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My Blog Personality

24 November, 2008 by thevicarswife

Just found a great little site which analyses your personality type from your writing style on your blog!

I came out as

ESFP – The Performers

“The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead – they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation – qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.”

When I’ve previously done the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator I’ve been an ENFP, so this is pretty close for an instant analysis. I wonder if the site has detected my current preoccupation with vicarage decor and my great desire to avoid planning the house move. It certainly seems to be very much me at the moment!

Posted in Fun | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

My new favourite website

10 November, 2008 by thevicarswife

The Curate has recently been appointed as a real life Vicar and we will be moving to a grown up vicarage a few weeks after Christmas. This is all very exciting – the chance to serve God in a new place and put down roots after living in 7 houses, 5 cities and 3 countries in 13 1/2 years of marriage.

The challenge now is to get ready and one of my tasks is to sort our sofas out. The sofas were bought 9 years and 4 houses ago and on a different continent. We love them but a series of cats has meant that the covers are disgustingly shredded and are suffering from small children induced wear and lots of tear. They are Ikea sofas and Ikea have discontinued the range.

When I asked at a local furniture shop about the cost of replacement covers, figures of £600 per sofa were mentioned, sending me straight for the Ikea catalogue to look at brand new sofas. However, today I discovered this fantastic site where I reckon we’ll be able to recover our entire set for less than the price of a new sofa. Phew! And how eco-friendly too.

Now I just have to decide on colours…

Posted in Family, Recycling | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Pigeons

21 October, 2008 by thevicarswife

The Queen is in the juniors now. This is a big thing because

  1. The juniors is on a different site
  2. The Engineer is in nursery which starts earlier than the infants, and at the infant site
  3. So we have to leave twenty minutes before we used to last year
  4. And we don’t cross with Mr Goldtooth any more.

This makes our mornings a little more stressed and a little less jolly. But the upside is the pigeons:

Pigeons

Our pigeons are fatter than this

I confess: I have encouraged my children to do something terrible on a regular basis.

Whenever they see the pigeons, they make big roaring noises and run at them, sending the pigeons up into the sky, or across the pavements, depending on how lazy the fat birds are feeling.

We see the pigeons nearly every morning, as local Asians, believing the birds to be reincarnated relatives, feed them daily on torn chappattis, bread, birdseed, rice and beans. Sadly, they don’t do this in their own gardens, but in the shopping precinct, which is then covered in bird poo, mouldy bird food, and later on, with rats picking up the leftovers. The instructions in English and Punjabi indicating that feeding the birds is against the law have no effect.

I’m not sure whether my kids roaring has any effect either, but it makes us all feel better.

Posted in Family, Inner city, School | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Grammar Rulz

17 October, 2008 by thevicarswife

The Engineer said today

I make-ed a sandwich in nursery and I eat-ed it.

He doesn’t like his verbs irregular.

Posted in Family | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

A Trip to the BarBars

1 October, 2008 by thevicarswife

On Monday, on the way home from school, I decided that the Joker and the Engineer could do with a haircut, so we called in at the BarBars (their pronunciation).

We like going there. The haircuts are swift and cheap, although I seem to have no control about the final look. I am trying to go for the slightly long-haired-sweet-little-lad-who-surfs effect, the sort you might find in mini-Boden – I am middle class, after all).

But stepping into our barbers is stepping into an Indian barber’s in Delhi, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. A telly showing cricket or Bollywood movies, a picture of a Hindu god/a Sikh guru/a verse from the Koran, a pungent smell of some strong cologne, some tatty newspapers in a swirly-lettered language I don’t understand and some magnificent barber’s chairs, upholstered in vinyl. The barbers themselves have elegantly coiffured hair, gold chains around their necks and a gold tooth or two.

Our barbers know how to cut hair and they don’t get the Boden catalogue. So despite my attempts to describe the look, my boys always come out with the hair cut that the barbers like. And what they like is a traditional short back and sides. The only variation (after going a good few times now) is that it gets left longer at the back. This time only the Engineer got that version. And they both got gel.

Last time we went I took a few photos of the barbers at work. And this time I took a shot when we got home to show why my boys would fail to make the Boden catalogue but are still gorgeous. Enjoy.

Posted in Family, Inner city | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

How to cope with a looming kitchen inspection

25 September, 2008 by thevicarswife

Mrs Discoman sent me this Youtube clip, which made me smile this morning. It also lessened the stress caused by the prospect of having my kitchen checked out by someone who knows about catering and hygiene.

I particularly liked the line “He loves me when I waste my time by writing silly songs”. But sadly no line with “He loves me when my kitchen is filthy”.

PS The kitchen inspection is not another nanny state extension announced in Gordon Brown’s Labour conference speech along with nursery places for two year olds. It’s because I’ve just started baking for a cafe and they need to check that I won’t poison the public.

Posted in Food, Fun, State | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Concealing my age – some chance

16 September, 2008 by thevicarswife

It was my birthday last Sunday and the Curate very kindly wished me a happy birthday during the notices at church. He mentioned that I was twenty-one again. However, my children were keen to put him right. Straight away and very loudly.

‘Not TWENTY-one. She’s FOURTY-one’ they chanted from the pew. Good to know that they know their numbers…

It reminded me of the time that a friendly local shopkeeper asked a very chatty Joker his age a while ago.

‘I’m three, the Queen is four and Mummy’s thirty-eight’ he informed the grocer.

I think I might just get a large badge announcing my age so the kids don’t feel the need to tell everyone.

Posted in Family | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

RML

11 September, 2008 by thevicarswife

As a concerned Christian parent, I am always pleased to hear when my child is being taught truth from the bible.

So I was extremely impressed when I was told by his Year 1 teacher at our church school that the Joker is studying RML. This course is well known to Anglican Evangelicals for providing excellent in-depth bible study at St Helen’s Church in the City of London.

Eventually my brain clicked, since we were talking about the Joker’s reading and writing, and I twigged that she was actually referring to his literacy programme (which is very good, by the way, synthetic phonics and all that). Hopefully once he’s completed his first RML, he’ll be ready for the other one.

Posted in Faith, Family, School | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Toys

6 September, 2008 by thevicarswife

Our new church assistant arrived a couple of days ago. Gentle is in his mid-twenties and has joined us from Ghana. He’ll be here for a year to help the church in all sorts of ways and, hopefully, to learn something of our culture and more of our Lord.

Last year’s church assistant, Gambit, was here and we were sitting around the kitchen table discussing the recent tragic loss of the Joker’s much-loved toy dog (don’t panic, a replacement has now been sorted, thanks to eBay.fr). Both Gambit and I had tales of lost soft toys in our childhoods and then I asked Gentle if he’d had a favourite toy when he was growing up.

‘Not really. In Ghana, children don’t have toys,’ he said. ‘There isn’t the money for toys.’

I looked around my chaotic kitchen, stuffed with children’s toys and games and felt a mix of emotions – guilt, gratitude and excitement at the prospect of learning more of life in Ghana, where kids have no toys but the Sunday school classes are packed.

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The Olympic Effect

3 September, 2008 by thevicarswife

Well, it’s been the holidays and so I’ve not been posting. My brain goes to mush when the hoards are around. Anyway, I have a great list of things I want to blog now school’s back and my brain is recovering some rigidity. We’ll see how it goes.

Today’s summer tale is of the Queen and the Joker having a tussle in the back garden of the holiday house we were staying in. They were laughing their heads off and pulling each other’s clothes. The Queen made a particularly vicious-looking grab at the crotch of the Joker’s shorts.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Jojo, Mummy.’

‘Jojo?’

‘Yes, jojo, you know, like on the Olympics,’ said the Queen as she successfully threw the Joker to the floor in what I took to be an ippon.

I was just pleased they weren’t practicing escrime instead (amazing what useless new vocabulary you learn when watching French telly).

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