Before becoming a mother, I never would have expected to utter the phrase, “STOP RUBBING TOAST ALL OVER THE DRYER!” to anyone.

It’s been a while since updating this blog. Life has kind of taken over. Well, the Prawn has kind of taken over. The Prawn is now 17 months old, has a vocabulary of over 100 words and finds new ways every day to delight and frustrate us. I imagine that she is currently stomping around the living room like a T-Rex shouting “OBAMA!” and spreading crumbs everywhere. We’re not those parents who try to turn their kid into a walking billboard or anything, but The Rock Star bought his book last week and since then, she’s spent a lot of time pointing at the cover and saying,

“Daddy!”

“No, darling, that’s Obama.”

“Daddy!”

“OBAMA.”

“OHHHHH-BAMMA!”

So he is now her favorite person on earth. The Democratic convention, what little coverage of it we’re getting over here, is a dream come true for her and a balm to soothe the gaping hole that the Olympics left in her life. “LYMPICS!” she’d yell the moment she came into the living room in the morning. But now that there is Obama, everything is all good.

I feel grateful not to be in the US during an election year, because I’m fairly certain I would have thrown something through the television by now. Getting older and being able to see things in shades of grey rather than black and white has it’s advantages, but genuine stupidity and bad grace is pretty obvious to anyone. It’s easy to see why voter apathy is at an all time high- anyone not wanting to be frightened into voting for the right guy would be hard pressed to find out why they should be voting at all. Years ago, when Saturday Night Live was still funny, Dennis Miller introduced the concept of a “vollyballocracy” in which “one guy serves until he screws up and then the next guy gets a turn.” It’s starting to sound better to me.

8 years is really too long for ANY one party, especially ones as partisan as they are in the United States, to be in power. It’s much the same over in the UK. Complacency sets in after a while. Balls get dropped. Those in it for their own reasons get bolder. Although, in Britain, you’d be hard pressed to find any huge ideological differences between the two major parties any more as they’ve both desperately migrated towards the centre in search of votes. You’ve got no one screaming Roe vs. Wade at anyone, everyone wanting tougher immigration laws and a complete overhaul of the social system, and both parties professing to have the people behind them. It is little wonder that the overarching opinion of politics can be boiled down to “meh.”

Should my ballot from the state of Minnesota arrive in early November, I’ll be casting my vote for Mr. Obama, but wondering if it’ll really bring the “change” that I’m seeking.

To all of those who have besieged The Rock Star with repeated calls for the now infamous “Hula Vid”, he has instructed me to post the following as his reason for politely declining your request.

“The internet scares the shit out of me.” he says.

I do a lot of sitting around.

At work, I find myself chair bound most of the day except for when I summon up the courage to venture to the petrol station next door which is owned by a surly Pakistani who I inevitably interrupt during a mobile phone conversation with my unreasonable desire for a Diet Coke. At home, I obviously find myself a little more active what with a 17 month old grabbing machine powering all over the house, but my craft undertakings usually require some degree of stillness for hours at a time.

Fed up somewhat by this sedentary life-style, the Rock Star and I used some cash that wasn’t lying around to get ourselves a little motivation in the form of a Wii and Wii Fit after spending a week with a system belonging to Duff and Trumpet.

The Wii Fit wasn’t easy to find. I imagine that Nintendo wasn’t quite expecting the volume of interest in a fitness program in this age of couch to ass ratios. However, I am rarely defeated when I get a mad impulse, so in a fit of musthaveitnows, I found a Wii Fit board for sale in one of the Amazon Z shops for about 30 pounds over the retail price and bought it.

Judge not. I’m not sitting around anymore.

Well, actually, I AM at the moment due to a bout of lurghy, but for the first 10 days after our impulsive purchase, I spent an hour each day engaging in yoga, muscle exercises and cardio worthy of a trip to the gym. And, like a 3 year old, I was motivated because IT LOOKED LIKE A GAME.

I’d be hard pressed to register any complaints about the Wii. Nintendo knew what it was doing when it designed the system. What’s the one major complaint of parents about video games besides the mind bending violence? Kids, spending hours a day sitting on their rapidly expanding backsides, eyes becomes big and nocturnal like bush babies. So what did they do? Came out with the Wii. Not only would kids PLAY these games, but they’d BEG for them. BEG TO EXERCISE. Not only that, but THE WHOLE FAMILY WOULD WANT TO PLAY THE GAMES TOO. Major video games coup.

The Fit balance board is a fairly impressive piece of kit. Although the technology to measure BMI is available in the common bathroom scale nowadays, the level of sensitivity when it comes to balance is really quite astonishing. The yoga program has definitely made me more aware of my centre of gravity as well as my posture during the times that I AM forced to sit on my rear. The cardio program can be quite punishing as well. One wouldn’t expect that being forced to hula hoop for 6 minutes would make you want to collapse into a panting heap, but I would suggest that anyone give it a go. (I have been tempted to secretly film the Rock Star engaging in this exercise and publish it on the web, but I am afraid of being served with divorce papers.) I’m also quite enamored of the rhythm boxing as well as jogging for fat burning. One of my main motivations of late is to defend my records from the Rock Star, who has a natural gaming gene that enables him to go cruising past every high score ever set, infuriating gamers that have been carefully cultivating their successes over a much longer period of time. The only achievements that I believe to be out of his reach are my yoga scores; a discipline that he finds difficult due to the fact that he is built like a long triangle with broad shoulder and narrow hips. Me? I got a whole heaping helping of ballast around the middle.

But I’m working on it.

My daughter rocks.

Just a little news from the crafty side of Blogapotamus…

I’ve been thinking ahead.

In November and December, I’ll be doing my first craft fairs; the H@ndmade fair in Oxford and WeMake in London. I’m pretty excited about the prospect, having attended many fairs in the past, but never exhibited.

During my childhood, my mother was a rabid craft fair junkie. I know that my father probably grimaced every time she informed him where she was spending the coming Saturday. She is quite the crafty sort herself; while I was growing up, she made and sold wooden ornaments and fracturs (Pennsylvania Dutch folk art) as well as baked wedding cakes to supplement our income while she waited for me to be old enough for her to return to teaching, so the impulse to surround herself with crafts was well-nigh inescapable.

The particular crafty monkey on her back took the form of dried flower wreaths. As you can see from the example, they could often run into the hundreds of dollars. Beautiful as they were, their arrival in our home was always heralded by a chorus of “Now, where the hell is THAT going to go??” from my dad. My father is the most patient and lovely man on the face of the planet and he DID have a point. These enormous wreaths took up a lot of wall space and with every new one that came in the door, that space rapidly diminished. Perhaps this explains the seemingly endless need for household renovations: to come up with new, virgin wallspace.

To bring this long-winded diatribe back to the subject of the above photo, I wanted to make sure that I had some smaller items available for impulse buying. (Which is basically the kind of buying that goes on at a craft fair unless, like my mother, you have a particular kind of geegaw in mind when you set out.) So I knocked out these five little colorful beauties that will hopefully go to fantastic homes.

Can I just say how much I love pre-made bezel cups? While they don’t work for higher set cabs, (the stones would be too likely to fall out) the lower set ones fit perfectly and safely and it means that I don’t have to spend time swearing at my bezel wire for not doing exactly what I want it to. Out of the five necklaces, I was able to use bezel cups for 3, which saved a lot of time. While the vast majority of my pieces are entirely handmade, I DO like to to make things easier for myself occasionally!

If you feel the urge to feed your need for silver jewelry, check out the goodness in my shop!