Posts made in September, 2009
It’s a blanket… WITH SLEEVES!!
**WARNING** This post contains images of extreme sleep deprivation and bad bed head. You have been warned (it was a looong night last night!)
Right. Here’s the deal.
You’re going to read my review. The Sleep Deprivation Carnival should be up by Monday afternoon and on Tuesday I will announce the winner of the Slanket competition, all disappointed parties can go and buy one here, and then that’s it.
We’re moving on.
It’s time.
But first, you want to know don’t you? You want to know whether the fleece is really as soft as the mythical Angel Unicorn Sheep of deepest Tibet, whether those sleeves really do envelop your arms in the warmth of a thousand kittens gentle breath. Whether wearing one really does feel like returning to the womb in a transformative and healing regressive experience? Whether it’s REALLY everything we’ve been imagining?
Right??
Well the answer is…emm… no. Come on people – it’s a giant blanket with sleeves. Let’s not get silly.
But it is pretty good I have to admit. In fact it, it’s better than pretty good. Being completely serious I actually think it’s rather brilliant.
Imagine if you will a dressing gown four sizes too big and ten times too long which you put on backwards. It has extra length above the neck to create an extra snuggly cowl effect giving the impression that you are in fact some kind of arctic monk.
Now let me get this absolutely, irrefutably clear. Whilst wearing your Slanket you are going to look very, very stupid. No not even ironically cool, not even kitsch cool. Just stupid. But you will be so warm and cosy that you will simply not care.
It is THE perfect slobbing on the sofa attire, but unlike a vastly inferior regular blanket, leaves your hands free for reading, laptop tapping and wine sipping. It is soft, it is cuddly, it is machine washable for the inevitable jam spillage and chocolate smear (I imagine I’ll be testing this feature pretty soon – I fear there was some definite crumbage last night during a marathon biscuit eating sesh).
We also discovered that it makes the most brilliant Halloween costume (as pictured) – I was channelling ‘Death Eater’ in this one. And I must have been channelling more than I had attended as we noticed a mysteriously ghostly orb on this photo after we’d taken it. Quick! Call Derek Acorah!!
I do however, have the following reservations:
1. It causes unbelievably amounts of static electricity and crackles like a mo-fo when you take it off. Ok not a HUGE problem but it does leave you feeling a bit like a giant lightening conductor and for safety’s sake I would recommend you clear the vicinity of pets and small children before removing your Slanket in case they get set on fire or something. However the bonus static mad-hair points are worth considering.
2. You cannot walk in a Slanket. Don’t try it. Seriously. I have a bruise to prove this.
3. You have to put up with looks from your significant other that very clearly demonstrate that your sexy points have just dropped several leagues. In fact that look hints that they may never touch you again. This worries me.
But I love it. OF COURSE I love it. It’s not supposed to be cool. One look at the Slanket website will tell you that they don’t take themselves or their product too seriously (check out the ‘latest news’!) And that makeS me love it all the more.
Because I love my new best friends at Slanket I would like to offer up the following ideas for future Slanket spin-offs:
1. The Sweetheart Slanket – double width with FOUR arm holes for Slanket snuggling with your loved one (hopefully rekindling some of the romance lost caused by your partner seeing you Slanketing solo).
2. The Breastfeeding Slanket – with handy velcro flaps for nursing.
3. The Party Slanket – take idea one and just add widths and extra sleeves – enough for you and all your mates. Perhaps with the option of joining both ends for a kind of ’round-the-camp-fire’ option.
Right that’s it. See you tomorrow for the Sleep Deprivation Carnival and keep your ear to the ground on Tuesday for the competition winner. I’m off to do an awful lot of typing and try to erase the word Slanket from my mind.
In any case – I’ve already been tipped off about Sleep is for the Weak’s next big obsession. I’m thinking of a whole snooze-wear feature. PRs? Anyone??
I have confidence in… erm… something?
Picture if you will.
I am sat here in my jeans and over-sized sweater and my messy boy hair, wearing novelty socks and eating too many chocolate digestives. I haven’t brushed my teeth yet. Unlike most mornings, today I did manage a whole fifteen minutes under a hot shower while Kai emptied the bathroom rubbish bin of tissues (don’t judge me – I’m strengthening his immune system), but absorbed in my hot-shower bliss I may have absent mindedly shampooed three times and conditioned twice so the messy boy hair is slightly lank. The over-sized sweater despite being clean on this morning already has some banana on one sleeve and what I think may be snot on the other. In the last 24 hours I have burst into tears a record number of five times and kicked two inanimate objects. I have had four hours sleep.
There are many things this scene screams. Confident, secure, fully-functioning grown-up is not one of them.
I have been struggling especially with the C word lately. No, not THAT C word. Confidence.
You see I seem to have mislaid mine. It’s not down the back of the sofa with the half-eaten rice cake. It’s not in the overflowing washing basket (hell it wouldn’t fit in there). It is not hidden behind the pile of clever books I can’t bring myself to read.
In fact, I don’t know where the frick it is. I haven’t seen it in quite a while.
More and more I envy those people who seem to ooze it from every perfect blemish-free pore. Those people that manage to combine motherhood with work and successful careers, with exciting projects coming out of their every orifice . Managing to fit deadlines around school runs, gym sessions and skin care regimes.
It’s like they are privy to a secret I have no idea about, passed about in hushed whispers while I was in the loo.
Around you – yes you accomplished people, I am left feeling so ineffective. So immature.
Why do I feel like this? Where on earth was I when the confidence ticket was handed out? (in the loo again probably – really should have worked harder on my pelvic floor).
I am 27. But I look kind of young for my age. I have a tendency to get written off by people, spoken to by strangers with that unique mix of patronising sympathy and instant dismissal. Old ladies can never believe it when I mention a husband, “but my, you’re too young to be married surely?!” and act surprised when I manage to come out with a vaguely intelligent or articulate comment. I always get asked for ID – once when I was buying PETROL which was more than insulting (surely I look older than 17? Don’t I??!!) My brother is two and half years younger then me and I look like his scruffy kid sister.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure when I’m 40 I will be grateful of this fact but right now it’s not really helping in the confidence department.
Social situations? Oh god where do I start. The stuttering? The complete brain freezes that make me incapable of speech? The completely irrational habit of coming away from all social encounters feeling dreadfully insecure and convinced I am the most scorned and despised person on the face of this planet?? I’ll stop there.
And then there’s work. Or ‘work’ as it should probably be referred to. Finding your way as a fledgling writer is not easy I can tell you. One of my opening exercises with my writing course was to free-write about your doubts about becoming a successful writer. I wrote six pages without even blinking. The thought of me ‘making it’ seems laughable. Successful writing seems to require a breeziness and articulate confidence that I can only imagine.
(Oh god. This is turning into a whiney post isn’t it. I apologise – there is a point I promise.)
It’s just I’ve been wondering what it is I’m missing? The right hair cut? The right clothes? The right pen? An ability to speak in whole sentences?
It’s easy to feel like those things would make all the difference but somehow I doubt it.
It’s also easy to feel like I’m the only one in the world left feeling so small, so insignificant.
But I’m not. I know I’m not.
I casually mention on Twitter about feeling like this and all of sudden I’m met with dozens of responses. All from women who say they feel the same. Many of them successful, accomplished women whom I admire.
And I’m left wondering… maybe the idea of a mysterious, innate secret to confidence is a misnomer? Perhaps, actually, none of us are the secure, confident people we imagine each other to be.
Maybe it’s not about FINDING confidence at all but actually just about FAKING it? And some people are just much better fakers than others?
So do you know what? That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give up trying to find it and settle for faking it instead.
And we’ll see what happens.
Now where’s that guitar case? I need to go swing it round on a mountain top.
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Taking a bit of a breather from the Sleep Carnival today – but do keep your submissions coming in, especially if you want to get your hands on the prize of all prizes which still seems to be causing a ridiculous amount of hysteria (not that I can blame you).
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Hold The Phone! It’s Slanket Time!
My goodness, what an odd evening. I’ll come to that in a minute but first… news!
The Sleep Deprivation Carnival!! Wow – what a response! I’ve had dozens and dozens of submissions via the comments and email, thank you all so much! And from all round the world too. I’m going to have to start calling this the (probably) World’s First INTERNATIONAL Sleep Deprivation Carnival. The UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, all across Europe – a veritable feast of multicultural bleariness.
There’s been an amazing variety of stories and experiences coming in which was just what I was looking for. Hopefully, once it’s up and running, the posts from the Carnival will provide a permanent refuge and resource for all the world’s sleep deprived looking for a bit of advice and solidarity.
Pretty awesome I think you’ll agree. But that’s not the best part.
No the best part is what happened to me earlier this evening.
It’s a normal evening. I’m amusing myself being my usual random and slightly annoying self on Twitter. And I happen to mention the rather amazing discovery that I had just made via a lovely friend on Facebook. The discovery of THIS:
I know.
Isn’t it the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen??!
I thought so too. It is a Slanket. A blanket. With sleeves.
Anyway. Innocently tweeting about the fabulous Slanket, I soon found myself at the root of a veritable Twitter frenzy as news of the Slanket spread like wild fire through a Slanket factory.
EVERYONE wanted one. Well, almost everyone.
By the time I had put Kai to bed and got around to emailing the MD, he’d be inundated with requests from bloggers to review a Slanket on their site. I thought I had missed the boat (and was rather peeved about it too since I had started what shall be known as the Great Slanket Twitter Madness 2009).
But do not fear dear readers, do not fear.
For I, queen of Slankets, have obtained one for you. Offered up as probably the world’s greatest give-a-way in the history of give-a-ways. Turns out the MD Gary is an absolute peach and was all too happy to oblige.
There is no difficult question, there is no need to tweet it or stand on your head to prove your worth. Just submit something to the Sleep Carnival and you will be in with a chance of winning (all names in a hat and picked at random). If you’ve already submitted something you will be automatically entered. If not then hop to it!
Here’s the bonus though. Submit a post and you’ll receive one entry. Submit a sleep deprived photo of yourself? And you get an extra THREE entries into the competition. You can even just submit a photo if you like – I’ll still give you three chances to win.
Yes. I want to see the bags under your eyes and your bed head THAT much.
So what are you waiting for??! You’ve got till Sunday…
P.S. If, for some reason, you haven’t fallen madly in love with the Slanket (mental illness perhaps) then you are very welcome to opt out of this competition and just submit a post or photo with no Slanket-strings attached. Just let me know and you’ll be excused.
P.P.S Images courtesy of Slanket.com - you should go check it out! It’s brilliant!!
P.P.P. S Is it just me or is the word ‘Slanket’ starting to sound really weird?
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Read MoreThe Sleep Deprivation Carnival 2009!
Hello all!
I’ve got something a bit special planned for you this week – Sleep is for the Weak’s very first Sleep Deprivation Carnival 2009!
Now doesn’t that sound fun? And not at all weird and depressing?!
As most of you know, sleep is an especially big problem in our house. Kai has never slept well, rarely managing more than a couple of hours unbroken sleep at a stretch until recently, and having immense difficulty both falling and staying asleep, with a horrendously out-of-wack body clock that still often thinks that 4.30am is a very good time to wake up and start jumping up and down and screeching like a frickin banshee.
It’s been an especially tough couple of weeks for one reason or another (as you’ve probably noticed from all my “I’m tired!” tweets! – sorry about that, very dull I know) and I thought what better way to put the ‘fun’ back in ‘barely functional’ than to host my very own carnival.
I know I’m not the only one for whom sleep is a difficult issue. Like it or not, sleep deprivation is a real experience for most parents with a new baby and effects everyone to a greater and lesser degree. If you’re lucky, it will only be an issue for perhaps the first few weeks, but for more many of us, severely disrupted or lost sleep can be a major problem for many months (or even…dare I say it…YEARS! *gulp*).
In the middle of those long nights and exhausted, bleary-eyed days, sometimes a sense of humour and the solidarity and support of my fellow parenting peeps (and chocolate and twitter of course) are the only things that gets me through. So I thought it would therapeutic and a bit of fun to invite you all to share your sleep deprivation stories.
You could write about:
- The worst night’s sleep you every had
- Something stupid you did while seriously sleep deprived
- The sleep problems you may be experiencing with your child at the moment (you never know, people may have some tips for you)
- How lack of sleep has effected your day-to-day life
- Your best sleep deprivation survival tips or no-sleep remedies
Or even better
- How you survived sleep deprivation and came out the other side and now have babes that sleep like angels -giving us poor parents still in the thick of things the hope that THIS WILL PASS!!
Write your post (or use an old one) and either post a link in the comments section below or email me using the contact button on your right. Next week I’ll post a review of all your submitted stories for us all to share in.
Feel free to use the badge at the top of this post and link back to me if you like, or just to make it extra easy for you here’s a HTML code that will insert the image directly into your blog with no uploading required (cause I’m nice and super clever like that):
Joining me from Twitter or Facebook and haven’t got a blog? You can still take part! Just write and submit your entry via email and I’ll be sure to include them in the round up next week.
As an extra bit of fun I am also inviting you all to submit photos of yourselves looking seriously sleep deprived.
Here’s one of my very brave friend Mark to start us off who is busy looking after his very elderly grandpa (which I think counts as parenting in any one’s book)…
Again, email me your pics and I’ll display them in a rogue’s gallery next week. My lovely husband Ant and fellow sleep-deprivation partner will pick his favourite who will then be awarded a random sleep-themed not at all crap fabulous prize. And just to prove to you that Ant has suffered with the best of them, here’s one of him to add to the mix…
Enjoy and good luck! The deadline for submissions is midnight next Sunday 27th September so don’t miss out!
P.S. If you fancy giving this venture a plug via the share buttons below that would be just FAB and I will love you forever.
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