Saturday 24 January 2009

Breaking News..... She's UP!

Just a very quick post before I tuck into my hot and sour soup and singapore chow mein, but Lara has graduated to standing, as of last night! Life will be totally different (again) for all of us now. The second time she stood last night she started to climb over the little barrier we use to keep her penned in the dining room.
Here are a couple of videos from today to prove it.. I'll post more news tomorrow.



Thursday 22 January 2009

Liverpool-Smiverpool and other things this week

See how I cunningly made no reference to Monday's Liverpool v Everton game? I got the draw part right, it was inevitable as soon as Liverpool conceded a free-kick with three minutes to go. How frustrating! Well, they can do it all again in the FA Cup on Sunday afternoon (4pm, on Setanta - hmm, is the Wendover beckoning again? Perhaps I'll just listen on the radio instead).

I watched Barack Hussein Obama fluff his lines on Tuesday, but was impressed by his speech, it'll be interesting to see how things change in the coming months as he undoes those thing Dubya set up. I was also impressed how he went to 10 Balls in one night (at 2am Washington time he was at #9 apparently), had to dance and give a speech at each one, yet he was in the Oval office at 8.35 the next morning. The power of Red Bull, eh? During the inauguration I wasn't impressed with BBC's coverage which had the commentators desperately trying to talk all the time about anything at all rather than just chipping in with pertinent comments at the appropriate time; I nearly missed the swearing-in because I was channel hopping over to CNN to watch their coverage. I did come back to the BBC in the end because not even they chose to talk over Obama's speech.

I was watching this via our spanky new Sky+ box; we'd been having problems with the old one, with the picture and sound freezing on recorded programmes, and a bit of googling took me to a forum where someone had suggested a method of convincing Sky that it was better for them to swap an old, dodgy box for a new one rather than risk losing a perfectly good paying customer (here's the post). So now we have double the recording time and can use Sky Anytime - their on-demand service. We used that last night to watch a programme on the Iditarod Dog Sled Race in Alaska on National Geographic, and the added bonus was that Anytime cut out the adverts! While we watched these teams of dogs pull sleds for 1800km in below freezing temperatures, we wondered if Mishka would be any good at that... he was asleep on the sofa in a pose that only boy dogs seem to be able to pull off. Typical bloke..

Having a dog and a crawling baby means that one of the most important bits of technology in the house isn't the 2 laptops, the PC, the wireless multimedia streaming thingy, or even the Sky+ box, it's the hoover. We have a record of breaking them at an alarming rate, and we bought our third in less than a year last week. It was a great deal from Empire-Direct.co.uk, an online electronics retailer I'd used before, and Mum has used as well. It turns out it was such a good deal because they were trying to raise cash - they went into administration on Monday! Our hoover arrived last Tuesday, we were only just in time.
Olga reports it's very good, by the way...

On that note, it's time to go and pick Lara up from nursery - my favourite part of the day, as she genuinely is happy and excited to see me and comes steaming over to be picked up, usually pushing the other kids out of the way en-route. Then it'll be a clip round the ear from Olga once she's read this post later tonight...

Back to School and Knee-Walking

Lara has gone back to nursery today after having Monday and Tuesday off - yesterday was "mum's day". She's definitely making a transition from crawling on all-fours to knee-walking, so I don't think it will be too long before she pulls herself up and stands on her own two feet. Last night she was able to stand up while holding my hands, without me actually holding her, for a couple of minutes. She was even confident enough to hold on with one hand for a short time, and when her leg started to give way she was alert enough to correct herself and stand up straight again - it was amazing to see the concentration on her face for the few seconds while she worked it all out.
She still has a cold but it's not as bad as previous ones, who knows, perhaps her antibodies are learning their role too? Despite this her sleeping is back to being good again, last night she slept continuously from 8pm until 6am, so hopefully she'll keep this up once her cold has cleared up. Her appetite is down a little, but maybe it's actually normal now and we're comparing it to how she was in previous weeks when she would eat anything put in front of her. In one visit to the kitchen she decided to contemplate trying Mishka's food too, but Olga was able to intervene before her hand reached her mouth.

NOT Lara!!

Mishka can eat Lara's leftover food, but not the other way round. His food bowl goes onto the kitchen worktop now when Lara's in the kitchen, but that didn't stop her washing her hands in his waterbowl yesterday.
Whilst in the kitchen, she began her training for being a good wife in the future by learning how the washing machine door opens and closes, and by putting Dad's slippers in. Was it a hint?
My final observation of the week has been how determined she is - I'm sure in the long run this will be an admirable and useful character trait, but it might be a right pain in the bum during those years from 2-17. She loves to push her larger toys round the dining room floor, but this means negotiating the numerous table and chair legs, and in most cases when she gets stuck she'll let out a clear "I'm annoyed about this" yell - not a cry - then push and pull the toy until she gets it free. I've seen her succeed more times than fail.

Monday 19 January 2009

A quiet weekend

We didn't do much this weekend, we decided to have a lazyish time of it. On Saturday afternoon we had a go - finally - at making some plaster-of-paris imprints of Lara's hands and feet. Well, we decided to practise on Mishka first. It's the first time I've used plaster of paris since I was a little boy and my sister and I would make plaster figures from Magic Roundabout moulds - remember that, Cath?!
Anyway, our lack of experience showed, and we left the plaster too long before trying to make the imprint of Mishka's paw. He was delighted, but at least we know better for when we try with Lara, which at our rate of doing things, will be in the summer!
Lucy came over on Saturday evening and her and Olga went out for a girly gossip and to try out the new Wetherspoons pub in Wycombe, and in particular their 99p bottles of San Miguel.
Lara has started with a new cold now, and it manifested itself on Saturday night when it took me 45 minutes to get her back to sleep after she woke at 11pm. It's frustrating because she's clearly tired and wants to sleep, but the second she dropped off she'd cough and wake up. Eventually the Calpol and Tixylix combination kicked in and she slept through the rest of the night, much like her Dad depsite the tipsy Russians arriving home at 2am (so Olga told me, it could have been 5am, I was snoring my little head off in bed).
Sunday was even quieter, I only left the house to walk Mishka in the evening and that was it. We cooked a roast duck for lunch and fended off the winter weather with rhubarb crumble and custard for afters. Lara enjoyed some of the duck but not so much the veggies, but we'll let her off being picky while she's under the weather.
That said, she did sleep through the night last night, but a combination of her cold and a touch of Delhi Belly (Or Wycombe Intestine?) meant that we didn't risk taking her to nursery today, so I've stayed at home to look after her. I made an attempt to get some work done in our study so Lara came with me and promptly unpacked all the drawers and went through all the bags she could find...



It's Liverpool v Everton tonight on Sky, so I'm off down to the Wendover when my shift ends for a relaxing beer, no doubt to watch a Liverpool "special", a 0-0 draw.
Famous Last Words.