Ingredients:
– Rioja
– Red Leicester
– Brie

Method:
– Open Rioja cork. Pour generously into glass.
– Open Red Leicester package
– Open Brie package
– Find clean knife
– Turn Barbie on the iPad & Star Wars on the DS
– Enjoy!!!

“Being a mother is the hardest job on earth. Women everywhere must declare it so.” – Oprah

Some days you wake up feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. Your children are healthy, your children are happy and you are doing a wonderful job as a mother.

Other days you wake up to a wailing, puking child and wonder where things have gone terribly wrong.

There is also a day when you wake up and remember yourself. It’s usually after 18 months of feeding/changing/feeding/changing/
crawling/feeding/changing/changing/feeding/walking/
feeding/changing/tantrums/feeding/changing/a few glasses of wine.

There it is. Laying in front of you. There is a life outside of this and you can join.

An invite into the secret club of people who go out past dark. People who laugh at adult jokes. People who put on eyeliner and perfume. People who enjoy life outside of Birthday parties and family swim. People who enjoy making that Barbie cake for the 100th time just for fun, but also enjoy a nice glass of vino and a lovely dress.

It’s been a long time, but I’m delighted to be back in the club!

I began my journey with eyewear when I was 5 years old! My little fro and brown rimmed 70’s glasses made me supermodel material at a young age.

The first experience I remember in my spectacled life is telling my 1st grade teacher that I had glasses and needed to wear them to see the board. How geeky! My mom must have made me do it.

I graduated to the big step of contact lenses at age 13. My grandma and I got them together and it was a momentous occasion.

Because I had bad astigmatism, I was forced to get gas permeable lenses. Essentially, these are an advanced version of hard contacts which wore colluses on my inner eyelids. This meant I walked around for the first couple weeks with my eyes popped so far open and desperately trying not to blink that I looked like a deer in the headlights.

Even more challenging was trying to ‘pop’ them out of my eyes. There was a special maneuver where I pulled the corner of my eye to force my eyelids to pop the lens out. I’m not sure if I can truly explain how difficult this is to master. The first night I popped the first lens out like a pro. I was a contact lens natural!

The second lens, however, was not so successful. After 2 hours of pulling, pushing and rubbing my eyes I was actually further from getting lens #2 out of my eye. By this time my eye was so swollen from the prodding and tears that it was barely open enough to do the ‘pop’. At one point, we were in the car with the ignition running and ready to depart for the ER.
I pleaded for one last attempt.
Thankfully, it worked!

After many years of contact lenses, many misguided pops leading to family members disassembling the bathroom sink (thanks Greg!), I made the huge leap to Lasik surgery.
My life was transformed!!
I could see the clock in the morning and the bottom of the shower.
I could sleep in for 5 extra minutes and go to bed 5 minutes later as I didn’t have lenses to deal with.
I didn’t have to worry about falling asleep on the couch and waking up with my lenses glued to my eyes from dryness.
There were no more tears streaming down my face when the wind blew or I went for a cycle.
I was a new woman!

Five years after Lasik, I’ve gone full circle. Glasses Again.

The frames are still brown but with anti-glare lenses and more up to date frames. Fortunately, I’m feeling much more stylish than my bespectacled fro days.

Since I’ve returned from maternity leave I’ve seen my daily commute as my ‘me time’. It’s a relaxing time of the day when my brain and my body is able to shut off. In the mornings, I use the journey to read a book. In the evenings I flip through the gossip pages of the free newspaper that’s thrown in front of your face at the entrance to every Underground and train station. On a good day I can even complete a couple of sudoko’s on the train. I love my me time!

Last week I peered over my free paper and this is what I saw from my perch at the top of the bus:

Wall to wall cars.
Wall to wall buses.
Wall to wall people.
What sort of delusional state was I in to find this craziness peaceful and relaxing?

Apparently 1 million + people commute into London from outside the M25. These commuters on top of the 7.5 million people living in  Greater London makes for absolute madness at 9am and 5pm. As of July 2007, Greater London surpassed Paris as the most populous municipality in the EU. Wow! This is a lot to take in for a Missouri girl!

I am so sorry that my little bubble has burst. I much preferred my dream state of a blissful daily journey to the new reality of the steel jungle that I’ll be facing next week!