Carving set up (so glad it didn't rain!) |
Mon: Pea burgers & Sweet Potato Fries (A)
Tue: Slow Cooker Black Bean Soup (R)
Carving set up (so glad it didn't rain!) |
Breakfast
We stopped eating cereal a few months ago. We used to have Shreddies, bran flakes, or Weetabix. While these all seem like fine cereals, bran flakes are 15% sugar. Shreddies are 13% sugar. Weetabix are 4% sugar, but they are also gross (my opinion) and messy.
I don't even know if Weetabix is a thing in the US. It looks like this:
When you add milk it turns into a sort of paste, like an ultra processed porridge with not flavour at all.
Anyways, I digress. We still need breakfast. Our current rotation is as follows:
(That background pumpkin is not long for this world) |
We also always have apple or banana or pear with our breakfast. Sometimes melon, if I'm feeling fancy, and if I've chopped it the night before.
Grocery Delivery
We are figuring our the best day and time for grocery delivery. We were doing our meal planning on Friday night with a delivery saturday morning, but this had the logistical challenge of needing to get the order in by 9pm. We also needed to be home to collect, and I am not paying £2 more for a 1 hour delivery but it meant the groceries showed up sometime between 8am and 12, which could be fine or could be chaos.
This week we tried a friday delivery, again between 8 and 12. Unfortunately the timing was pretty much the worst - both babies woke up at 10, the delivery came at 10:20, and as he arrived I was halfway downstairs with two babies (we are still working on stairs) when lilah came to the bottom of the stairs holding a beeded necklace (ie massive baby choking hazard) which she proceeded to break and drop all over the bottom of the stairs. Then she started crying, which caused nora to start crying, and I could neither get down the stairs (because the two babies) or up the stairs (because the two babies). Thankfully Andy was not in a meeting so he came and helped unpack the groceries.
What are your go-to breakfasts? Are you a breakfast person? Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. I would love to eat/make hash browns and home fries more if the kids ate them. I used to make Shakshuka sometimes but I know the kids will give it "a million thumbs down" so it's not worth the effort now either.
Our nanny was on holiday this week which meant I took annual leave from work to do what our nanny does for a job. It actually was nice to spend a few days with the twins - on Wednesday we went to baby sign language and on Thursday we went to a friend's house for a play date. I do have a bit of the Sunday Scaries at the moment as I have a very busy week in work next week - my handover/mat leave return period is over and it's time for me to do the running I intended to hit the ground with (weird sentence structure but it's staying).
While I enjoyed my twin days, I was honestly pretty burnt out on parenting by the weekend (I'm allowed to say this right?) and was definitely not on my best parental behaviour this weekend. TGIS - Thank God It's Sunday - and I can get some me time (ie work) next week.
We still packed a lot into the weekend - on Saturday I did a 5k run, we did a split parent and 1 kid 1 baby trip to the park (1 baby and 1 6 year old is so easy!), and I got my hair dyed. On Sunday I took the kids to a Sukkot party at the Synagogue, then took Isaac to a scouts meetup, and managed to make a chicken and mushroom pie and chips for dinner. Basically the weekend was busy, we did a lot, and I was mostly grumpy.
How cute is this weekend morning reading? |
Reading
I am slowly reading The Stand In by Lily Chu. It's cute.
I am sort of giving up on You Only Die Once because I am not in a headspace for a person with no kids to tell me how to be awesome or how to avoid wasting my life. Watching four kids this young feels like both a total waste of my own intellect/goals/ambitions and fundamentally important to my own intellect/goals/ambitions and I just can't connect with her premise right now. However I think it's a good book and I bet I'll enjoy reading it in a few years.Monday: 20 Minute Full Body Strength, 10 Minute Postnatal Core, 10 Minute Focus Flow: Back, 10 Minute relaxation (all Peloton)
Wednesday: 15 minute Hip Hop Barre, 10 minute postnatal core, 10 minute full body stretch (all Peloton)
Thursday: 30 minute run/walk. 20 minutes Arms and Shoulders with Callie (my first live class), 5 minute upper body stretch, 5 minutes post run stretch. (all Peloton)
Friday: Gym with gym buddy! Legs. Fun. Hard.
Saturday: Parkrun 5k (also another 1.5 miles there and back). 10 minute full body stretch (Peloton)
Today I went to a baby class with the twins.
In case you are curious, this is the first baby class I have attended with them. I have been to three play groups with them, and I have taken them to soft play twice.
For comparison, Isaac had two baby classes a week.
The babies loved the class. I was the only parent of twins there. At the end of the class one of the mums asked me how the twins sleep.
"great" I said. "because they have to"
Sleep is the number one twin question I get. A colleague recently told me that he is so exhausted because his 18 month old and 3 year old get up multiple times a night each, and that they both need parents in their room to fall asleep.
I would be exhausted too.
I think, often, when people ask me "how do you do it" they are extrapolating from their situation. "how do you get up 3 times a night for twins?" is a legit question. The answer is that I don't get up three times a night for twins.
Today a mom asked me how I got them to sleep well and I said "because I had so many kids, I couldn't always always attend to the twins, and sometimes there was crying, and sometimes there was longer crying than I would have liked, and now everyone sleeps really well. I know that sort of sleep training went out of fashion in the early 2000's but without sleep I wouldn't be able to function"
Anyways, the conversation didn't go on much from there. Because how could it.
I started thinking that one thing which bothers me sometimes is that my current life is so unrelatable. I have so many small children. I have a decently big job, and I'm trying to move up quite quickly at the time when most people I know are taking it easy. I am trying to keep my fitness up and enjoy my job and enjoy my kids.
We self catered a birthday party for 26 four year olds when the twins were 9 months old.
We went to the pumpkin patch with 4 kids.
We cook all our meals at home.
We recently redecorated and moved 4 of the 5 bedrooms in our house around.
We have a 5 bedroom house
Everything on this list isn't rocket science. I am not a rocket scientist. But I am also more and more aware that this is not how many people live, and especially not in my suburban enclave of South Wales. I've found a small community of awesome blogging and podcasting people doing awesome blogging things which make me feel like it's OK to continue trying to be awesome. But the more I do, the more I realize how disjointed I am from the local people I spend time with on a daily basis.
And also, my goal is not to make other people feel bad about their lives. Having kids is hard! Having two kids is hard! Having a job is hard! Having a less flexible job than mine is hard! Trying to do sport is hard. Working from home is hard. Working in an office is hard.
And then there are things we don't do. We live by our routines. We don't stay out late. We don't go out in the evenings. We don't do kids activities in the evenings. We don't travel.
Even these decisions can be unrelatable. Everyone in the UK travels. This is a tiny rainy island and people were not meant to stay here 365 days of the year. There's no reason we would have 5 weeks of holiday if it wasn't intended for us to leave this small rainy island.
I don't really have a great answer to this. My life is ridiculous now. The amount of planning it takes to function well is... a lot. I also don't think there's an option for us to do less or take it easier. We can either plan every meal... or we can not eat? There isn't any moderate parenting with so many young kids. There is only 100% attention, 100% of the time. I can see why even people with four kids often don't have them in five years.
I don't have some grand point to end this, except that I guess it's okay to not be relatable, and I probably shouldn't worry about it. And maybe I should try and figure out a better way to answer people when I'm asked about baby sleep habits.
But then this evening I already forgot the meltdowns and remember this:
Perfect Pumpkin Hunting |
Pumpkin Catapult. £2 for 3 pumpkins |
We made it to the corn maze for the first time ever! |
Lilah has full autonomy on her clothing. Exhibit 1. |
Audrey (L) Nora (R) now 11 months old |
My epiphany of this week was that I have added 27 hours of childcare to my week and 30 hours of work and I am fairly sure that time for exercise = the delta. Is that how people use "the delta"? I don't use that word but I've realized certain people in my work do. Either way, the math of my return to work isn't ideal, but I am fairly sure I can be more strategic soon. I am also *finally* almost over COLDZILLA. Basically, things are looking up.
Reading
Someone on the blog-o-sphere read this recently and recommended it and I cannot remember who because why do I never write things down?? Anyways, I am enjoying it. I was also reading an early copy of The Plan on Kindle but I have decided it will be a much better read on a real book. And I'm really really slowly reading You Only Die Once but it has interesting excercises that I should probably actually do.Hello October! I am so glad to see you! October is possibly my FAVOURITE MONTH OF THE YEAR.
Who is this Angry gnome from Halloween 2020? It's 6 week old Lilah and 2 year old Isaac:
Or what about windswept Isaac & Lilah (3 and 1), late to the almost empty patch in 2021:
Oh what about this super casual lean from four year old Isaac and two year old Lilah in 2022?
Or how about that time in 2023 (5 year old Isaac, 3 year old Lilah) when I was 36 weeks pregnant with twins:Anyways, I love October, and I especially love going to the pumpkin patch.