101 Progress Check - 17th September 2013

Hiya - is anybody still there?

It's been a bit slow going over the last few months, but I had some news the other day that, while making things a bit tricky initially, may actually free up some of my time in a way that I can work on these challenges (especially with the ones involving my boys).

The boys love going to childcare after lunch club/school, but unfortunately the lady who has them needs to cut back on the number of days that she can have our two - have I mentioned before how Switzerland is really not set up for families where both parents work outside the home (especially if they both work full-time)? It's really not ideal - I won't go into full details here, there's enough for a whole post on this, but let's just say that even though Christopher (my oldest) is now 8 and in his second year at school (after 2 years in Kindergarten class) my oldest boy is still only in school every morning and two afternoons a week.

Thankfully they can still go to the childminder on Mondays and Fridays, so it's only Tuesday - Thursday that we need to deal with. I'm looking at this as an opportunity to see if I can change my working hours. As much as I would love to be able to cut the number of hours I work I doubt that this is possible, however, if I can juggle them around a bit I may be able to work from home 7:30 - 13:30 on Wednesdays so that I can be home for the boys when they get home. This would mean that basically I will have an afternoon each week where I can do things with my boys and catch up on bits around the home, leaving the majority of my weekend free so that I'm not trying to get everything done at the same time - yay!!!

Anyway, back to the progress so far...

On Sunday (after a manic afternoon entertaining small boys for Marcus's 6th birthday party) I thought it would be nice to watch a musical, so I looked down my list (having crossed Fame off the other day as not actually being a musical - I was very disappointed when I realised that it was just a film with a few musical numbers in it - and not a very good one at that). Oklahoma was next on the list, hmmm... a nice bit of Hugh Jackman and Maureen Lipton? Yes, that'll do nicely - until I realised that the version I have isn't that one. OK, so South Pacific... I haven't seen that yet... three minutes of black screen and music before the credits start (yep, old film, so many of the credits are at the beginning), then three minutes of credits before the film starts (starting to lose the will to live now), but then it starts... and I really just couldn't get into it, I was gutted, I was expecting to really love it, but I couldn't seem to understand a lot of what was being sung and it felt quite slow going. I may try it again another day, but not just yet. So what did I do? I watched Hairspray!!! Yes, I have seen it before, but I like it, and it is a musical and by the time I got to that point I really just wanted to watch something that I would definitely like :o)

I started my challenge to drink Rooibos tea every day for two weeks on September 8th, and I'm still going strong. I like Tick Tock rooibos tea, so will have to pick up another box when I'm in the UK for the Philofaxy meet up at the end of the month.

I discovered the other day that, yes, I CAN walk in high heels. I have a pair of heels that I used to wear sometimes for Salsa and they are fairly high, and a bit chunky, but not so chunky that they lose the feeling of walking in high heels. I put them on to see how they would look with a dress that I have, and I managed to walk (like a proper lady and everything, instead of just wobbling around) through the apartment - now all I need to do is get some high heels (not stilettos, I have no need to try to break my ankle) and wear them. I'm not sure yet where I'll actually wear them, but it will happen :-)

Next - a very exciting announcement - on Monday morning at 9am as soon as they went on sale I got some BIFFY CLYRO TICKETS!!! They announced on their Facebook page on Saturday that they were adding a venue in Zurich into their tour schedule on November 18th, and because it's an additional venue it's quite a small venue - perfect!!! Now all I need to do is sort out a baby sitter, which could be fun as it's a Monday night, but I will find a way :o)

I feel that it's time to review the outstanding challenges that I have - it's all very well setting 101 challenges, but during the course of 1001 days, things change, what you thought you would really like to do, you realise you actually aren't that fussed about, you discover new things that you'd rather do instead, you realise that there are other things that are more important than some of the things you had originally planned, or your children aren't actually interested in the things you thought they would be.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks I will be doing some more planning and reviewing and will make some changes to my list. For example - taking the boys to three shows... they've been to the Batman show which they loved, but do they want to go and see two others? No? I've tried The Lion King, Shrek the Musical and a couple of other things I thought they may be interested in, but they don't want to go... so I am thinking that will be changed to "Take the boys to see a show". Others may just not be practical to do in the remaining time, I could just say, "oh well, I didn't do it", but if I do that to one thing it's so easy then to climb onto the slippery slope of not bothering to try to achieve the others - I think it is more sensible, and challenging, to change the challenges to things that are actually do-able.

One thing on the list that may go is "camping" - realistically I can't see it happening this year now, and it is very unlikely to happen in the early part of next year. There is also the issue of the initial layout - is there really any point in buying all the gear, to only use it once? We went to Europapark in May and stayed in a covered wagon (no, nothing like a caravan, more like a tent with a wooden floor and small bunk beds), Ben keeps asking if we can just class that as camping - I'm really doubting that, although we were cold, had to walk across to the toilets in the night, and walk in pyjamas to the shared shower block, so it wasn't totally dissimilar. But... and this I feel may be the main issue, we missed out on the whole "trying to put the tent up, getting stroppy, finally managing to get everyone in, only for it all to collapse during the night" experience...

Anyway, that's me done for now - time to stop waffling :o)

Hope you're all having a great week.

LJx

P.S. Apologies for any spelling errors - I haven't read through this to check it's all OK, and spellcheck isn't working for some reason...