Real food....

One of the things I hate about commuting around London from studio to studio,

is that despite my best efforts i normally end up picking food up 'on-the-go'.

London is the King of 'on-the-go' food.

Everything is packaged and processed to be eaten on the tube,

and dont get me wrong some of it is not just crappy junk food,

but probably fairly enough nice and healthy stuff....

but it all adds up and i end up spending a fortune everytime i just walk past a shop.

I liked this little video i saw on a Cup of Joe.

I try to prepare food at home, 

but so often i just run out of time, or am too tired

and why should i bother when its all there in front of me.

But i agree,

the best food is food that you know what is in it.

The other day i was going to buy a spinach and ricotta pasta sauce,

and i thought to myself  wait a sec,

i could make that easy.

so i bought the ingredients and it took a few minutes,

and i made it.

and it was delicious,

and the level of satisfaction and appreciation for my food was 

far more.

and i had leftovers that i froze for another meal....

Also this month i stopped drinking Fizzy Drinks.

i think its the first time in my life i've gone more than a week with out some form of soda.

(or even a few days, my parents had us drinking it young!)

and sure there have been a couple of days when

i've really really fancied one,

but more often than not i've had a really nice time

buying fresh fruit juices instead....

but dont get me wrong,

i'm counting down the days till

my next can of Irn Bru!

Life gets in the way.....

Whooopssss.

been in blogging limbo.

Its not that nothing has been happening,

in fact a lot has been happening.

Long story short but whilst i was away having a lovely 

holiday with husband a few work emails

came in that gave me a distinctly bad feeling that

things weren't going good.

(it spoiled my Christmas a little)

and in fact after arriving back in the country and

calling my boss everyday (to no avail),

it eventually turned out

that they had decided to give my job back to the

girl who i had taken over from

and effectively unemploy me.

GREAT!

they gave me a bunch of reasons that 

they had decided to do this....

but this was the first time i had heard of any problems,

as i explained to them,

if you were unhappy with my work 

surely telling me so i could do a better job.

To make matters worse i found out this information

from my assisstant, 

(who forwarded me the updated schedule

which she had been given a month previously...

reason that i hadnt been given it was because my name wasnt on it.)

and eventually got the boss to contact me...

via text message.

Well, it knocked back my confidence a lot...

i wondered what i had done wrong.

How could i go from thinking i was doing a fairly good job 

(does anyone actually think they're doing a good job when they teach?)

to being unemployable....was i really that bad?

I negotiated some work till the end of the month 

to give me time to find new work.

But i'd lost my footing and was second-questioning my every class.

Then i went in and assissted a new girl that they had brought in 

to take over one of my classes.

and from the second the class started i realised she 

was a terrible teacher, and i'm

fairly sure had blagged her way into the job.

And i thought to myself,

i've got stuck in the middle of some, 'office politics'

and somehow pulled the short straw.

And starting next week i've got myself a new job.

That i'm really excited about,

at a high calibre school here in London and i'm excited

about working with the school as the Director is quite

inspirational to me...

and i think its going to be a better fit to my style of teaching.

So here's to fresh starts.....

Being Married

The other day someone made the comment to me 

that they didnt feel like they were married even though they

had been married a year.

And i defended it saying that being married to me has made such a huge

difference in our relationship.

Somehow i feel like a different person.

I feel like Mrs Reid.

not Miss anything.

It didnt happen over night,

i didnt wake up the morning after wedding and feel 

everything had changed.

I guess its a bit like birthdays,

you change age over night,

but gradually over the year you realise that you have developed

and changed and no longer are the person you were a year ago.

Everything just feels more solid now.

Before if he annoyed me

i always had the option to say,

actually you bug me, 'goodbye'

but now i have to think to myself,

this is forever,

is this something that i'm going to give on

or is this something that is too important and i need to take on.

give and take,

it started out a bit like that,

but at the moment it feels like

we're on the same path,

sometimes i feel i know him better than he knows himself,

sometimes i realise he knows me better than i know myself,

little things still surprise me,

things i didn't know about him

(he says i didnt ask....

i say why would i out and out ask you 

if you worked in a cowboy rodeo before?)

some people think that marriage is just a piece of paper,

something legal incase at one point you need to divide up your assets.

its so much more.

i cry a lot more at movies,

especially war films,

i think to myself,

imagine if that were husband...

in Saving Private Ryan one of the guys in the background

got blown up and i noticed he was wearing a wedding ring....

oh dear....

i didnt stop.

i love it when we are around other people

and i get to show him off.

'this is my husband'

and if i can see that they dont quite

see how fabulous he is

i pity them 

and secretly smile at what i know i have

and they are missing out on.

hmmmm....

where did this mushy post come from.

Dont worry,

i've got loads of actual interesting stuff to write about at some point.

like my trip to the Caribbean,

trekking through bat poo,

fooling some poor real estate agent into 

taking us around as we were considering buying our own private desert island....

Unproductively Productive....

So i rather productivley made myself a work website this evening.

Suprisingly it didnt take that long, only a couple of hours

and for so little effort i'm pretty impressed with myself...

check it out

http://mrsrkreid.wix.com/rebekahreidballet

My man....

This is my husband...

flying

my very own superhero

and i miss him,

and leaving him behind after 15 days together 

not knowing when we'll meet again

makes me sad.

Coming back to London,

a place that never feels like home to me

makes it even harder.

Being messed around by your work

so that you've got from being

part time employed

to virtually unemployed

makes it sucky.

But he reminds me 

that our future is bright,

he reminds me that the time apart is important

for our future time together.

and he reminds me that this

was my own decision

and i can change it at any time.

sometimes i wonder.....

Christmas in the sun!

I fly off to see husband tomorrow.

its going to be my 4th Christmas in a row in the sunny climate.

i've had enough of the cold weather....

Christmas is going to be on the boat this year....

hmmmm,

i barely survived it when i had my birthday on the boat,

husband has promised me this will be much better.

Plus im gonna be in Panama....

yeah baby!!!!!

i is living the high life!

now if only i can survive the 

37hours of travelling,

even more worried as i have a bad back at the moment that has my

hobbling round complaining to everyone who will listen to my tale....

and i get to see HUUUSSSBBBAANNNDDDD,

its gone so fast but felt so long,

parents week...eeeek!

So this week is parents week....

eeeeekkkk!!!!!

i've been dreading it, 

in fact i avoid the parents so much that my boss

told me the other day i had to make a real effort to actually speak to them.

I'll confess, i havent done a really great job,

i need to get better at the schmoozing, 

lets face the parents dont really care how good i teach

their babies...all they care is that i'm

nice to them...

(and i'm not always nice to them!)

it has been interesting in some respects....

i've learned a little bit more about some of my students

through these (brief) interactions with the parents.

In one class on Monday i have one little 5 year old girl

who i just haven't been able to connect with

(she has informed me she isnt coming back next term)

and i really hoped that during watching week she might

actually pull her socks up and try doing some ballet

(she really seems to hate it!)

but she didnt, she fluffed her way through and made silly faces,

and i wondered what her mum was thinking about her little girls

attitude during the class,

and then at the end of the class when all the other children 

had gone home she sat crying in the corner,

her mother hadnt come.

'she pinky promised me'

she cried,

'she promised she would come, and she just didnt bother'

and it nearly broke my heart,

and i tried to tell her that i'm sure her mother

was so upset that she couldnt make it,

and that sometimes its hard for mummys to keep their promises,

but this was a little girl who looked like she had too many broken promises.

I'm not sure she will come back next term,

but if she did i would have more patience with her and

give her the love that she deserved.

I had another older teenage student in one of my classes

who is in a class well beyond her level,

i keep trying to explain to her its too difficult

and maybe she should think about going in another class.

but she wants to come to this class and she plods along,

i think completely unaware of how far behind she is.

and at the end her mother came up to me 

and thanked me for having her daughter in her class.

she said she could see it was difficult for me to have her

daughter my class, and that she is behind in so many

of her classes and that she was just so pleased that her daughter 

kept wanting to come and how good it must be for her.

And i realised there is much more to the story behind this little girl too,

and that i have to stop trying to point out to her how behind she is,

i'm sure that she gets that a lot in life and instead 

just let her enjoy dancing the way she wants to.

I guess by getting to know the parents a bit better

i'll get to know the children a bit better,

and seem them not just as kids that wriggle and cant keep still

but as children who need a loving natured ballet teacher as much as 

they need ballet technique.

 I read a book this week which said something along the lines of

how at a young age children rarely actually care about what they are being taught but

care what the teacher thinks of them and if they like the teacher....

i think its so true...

and i need to remember it.