Some shocking revelations.

So, you know in my previous post title i was musing if sleep was actually necessary to life? Turns out.  Yes it is.  In fact, it's amaaaaaazing!

Rudy slept through the night on Friday.  I was totally and thoroughly unprepared for this possibility.  He went to sleep around 7.30 ish and i followed around 10.30 ish, and the next thing it was ten to five in the morning and he was waking for a feed.  I fed him and he went back to sleep until 6am.  Awesome!  He hasn't done it since.  Thankfully i wasn't under any illusion that this was to become a regular thing, so i'm not too disappointed, at this stage it's just fantastic as a one-off event, and so well timed as well after my epic Awake For Nearly Forty Hours Straight Episode.

Another shocker, i'm sure you'll agree, is that there is such a thing as Too Much Chocolate.

"Surely not?!" I hear you gasp.  Well, hear me out on this one.

Today we made Chocolate Bran Flake Cakes.  The "healthy" alternative to chocolate cornflake cakes.  Made using cocoa powder, honey, butter and, you guessed it, bran flakes.  Having worked last night, and having got only 2 hours sleep when i got home this morning, i was not particularly in the mood for baking.  Admittedly, these cakes don't actually require baking, just sticking in the fridge to set, but you know what i mean.  Mixing ingredients up and making a mess of the kitchen.  Baking.  However, you may remember that Chris has two assignments due in less than two weeks, and so while Rudy was napping this afternoon he was trying to read a textbook on reflection whilst Toby was bouncing around making a lot of noise and becoming increasingly frustrated that Daddy wasn't playing with him.  I decided that baking was the answer and bundled him through to the kitchen.

Unfortunately it didn't go so great.

I followed the recipe to the letter, but at the end found myself staring at what was essentially a pile of very dry looking bran flakes.  Well, bran flakes. Which by their very nature are very dry. With just a smear of chocolate across the top of them.  This can't be right, i thought to myself, we need more chocolate.  This is around the point Toby lost interest in 'helping' and decided he just wanted to 'watch' whilst playing with his toy robot*

Mere moments later Rudy lost interest in napping, and, well it all just fell apart a little bit.  I cobbled the cakes together myself, gave Rudy a wooden spoon to lick and gave Toby some alphabet fridge magnets to play with.  Chris gave up on his book and started preparing dinner.

Here are our cakes:

They are too chocolatey.  I mean, really.  You wouldn't think too much chocolate could be a bad thing would you? But it can.  These cakes are the proof.  The experience is how i imagine it would be to eat solid cocoa.

Rudy disagrees:

But Toby is nothing if not brutally honest.  And was more interested in an episode of Abney and Teal he's watched at least twenty times (if not more) previously, than in sampling the cuisine!

So it's been a lazy ish day at home today, i am hoping we can get outdoors and do something a bit more active tomorrow.  Chris is in work all day though so it will require some bravery on my part.  We spent the afternoon at the park yesterday though, all 4 of us plus the dog.

It reminded me how good it is just to get out, even if it's not to go anywhere or do anything particularly mind-blowing, just the fresh air, and change of scenery does us all good.  So i'm planning to rinse and repeat tomorrow, weather permitting of course.  We don't mind a bit of drizzle, but on the whole Toby isn't a big fan of rain.  Ten minutes of splashing in puddles and he's tired and complaining of wet feet and wanting to go home. So let's hope for a dry day for all our sakes.

Footnote

*which is not, in fact a toy robot at all.  It's a Helghan figurine, these are, i am told, alien creatures from an 18-rated PS3 game called Killzone 3.  Chris got it as part of a collector's edition.  Yes he's a geek.  Quite how it then became one of Toby's most favourite toys i'm not sure.  It happened at some point during the house move, clearly when our parenting skills had lapsed somewhat. Toby could have picked up a crack pipe off the street and adopted it as his "Favourite and Best" and we probably wouldn't have flinched, such were our stress and preoccupation levels!