Winter, work and plans

It's Winter with a vengance. Our last two Winters have been so mild that any overnight frost has melted by the time the sun has risen.
  But this weekend when I took the dog outside in the morning, everything in the backyard was coated in a layer of ice. Puddles were frozen and there were weird little patches of ice here and there. At seven am this wasn't weird but the ice didn't melt until after ten! Which may have meant there was a lot of time when I was wandering around poking all of the frozen things like a five year old. I can't remember ever seeing a frost so heavy that took so long to melt but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. My memory is rubbish.
  It made me worry that we were in for an insanely cold Winter, some people were even talking about snow! But this morning we're back to no frost at all which was reassuring.

  I survived my nightmare run at work, without biting anybody. But (as you can probably tell by how cranky my Baby Secrets review was) I did get fairly grumpy. The boys weren't doing their share at home, the baby wasn't sleeping through the night, we all got sick and to top off all the fun, my nearly nineteen year old cat had a seizure. That's his second one now. The vet says this means he probably has a brain tumour but other than that he's ridiculously healthy. In the middle of all this Early Childhood Intervention started calling about the Giant Baby again, despite having been told he wasn't eligible for their assistance. Ultimately they rejected his application for testing again. One thing I've discovered from talking to them and making appointments for hearing tests and speech therapy and so forth, is that a remarkable number of people can't read the Giant Baby's name. I would totally understand if we'd given him a made up name but he has a completely traditional name with the traditional spelling and the number of people that look at his name and react like it's the most bizarre thing they've ever seen, blows my mind.

  The new season of Shopkins Happy Places is out. I don't know if I'm going to buy them or not. I still don't have one set from the last season. Every shop nearby is still overstocked with Bubbleisha, the bathroom girl from season one. And if it's going to be nightmarishly hard to get my hands on all of them again, I just can't be bothered. But that doesn't mean I won't change my mind and buy them anyway.

  I have trouble getting stuff done. Part of the issue is that I over-plan things. I put off starting things until I've planned them to death. By then, I'm starting to get bored with whatever the thing is and as soon as I start making whatever I've been planning, I start planning the next thing. Which firstly makes it hard to concentrate on what I'm actually doing and secondly ensures I'm going to be bored with the second thing before I even start it.
  So I've come up with a plan to hopefully combat this. I bought a little ceramic jar. I wrote prompt words on small scraps of paper and folded them and put them in the jar. Some of the words are date periods, some are words like "sparkle" or "play" where I could make anything this word makes me think of. For example if I pulled out the word "Movie", I could dress a doll as a movie character, in a replica of a dress from a movie, as an actress or actor, in an outfit to go to the movies in or simply in an outfit that has a print that is somehow reminiscent of movies etc.
  On the first of each month, I plan on pulling one of these slips of paper from the jar and using it as inspiration to design and make something for one of my dolls. This way I don't have time to overplan and I can't start planning ahead because I won't know what the next prompt will be. I can't guarantee this will make me more productive but I'm hoping it will.
  So I couldn't influence what word was chosen, I had the Giant Husband pick out my word for the month last night. (I also figured that doing it this way would make me ashamed to demand a redraw if I didn't like the word I picked.) He pulled out 1950s. So this month, I have to make something 1950s inspired. So far, I know which doll it will be for, but that's it.

  If anyone reading this can think of a word suggestion for my jar, please leave a comment. The more words I have, the better.