Something old, something new....

...in which a wedding has occurred.

Yesterday Saira got married to her Very Significant Other (who is presumably now upgraded to her Extremely Significant Other :)). 

Since this is a public site I won't share pictures because facebook privacy settings exist for a reason, but I will say that they're an absolutely lovely couple who thoroughly deserve the happiness they bring each other.  (I do think they're rushing into a bit though - 12 years is an awfully short time to be together before you get married ;)).

The wedding/wedding breakfast/reception went on all day (except for a brief interlude, where we went back to our hotel room) and we had an absolutely fantastic time. We love our kids, but sometimes we need to stop being "mum and dad" for an evening and just be Ann and Chris, who can stay up till 2 AM dancing and chatting with friends and drinking (although the drinking isn't necessary). I'm quite proud of the fact that we were 2 of the last 6 people to go to bed (the other 4 being the bride and groom themselves and another couple), although I've also been somewhat exhausted all day!

Saira and her VSO quite often come round to our house for barbecues (basically whenever all of us have a weekend free and the weather is good enough to cook outside). G and I will invariably get the guitars out and inflict sonic abuse on everybody within earshot, and it appears there's no law to stop us (or if there is nobody's found it yet). 

This is great fun (for us at least), and G is actually a very competent guitarist, so it was great to see him play the guitar on stage with some friends who are musicians (Little Red Bird and Vera van Heeringen, who is also G's guitar tutor). He's normally very shy about showing off like this so it was great to see him getting up on stage to play (he only did one song with them and did his best to hide at the back, but it's a start! :)).

I decided to not worry about Slimming World stuff for the day; I did make a mental note of what I was eating/drinking and tried not to go too far over my allotted syns for the week (I hadn't had any for the whole of the rest of the week, which isn't recommended but didn't really bother me). This seems to have worked - at weigh in tonight I had lost 1.5lbs, which means I'm now just 1 pound above my original target. Which is nice.

Food-wise I've been making the usual Slimming World stuff; paprika pork is the kids' current favourite, with chicken rogan josh coming a close second; we've had steak a couple of times too because it was half price in the supermarket.

That's kind of it for now....I may not be able to update much more than once a week for a while because of the summer holidays and looking for a new contract (getting quite urgent that I find one of those now, at least before September).