I was watching Li’l Bhaji run around Tumbletots this morning – he was bombing about, hugging members of staff randomly on the run through to the next hurdle to climb spreading joie de vivre wherever he went.

I’m starting to realise that, rather than make the toddler more like the adult, we should be making the adult more like the toddler. Trust me, I know toddlers get bad press, but I think the world would be better this way. So, without further ado, here are my new toddler-ish resolutions:

• Hello World! This is me – no excuses, no explanations and NO apologies
• Hug more – without worry or expectation of a hug back.
• Do everything with my full energy and concentration.
• Be shamelessly self-promoting – no other bugger is going to do it.
• Forget about the “shoulds” – instead flit randomly, enjoying all that life has to offer.
• SPEAK OUT LOUD AND CLEAR when pissed off rather than hide behind polite facades of “no really, I’m fine about that”.
• Have no hangups about learning from other people skills I want and need.
• Pick my nose in publ…. oh wait, that wasn’t one of them….

Anyone got any more?

In another vile display of shameless self-promotion, I have recently been reviewed by The Weblog Review.

While I feel the reviews were fair, had reasonably high scores and they seemed to like my blog layout more than last time, I have to say that I’ve come out of the experience feeling a bit … bland. I have an easy-to-the-eye blog you can navigate around and I can spell (allegedly). The sum total of my achievements. Probably a fair summary… but still.

So, a quick rebuttal just to spice the place up a bit:

1. It’s not my bloody dog! Sorry for the strength of feeling, but I’m glad to get that off my chest.
2. It’s Pewari Naan, not “Pewari Nann” – see? Bad pun… it doesn’t work if you spell it wrong.
3. The focus is me … Me = Random. Also, me = mother of toddler who is only just coming back into the world of the living – hence the “new focus”.
4. The infamous mooncup post is over two years old now – so not really a “new focus” after all – just more of a “pre-baby”/”post-baby” recovery.

Toys firmly back in pram, promise. Now, what would you like to see at the Prattle to liven things up a bit? See, I even take requests…

My fifteen minutes of fame: Blogging Baby currently have an interview with me on whether I feel being a university-educated stay-at-home mother means that feminism is dead in my life.

So, what do you think – am I wasting my education?

I didn’t think I’d be able to do it again. I hover around the minimum weight required to be a blood donor, but the scales this morning said I was bang on 50kg so off I went to the local community centre to give up my pint. Much, much easier this time as I had the foresight to request a local anasthetic (yes, I’m a wuss… but I was a comfortable wuss) so I was more relaxed and the blood extraction was much quicker and smoother.

Did you know that only 6% of the elligible population (i.e. those that are medically able to give blood) are blood donors in the UK? That’s shockingly low. So if you’re one of the 94%, go get off your arse and save a life. If I, Pewari, the needle phobe can do it, so can you. No excuses.

Besides, where else will they let you eat your body weight in digestives afterwards completely free?

This week’s tenant is Haunted House Dressing – a blog “where toasters run free and hippos climb trees” (just don’t tell my Tefal bready appliance – it was hard enough enticing it to our house in the first place).

It’s a bizarre, but oddly appealing site – I struggled to work out which bits were sidebar and which bits were blog entries, but worth taking the time to find your way around. The entries are a mix of artwork, photo-comics, poetry, zombies, stories and many many random insanities. Very easy to lose yourself in there for an hour or two…

Just went out for a walk with Akra Jr and an old Kodak digital (fixed focus so he could handle it). This was his best photo. Not bad for a four year old, is it?!

… at least while on Flickr.

Yesterday, I had a pretty cool day – and it proves my personal theory that it’s the little things in life that make us the most happy. The day started with the discovery that one of my photos on Flickr made the top 500 interesting on explore – for the first time EVER. Okay, so its highest ranking was No. 440, but to me that is pretty awesome. I was glowing all day, much to the bemusement of my real life aquaintances who are, of course, blissfully unaware of my online alter-ego.

The amusing thing is, that the photo (a line of five “me”s – all merged together) was a way of getting me out of photographing a queue in public. I am painfully uncomfortable taking pictures in populated places (unless obviously touristy) at the best of times, and an attempt to get my final scavenger hunt item was wrecked by a passing van. I couldn’t screw up the courage again, so instead made it “easier” on myself by having more wardrobe changes than a Las Vegas Showgirl… Still, having five of me around is proving quite handy. The one dressed in black is currently clearing up the kitchen for me while I faff about on the computer (what do you mean, she isn’t?! Damn…)

The middle of the day passed uneventfully, with the added complexity of Li’l Bhaji discovering his inner toddler (notably he’s learned new shoving, screaming and tantruming skills and putting them to good use). Then, at bedtime, the magical…

“Mummy!”

I asked him to repeat it. “Mummy! Mummy!” I rush in to show Akra this amazing new feat (for the non-parents in my audience, just quietly move on to another post, the gushing won’t take long) only for Li’l Bhaji to look completely innocent of all charges and giggle inanely. Take him back to bed… “Mummy! Mummy!” … take him back to Akra… silence. He repeated this a good four or five times, delighted to find a new trick to delay bedtime. He then blew kisses to me from the cot – another new trick.

Oh all right then. I won’t sell him on Ebay quite yet.

In a recent blog entry, the Complimenting Complimenter asks: “Which teacher growing up would you compliment now that you’re grown up?” I was going to reply directly on his site, but the more I remembered the more I realised it justified a blog entry in its own right, rather than clogging up CC’s comment box.

English was never a strong subject of mine. In the final year of primary school I was consistently vying for top position in maths, but while I was reading at an incredible rate, I struggled to write coherently and it was predicted I would fail entrance to the local girls’ school due to my weakness in English.

Somehow I scraped through (presumably my maths score was good enough to override the english score) but the pattern continued – I consistently got Cs and Ds for English. Despite living in my own dreamworld most of the time, I just couldn’t summon the imagination to make up stories on paper, let alone express them in an interesting way. I think what I hated the most was that in English there was never one right answer – at least in maths or science classes you were either wrong or you were right with no ambiguity.

Then in my second or third year (my memory is hazy) we were put into sets and as a result were allocated a new english teacher – Mr Wright. We were all a bit afraid of him – he had a reputation for being very strict and short tempered (indeed, he’d supervised us once when a teacher was off sick and we all had to go through worksheets in strict silence – he put the fear of God into us). Who’d have thought he’d have ended up such a huge influence on my life?

I can’t remember specifically how he inspired me. I know my attitude towards english as a subject didn’t improve much at the time, although steadily my work started getting As and B+s. He once told me that my writing style was “terse and pithy” – my mother laughed cynically and told me that was teacher code for I didn’t write enough. I wish I hadn’t believed her. I confess that I still tend to struggle with any areas of writing that require a long wordy description -and always err on the succinct side (this long, rambly post notwithstanding).

Most of my lessons that I remember from those years were his class: the day our task was to hunt out typos in the Guardian (was the first time I’d ever heard the alternative title of Grauniad); the day at the start of the first Gulf War when he cancelled the lesson and let us all watch the news on TV (it was a private school where a large proportion of students were forces children); the day when he read out the last scenes of Romeo and Julliet and cried because he was so moved (this from one of the strictest teachers in school!); the day he asked how many of us wanted to become teachers – no hands went up…. his response was “if none of you want to be teachers, ask yourself this: who will teach your children?”

I decided not to do English for A-level – my destiny lay in the sciences, or so I thought. I got the impression Mr Wright was disappointed in me for not continuing English. I was bemused why that would be as it was patently not a subject I enjoyed or had any aptitude for. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that my interest in science was primarily because I was attracted to the excellent science writing out there – at university level when much of it was dry and mathematical, my interest was lost. I wonder if he had some foreshadowing of that, even then?

I have no way of contacting him now as much as I would like to. I don’t even know his first name, Wright is a fairly common surname and he’s long since left my old school. But even if I could, what would I say? “Mr Wright, I now write a little known weblog daily because of you”… or perhaps “Mr Wright, I occasionally get paid writing work for copywriting/search engine optimizing work for property websites”… or even “Mr Wright, I’m planning my first novel … but oh, it’s a Mills and Boon, not high literature.” None of them sound particularly impressive or reflect the huge changes in my life and outlook since that 16-year-old girl took the wrong educational path.

Perhaps, “Mr Wright, the written word is now a huge part of my life, it compels me and I don’t think I could live without it. You introduced me to that world, your words still inspire me now and whatever I say will sound completely inadequate, but I shall try anyway. Thank you. Thank you with all my heart and soul.”

Would that do?

Edit: one thing he obviously didn’t teach me was proof-reading. About six billion typos fixed…

I’m no stranger to “interesting” product substitutions when purchasing weekly groceries via the Internet. I’ve had swaps ranging from nappies at three sizes larger than required, to a tiny vegetarian ready meal instead of the beef roasting joint we’d intended to feed three people on Sunday with and still have some leftovers for shepherds pie. All those pale into insignificance after last night’s Sainsbury’s delivery, however.

Along with the rest of my shopping, I’d ordered a jar of Uncle Ben’s Sweet and Sour sauce with extra pineapple for our lazy meal of the week. Obviously, a lot of people had been overcome with desire for a sweet & sour stirfry recently, as Sainsburys had none in stock. So they subbed it with …

… wait for it…

… a whole fresh pineapple.

Marvellous. Took me and the delivery drivers a good five minutes before we could stop laughing…

Well, I am pleased to report that my Father-in-Law finally had his quadruple bypass yesterday at around midday and is now recovering well in Intensive Care.

Interestingly, the hospital is currently in the midst of a huge anti-MRSA drive with lots of awareness posters everywhere and a few thousand gallons of handwash being used hourly (okay, I may have exaggerated a little on the last bit, but you get the picture). When Father-in-Law was admitted back on the 10th, we had an ironic laugh at the advertising for this drive as it was based around a launch date of 16th January. So what about the poor sods who are in there before that date? Doesn’t it seem strange to have a plan of action to defeat the superbug and then place a delay on starting it?

It’s especially nerve-wracking when a good friend of the family had a similar operation at the same hospital last year and caught an MRSA infection while he was there. All in all, we’re hoping that Father-in-Law will recover quickly and be able to minimize his hospital stay. On the plus side, while Akra was visiting today, the patient in the bed next to his dad was moved to a ward. Akra reports that within minutes of the patient leaving, a cleaner was there giving the whole area a thorough going over – even scrubbing the curtain rails. Reassuring. So it seems they may be on the right track after all.