Rachel At 10

My daughter – my eldest child – turns 10 years old in a few days.

Of course, she’s precocious beyond her years. Ten going on teenager, really. But I think it’s fun when they’re this age to sit and reflect on their journey. After all, it’s been a decade.

I remember when she was a baby, I’d come home from work in the afternoon and go for a nap with her. I’m sure it started off as me giving her mum a break, but we’d ultimately settle on the bed and she would fall asleep in the crook of my arm. It was a standing arrangement.

Of course all of that was in a different house, fifteen miles away, a decade ago. So much has changed in the meantime. She’s had two brothers. She’s joined classes. She’s made friends.

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Do too many computer games make children averse to reading books?

I’m writing this post after a massive stand-off with our middle child. It was literally a three-hour battle of wills. And it was about…a reading homework.

Homeworks in our house are lengthy affairs. The kids come home, their returns staggered by about an hour in general. The two youngest are first home, and they get stuck into homework right away. How quickly they finish depends on how focused they are, how tired after school and how hungry.

Today, Jake had to do a reading homework in addition to his usual tasks. You could tell right away he was going to be a reluctant participant. He was impatient to race off and play Playstation with his brother. Since the Playstation made a surprise return to our household earlier this week, it’s been virtually all they want to do.

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Weight Loss & Fitness Update: The Amazing Week 17!

Yikes. I noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve done the fitness update on this blog. And that it’s been an incredible 17 weeks since I started this. Wow.

The weight loss has continued on its downward trajectory, and I’ve continued to exercise and maintain a healthy diet. Let’s take a look at the weight loss journey as chronicled here on Family Of Five:

• Week 1 – Weighed in at 109.8kg. This was before any exercise or substantial change of diet.
• Week 4 – 103.8kg. Quite an inspiring drop in weight. I think it was these big initial changes in weight that spurred me to keep going.
• Week 6 – 99.4kg. Even after this 10kg drop from my initial weigh-in, I felt like I was on a plateau for weeks afterward. I stayed persistent though, and kept exercising and eating well.
• Week 17 – 87.6kg. Again, I felt like I was stuck around 90-92kg  for the longest while. But in the last week, I’ve seen the weight start to shift again.

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Weight Loss Goal: Beat the 100Kg Barrier!

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted an exercise update here, but the Biggest Loser Challenge continues!

With my last update, I was weighing in at 103.8kg. However, with some increased exercise, I’ve been steadily working the weight downwards. This morning, after a 3.2 mile jog, I showered and weighed in at 99.4kg.

Now, no doubt throughout the day that may rise to over 100kg again, but it’s a great sign that I’m nearing my target weight. In fact, it’s virtually the midway point. Remember, my starting weight roughly 6 weks ago was 109.8kg, and my target weight is 90kg. So I’m literally in the middle.

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The Biggest Loser Challenge: Hitting a plateau?

It’s been exactly 20 days since I started my Biggest Loser challenge. Almost three weeks. And there’s quite a bit of change to report.

Diet

First up, I have to a reasonable extent, been looking after what I eat. Smaller portion sizes, more fruit and veg and smaller meals spread out across the day to make sure I don’t get ravenous and go on a fridge raid!

However, there have been a few setbacks – most notably two takeaways in one weekend. We had houseguests and ordered in. And washed the junk food down with quite a lot of beer. Other than that though, my alcohol consumption is virtually nil right now, and I’m trying to keep junk food out of my diet.

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Can I be the Biggest Loser?

A couple of days ago, I started playing the Biggest Loser Wii Game. Not that I’m remotely as wobbly as the contestants on that show, but for the last few years I’ve been struggling to regain control of my pot belly.

I’ve touched on this theme before, but getting started is the biggest problem. Just trying to be more active throughout the day, eating smaller portions and healthier foods. Swapping snack foods for fruit.

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I got an iPhone for Christmas!

So what’d you get for Christmas? I got an iPhone 4. And though I’d been hinting heavily to Lisa about getting one, I honestly didn’t expect to receive one!

What was really funny was that Lisa gave me a decoy present first – a Bluray player. The box was clearly too big to be an iPhone. I flirted with the idea that it might be…gasp…an iPad, but the parcel was too heavy.

When I discovered it was a Bluray player, I was initially crestfallen. This is a present for everybody! Then I looked at it a bit closer – not only was it backward compatible with all our DVDs, but it can connect to our home network and it can play media from USB drives. This is fantastic, because I have a ton of videos in AVI format on a 500Gb hard disk that I can now just hook straight into the Bluray and play! Previously, I had to hook my laptop up to the TV, then play the media through the laptop, so this was amazing.

So engrossed was I in the features of this gadget, that I didn’t even notice Lisa throwing another smaller box at me…I barely took my eyes away from the Bluray player.

At this point, I genuinely had no idea that there was another big present. When I opened the package and saw what it was I was actually overwhelmed for a moment. These were twoamazing, expensive presents. And I’d dreamed of getting an iPhone for ages – I suspected it briefly when Lisa sold my old Sony Erickson phone a while back.

Now, my father-in-law has a wonderful turn of phrase for things he doesn’t like or understand:Shite. Looking at the iPhone over Christmas dinner, he issued his usual judgement. “It’s shite. What does it even do?” Well, what doesn’t it do?

It’s got great social media apps – I can update Twitter and Facebook from wherever I am. It’s got maps, calendar, music, stacks of features built in. I’ve downloaded Monopoly, Scrabble and Sudoku for my iPhone. What else? High quality camera for still pictures and video. Amazing for capturing little fun moments with the family. The built-in voice recorder is amazing quality. The multimedia capabilities of the iPhone are astounding – all in that tiny little box.

On New Year’s Eve, we used the Skype app to chat face to face with our friend in America – for free. I’ve used Facetime to chat to Lisa – it’s fantastic, but a bit frivolous. I’ve discovered the joys of FourSquare – a fun app that checks you in wherever you are and tells you what’s going on around you.

I’ve probably only touched the tip of the iceberg – like today I bought an app that allows you to have SSH access to web servers. Being a web administrator, it’s handy to be able to check server status and restart services remotely from wherever I am.

It’s so much more than a phone, and I’m so grateful to Lisa for being a real darling and buying me the best toy ever for Christmas!

So, over to you – did you get any cool stuff for Christmas?

The one where we buy new wardrobes for our bedroom

Tonight we go to bed with the smell of sawdust in our lungs.

After almost eight years in our house, we’ve had some new wardrobes fitted in our bedroom. They’re called Sliderobes. I mention that because I’m not sure if that’s a common name all over the world.

When we first moved in, it was a new build house and we had a lot of furnishing to do. So we spent a lot of money on a lot of cheap self-assembly furniture. It looked okay at the time, but over the years a lot of it has started to look rickety.

So Lisa and I decided to start working on the house room by room. One room roughly every six months. But doing what we didn’t do first time round – we’re concentrating on getting the standard of finish really high this time round. Getting the woodwork perfect, accessorizing the room and getting a tasteful colour scheme established.

The first task was to replace our wobbling wardrobes. After pricing the official “sliderobes” providers, we got in touch with a local company through a family friend who quoted a really competitive price.

And today, braving the treacherous Arctic conditions Northern Ireland is facing, they arrived to fit the new wardrobes. We swiftly pulled apart our old furniture and dumped it (saving a few bits for a cosy evening fire). The guys showed up around mid-day and went to work. They might have left the front door open one too many times, letting in icy air and the possibility of a few rodents (hope not), but they worked solidly and by about 7pm we had some shiny new wardrobes!

This new installation runs the whole length of one wall, with four subdivisions – lots of hanging space combined with drawers and shelving, and all of it behind sliding mirrored doors. It makes the room look infinitely tidier. Next on our decorative checklist is getting wallpaper for a feature wall on the opposite side of the room. And then maybe some matching curtains/bedding/soft furnishings.

Let’s try this again…

Oh dear. 2010 hasn’t been a great year for prolific dad blogging, has it? Neither was 2009 for that matter. Or 2008. Or…you get the idea.

Horrible things my wife has done to me: Selling my mobile phone

I’ll admit it – I don’t use my mobile phone much. When you work from home, you’re never more than a few feet from a landline. The only time my mobile gets dusted off is when I’m going out for the day – and even then it’s only as a precaution in case the car breaks down, or I’m running late.

Still, when I was heading out the other day, I couldn’t find my mobile anywhere. Strange…it was on the charger the other day. And with that thought in my head, I popped my head into the living room and asked Lisa if she’d seen it.

Then I remembered. Pennies dropped. Things clicked into place.

“You sold it!” I spluttered, in a J’accuse stylee.Her face froze for a split second, not sure how I was going to react. Then she just burst out laughing.

It turns out that she’d sold it four days before. I’d worked out that the last time I saw the mobile, it was charging on the kitchen counter. Except I wasn’t charging it, Lisa was. We’d joked at the time about how I might have missed a few messages from my best friend…O2 Alerts.

And why? Well, it seems Lisa’s found herself a new alternative to eBay – Amazon Marketplace. After trialling it a couple of weeks ago with some random electronic items, she decided that anything electronic and unused was fair game. Hence the great mobile phone sale. And various other items. It’s all in a good cause though – she’s saving the cash for Christmas presents.

What’s funniest of all is that she knew me well enough to know that she could sell my mobile phone without telling me and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.