The "Moving House" Diet
Guaranteed and Safe(ish)*!
This week I have been trying to shift some excess fat, FAST! The results are AMAZING**.
Packing up your house in the presence of small children is not easy - they want to get in the box, they want to get everything out of the box, they want to put things in the box that you don't want in there, they want to draw on the box (fine), with peanut butter (not fine), they want you to play doctors/teachers/dinosaurs with them and no they will not accept a variation of those games (doctors-who-are-packing/teachers-who-are-packing/dinosaurs-who-are, ok, you get it). I've spent my entire week trying to pack. More crucially, I've spent my entire week trying to get rid of things so that I didn't have to pack them.
It's typical of me to focus on one tiny detail of a grand plan (I'm like this with my writing, too - detail, detail, detail, oops, lost the plot), but I didn't realise I was doing this until after I'd become so obsessed with clearing the food from the fridge that I'd consumed most of a jar of (Belgian) chocolate spread, a dangerous amount of lime pickle, and a lot of cheese. There wasn't much else in there because I'd purposely not been shopping all week - I've been feeding the children by scraping off that stuff that always ends up at the bottom of your store cupboard (a mixture of spilled golden syrup, porridge oats, caster sugar and fish sauce).
I became fixated with the notion that eating chocolate spread on toast for breakfast (breakfast at 7 and breakfast at 10 - the first one doesn't count because I'm half-asleep), and high tea (suddenly high tea seemed like a meal to introduce to the family), and dipping my finger into the jar every other time I passed the fridge would really help the packing-up process. I mean, if we didn't have to carry that heavy jar, our moving problems would be over! Right? Just another lick, ooh some toast crusts to dip into it, come on, come on, you're doing yourself a favour finishing this. In between I ate lime pickle and cheese sandwiches (washed down with lots of milk owing to the generosity of pickle - well, there was only a third of a jar left so there was no point packing it, might as well empty it...).
Mission complete. All of the boxes are filled to capacity so I was right: there was no room for a jar of chocolate spread.
Testimonials:
"Now that she's got rid of that excess chocolate spread, we're all a lot happier." The Australian
"Mum never lets me eat chocolate spread." The Girl
"Mah." The Boy
"If anyone needs 17 assorted tupperware lids, call me." Me
*long-term use not advised
**subject to interpretation
5 comments:
LOL! I've been guilty of the exact same behaviour, only in my case it was a jar of marshmallow Fluff (the ultimate industrial American foodstuff!)
Aaaah, this takes me back. When I was three we moved to Manhattan, and the vast boxes became our chief plaything for the following three years - for some reason known as our Spiderswebs. Boxes you could curl up in, wadrobe-type boxes you could stand up in, and all for drawing on. On year my older sister made a whole play kitchen for my younger sister's birthday out of them.
And then just when they were falling apart, we moved back to the UK, and had a whole new set of boxes...
Oh. You've reminded me of lime pickle now. Which is calling to me even more than the chocolate spread idea. I lurve lime pickle. You were talking about extreme writing - I think of LP as a kind of extreme eating experience. I like to load it up on the side of whatever it is I am eating it with until I almost can't bear it. Almost...
Pleasure and pain. Ah me.
LOL! I'm moving in two days, thank heavens I'm not trying to do it with kids...
Leila
Marshmallow Fluff sounds like something I need to investigate...
Emma - we have a beautiful wendy house but guess what the children would rather 'camp' in at the moment... I am having to prize the boxes out of their fingers one by one.
Mockling - extreme eating, yes!!
Hope your move went well, Leila!
I am just recovering from mine. Bit all over the place - put a load of washing on yesterday and found when the cycle had finished that I'd put in ten coins and a used nappy...whoops. Boy do those things swell!
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