Shauna’s story of her weight loss journey to healthy living strikes a careful balance between raw emotion and comedy gold. I was instantly drawn to the warmth and honesty of Shauna’s writing, and found myself cheering her on from chapter to chapter, wishing I could step into the book and give her a giant hug as she made progress and faced setbacks.
I read the book from cover to cover in a matter of days, and then re-read it again at a more leisurely pace, savoring my favourite bits. My particular favourite parts revolved around Shauna’s arrival into Edinburgh and also her return visit to Canberra, probably because I lived in Edinburgh for 5 years (a fellow graduate of Edinburgh University’s EE department, like Shauna’s husband Dr. G - just an MEng though, not the grand PhD!), and my husband was born and bred in fine Canberra town, which is where Shauna was living and working before she moved to Scotland.
The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl was a fun, inspirational read with a serious side. Shauna spins a great yarn, and it was such a pleasure to read her story in full. I know Shauna has reached her original Dietgirl goals, and that make me happy, but I’d rather like to see some sort of sequel! Dietgirl Takes Manhattan, or something! Onwards and upwards Dietgirl! You’re a true hero.
Alexander does not want to get in the stroller any more when we take Rosie for her evening walk. He wants to walk too, pushing his truck. He can go pretty far too! After a while he gets tired of pushing the truck, but he’s still happy to walk (or run!) all the way home.
My Firefox 3 has stopped playing embedded videos. I’m running Vista OS. Videos work fine in IE, but I don’t really want to have to open IE each time I want to view a Flickr, YouTube or Facebook vid.
I did a bit of googling, and came up with some suggestions to disable IEview extension. But that solution makes no sense to me, since I don’t believe I ever installed this extension in the first place.
If you have any other suggestions, I’d appreciate your input!
Update: Ooh! Ooh! Installing this media wrap add-on worked - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1879
It’s the first thing Alexander says when he wakes up. It’s his greeting whenever he sees Mark or my Mum or Dad. He points them out on the street, in the carpark, on the television. His favourite bedtime story book is the Thomas the Tank Engine book about Thomas’ race with Bertie the Bus. Everyday, he asks to go in the car. He wants to go for a ride to somewhere, anywhere. (Hard to believe this is the same child who used to hate the car!). And he loves to get inside the car, clamber into the driver’s seat and stand behind the steering wheel, pressing all the buttons and levers. He likes to play with his toy cars too, but they pale in comparison to the real deal as far as Alexander is concerned.
Cars are “car!”, buses are “car!”, planes are “car!”, bikes are “car!”. In short, all moving vehicles, all objects with wheels are CAR!
We went on holiday to Chamonix earlier this month, and Alexander really enjoyed his time in the mountains. The journey across was challenging. Alexander was so intent on taking in all the new things going on around him in the airport and on the plane that he stayed awake for 15 hours straight. I don’t even like to be awake for that long. It ended in tears, for both Alexander and me. He was so sad because he was so tired, and I was so sad because he was sad and I couldn’t get him to sleep, and it downward spiralled into us both crying for about 5 minutes until he finally fell asleep in my arms. Once he was asleep, he was completely OUT. It was a fairly short-lived melt down, but felt awful at the time! Poor boy.
Apart from that incident on the outbound journey, Alexander did great on the trip. No real problems with jet lag. He loved all the outdoorsy stuff we did each day. We rode bicycles and did little hikes and clambered all over an assortment of climbing frames and swing sets throughout Chamonix.
He seemed to thrive on his temporary holiday schedule that had him heading to bed around 9pm and getting up around 9am (there are full blackout shutters in his room!), instead of his usual 7am-7pm. The shifted schedule meant we were able to eat dinner as a family most evenings. Lovely.
Credit/blame goes to his grandparents for introducing him to the delights of croix de savoie (giant vanilla pastry thingy), french fries, ice cream after every meal, whole peaches, chicken nuggets and Orangina.
Alexander is getting so tall! He’s now tall enough to comfortably open all the doors in the house without standing on tippy toes. He wears all size 2T clothes and his shoe size is a 6.5 or 7! There are 2.5 yr olds in our church playgroup that are the same size as he is at 16 months!
His vocabulary is starting to explode. It seems like he’s using new words each day. Last weekend I went through to the bedroom to get dressed so we could take Rosie for her morning walk all together. Rosie followed me, and I shut the door behind me. Alexander must have followed me too, because he started banging on the door shortly afterwards, shouting “Mummy! Osie! Door!”. Smart kid! He can mimic words we say to him with surprising accuracy when he feels like it. Yet he still chooses to use one word above all others.
We went to the Navigli district one evening in Milan for dinner. We sat down at a crowded restaurant, surrounded by native Italians, and proceeded to have one of the most disappointing meals possible. The salads weren’t fresh, the pizza was blah and the wine was undrinkably bad. We needed dessert….
