Wednesday 20 April 2011

27.5 deg C today, and Lara's impression of Princess Kate

It's been lovely all week (so far!) and amazingly enough the forecast looks good for the Bank Holiday weekend. Lara and I are going up to Radcliffe on Friday on the train, Olga's trip to Kazakhstan is back on, and she flies out on Sunday afternoon for two weeks.
Luda is enjoying the sunshine this week, working in the garden (voluntarily, I might add!) - today's she's painting the top decking with wood treatment. I checked the temperature from my weather station at around 2.30pm and it was 27.5 deg C (82 deg F), and not much lower than that in our southwest-facing office, with the windows and doors open. Oh how you office workers take your air-conditioning for granted!
We had a big shopping trip for holiday clothes for everyone on Saturday, it's been years since I bought new clothes for holiday, and I can see Lara taking more clothes than me.
She made us laugh yesterday at teatime.. she asked me to get her some more water, but the way she asked was more dismissive than I liked, a bit like a princess talking to a butler, so I made some crack like "Ask me nicely, you're not Princess Kate", her reply was "Middleton"! I know they're making a big deal of the Royal Wedding at her nursery, culminating in an Afternoon Tea that parents are invited to next Thursday, but clearly she's taking it all in. We followed up with "Who will she marry"?, but there's no catching Lara out, "Prince William".
It would be nice to go and see London at the moment whilst all the bunting is up, but we've no time. Luda, Lara and I will watch on TV unless I can find some event in Wycombe showing it on a big screen.
The boys are enjoying this nice weather, they're spending most of the day lazing in the back garden, until the postman or local councillors arrive at the front door, when the barking starts and they have to be brought indoors. In the meantime, this is how they spend their days:

We're planning on camping a couple of times this Summer, and decided it would be wise to put the tent up in the back garden to make sure mice hadn't nibbled holes in it (it has happened to the old tent), and it gave Lara a great place to play when she got home from nursery. I bought a couple of new sleeping bags for us, Lara has nearly grown out of her cute toddler sized one, so she'll have one of the new ones, as Olga already has a good one. I worked out that mine is 16 years old, and whilst it was top of the range in 1994, it was about time I had a new one. I couldn't resist trying it out, so slept in the tent on Sunday night, with Jackson for company. The sleeping bag was fine, but the slope on our garden meant everytime I rolled over, I also rolled down the hill, and I woke up on the other side of the tent in the morning.

Tonight we're utilising our babysitter again, and going to the cinema to watch Limitless. We've not been to the cinema together since Lara was born, so it's simple pleasures like that that we hadn't realised we'd missed. Luda is being a great help with the babysitting, Olga and I went out for a Thai meal last Friday, where I had a Weeping Tiger (it's beef dish!) and it was great.