Mealtime madness

September 15, 2004

Having a nice quiet evening while Stuart is out at a work dinner. Bedtime with the boys was relatively painless, Oliver ate a good meal and Ben had none – he decided that spinach tortellini and veges weren’t on his agenda. Oliver was so tired as he did not have a day sleep today, when he is exhausted or upset he only wants yoghurt but amazingly tonight and last night he has eaten good meals and slept well at night. I am trying to get them to eat a better variety of foods, but they mostly are not interested.

They used to be such good eaters it all went to pot a few months ago and now they are flexing their muscles. It is amazing how determined these little fellows can be. I don’t want dinner to be a battleground as I want them to have a healthy outlook with their food. Just getting them to sit still and in the one spot is a huge battle.

They haven’t been weighed or measured for a while, so I don’t know how they are doing really. Oliver looks quite pale these days and has grey circles under his eyes, I wonder if he is anaemic or just tired from the late nights. They will be seeing the dutch “plunket” clinic on 20th Oct so will be having a good check over then.

We have finally sold the Range Rover in NZ and money is in the bank. We ended up only getting $13k for it but we couldn’t keep it. Sorry to see it go but driving a smaller car now can see that it was a huge beast to drive around.

We decided that we should buy a satellite navigation system for the car, mainly because I keep getting hopelessly lost every time I go out in the car. Getting better now, but I find if I don’t study the map and write down all the directions before hand it is a total shambles. One day I will end up in Germany or something. I haven’t gone to two mums and tots evenings because it will mean I have to negotiate my way to two places I haven’t visited at night. Too scary.

Anyway, buying the satnav system came with the familiar dutch dramas. We bought a system that was on sale at the local Media Mart. There was no mention of anything missing etc. We got home and started to load the maps up, problem number one the palm only had a memory of 42mb and the maps of Benelux was 202! So stuart bought another memory card on eBay and it is on its way in the post from UK. Next problem was registering the software. He did this at work only to discover it had been previously registered – the store must have used it as demo and registered their name and not mentioned this in the sale. Anyway, Stuart called the shop and was shortly told to call this number, he did and about five different numbers later has a new registration number and we are on our way. Will put it in this weekend and give it a go. Hopefully I won’t get lost now. And hopefully, we can visit other parts outside of Holland also.

Benjamin and Oliver are very trying and very gorgeous and amusing at the same time. They are such busy little fellows these days. Boredom is always lurking around, which is understandable in our living arrangements. They are great on their own tootling around and very settled but once they are together they are at each other, or stealing each other’s toys. Benjamin is particularly bad at this, each day poor Oliver has a new scratch on his face or bite mark on his arms or back. If there is trouble Benjamin is usually the ringleader, he knows he shouldn’t be doing it but it doesn’t seem to stop him.