Wednesday 6 April 2011

Busy times

Wow, nearly two more weeks slide by, it's a reflection on how busy things are at home at moment. What's been happening? Well, in no particular order:

  • Olga's mum arrived on the 2nd April, and will be here until September. Last year she helped look after Lara for a few days a week, but now Olga and I are working at home, that just wouldn't work, Lara would not understand that we weren't there to play with her, so she'll carry on full time at her nursery.
  • We booked a holiday! It feels like we've not been away for ages, almost as if we've not had a holiday since Lara arrived on the scene, but then I think of 3 weeks around Ekaterinburg, a few days in St Petersburg, a few days in Barcelona, Ireland, a week in Holland, Wales, Devon (twice), the Lake District, and that's when it's been the three of us! On top of that Lara's had fortnights in Cyprus and Russia with Olga! Olga has been hoping for a beach holiday for ages though, so we've gone the whole hog and booked a week-long Med cruise, followed immediately by a week in a hotel in Majorca. It turns out I've booked the same hotel that my mum and dad took me to when I was 10 months old. Not that I remember it!  The cruise will take in stops in Corsica, Italy, France and Menorca. That's the last two weeks of May sorted out.
  • Lara still loves her gymnastics, and last week got her first badge - it was only a token effort really, to give the kids something to show us proud parents, but she has definitely improved in the simple things she has to do there, so it's certainly not a waste of time, and she really looks forward to it. Here's her badge..:
  • The whole working-from-home thing is going really well, we're both very busy, and it's all super interesting stuff. Olga's proposed trip to Kazakhstan has been postponed for a second time, which is fine as she can spend more time with Lara and her mum (and me!). I have already booked a train ride up to Radcliffe over Easter for Lara and I, so we'll go ahead with that, Olga and Luda can have some quality Russian time together. I have been benefitting this week from Luda preparing lunch and tea for us, I could get used to this!
  • Exercise! I bought a bike off eBay a few weeks ago, and I have actually used it more than once to get to the gym and back in the mornings. It's been a good few years since I rode on the roads, but at 7am it's pretty quiet, I'm not sure how keen I'll be at 8.30. We'll find out when we get the child seat for Lara, then I'll be taking her to and picking her up from nursery on it...
  • Lara - everything's fine with her, she had a cold recently but nothing out of the ordinary. Since we took the sides off her cot a few months ago she's been really good at sleeping in her bed and not wandering around, although once or twice we've heard her creep downstairs and appear in the lounge (she can easily defeat the stairgate, it's only there now to keep the dogs downstairs). I was worried that she's do that every night and we'd struggle to get her to sleep, but it's not the case. She's waking up earlier than before, more consistently around 6.30, sometimes she'll sleep till 7am. It suits our timetable though, and getting up in these lighter mornings isn't as difficult as if it were midwinter. It is funny on the occasions when she has a proper lie in and we have to wake her up, her first line is "I want a bit more sleeeeeeep" and she pulls the duvet over her head. She's three going on 14. She went through a phase of insisting we leave her light on, and I was worried this would become a permanent habit, but it lasted a week or so and now sometimes she insists on a little bit of light, other times she'll turn it off herself when she's finished reading (OK, looking at the pictures), and sometimes she'll insist on us turning off the light completely.
Well, that's that I think. Time to move away from this laptop and doing something totally different - sit in front of the Chelsea v ManUre game on tv!