­ered in the weeks fol­low­ing this won­der­fully shock­ing dis­cov­ery. We sucked, majorly. We never had that much prob­lem choos­ing with the girls. We went through every list we could think of. At some point he was going to be Oscar, we liked the name. But then I imag­ined him — fat. What if the boy is fat? Oscar is nice on a lovely charm­ing boy/man, but on a fat one its just wrong.  I had not given up the idea of hon­or­ing the night he came to be, so I was again search­ing for some­thing that has to do with the date. And that is how I stum­bled on his name. I saw it — I exclaimed — I uttered it to Mr.Blab — He loved it — and that was that!

His sec­ond name is in honor of our around the world trip together and his water birth. It was not easy to find some­thing that has a con­nec­tion, but is also nice and goes with his name, but we man­aged ok, I think.

I am happy with the names we chose. Most of all, I am happy we never had to com­pro­mise between each oth­ers choices. Mr.Blab and I work well together that way. Makes life that much easier.

Hope this answers your ques­tion, although in a round about way

I just dis­cov­ered that the indi­vid­ual pages of the blog dont work. I had tweaked some­thing yes­ter­day and I hope that is what caused all this. Otherwise, I am not look­ing for­ward to try­ing to fig­ure this out.

Harumph!