Sunday, July 30, 2006

Parenting and general maintenance

I'm losing interest in reading to my kids. I know. Bad, bad, BAD parent! O has long gone off picture books. However, even though he loves reading by himself, every now and then he likes the ritual of a bedtime story. And when you read him a story, he wants Joan Aiken and Roald Dahl. J is more problematic, who just turned five and cannot read at all, has decided that if his brother wants chapter books, surely he can't stoooop so low as to settle for Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs. Most of the books they like are fairly well written and funny. But!

But have you tried reading out loud for fifteen minutes lately? It's pretty knackering. You need to move your mouth a lot and concentrate on the words and inject emotions and use different voices for different characters. It drains me. And it certainly doesn't help if you've already downed half a bottle of red wine by story time.

However, I have found a brilliant solution. Get the older one to read to the younger one. Ah ha!

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Some slightly worrying observations regarding my offspring:

The young one likes to describe good looking women as "hot ladies". He begged for me to let him watch Miss Universe.
The older one likes reading Dilbert even laughs out loud. Says he wants to be a technical writer for a major corporation. "Apple, you know, the company that makes iPods".
The young one still says "sgabetti" instead of "spaghetti".
The older one has been staying up till 3 a.m. recently. I hope he's not turning into a premature teenager.
The young one seems more intelligent than me. This is depressing
The older one likes watching BBC Prime. Even more depressing.

In fact, older one seems very British. He's better looking than most British kids, and has better teeth, of course, but apart from that... He loves bacon, crisps, Mars bars, sugary cereal, favourit fruit is bananas, likes white bread, grilled cheese on toast, KFC, and so on. He eats sugar cubes and string candy and all other items that Jamie Oliver tuts at.

The young one is less worrying. He likes tomato sauces, tuna fish, sushi, bbq pork buns, har gou, mangoes, oranges, grapes, flavoured sea weed, and that. You know, healthier stuff, tastier stuff. Actual food. He would make Jamie proud.

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OK enough of this parenting business and now back to me.

Heavy period finally subsiding a bit and was able to run on the treadmill for an hour today. The last week or so, I've only been doing the cross trainer and weights and a little bit of gentle swimming. My plan now is to do an hour or more cardio on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday each week, and do weights on all other nights. Right now I do three days a week and not very systematic at that. I figure I should just make it a rule to get out and work on the designated nights. Run, skip, swim, crosstrainer, row, whatever. I just have to make up the hour. Should be able to do more running outside in September as the weather cools off a bit.

My shoulder and hip joint is still bothering me. My hip joint (where the top of my thigh bone joins the hip) still hurts less when I haven't been running for a week or so but today as I walked home from the train station it really did not feel well at all. Subjectively, my right leg felt three inches longer than my left. My right shoulder is better now when lifting dumbells, but the clicking sound is still there and my front crawl still feels awful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is back to 20 degrees and raining here in the UK, but we still have bad teeth. Sadly, we get these from eating sugar cubes and Mars bars so the days of O's prizewinning smile are numbered!

Thank you for clarifying what a hip joint is, by the way. This is the sort of nugget that keeps me logging in.

Pierre said...

Pleasure's all mine, Charlie.