Music I Grew Up With: Part Two

Continuing with the random music from the arists of my past, here is the next installment. Just some lovely things for your ears!

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Perpetuum Mobile

Sade, Your Love Is King

The Beautiful South, Let Love Speak Up Itself

K. D Lang, Constant Craving

Kirsty Macoll, New England

Christmas Sentiment

All too often Christmas can become all about the gifts.

Over the past couple of years Husband and I have had limited funds to treat each other to gifts and I've taken to going down a much more sentimental route..whether he agrees with me I'm not entirely sure! 

For an absoloutely beautiful short story perfect for couples facing the challenge of buying each other secret gifts with little money you MUST read 'The Gift Of The Magi' by O. Henry. It is truly beautiful. I could not find a copy of it last Christmas for my Husband so I wrote it out by hand-and I think he appreciated the sentiment behind it!

Music I Grew Up With: Part One

I love music. Who doesn't? And I'm not one of those music snobs either...I don't complain that the band has 'drifted from their roots' or a song is just 'SOOOO lyrically immature' and am a firm believer of if you like a song, and it means something to you then surely it was worth being made. Music is a subjective art, it isn't really fair to objectify it. It is also very personal.

So with that out of the way here is part one of music I grew up with: have a listen, see if you love it or hate it!

It's a little cliched when my family is from merseyside but The Beatles were on in my house a lot, and if they weren't on the casette player (yes, CASETTE) my dad would be wandering around whistling a tune.

Clearly with a back catalogue like theirs I could list songs forever but here are some tunes that stick out in my mind the most.

Girl

This Boy

'You've got to hide your love away'

Parenting and Pregnancy Books

I am a little bit of a 'by the book' individual. Whilst I like spontaneity in most things, I do relish doing something 'right' and the 'best way possible'...yes I was a little bit of a nerd at school.

Having a baby doesn't really fit into my bizzare view of 'excelling at tasks' so when i found out I was pregnant at 21 there were no prizes for guessing how I would react to the news...I bought out Amazon's collection of all the parenting and pregnancy books I could find (looking back i really don't know what I was thinking). As a tip for any mums-to-be out there, there really is only so much you can know and every book says pretty much exactly the same thing. Having giving birth for millions of years I think us females have got it down to a fine art and as long as we vaguely know what's going to happen that's probaby enough; there is a definately some truth in such a thing as knowing too much!

Christmas already?

A number of things must be in place for me before I feel the urge to want to string up mistletoe and start nurturing the mulled wine...Firstly, there needs to be very cold chill in the air, the kind that takes your breath away and replaces your voice with a display of white condensation, not the 'ooo it's a bit breezy today' kind. Secondly, I need to be thinking about my ticket to watch It's a Wonderful Life at the Liverpoool Philarmonic on Christmas Eve and being physically restrained, i.e. wrestled to the ground, in order to stop me putting on the DVD prior to the 24th thus ruining the experience for myself (The incessant singing of 'Buffalo Girls' around the house usually calms these urges). And Finally, there absoloutely must be a sense of panic in the air.

Christmas is not Christmas without panic.

I was raised by a father who would drag me out shopping at 2pm on Christmas Eve: Oh the panic! The suspense! Will we get everything? Will they have any left!? What last minute replacement wil we choose in a moment of crazy impulse aginst the clock?! To some extent this experience year on year has made me slightly more organised than in my childhood...however, I love the atmosphere in town when you run out on Christmas Eve to grab that all important gift that slipped your mind. It is always magical.

So who has already started their shopping and who has already finished?! I'm afraid I won't be joining in until Jack Frost is really nipping at my toes...

Something for the Weekend: Chocolate and Walnut Brownies.

Borne out of a long weekend at work and a craving for something sweet I made myself 9 Brownie squares (I did share them in the end...) and even over-indulged with a scoop of toffee and pecan ice cream!

They are equally good with some cherries thrown in or swap the walnuts for pistachio and white chocolate chunks...mmmm

First Dance: Mushaboom, Feist

We spent a LONG time choosing the song we would have our first dance as a married couple to. Months of veto-ing each others choices and endless arguing our corner on that particular weeks song choice...until, completely by chance, I started to relisten to some Feist songs I'd loved whilst at university. In doing so I stumbled across this gem and that was it. We didn't have to choose anymore. Wonderful song!

P.S Lana Del Rey's, Video Games: A recent song which may sound quite romantic on a first listen..read paragraph three of this article!

Love for libraries

I was always in the local library as a child, with my parents, my sister, or simply escaping by myself to wander the aisles and pick a new world to spend the week in.

When I moved from the place I spent my younger years I stopped going so much, with the exception of the hours spent studying in the University library of course, which did definately not hold the same allure!

Since having my little girl I have definately redisovered their magic in a BIG way. Not only is she ecstatic at the sheer volume of books she can have read to her when we visit but the prospect of actually choosing ones to take home for three weeks fills her with joy! And it teaches her to look after things and the concept of 'borrowing' even though she is only 2...

We LOVE our library, from the books we borrow, the storytime we attend and the baby bounce and rhyme we used to and in turn its helping a little girl I know fall in love with books. Which is exactly what I planned for her: she never stood a chance against her bookish mum and my secret weapon: the library.

P.S. I visited NYC public library when I was 16-they do not come more stunning than this place!

A 2 year olds joy...

Nothing makes this one as happy as dancing does...except for dancing with lots of  people.

Photo: Matthew Rycraft Photography