Tuesday 31 January 2012

"Back" to normal, nearly, and Olga's bump

After 10 days on codeine painkillers and anti-inflammatories, my back has recovered sufficiently to allow me to put my socks on in less than 5 minutes. I had last week off work (as much as you can when you work from home, between my laptop and phone I was never far from my emails) as I simply couldn't sit at my desk for more than 5 minutes without the pain becoming unbearable.
The GP has referred me to a local Sports Physician - Dr Philip Bell - who happened to be the England Cricket Team Doctor between 1996 and 2001, so it's just down to my medical insurance company to decide that because my back hurt 5 years ago they might not cover me for this next treatment. Bit like saying they won't cover me for a brain tumour because I had a headache once. We'll wait and see what their decision is.
I was sensible and chose to not take part in last week's LGCC Cricket Nets, but I'll give it a try tomorrow, although I'll try to take it a bit easy and not bowl at 100 mph like I normally do ;-)

Olga is as well as she could be. I'd describe her bump as more like a mound now, but she's coping fantastically with it, and whenever I stop for a minute and take a proper look at her, or she puts my hand on it to feel him kick & punch, I get a wave of excitement and can't wait for him to arrive. Olga's 32 weeks exactly today, 8 more weeks to go - on paper at least - so we'll be on full alert from 36 weeks. Bags are already packed...




In other news, we've reduced the asking price on the house to something more sensible, and we had 3 viewings on Saturday, with another one due next Saturday afternoon, so it would be typical if we sold the house and agreed to move just as Olga goes into labour.
Finally, we submitted our choices for Lara's school before the deadline in the middle of January. We'd only visited two of the three schools, but the one we didn't see is our third choice anyway. To be honest we'll be happy if she gets into any one of them, but we voted separately on the order we'd choose, and both of us agreed on the 1-2-3, which was reassuring.

Shares in Persil & a new gadget

The night time toilet training is going as we might have expected, at least it's no worse than we expected. So far we've had one night without having to change Lara's sheets at all, but other nights we've had to change it 3 times. We're using the "lifting" method mostly, where we plop Lara on the potty every couple of hours during the evening, often she barely wakes up at all. Then during the night we're relying on Olga's bladder for a wake-up call, and when Olga's answers the call of nature, she pops in to see how Lara is, and persuades her to go on the potty. It does mean that the washing machine is getting some heavy use at the moment, and hence why it would be good to buy shares in Persil.
This week we've deployed the "Chart and Stickers" attack too, and Lara is loving that, and she's understanding that she gets a sticker on her chart when she gets herself to the potty in time.

This new routine does mean that Lara is waking earlier than normal, we can tell when she's unlikely to go back to sleep, and this is any time after 5.45am. It's proving easy to occupy her for an hour now by pulling her table out so she can do some drawing, or she looks at her Mr Men books (I'll not say she reads them!), or more likely she'll watch a DVD of Russian cartoons over and over, she's not bored of them yet, and there's very little talking, although she is learning the little that the Wolf and Rabbit are saying (Volk and Zayets, Nu Pogodi! (Волк & Заяц Ну, погоди! for our Russian readers!)). That DVD/TV combi we bought at Christmas for her room is paying dividends, we couldn't care less about the "No TV in the kid's room" school of thought, we control what she watches at the moment, she's happy, we're happy, and she's hearing more Russian conversation than she would otherwise.

The other gadget we've invested in is an Asus Eee-pad Transformer Prime, an Android tablet that comes with a detachable keyboard, so you can use it just like a normal netbook, or you can detach the keyboard and use the screen as a tablet PC. It's fantastic, and only crept ahead of an iPad 2 when we found out how tricky it can be to transfer music, photos and videos onto an iPad.  Lara is already comfortable with it and we've only had it for 4 days (she was OK with it after 2 days!), to the point where tonight she asked where her eee-pad was when she got home from nursery, as she wanted to listen to the Cinderalla story that I downloaded for it.