My Family and Other Animals

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

2012-01-31T20:45:00.002Z

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

2012-01-31T20:31:00.001Z

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.

Touch your toes? Only Lara can

2012-01-23T23:31:00.001Z

It's painfully amusing at home at the moment, as if something needs picking up off the floor, the quickest way is for us to shout for Lara. Olga has an obvious reason why bending, touching toes or lifting anything heavier than a lamb madras is a no-no, but since the end of last week, it's a bit struggle for me too. I've had lower back pain on and off for years, most likely caused by a change in posture after I mangled my knee playing footy back in 2003. Previously it's been treated with heavy duty nurofen and some physio, but this latest bout was different. So different that it required a trip to the GP on Friday, who has diagnosed sciatica, and prescribed elephant tranquilizers and anti-inflammatories.
There was a funny moment on Friday morning, after I'd gone to get Lara up for nursery, and the pain nearly made me chunder, so I headed to the bathroom and lay on the floor. Lara came and found me, and this was the conversation:

Lara: "Papa, why are you on the floor?"
Me: "I thought I was going to be sick, Lara."
Lara: "Do you need the pan? I can go and get it." [We give Lara a pan to be sick into when she's under the weather]
Me: "No, thank you, Lara, I'll be OK now."
Lara: "If you're sick on the toilet, Papa, I can clean it up. I'll get tissues."
Me: "It's OK, Lara, I'll not be sick now."
Lara: "Or you can be sick in the sink or the bath. I'll clean it up."

Humour is the best medicine.

Since then the other non-Lara news is that I struggled through the cricket club AGM on Friday night, and that officially ended my reign as Second XI Captain, as my successor was voted in. I did resign, rather than being sacked, given that my efforts this summer might not be 100% aimed at Littlewick Green.

Nappy-free house for 2 months?

2012-01-23T23:10:00.001Z

Given that Lara has her new bed now, and has settled perfectly into it, not falling out once, we decided it's finally time to take the plunge and dispense with the night-time nappy. Up to now we've been quite content for all three of us to enjoy nice lie-ins, as Lara's good at sleeping until 6.45 at the earliest, and often past 7am. We've had no reason to rock that comfy boat?!
But now, we've decided we have to take the plunge at some point, and probably better to have those disturbed nights now before Junior arrives - the chances of them synchronising their efforts at waking us are pretty remote.
We've been talking to Lara about this for a couple of weeks, and all this week since she's had her new bed, but last night was the first night we tried it. We woke her for a potty visit (we're happy for her to use a potty in her room for night time tinkles to start with) just as we were going to bed, and whilst she wasn't delighted at being woken up, it had the desired effect, as she slept right through until 6.50 before we heard her stir, and it was difficult to tell if she'd woken and tinkled or tinkled and that woke her, but either way, it was a very good first night. Fingers crossed things carry on that way, although we have a mountain of clean bedding ready to go at a moment's notice.

Making the bed

2012-01-16T17:33:00.000Z

This weekend was dominated by a bed. Lara's new "mid-sleeper" bed arrived at 9am Saturday morning. Argos had been very efficient - first calling last Saturday to say delivery would be this Saturday between 7am and noon ("if that's OK?"). Then on Friday evening they texted to say it would be between 10am and noon. Then the delivery man phoned at 8.30am on Saturday to say they would be with us in an hour, and sure enough 30 minutes later they turned up, complete with two large, heavy boxes and a mattress. I'd just had time to dismantle Lara's previous bed, ready to put it back together in Junior's room.

It took me 45 minutes to unpack the boxes, get the wood into organised piles and sort out the screws, bolts, nails and other fiddly bits. It took Lara 0.45 seconds to knock down one pile of wood that was leaning against the wall. There were two parts to the assembly; the bed frame and then the chest of drawers/slidy desk part. The bed frame went together without any hiccups, the instructions matched the way we wanted the frame, with the ladder to the left of the bed... This was about 2pm by now, and I set to putting the chest of drawers together...
Which is when the fun started. The instructions for the chest of drawers were based on the ladder being on the right-hand side of the bed.. I hadn't appreciated this, and followed the drawings religiously, and ended up with a chest of drawers with a shelf unit that fitted perfectly under the bed, except the drawers were behind the ladder, and so wouldn't open fully. Hmm, I'd just nailed the back of the unit on as well...
So, I took a deep breath, got the nails out (with extreme prejudice), took the whole unit apart and put it back together in the ladder-to-the-left orientation. It was 5pm by now and Lara and Olga had already gone up to Lara's friend, Zoe's, house for drinkies, so I packed up for the night and went to join them.

After a bit of a lazy morning on Sunday, then a bit of work, then a lovely walk down by the Thames in Cookham with the boys (crisp, clear weather, and we bumped into another 5 year old male Airedale called Stanley), and a quick trip to the pub for a swift half (Lara's idea!), a roast chicken dinner, I set about finishing the drawer unit and fitting the slidy desk after tea. It was 9pm before the last screw was tightened, but the desk slides out, the drawers open and close, and Lara hadn't fallen out of bed after her first night on Saturday.
We're really pleased with the end result, and Lara is too. I climbed up onto her bed this morning whilst she was pretending to do homework on her desk, when I was told in no uncertain terms that "NO adults are allowed on my bed".
I took some photos as I was building it, here's the result...

Christmas

2012-01-10T21:34:00.000Z

After a busy Christmas Eve, when she didn't go to bed until after 10pm, Lara didn't stir on Christmas morning until 8am, but then it was hard to hold her back from heading downstairs to see if Father Christmas had been. This was the result..

It wouldn't be Christmas without the traditional photo of us with party hats on, I was lucky that I got to take the photo using my new camera Olga had given me, but trust me, I was still wearing my hat.

Christmas Eve and New Years Eve

2012-01-10T21:27:00.000Z

On Christmas Eve we took a short notice trip into London, Olga had to meet a client in the huge Westfield shopping centre and pass her a brown envelope (it's was all above board!), then we took my mum to a Russian cafe for borsch, and so Olga could do some shopping for New Year's Eve (more to come on that), and to reward Lara for her patience, we took her to the Winter Wonderland park in Hyde Park. I normally do very little other than sit in front of the TV on Christmas Eve afternoon, so this made a lovely, Christmassy change, and of course Lara loved it.

On New Year's Eve we went to a Russian party. The local Russian community had hired a village hall, and the idea was that each family would bring some food and that was put out on tables for people to help themselves to, and you just brought your own drink. There was lots of entertainment for the kids, centered on Ded Maroz (the Russian version of Father Christmas), the evil Baba Yega and Ded Maroz's grand-daughter, Snegurochka. Midnight in Moscow (8pm) and Tallin/Riga/Vilnius (10pm) was celebrated before the big cheer at midnight. The kids games were conducted in Russian, and Lara watched for much of them, but joined in in places, and then enjoyed a boogie on the stage as the music played.

And here's a bit more of Ded Maroz and Baba Yega:

Woah, it's back to normal at last & getting ready for Junior

2012-01-04T22:06:00.000Z

Wow, there's a lot to catch up on, and no way will I try and do it in one long post - I'll be up half the night writing it. I'll write a few posts over the next few days to bring everyone up to speed.

What's been happening this week? Well, today we had only the second viewing of the house since September (we had one just before Christmas). These viewings are very handy because it forces us to clean the house and have a big tidy up. The main focus this week has been to clear out our box room, which has been used as Olga's walk-in wardrobe since we moved here, and get it ready to be Junior's nursery. That room was finally cleared this morning, and once the viewing was over, we took a car load of stuff to our storage unit, and brought back a car load of things we'll need for him. The changing table, crib, car seat, bath and boxes of baby clothes and breastfeeding equipment has come back, and his new pram was delivered from Mothercare today too, which Lara is testing here:

This is a present from Olga's grandma in Russia, it's the next model up from the Maclaren that we've used for Lara, and that has been a brilliant pram. This one is a little larger and heavier, so we'll be keeping her old one for holidays. We'll be getting one of those "boogie board" ride-on things to fix to it for Lara to stand on.
Olga had an appointment with her midwife today, Junior is fine, he's head down at the moment, and the position of his feet accounts for the kick he gave her the other night which actually made her cry out "Ow!".
Tomorrow we're going to visit one of the three schools that we'll be putting on the application form for Lara's school...
Phew, that's enough for today, more about Christmas and New Year in the next few days.

Christmas Dinner is being prepared

2011-12-25T11:35:00.001Z

My team of professional Sous Chefs prepare the vegetables

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Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T00:59:00.001Z

Here we are, all set for later this morning...

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Happy Anniversary, House

2011-12-19T23:14:00.001Z

Just a quick post to mark the 5th anniversary of us moving into this house. Ironically, this evening had been spent tidying up, as we have the first viewing of the house since August tomorrow.

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Suited and booted for a change

2011-12-14T22:38:00.001Z

I've been working away from home this week for the first time since joining Flare, helping with a training course in Windsor. It's meant wearing a suit, which has actually made a nice change, and getting up very early. Earlier than Lara, no less.
Yesterday was the first day in a long time - since she was last on holiday with Olga I think, early in 2010 - that I didn't see her at all. I was away out of the house at 7am, before she'd woken up, and I didn't get home until 9pm, well after she'd gone to bed.
Today our trainee and I popped out from where we were working to see the Changing of the Guard at Windsor Castle, here is a snippet for anyone who's not seen it before:

Yesterday was a bit of a marathon trip to get to Windsor - so that Olga could have the car to take Lara to her last gymnastics class of the year at lunchtime, I took a bus to Marlow, a train to Bourne End, another train to Maidenhead, a third train to Slough and a fourth train to Windsor. Dad would have been proud! Door-to-door that journey took 2 hours (the boss gave me a lift home!) On Monday I drove there by the back routes and it took one hour. I drove there today by dual carriageways and A-roads and it took 37 minutes, despite the traffic looking heavier than on the B-roads on Monday. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Olga and I are working together with our trainee tomorrow - she's a Kazakh lady Olga knows from her visits over there - so I think we'll take the A-roads again!

The Best Looking Male in High Wycombe

2011-12-14T22:25:00.001Z

It's official - the Best Looking Male in High Wycombe lives in our house.
Sadly, it's not me, but Mishka.
Back in September I took him to our local pet store who were having a Dog Portrait day. The usual story - have a couple of photos taken of the dog, enter them into a competition, no obligation to buy... Of course when we saw the photos a week later, we had to buy one!
When I came home from work today (have been working away from home), Olga said there was a surprise for me... a large framed print of Mishka's photo - he's won first place in the competition! Here's the link to the photographer's website for proof, and here's the boy sitting in front of his (ok, our) prize tonight:

Mishka will enjoy a jucier treat this weekend as his prize!

Birthday Lunch

2011-12-10T15:17:00.001Z

We went to pizza hut for lunch after picking up Laura's free Design-a-Bear at Argos, free to those kids who had a birthday today or tomorrow!

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Lara is 4 today

2011-12-10T07:29:00.001Z

Lara opening her first present just after 7am this morning.

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Christmas and New Year plans

2011-12-09T21:36:00.001Z

Not having an office as such, Flare doesn't have a Christmas Party, so we'll make our own entertainment - perhaps the High Wycombe branch might go out for a meal. There is a night out in Reading on the 16th to catch up with Anton and Becca and the Learys, and this will give me a chance to do my final shopping on the 17th - should be nice and quiet in Reading 8 days before Christmas.
Grandma is coming down to stay with us for Christmas this year, which will be lovely. We've made much more of an effort with the decorations, as much for Lara of course as for the fact that we'll actually be here over the Christmas period. We've not gone to the same extent as some of the houses on our street, but we've pushed the boat out a little with some fairy lights outside, and we've no less than three trees up - two downstairs and one in Lara's room.

After Christmas we'll go with Grandma and meet Catherine, Nick and the kids in a lovely country pub in the Cotswolds for a pub tea, and to swap presents. This is after we've blasted round the John Lewis sales! Lara's big treat before Junior arrives will be a new bed, probably one of those cabin-type ones with lots of space underneath to explore and fill with ~~rubbish~~ all her stuff.
We're really looking forward to New Year too - Olga is a member of a Russian social media website, and one of her contacts on there alerted us to a get-together some of the local Russian community is organising. They're hired a local village hall, and will be having a party there. Everyone brings a dish for the buffet, chosen from a list, so no-one brings the same thing - there'll be plenty of Russian salads, so I've been given special dispensation to bring some English food too; there'll be other English spouses there, so at least I'll have other husbands to chat to and drink vodka with. Kids are coming too, of course, and each family will being a game along to keep them entertained, we're going to bring Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and Olga is going to paint the tail-less Donkey. New Year is much bigger deal in the Russian community than 25th December, so it will be a great experience to see how much everyone enjoys it. And as a bonus, poor old Olga can drive us home, no need for a triple-price taxi or a cold 2 mile walk. Thanks, Darling!

Building up to birthday and Christmas

2011-12-09T21:21:00.001Z

The past few weeks have been about getting ready for Lara's birthday and Christmas. Presents for both have been bought and wrapped (Lara, if you're reading this when you're much older, it's a good job you've not looked in the garage!). Last weekend Lucy came over, and we went into Wycombe to do some shopping, and Lara went to see Santa. This was the first time she'd seen him when she understands who he is, she did meet him in the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park a couple of years ago but that pretty much went over her head. He was very good, there were clever little touches that I'd not appreciated, such as we'd told his "elves" her name in advance, so when she first saw him, he welcomed her by name. This helps us with the whole "Santa knows if you're being a good girl, remember he knew your name when you met him" thing. Here she is in the queue:

Then we went for a Chinese meal; Lara's never going to polish off a whole plate of chicken chow mein in one sitting, but it was nice to see her have a go..

She's definitely a fan of foreign food, this week she out-ate Olga and I when we had palmeny (lovely Russian dumplings) - she started with 15, while Olga and I started with 20 each. We had to donate some of ours to Lara, and she ended up eating 20, leaving me with 18 and Olga 17. She loves ravioli, which is just like palmeny in tomato sauce to her, and today she wolfed down polish sausages. Pasta Bolognese is her all-time favourite at the moment, but I still persist with a Sunday roast. It's not a big deal if she doesn't finish that, I'll find room for extras. It has got to the point now where we've started serving some of her meals on adult plates rather than her kids ones!

On Sunday we went for a walk in the park in Marlow, and fed the ducks, although Lara ate almost as much of the bread as the ducks, swans and geese..

Olga is over her pneumonia now, though other pregnancy-related aches, pains and cramps are cropping up. Junior is kicking and punching, and when he's particularly active I've been able to feel him too, if I get my hand in the right place. Lara is still giving him big hugs before bed; we're trying to get her to understand how she'll not be the 95% focus of our attention (the boys get the other 5%) once he arrives. It's probably good that she's getting a lot of extra attention now for her birthday and Christmas without Junior being on the scene.
The boys are getting cold at night, we've put both their beds next to the radiator in the hall now, where Mishka has always been, but we'd come down in the morning and find that Jackson had turfed Mishka out of his bed, and Jackie had settled in! We're going to treat Mishka to a nice new, big bed, and Jackson can have Mishka's old one.
It's all about keeping the kids happy....

Last day as a three year old

2011-12-09T20:48:00.001Z

Lara and Olga baked some cakes last night for Lara to take to nursery today. The kids had a little party, with some games and dancing, and Lara made sure each child took a cake home, with some left over for the staff. She took her mini-me, Natasha, with her, wearing the outfits Baba Luda created whilst she was staying here this summer.

Tonight Lara helped Olga pack the party bags for the party tomorrow at the soft play centre near our house. Lara is sooooo looking forward to being four, she's been pretending she's four for the past two days.
We've got lots of plans for tomorrow, it'll be a busy day!

Funny who you see in the giraffe house

2011-11-23T20:58:00.001Z

Oh, I forgot to say that while I was having a sit-down at the zoo, watching the giraffes in their shed, Olga - who had taken Lara outside to see the next enclosure - called me but I missed her call. As I was checking my phone, a family walked past me into the giraffe house, but I took no notice of them. It turns out it was Rob Brydon! Olga thought it was him, and called me to tell me to have a look, but of course I missed the call. Anyway, we saw him later, going into the bat house, and yep, it was indeed the Welsh comic. He's shorter than he looks on TV...

A few days out

2011-11-22T21:27:00.001Z

We had a clear weekend 2 weeks ago and so took the opportunity to load up the car and head up to see Grandma. It was only a flying visit, but it was lovely to see her and Lara was very excited. We didn't tell her in advance that we were going, and waited until we picked her up from nursery on the Friday teatime. Mishka was in his usual co-pilot seat, up front with me, and Jackson was on the floor in the back, with towels and sick bags at the ready. The poor fella isn't getting any better at travelling in the car, and is sick every time. Interesting that Mishka has never suffered from this problem. Lucky us!

To give Olga some relaxation time, Lara and I took Grandma shopping in Manchester. We're used to Wycombe now, and it was a surprise to see how crowded a big city can get on a Saturday afternoon. Wycombe's Eden Shopping Centre can get a little busy, but I'd never call it crowded, this was a shock!
The weather was lovely for November, with blue skies, and Mum suggested we go to the Christmas Market they're setting up in St Anne's Square. It would be lovely now, but many stalls were still being built on that day. We did have a very nice hot chocolate though while we watched the world go by. We wandered past Manchester's equivalent of the London Eye, and when we got home Lara tried on the first addition to Grandma's new dressing-up box - the elephant outfit.

On Tuesday we had a day out to London Zoo. The weather was still lovely, and being midweek the Zoo was nice and quiet, apart from the odd school party. The new penguin enclosure was a favourite attraction, but the giraffes, meercats, lions, tiger, butterflies, and monkeys all ran them a close second.

This weekend has been a bit of a mixture of trying to tidy the house, do some christmas shopping, and poor Olga wore herself out stripping the dogs, but of course they look wonderful for it afterwards. I'll post finished photos when I remember to take some, but here are a couple with Lara helping and documenting:

Careful with those scissors, Olga!:

Oh, hang on, I found a video I took with the kids in it:

A quieter time (apart from the fireworks)

2011-11-09T20:04:00.001Z

Bonfire weekend passed uneventfully, apart from one of our neighbours having a visit from Fireman Sam and his cronies - his fire had got a little larger than he intended, and I think a neighbour whose garden backs onto his phoned the fire brigade, to protect his fence. Lara thought it was wonderful.
We had a nice visit from Auntie Cath & Uncle Nick, with cousins William and Elizabeth on Saturday morning, Lara was soooo excited. After that I took her to Littlewick Green for a Dad's & Kids afternoon - a pub lunch followed by a GeoCaching walk - you use your GPS on your smart phone to find "treasure" hidden by other GeoCachers. It was only a mile and a half's walk, but it was good fun for the kids, although I probably carried Lara at least a third of the way:

On Sunday we played a bit on our new (second hand) Nintendo Wii, then took the dogs for a good walk, this time Lara walked the whole way, probably another mile and a half. Lara modelled for some photos of herself holding photos of herself:

Olga is "showing" more and more now, as her body recovers from the pneumonia, to the point where I suggested she should use her bump to ensure she got a seat on the bus yesterday, when she went to Reading to see Lucy. Lara has become very accostomed to the idea of a baby brother, and the hugs for him have multiplied. We've started buying odd bits and pieces for him that we reckon we'll need, first on the list was a very portable Samsonite pop-up travel cot, identical to one we borrowed off Anton and Becca when we took Lara to Russia when she was 6 months old. It was perfect for that trip, and Olga won one on eBay for a fiver, with the seller living only 2 miles away, we couldn't say no!

Junior Update - 20 week scan

2011-11-04T17:09:00.001Z

Olga had her 20-week scan this morning, and even after all the trouble and illness over the past 5 weeks, Junior was given a clean bill of health by the sonographer, he was happy with everything he saw, and Junior is on the line or above in the 4 graphs that were put into Olga's notes for whatever measurements were taken. What size would Junior be if Olga had been fit and healthy for that time!! :-)
As I say, the sonographer was able to see everything he needed to see, and something he didn't need to see, but asked if we wanted to see it - a little dingle-dangle! Junior is a he :-)
Still all on course for March 27th then. Tonight we break it to Lara that she's going to have a brother, and not the sister that she's been seeing when she looks into Mama's bellybutton...
Here he is:

Mama & Papa - a study in pencil

2011-11-04T17:00:00.002Z

Lara brought this home from nursery earlier this week. It's not their policy to teach the kids to draw, more to encourage them to learn on their own. Lara seems to have learnt how to draw people, and faces in particular, over the last month or so, and this has been her best effort to date. She even got our hair right!

Walking Jackson

2011-11-03T23:58:00.001Z

Just a quick one from a few weeks ago when the weather was nice enough to walk the dogs to and from Lara's nursery. Lara didn't walk Jacky for long, but she enjoyed it for a few minutes.

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Halloween, Logic and Languages

2011-11-02T20:57:00.000Z

We're not into trick-or-treating, but we don't mind if other kids want to do it, and Lara looked forward to dressing up as a wicked witch when she got home from nursery. I'd stocked up on a load of sweets, but we only had one group of visitors, which means someone's got to eat those sweets over the next few days, oh well... :-)
Here she is with the pumpkins she helped Olga to carve on Sunday (Lara designed her pumpkin, the one on the left, with only minimal help):

Her logical mind continues to amuse me. On Monday, while eating tea, I asked her what she would be doing the next day (Tuesday is her gymnastics day, and she knows this very well). She claimed not to know, so this is how the exchange progressed:

Papa: What are you going to do tomorrow, Lara?
Lara: What day is it tomorrow?
Papa: Well, it's Monday today, so what comes after Monday?
Lara: Tomorrow.

Genius. I couldn't argue with her.

In her own quiet way she's increasing her Russian vocabulary too. Last week I bought some children's books that help with English to Russian vocabulary (I can use them too!) and some flashcards in Russian, and she has enjoyed trying to learn some of the words, but I was astounded how many she knew of the flashcards after only one or two evenings of practise when it's Olga's turn to take her to bed. Without trying to be too pushy, we're encouraging her to use Russian words for simple things like colours, and numbers, and hopefully as she uses it more, the even more interested she'll become, and hopefully it will snowball into her using full sentences in the future.

Lara 20/20 vision, gender prediction and a perfect nursery

2011-10-25T21:12:00.001+01:00

Lara is fine at the moment, not showing any ill effects from her bang on the nose. She has a bit of a cough and a cold, but hey, that's normal for our house at the moment, I'm surprised we're not giving the dogs Lemsip.
She seems to fully grasp the concept of Olga and Junior, if not the timescales involved. We got a great kid's book from the library this weekend, called "There's a house inside my mummy", which we read to her every night. Last night when Olga was reading it to her, it led Lara to put her eye to Olga's belly button "to look at the baby", and she went on to announce that it's a girl.
Her eyesight is amazingly good. This morning she spotted one of her nursery workers walking to the nursery, and from fully 200 metres away she was confident in saying "That's Bianca over there".
Whilst I'm mentioning it, it should be noted that our nursery, the Cressex Day Nursery, has just had its Ofsted assessment back, and it achieved Outstanding in all 17 categories that it was assessed on. Now that is something to be proud of.

On the mend

2011-10-25T20:48:00.000+01:00

Olga is getting better, slowly. After she came home on Wednesday, she had her antibiotics and two inhalers, and they seemed to be helping with her breathing, and her cough - whilst still very irritating for her - was at least doing what it was supposed to be doing, and dislodging the gunk in her lungs. However, weeks of heavy coughing had taken its toll, and she had a bad stabbing pain in her ribs, and worried that it might be a clot developing, and at least wanting to report it, she headed back to the GP on Thursday.
He checked her over properly, unlike his two previous colleagues (one of whom had listened to her breathing with his stethoscope through two layers of Olga's clothing!), and reckoned that it was a muscle strain. Ibuprofen would have been the normal solution, but of course Olga can't have that, so it was back to the paracetamol, and let the antibiotics do their job. After a bit of internet-diagnosing, we wondered if it might be pleurisy, but even if it was, the solution to that is to treat the underlying cause of it, which is the chest infection.
So, each night Olga's been able to get better and better quality of sleep, taking a puff on her inhaler if she wakes up coughing in the night, and tomorrow she finishes her course of antibiotics. She went to see the GP today so he could see if she needed another course prescribing, but she doesn't. Her cough will linger on for a few more weeks yet, most likely, but the infection will be gone, and hopefully she'll be able to get a full night's sleep.
All focus switches now to the 20-week scan for Junior next Friday. Two possible side-effects of pneumonia in pregnancy are low birth weight and premature birth. Well, Lara had both of those and she's strong as an ox and twice as stubborn! I will feel better once we've had the scan and know more about Junior's progress.

Home now, and the diagnosis is in....

2011-10-19T15:56:00.001+01:00

Olga's back at home, as of 3pm today. Her discharge sheet from the hospital states Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) as the diagnosis of her illness, so at least we can put a name to it now. She's got 2 inhalers and bottles of pills galore to take, and won't be running any marathons in the near future.

One more night away

2011-10-19T00:27:00.001+01:00

Olga's having one more night in hospital tonight. She's been given 2 inhalers to use, and been given some breathing exercises to do by the physio, although when she did part of them this morning when I was there, the result was her coughing worsened for 45 minutes. I suspect that is what is supposed to happen though, it's supposed to get the gunk in her lungs moving. She's still on antibiotics, but came off the oxygen this afternoon, and still has blood-thinning injections once a day, to combat any clot. So, she should be home tomorrow, which will be great, but more than anything I want her to have a good night's sleep without coughing.
I remembered to take a photo of Nurse Lara tonight, before we were ejected from the ward due to their No Kids rule. Something to do with avoiding infections, whether they're worried about the kids taking something in or taking something away wasn't clear! We hadn't been told this rule, communications between staff and family could be better - some nurses on the ward today weren't even sure what time evening visitor hours were... Anyway, there's nurse Lara giving Mama an injection and checking her temperature.

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Nurse Lara visits the patient

2011-10-17T23:19:00.001+01:00

Olga is staying another night in hospital tonight. Her temperature has stabilized today, thanks to the antibiotics, but her cough is just as bad, and her breathing isn't much better, and so she's been on oxygen all day. I went to see her for a few hours this morning, then Lara and I went to visit her after tea tonight, and we thought it would be cute if Lara wore her nurse outfit, and took her Doctor's bag with her. It's actually her Vet's bag, but the equipment she carries in there is good for humans and dogs! She checked Mama's temperature, gave her some medicine, gave her an injection, looked in her ears, rubbed some cream in, brushed her hair and trimmed her nails (all pretend of course, apart from the hair brushing!) The real nurses loved it!
The word from the Doc is that there's a good chance Olga will come home tomorrow, but we'll have to wait and see how she is in the morning. I only thought of taking a photo once we were in the lift on the way down from the ward, which is a shame..

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Had better weekends!

2011-10-17T00:32:00.000+01:00

Woke up in plenty of time on Saturday to play with Lara while watching the Wales v France game (even if Sam Warburton's sending off was justified, Wales deserved to win, if only the try conversion and that penalty had gone over, both were soooooo close), then took Lara to the park with Jackson, to gauge his reaction to other dogs, now that he goes out with his muzzle on. He was fine, no agression, just far more excitement than a foot-tall dog should have! I've still not let him off the lead yet, the park where we took him is just too big, it would take me ages to get him back if he did disappear off to play with another dog.
Back home to watch the Liverpool v ManUre game, which naturally I'll say Liverpool should have won, but at least they didn't lose. Then time to take Lara up to the top of the garden to pick up the fallen apples before I mow the lawn. Poor Olga is still in a bad way, and seems to only be able to get any kind of sleep in the early morning, once exhaustion kicks in, so she didn't get up until 10.30am, and then just didn't have the energy to get off the sofa. Lara gave up helping me to pick apples up after collecting about 6 apples, and decided it was more fun to kick my raked-up piles of leaves and apples about, or do somersaults on her trampoline. I don't mean proper ones, this is with the aid of the support bar on the trampoline that she's supposed to hold whilst bouncing (it's not one of the common round, caged-in type of trampoline). It was just the kind of thing she does at gymnastics, and was very confident at it, completing dozens of them whilst I picked up 2 full bin bags of apples.
So, I thought I'd nip to the bottom of our garden and bring the lawnmower up, and as I'm heading back up our rather long garden, I hear a nasty crack from where Lara is, followed by the kind of cry that kicks a parent right in their stomach. I dashed up, and Lara had an obvious bruise coming up right between her eyes, at the very top of her nose, and my first thought was that she'd broken her nose. However, there was no blood, and she stopped crying in under a minute once Papa had picked her up for a cuddle, so I began to calm down. Then I started to worry that maybe you can break your nose without blood gushing out, and that maybe she'd gone into shock and couldn't feel the pain. We applied ice (a bag of frozen brocolli) back in the house, and she really didn't seem in any more pain, and within 20 minutes appeared to be her normal, cheerful self. I put her to bed after popping out to a friend's 50th party for an hour or two (both my girls lying on a sofa each watching TV, comforting each other!), and when I pulled her T-shirt over her head, it pulled against her nose, and I thought this would be the acid test, if it was broken, the pain would show now.. and not a squeak out of her, so I think we've gotten away with just some swelling and bruising, although she says it does hurt when she pokes it with her finger (so, don't poke it, Lara!).

And so we come to Sunday - again, up early (7.10am, too early really) and I go and help Lara in the bathroom, almost not wanting to see how her pretty face looks this morning, but it was fine, still some swelling and some little bruising, but if anything was broken, I would have expected her to look like Stallone at the end of Rocky.
We watched the rugby and cooked our breakfast, and Olga came down just before 11am. Even coming downstairs caused her to be out of breath, and straight away this shortness of breath made her panic, and she had to sit down by an open window to recover. She'd felt like this once or twice before in midweek, but the feeling had passed quickly, but this morning she had this one attack, then another within 10 minutes, of extreme shortness of breath, bringing on a feeling of panic, and we both decided it was time to go to the Minor Emergency department at Wycome hospital. We have Junior to think of as well as Olga, and this has chest infection has been going on for two and a half weeks now, and it's not been getting any better at all after two visits to the GP, with a third appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning. Olga's had virtually no appetite in that time, and that's not great for Junior, so I packed a bag, almost exclusively full of things to entertain Lara with, and we went to the ME department at 11.30am. It was very quiet, Olga was seen within 10 minutes, and we spent the next 3 hours in a booth in the old A&E department, with Lara and I mostly playing snap, although I'd even been prepared enough to take our netbook and Lara's headphones, so for the last 30 minutes of that we had some peace and quiet while she watched Postman Pat and Toy Story. Olga had an ECG and a chest x-ray (note to mums-to-be: opinions differ, even within hospitals, about having x-rays while pregnant. We were of course warned of the small risk, but the interesting thing was the chief nurse who was looking after Olga confirmed what we knew already, that they would use a lead blanket over Olga's tummy during the x-ray. However, the radiographer poo-pood this, and said that using the blanket actually trapped the radiation inside the covered area longer than if there was no blanket, so Olga went blanketless) to see if that showed anything about the chest infection, or a blood clot, which is another possibility the Docs were putting forward. The x-ray was inconclusive, so they treated both issues, with a dose of strong antibiotics and an injection of blood-thinning treatment (makes us wonder why the GPs were so reluctant to give antibiotics, the Docs in the hospital didn't think twice, despite the pregnancy), while she had an IV drip for fluids, once the Doc had got the annular fitted. Glad I didn't watch that bit. Once Olga's temperature and heart beat had normalised (her heart rate was 110 when we arrived, I measured mine at 75 at the same time), we asked if someone could check on Junior, and another Doc appeared with the microphone-thingy, and found Junior's heartbeat straightaway, and it was perfectly normal, which made us both feel better.
After three hours Olga was transferred to a short-stay ward, and went over her story (for the third time) with another Doc, who said Olga would stay there at least until the Consultant had done his rounds and seem her. She couldn't say for certain when that would be, so I took the opportunity to take Lara home, so we could let the dogs out for a few minutes in the garden, and I could get an overnight bag ready for Olga just in case. We stocked up on grapes, juice and a copy of Now magazine and went back about 4.30pm, staying with Olga until the Consultant came round at just after 6pm. While we'd been out, the ECG Doc had come back to see Olga, and tested the oxygen levels in her blood - he likened the level to that of a 93-year-old heavy smoker, so when we returned, Olga was hooked up to an oxygen cylinder as well as an IV drip, but she was well enough to have had a cup of tea and a sandwich.
The results of her blood tests weren't back yet, but the Consultant's opinion was that she has a very bad chest infection in both lungs, and that will be treated with at least one night's stay in hospital on antibitoics, although I wouldn't be surprised (and I think Olga and I would both feel better) that unless she makes a miraculous recovery tomorrow, she should spend a second night there, we both feel some much better mentally (and physically I hope, for Olga) that she is there and that her illness is finally be treated with some proper medicine.
Lara was thoroughly bored of being told not climb on this and that, and to try and whisper and not shout, that we left Olga as soon as the Consultant had said his bit. She's got our netbook, with some films on it other than Postman Pat and Toy Story, and a book and her Now magazine, so hopefully she's not been too bored herself tonight, and I hope she's sound asleep now.

An interesting weekend, but hey, at least the weather's been nice!

Zombie House, and a quick getaway

2011-10-12T23:15:00.000+01:00

A piece of advice - don't come and visit us at the moment.

All three of us are suffering to different degrees with coughs; Olga has it by far the worst, she's been signed off work this week by her GP, she's had it for 2 weeks now, and despite 2 visits to the GP and numerous calls to the midwife, we're reassured that Junior isn't going to suffer because mama has a chest infection. Lara and I are spluttering, but it's not keeping us awake at night, unlike poor mama, who's not had a good night's sleep for weeks.

On a different note, I simply have to report on a personal best Lara and I set this morning... My alarm went off as usual at 6.50am, but the house was quiet so I opted for a lie-in, and was woken by Lara's usual wake-up call of "Papa, is it morning yet??!!!" at exactly 7.26am. Normally, this would mean a long, drawn out procedure of getting her dressed, washed and breakfasted, in order to leave the house once the rush hour traffic has died down around 9am. The general rule is, if we've not set off for nursery by 8am at the latest, she won't get there in time to have breakfast there, so she might as well have it with us without the hassle of sitting in rush-hour traffic.

Anyway, this morning Lara decided she was happy to be rushed, and I wondered if it would be possible to get her to nursery by 8am, despite being 36 minutes behind schedule already.

Getting her out of her jimjams and dressed was easy, she accepted my first offering of clothes, which is rare in itself. Face washing and toothbrushing happened equally quickly, and she helped me get dressed before we set off downstairs for the normally difficult job of getting her hair sorted out. By now it was 7.40am, and we'd already broken all sorts of records, but the hair has taken me more than 20 minutes sometimes to get three plaits sorted out. However, the secret today was that last night, Lara wanted to have her hair like Mama's, in some sort of high ponytail, so I had a practise before she went to bed, and Lara liked her new look. So this morning it was easy to get her to sit still long enough for me to put one new ponytail in, even I can do that in under 5 minutes, and after refitting her car seat (I took it out last night for some adjustments) when I checked the clock in the car as we pulled away from the house, it was 7.51am. 25 minutes from us getting out of bed to us driving off to nursery! Unheard of.

It might mean nothing to most people, but I felt Lara and I deserved a post dedicated almost solely to this near impossible feat...

The next Tiger Woods?

2011-10-06T00:02:00.001+01:00

Golf last Friday was brilliant - fantastic weather; I had 4 pars, including 3 on the trot - something I don't recall ever doing before - and I didn't lose one ball. In fact, I only had to look in the trees for it once in the whole round. I was "nearer the pin" than the three other guys in my group for the "nearest the pin" competition hole, and I hit the longest drive of the four of us on the "longest drive" hole.
For anyone that cares, I scored 34 stableford points, playing off a handicap of 27, and went round the par 69 course in 99 shots. I had a 30-foot putt that lipped out that would have given me a "3 for 5" score on that hole, the holy grail of golfers, I'm led to believe...

The boys were off the lead!!

2011-10-05T23:56:00.001+01:00

The other big news this week was on Sunday we took the boys for a walk in the woods, to the place we normally go in West Wycombe, where it's rare, though not impossible, to bump into other people walking dogs. The weather continued to be toasty hot, so we took a little picnic too. Part of the walk is uphill, across large fields, which at this time of year the farmer had ploughed but nothing was growing. Lara set off walking up this hill, before a slight difference of opinion developed about something and nothing, and she stomped off in one of her best huffs yet. As we could see all around for hundreds of metres, and there were no threats visible, we just let her stomp away, interested to see how far she'd get before she turned around.
It was about 100 metres, before a circling Red Kite worried her enough to return to us, and we agreed that I'd carry her on my shoulders for the uphil bit.
The really interesting bit was the walk in the woods, where we put Jacky's new muzzle on him, and let him off the lead. We didn't actually bump into any other dogs, but it was a relief to see that within 2 minutes he was trotting along, not trying to take the muzzle off, and coming back to us whenever we called him or gave our two peeps on the dog whistle. He did seem a little subdued whilst wearing the muzzle, not really going more than 20 metres in front of us, but that in itself doesn't worry us. At the moment, we'd rather he did that than run miles away.
We kept Mishka on his 5 metre lead at this point, but after our picnic we came back through the same woods, and decided to let them both off, so for the first time since our December holiday in the Lakes last year (outside of our back garden, of course) they were both off the lead at the same time. Mishka was more adventurous than Jackson, although to start with even he would only go 20 metres before turning to check we were still following. They both came back perfectly when called and whistled, which bodes well for future walks.
We got Mishka back on the lead when we noticed a couple entering the woods, as we didn't want him bounding up to them and worrying them, and we couldn't see if they had a little dog with them, but for those 10 minutes or so, I had what I want to achieve consistently in the future, a walk with my family in nice scenery, with our dogs off the lead, but responsive to our commands. Heaven!

Struck down with the lurgy, but Junior's OK

2011-10-05T23:41:00.002+01:00

Well, this week has seen our house resemble a ward in M*A*S*H rather than a home. Not so many gunshot wounds, but certainly an awful lot of coughing and wheezing. Olga has got it the worst, the poor love has a cough that would make a 60-a-day smoker blush, and Lara's not far behind. I've only just started with the odd little splutter. Even Mishka was having an attack of the sneezes today.
There's not much we can do for Olga, she went to see the GP today, but unsurprisingly, given her condition, her wasn't going to prescribe any antibiotics, and she shouldn't even take any over-the-counter remedies to soothe her cough, so we're relying on external and herbal treatments, with good lashings of vaporub, and plenty of honey & lemon in her hot drinks. Lara is getting by at night with vaporub and tixylix, she has no other symptoms than a bad cough at night, and even that isn't playing her up too much tonight (famous last words - I thought that last night but she ended up in bed with me in the office till 3am). I've decamped to the sofabed in our office so one of us can operate vaguely normally after some hours sleep, otherwise we were finding that as soon as we had both dropped off to sleep, I'd roll over and wake Olga, and her coughing would start again.
I've asked my Mum how to make a kaolin poultice for Olga, but we're not sure you can easily buy kaolin any more, but I'll have a look. I've just googled it, and the second result was from a Horse and Hound forum:

I'm sure that's not something to worry about, I don't remember them doing me any harm, although it might explain why I do like to jump fences from time to time.

Olga coincidentally had a scheduled appointment with her midwife today, and after a worrying moment of hunting around, they tracked down Junior's heartbeat, and everything was tickety-boo, a healthy 140 bpm or something like that. He or she was very active, and hid from the microphone-thingy a couple of times, and the midwife had to hunt "it" down again.

A dog blog

2011-09-30T00:14:00.001+01:00

We arranged a visit last week from a dog behaviour specialist, as Jacky in particular gets really worked up around other dogs, and it means we never let him off the lead on walks, which is a shame (Mishka isn't let off either, but that's another problem!). Also, they both go nuts for a few minutes any time we have visitors, and whilst it's not a major problem, they shouldn't do that, and we want to learn how to calm them down. So since last Tuesday we've been working on the boys' behaviour at home and out on walks. I've taken Jackson on his own to pick Lara up from nursery one day, and we walk them on separate leads now, to try and stop Jacky from nipping poor Mishka when we bump into other dogs. Jacky gets so frustrated that we don't let him play that he takes it out on the nearest thing, which happens to be Mishka, but has been our jeans sometimes, and we can't risk him nipping Lara one day. So, we're making more of an effort to socialise him with other dogs, so he'll be going to training classes soon enough. We have got him a muzzle though, so once he's used to wearing it on walks, we'll feel better about letting him go and investigate other dogs, without concerns about nipping. As the behaviourist rightly put it, we can feel "confident that we'll have the safest dog in the park [with the muzzle on]".
I baked them a cake too! To help with training, it's good to give them better treats than standard dog biscuits, so I baked Liver Cake:

It came out better than I was expecting, and as I was out picking Lara up when Olga was expected home from a meeting on Monday, I put a post it note on it explaining what it was, in case she mistook it for a nice brown loaf and took a bite!!
And today we've moved the boys onto some posher food too, away from pedigree chum (good marketing, average dog food, apparently). We'll be ordering it on t'internet, but given we'd run out of pedigree chum today, we had to buy some in from the local pet shop. There's 2 weeks supply there!

I'll have to cancel my Sky Sports TV package to pay the extra monthly cost (sorry, Simon!!)!

To help the behaviourist monitor our progress with the boys, and Jackson in particular, I've created a separate blog just about them. In case there are any doggy-people out there, this is the link.

Oh, and how could I not post some photos from Mishka's birthday on the 20th Septemeber!?:

Windsor & Heathrow this week

2011-09-30T00:03:00.001+01:00

It's been a busy week work-wise this week, so I'm only getting round to a blog post now, once I've finished what I have been doing, and it's late on Thursday night. Tomorrow I've got a day off for my Littlewick Green Cricket Club Annual Golf Day and Presentation Dinner :-) I had a second golf lesson on Wednesday, some more slight tweaks to my stance and swing were offered, and whilst I was a long was from perfect, hopefully if I can conquer nerves tomorrow, I might get round without looking like a complete arse (depends on what I choose to wear, I suppose!).
Last Thursday night we had a little party for Olga's birthday in the evening. Lara was desperate to help blow out the candles:

On Friday night Olga and I went to the "pubhotel" where we had our Wedding Reception, the Bird in Hand in Knowl Hill, for a nice meal and a change of scenery, as we stayed the night too, courtesy of a great GroupOn deal. On Saturday we went to Windsor to meet my sister, brother-in-law and their two children for a picnic on The Long Walk. Lara and Elizabeth collected dozens of conkers (I think we've still got Lara's share somewhere at home), and William occupied himself with Lara's football, or anyone else's football he could find. His dribbling is excellent, I'll put some money on him playing for England one day, and he's got a better vocabulary at age nearly 2 than a lot of premier league players.

Sunday morning was all about taking Baba Luda to the airport for her trip back to Russia. Auntie Lucy has gone with her for two weeks, so we had no worries about Luda travelling on her own. Apart from her baggage, a lot of which was secreted into Lucy's suitcase, although Sergei was still concerned about the weight of Luda's holdall:

There was time for one last hug before departure:

Afterwards there was some time for retail therapy to get over the upset of Baba going home, and we found Lara her own trolley:

Bizarrely, we bought her some cute earmuffs and a hat-scarf combo, ready for the autumnal weather, and for the past 2 days the sun has been cracking the flags and it's set to get warmer over the weekend!

Happy Birthday Olga

2011-09-22T08:17:00.000+01:00

Happy Birthday to Olga today, and to celebrate we're off into London for a day out, and a meal in Chinatown.
There is another reason to be in London today though, Olga has an interview to be a volunteer during the Olympics next year, so we have to get to the Excel centre first, before we can relax and enjoy the day.
We'll have a party at home tonight, Lara's looking forward to that.

And then there were 4 (plus 2)!!

2011-09-19T21:58:00.000+01:00

Well, here is the really big breaking news... we're expecting an addition to the family towards the end of March 2012!
We went for Olga's 12 week scan last week, and Junior was very active, so much so we needed a second opinion on the measurements that were being taken. "It" even did a headstand at one point. Maybe the quality of the scan image has got better over the years, or maybe it's because they are not the first scans I've seen, but it was really easy to see arms and legs, hands and feet, and the little heart was going 100 to the dozen.
Here we go....

We told Lara the next day, when she was on the mend from her stomach bug, that she was going to be a Big Sister. It took a minute or two to sink in, but once we showed her the scan photos, she was able to grasp that there was a new baby on the way. It really helped that we could quickly look back on this blog to a very similar image of Lara. One of her first reactions was to tell Olga that the only thing she could eat (well, drink) now was milk "because that's what babies eat". Since then she's asking to hug the baby, and rubs Olga's tummy.
So, there's another reason to keep up the search for a bigger house (OK, it's always been one of the reasons!)

Happy Birthday Mishka - his present is a therapist

2011-09-19T21:07:00.001+01:00

It's Mishka's 5th birthday tomorrow! For anyone that doesn't know the story, he was born 24 hours after all but one of his brothers and sisters by caesarian section, after his mum was taken to the vets for her post-natal check up. It was only during this check-up that he and another sibling were found to be alive, and were delivered there and then! Hence his Kennel Club registered name - Sarianova Lucky Fella.

It's a coincidence, but we have arranged for a renowned dog behaviourist coming to visit the boys tomorrow. I'm fed up with Jackson's behaviour when we encounter other dogs on walks, he gets very wound up, and ends up nipping Mishka, who nips him back (as you would!). We don't know if it's aggression towards other dogs, or just frustration that he can't play with them, but we don't let him off the lead to find out. Hopefully this lady will be able to offer some advice. She might even be able to tell us how to get them both to calm down when we have visitors! Any readers who have been to our house know to expect a very warm and friendly welcome from our boys for the first few minutes, but they really shouldn't do that, so I hope we can learn how to solve that problem too...

Golf - fore!!!!

2011-09-16T11:54:00.001+01:00

I'm off now to my first proper golf lesson! It was a bargain on GroupOn, and I want to see if he can work miracles before the Littlewick Green CC golf day on the 30th September.

Lara Update

2011-09-16T11:53:00.000+01:00

Lara's over her stomach bug now. She still had to sleep much of Wednesday night in bed with me, but she went to nusery yesterday and they said she was fine there, and ate well. Last night she spent the whole night in her own bed, for the first time after 6 nights, although she did wake a few times, and has developed an addiction to warm milk. This is OK just before bed, but is a bit of a pain at 1am, as our microwave is loud enough to wake the neighbours, never mind everyone in our house. Lara has promised not to ask for warm milk in the middle of the night again, unless she's ill. Tonight will be the big test. She did have a go at faking a tummy ache at 1am, when I was initially refusing to get her more warm milk, but she quickly refused the milk of magnesia I offered her to help her with her sore tummy. Funny that... I relented in the end though and got her some milk, but only on the definite promise that this was the last time..

CHAMPIONS - Lancashire County Cricket Club

2011-09-16T10:06:00.000+01:00

CHAMPIONS - Lancashire County Cricket Club Official Website

I couldn't let this pass without a post. Sky were kind enough to show the last few overs once Warwickshire had given in to a draw against Hampshire. At least Dad had the best seat in the house to watch the Red Rose county finally win the Championship. There might have been a few ciders knocked back last night in Taunton, even if it wasn't the locals doing the drinking!

Cliveden

2011-09-14T20:16:00.000+01:00

On Saturday morning we went to see the gardens at Cliveden, the swanky house near Maidenhead, famous for the Profumo scandal in the 1960s amongst lots of other things. Luda had read in the local paper that the gardens would be free to visitors on Saturday, as a way to entice people to join the National Trust. They were very spectacular, and all the better for being free :-)

Lara and her tummy

2011-09-14T20:08:00.000+01:00

Lara had a bad night's sleep last Friday, she was restless without really telling us what the problem was. I ended up spending the night with her, with us both sleeping on the floor in her room (she likes doing this, and would insist on us doing it when she's not poorly if I let her. It's quite good for my back, every once in a while!). She'd wake, shuddering with pain, and when I'd ask where it hurt, she'd point at her foot. I checked it over, and there was no bruising, and she didn't wince when I touched it, so I didn't think too much about it, and eventually we dropped off to sleep, although after a disturbed night, there was no way either of us was voluntarily going to get up at 6.30am on a Saturday to watch someone jump into the Thames, no matter how good the cause (sorry David Walliams!).
She had a good breakfast, but then went progressively downhill over the course of the day, still shuddering with pain from what we worked out to be stomach cramps. She barely ate anything all day, and when we tried calpol to see if that eased her pain, she just threw it back up. She's been very good at telling us when she's going to be sick, and so far *touch wood* we've always had a saucepan or her potty close at hand. (Over the course of the weekend, she displayed a definite preference for being sick into her potty rather than the pan, and she would insist that I hold her hair out of the way). I couldn't help but crack a little smile on one occasion on Sunday, she called for the potty.. "I'm going to be sick, Papa, potty!!!", and when I presented it (clean, I might add), she lifted her face from it after a few seconds and with a look of disdain that a teenager would have been proud of, stated "It's a bit smelly!".
Anyway, this upset tummy continued on Saturday evening and all day Sunday. She'd be OK at breakfast time, and eat quite well, but then the cramps would start, and all she wanted to do was lie on the sofa and watch TV, between bouts of loud (and upsetting for us to hear) moaning, and taking 20 minute naps. On Sunday night we decided it would be best if Lara slept in bed with me (and Buzz, it turned out) while Olga slept on the sofa, so that at least she might have a relatively undisturbed night.

Things weren't improving on Monday, and we were getting concerned about how little she was eating, so in the afternoon we took her to the GP, who reassured it appeared to be just a stomach bug, and to try and convince her to keep drinking as much as she could, and to try a little simple foods. Being told this by the doctor helped Lara understand that it would help her if she drank and ate something, and indeed by Tuesday she seemed to be over the worst of it. There was no calling for the potty, and she would even engage in conversation. By the afternoon she was happy to eat soup and bread, and it seemed like things were OK again. Last night though she still had some cramps and an attack of the screamy moans, so I took her downstairs to sleep on the sofa (we've already had me on her floor, her in our bed, this was the next place to try. After this I'd have her sleep on Mishka's bed.... (only kidding)). She slept well there, and we only woke at 8am, and she declared "I feel better now, can I go to nursery?". We felt it was still too soon, so she's been at home again today, and has been playing out in the garden for the first time since she started to feel ill. She seemed to have some cramps again after tea though, and got rather moany, but this might have been exhaustion, she went straight to sleep as soon as I put her in bed, without a book being read or a back being stroked (her latest thing she insists on).
So, I think she'll go back to nursery tomorrow, if she has a good night's sleep tonight, as she's been fine all day today and only went a little downhill after her tea.

David Walliams' Swim

2011-09-14T19:48:00.000+01:00

It would have been remiss of us not to have cheered on David Walliams as he swam the length of the River Thames, given we live so close to it, so last Friday night Olga and I headed down to Marlow, where he was going to be ending his swim for that day. BBC's The One Show were there to cover it, and Angela Rippon herself was on hand..

After an hour's wait, the man himself arrived to great cheers, although the crowd were on the wrong side of the river to get a good view (he's there in the centre of the photo, in the big white towel:

But he did come along in an inflatable and give everyone a wave before heading off to whereever he was planning to sleep that night (the Compleat Angler hotel, just 100m down the river from where we are standing, and VERY posh).

We had planned to bring Lara along the following morning at 7am to cheer him on as he clambered back in, but Lara's tummy got in the way of that..

Francesca's Christening & Birthday party

2011-09-14T19:36:00.000+01:00

Ahem, where were we? Yes, that's it, we'd come back from our three-night trip to Scotland on the sleeper. We loved it, and would really like to be able to take two weeks next summer to tour around the area properly.

Since then, there has been social events aplenty. A trip to Reading to see Anton, Becca, Eve and Tess (and to congratulate Mr & Mrs Leary!), and Lara has numerous invitations to birthday parties coming up. At the start of September we went to Marlow for the combined 1st birthday and Christening party for our friends' Ollie & Jo's second daughter, Francesca. It gave us all a rare chance to dress smartly:

Lara enjoyed stuffing her face, and Ollie and Jo had done a great job of putting on some entertainment for the kids, so the parents could relax for a while.

Lara's fondness for animal masks just gets stronger!

Tilehurst BBQ

2011-09-14T19:30:00.000+01:00

Considering it's hardly been a summer for BBQs, it seemed appropriate when we went to Anton & Becca's house at the end of August for an afternoon BBQ, that Anton had to do the cooking under an umbrella, in the rain.

The sun did come out in time for dessert, which Lara, Eve and Tess loved (as did the grown ups!). I'm not sure what's going through Tess' mind in this photo though:

There was the obligatory dressing up for the kids:

And Lara has perfected the Cheeky Monkey look:

Thanks for a lovely afternoon!

Pulling my finger out

2011-09-14T19:07:00.001+01:00

Right, Armstrong, pull your finger out and get this blog back on track!

More pics & a video

2011-08-28T11:02:00.001+01:00

Some more photos and a video have been uploaded to the same web album as the previous post..

Scotland August 2011

2011-08-22T22:57:00.000+01:00

I had time at the B&B tonight to upload some photos from last night and today....

A few days in the Highlands

2011-08-21T18:13:00.001+01:00

Just a quick post before we set off to London Euston to catch the overnight sleeper train to Scotland. We're going to get off at a little station called Tyndrum tomorrow morning, then do a 6 mile walk (I've got the backpack carrier for Lara!) to Bridge of Orchy station, where we'll catch the next train up to Fort William. In the afternoon we're going to head to Glen Coe, then back to Fort William to pick up our hire car. We've booked a B&B between FW and Mallaig, and then we'll catch the ferry on Tuesday morning to Skye. We'll tour around Skye then cross over the bridge, and head back to FW via Kyle of Lochalsh, before getting the sleeper back to London on Tuesday night.If we get a decent internet connection, I'll post updates as we go...

Time for a change

2011-08-07T21:54:00.000+01:00

There is another reason why I bought some hanging baskets a few weeks back, and that was to help spruce up the appearance of the house, as this week we put it on the market!
Olga and I have been working together at home since March, and we've decided that we would like some more space, especially so we can separate our working and living environments. Because we work from home, we're not tied down so tightly about living close to a particular location, we just need to be within a couple of hours drive of Heathrow and the Reading area, where some of our bosses live for the odd time when we need to meet up. This means we can cast our net quite wide when it comes to looking for somewhere new to live. We like the area we are in now, the countryside is lovely and only a few minutes drive from home, and it's very easy to get to London and Heathrow, but we have an opportunity now to get "more for our money" by looking for a place further away from London. We're in no rush to sell up, and we're not going to give the house away for silly money, so we're content to let this drag on if needed. However, if someone was to come along and really like the place and offers us something sensible, we'll take it. Our chances will be helped because we're going to rent for a while, to remove the concern of a long chain in the buying/selling process, and give us time to look for the "perfect" next house to buy, and then we'd not be held back in our own chain.
It also makes sense to do this now while Luda is here, she's brilliant at keeping the house clean and tidy while Olga and I are working, and can take the dogs out during viewings! Should it drag on past late September when she has to go back to Russia, hopefully by then Olga and I will be in the habit of living in a clean and minimalist house! We've rented a storage unit and have moved a lot of the unnecessary "stuff" into it, and will continue to do so until we're left with the bare minimum at home.
Personally I expect this to take some time, but we live in a desirable location, the house is in good condition and we've made a lot of improvements to it, and we'll have no onward chain, so you just never know, we might just get lucky and it could be sorted in weeks :-)

Need to get back in the habit of posting!

2011-08-07T21:26:00.000+01:00

Wow, I am really out of practise with posting on here, I apologise!
Olga has been away in Kazakhstan for a week, and has another week to go. This has meant Baba Luda and I are busier than normal with the house and Lara.
Lara has a friend at nursery who only lives a few doors up from us in Wycombe, and the girls have been visiting each other's houses to play, and last Sunday Lara and I, and Zoe and her mum went fruit picking at a local -pick-your-own farm. It was the first time I've done that, and whilst the fruit is more expensive than buying it at the supermarket, it was a lovely way to pass a few hours with Lara and it supports a local business, so we'll definitely do it again once Olga is back. I even made my first ever jam from the strawberries we collected! I don't like to blow my own trumpet, but even I noticed how tasty it is, and probably by luck more than skill the consistency is about right.
Lara is, well, Lara. She makes me laugh with the things she says (on the way home from nursery: "Papa, when can I get a tatoo?") and her intelligence, particularly her memory, astounds me. Today we visited Homebase in Wycombe after having a little picnic in the park, and she remembered that we'd been to that same Homebase two weeks ago, and that we bought baskets of flowers (I'd bought some hanging baskets for the garden, aren't I the softy type!). Maybe it's normal for a three and a half year to remember things like that in detail, but I'm still impressed.
She's waking almost like clockwork at 6.40am now, and sometimes she'll lie in bed and shout for someone to come and get her up, but more and more she's getting up herself and coming into our room. We can send her back to her room and she'll get herself dressed, which makes our mornings easier!

We're back!

2011-07-20T23:31:00.001+01:00

It's true! We've been back a week from holiday, and only now I'm getting chance to write something.

The holiday was fantastic - I'll not go into too much detail here, I'll be here for days writing about it, but suffice it to say we'd book the same cruise again for next summer in a heartbeat, it exceeded our expectations. The 2nd week, in a hotel on the north coast of Majorca, was almost as good, and in itself would have been a great break and we'd have loved a second week there too.

The cruise was very informal - no posh dining (unless you wanted that - there was a separate restaurant with waiter service and a dress code), lots of great entertainment and a kids club that Lara loved, which was just as well because she spent 3 two-hour sessions a day there!
The hotel was right on the beach, but also with a good pool, and never a problem to get a sunbed. The sea was lovely and warm, the beach shelving very gently so I could walk a long way out with Lara floating in her little boat. The food was good and the wine was cheap, and the weather was great - too hot one day, when later I'd heard it reached 42 deg C while I was out pushing Lara for her afternoon nap. Once she'd dropped off I called into a bar for a beer and couldn't actually ask for it, my brain couldn't form the proper sentence! And that was in English, not in Spanish.

I've picked out some random photos and videos...

Here's our first look at the ship while it was still in Palma harbour:

And here we are in Cannes:

Luton

2011-06-28T05:52:00.001+01:00

At the departure gate...

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Paella, Pasta & Frogs Legs

2011-06-28T01:36:00.003+01:00

Well, we're nearly off on holiday. It's 1.25am and packing is finished, the taxi is coming to take us to Luton airport at 3.30am, and the big decision is whether it's worth having an hour and a half's nap or just get in the holiday mood and have a whiskey & ginger. OK, I'll have one while I type..
We've got a lot of luggage, there's no getting around the fact that we don't travel light. 3 bags for the hold, albeit one of them is big but light, filled with beach towels and Lara's swimming paraphernalia. Then each of us has one cabin bag, Lara's is her cool Gruffalo trunkie:

And finally we're taking her pram too...

The itinerary has us spending tomorrow in Palma on board the ship, then it departs for Propriano in Corsica at 11pm. It gets there on Thursday morning, and then onto Civitavecchia on Friday, the nearest port for Rome. We've ducked the very expensive organised tours to Rome, and have booked our own train tickets, and we'll make up our own 4 or 5 hour walking tour on the day. From there we move up the coast to Livorno for Naples, then onto Cannes (Olga will be leaving the credit card on board the ship if we get off). Finally we visit Port Mahon in Menorca on Monday before we return to Palma on Tuesday. From there we transfer by coach to our hotel on the north coast, in C'an Picafort - a hotel I've visited before when I was barely a toddler. They have renovated it since then! We stay there for a week before coming home just in time for my birthday and our 5th wedding anniversary (already!)...

Next stop Britain's Got Talent

2011-06-18T11:53:00.003+01:00

I never knew Lara had learned the words to Daisy, Daisy - next she just needs to get the chords right on the guitar, and we're in business. Olga and I can retire and live off the earnings of our rockstar daughter...

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Daylight Robbery!

2011-06-17T09:30:00.000+01:00

When I came home from the gym this morning, the milkman had been and dropped off our usual Friday order - 2 pints of milk, 15 eggs, orange juice and bacon. I left them on the doorstep as Lara likes to find them and take them to the kitchen, and went in for my shower. 15 minutes later I sent Lara out to the doorstep "to see if the milkman has been", and when we opened the door, the bacon had gone!! You can't really see our doorstep from the road, it's up 15 steps, so I'm still wondering if it was a passing opportunist, or someone who had seen the milkman drop off a bunch of stuff. Luda suggested maybe it was a cat, and Lara has run with this, claiming she saw the cat, he's called Percy and he's pink.
I'm happy to let her believe Percy nicked our bacon... but it's really annoying!

Jabs, Rain and a Scarecrow

2011-06-16T20:25:00.010+01:00

Last Wednesday was a jabby day. Lara had to have her boosters, one jab in each arm, and the little trooper didn't cry, and earned two choccy buttons as a reward from the nurse. She did cry when we took the plasters off later that day, though. After Lara, it was the boys turn, as they had to have their kennel cough boosters at the vets; this is a nasal spray, and Mishka took offence at me putting him on a table in the vet's room, and he reminded me and the vet what a strong lad he is. Jackson was a different matter, he loved the attention, and had his spray and then a jab as well for good measure to boost one of his vaccines.
Here are a few photos and videos from the past couple of weeks:

With the sunshine and rain we've been having, the veg patch has gone crazy. Lara noticed that our neighbour had a scarecrow in their garden, and so Baba spent some time making one for our garden out of some of Lara's old clothes. In Russian it's called a "Chuchilla" (my phonetic spelling) and she lives in our veg patch now - maybe the only female scarecrow around? The garden is producing a lot of strawberries at the moment, which is no bad thing.

Lara decided on Sunday morning that 5.30am would be a great time to wake up, and although I slowed her down a bit, we were still downstairs having breakfast at 6.30am, which is much earlier than normal. It gave me time to write up our latest cricket match though, before Lara and I decided it had been a long time since we'd taken her bike to the park. The weather was terrible, cold, windy and wet, but that just meant that we had the whole playground to ourselves. Then we went shopping, and Lara got a nurses outfit and a cheerleaders outfit, complete with pom-poms, which worked out well, as she uses similar ones at gymanstics and so is deslighted to be able to practise with them at home. She was able to wear her nurses outfit when we got home from the shops as we went round to visit one of her nursery friends who is poorly with chickenpox at the moment, and Lara tried very hard to make Zoe feel better, taking her temperature and listening to her heartbeat.

Olga is away in Kazakhstan for another week; we've worked out that the best time for a skype call is while Lara is having her tea, given the five hour time difference.

Right, back again

2011-06-06T21:02:00.002+01:00

After a few hectic weeks, life is returning to a different normality now.

Dad's funeral went as well as could be expected. Lara and her cousin Elizabeth were very good in the chapel, and enjoyed running around and playing at the "do" afterwards at Radcliffe cricket club.

Since then, Lara's been to a friend's party at an indoor play centre:

Then last week we went to the circus that was on in High Wycombe. Of course Lara liked the clowns, and the acrobats were doing things that she recognised from her gymnastics (albeit 30 feet higher than she normal performs!). There were dancing horses, but the highlight were three Brazilian motorcyclists riding around in a big metal spherical ball - the Ball of Death, if you like. It was an amazing sight. Here's someone else's video of it I found on youtube:

Cricket at Littlewick has been a mixed bag, 3 straight heavy defeats, followed by us having to forfeit a game through lack of players, then this last Saturday we had a big win against our rivals at the bottom of the league table. Results and scorecards are here.

One plan we have for a future holiday is to rent a motorhome and tour around, perhaps in Scotland, or maybe the USA or Canada. To give us an idea of what kind of motorhome we'd need to rent, on Sunday we visited a huge motorhome show at Stratford-upon-Avon, and had a look inside dozens, from the very small to the ridiculously huge. The most expensive one we visited was £80,000 to buy!

We have booked one little holiday, up to Scotland and back on the sleeper from London Euston. We'll leave on a Sunday night in August, get off at Upper Tyndrum station in the middle of nowhere (a very beautiful middle of nowhere all the same), have a bit of a stroll, then get a normal train up to Fort William for the night, returning on the Tuesday night to arrive back Wednesday morning. It's just Olga, Lara and I but it might be a tight squeeze in one of those sleeper cabins! Given that we've done longer rail journeys in Russia with Lara, and without her in the USA, it shouldn't be a problem.

And finally, I had a strange trip back in time on Saturday - the cash machine gave me £5 notes! I'd heard they were planning on doing this, but it was the first time I can remember getting a fiver out of one since I was in Keele in '97!

This is our last normal week for a while, Olga is off to Kazakhstan again on Saturday morning for 2 weeks, then soon after that we going on our rearranged summer holiday to the Med for 2 weeks.

Dad

2011-05-12T14:41:00.000+01:00

Howard John Armstrong

27th July 1938 - 8th May 2011

It's not been the greatest week. My dad died suddenly on Sunday morning, at home, from a heart attack. Whilst not in the best of health after a couple of strokes over the past few years, this was certainly unexpected.
Early memories of him relate almost exclusively to railways - his father was a signalman, and Dad loved railways and everything to do with them. He'd take me on day trips with the North Manchester Railway Society to railyards in places as far afield as Eastfield in Glasgow and Eastliegh in Southampton. I might not have been the trendiest of teenagers, going train spotting with my Dad, but his knowledge of the subject was amazing to behold. On the night that Arsenal beat Liverpool 0-2 at Anfield to win the Division One title in 1989, Dad and I spent all night on Preston railway station (there is no such thing as a "train station"), watching the royal mail trains load up - in the days when a first class letter would arrive the next day, I was shown how it could happen. I saw more of the country on those trips than many of the kids I was at school with.
We built a large model railway in the loft at home, it took years. It started on a table, and grew until we had no choice but to move it up there. I remember waiting anxiously each night for Dad to come home from working in the bank to see if he'd brought a new piece of track, or a new engine or coach.
As I got older and my hobbies moved from train spotting to sports, Dad would come and watch. Perhaps not as often as I would have liked, but what that meant was that when he did come and watch, it meant all the more. I was playing so much sport when I was between 16 and 18 that I doubt he could have come and watched it all! He came to a basketball final we played at the YMCA in Manchester, and to the main local derby football match when Bury Grammar School's 3rd XI - with me as captain - took on Bolton School. I like to think we won that one. It wasn't all victorious - he watched me play cricket for Littlewick Green 2nd XI against Little Kingshill when I first started playing down here, around 1999, and I bowled a 12-ball over (not a good thing, for you non-cricket buffs). I was embarrassed for myself, but also for him, as he was sat near the Little Kingshill players, and I can only imagine the laugh they were having at my expense that he had to listen to, but he never mentioned it to me.
After his strokes he lost his mobility, and became a great supporter of Sky Sports. There was always a game to watch, be it Manchester City in the football season or any cricket at all in Summer. Cricket was a great love of his, and why not, when Gary Sobers lived across the road from you when you were a young teenager, and you worked in the scorebox while he was the professional player at Radcliffe. It's fitting that we'll be having a "do" after the funeral on Tuesday at Radcliffe Cricket Club, I think he'd like that.

Dad could be a man of few words sometimes, but every one of those was always a kind one.

A trip to Hyde Park

2011-05-01T11:27:00.002+01:00

I went into London on Friday to join in the celebrations for the Royal Wedding. I would have liked to have taken Lara, but with the crowds and trying to keep her entertained during the duller parts of the ceremony, it seemed better to leave her at home with Baba so they could watch on TV, and I could enjoy the atmosphere without worrying about her.
Hyde Park was fantastic, they had put up three huge screens, and lots of speakers, so no matter where you stood or sat, you got a good view and could hear clearly what was happening. It was cloudy and a little chilly to start with, but as if they had planned it, the sun came out exactly as Catherine arrived at the alter. From that point on it got warmer and clearer, and the crowd in the park cheered at the "I do" moments, and joined in with Jerusalem and the National Anthem, and the Queen proved very popular too, getting lots of cheers anytime she appeared. The highlights were those kisses on the balcony, then the fly past. Having been in Hyde Park for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002, when concorde made a flypast, I knew where the Lancaster bomber, Spitfire and Hurricane would come from, and it was great to see (and hear) them, but after they'd passed the palace, they turned 180 degrees and flew right over the crowd in Hyde Park, still very low, it was a fantastic bonus.

After the flypast there was a live band on stage in the park, and they had a "crowd vote" to decide the most popular song to play at a wedding reception, with Aerosmith's "I don't want to miss a thing" beating Bryan Adams' "Everything I do", and there was a mass karaoke session, which was very amusing.

And when I got home, my own little Princess was waiting for me, complete with the forced grin that many a bride knows on her wedding day, I'm sure!
:

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

2011-04-20T16:48:00.000+01:00

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.

The bookie is the only winner

2011-04-14T19:14:00.000+01:00

We had our usual dabble on the Grand National on Saturday, with no great success. Over the past few years one of us has usually won a bit of money, enough to cover the bets I put on, but not this year. Lara did the best out of all of us, Midnight Club came 6th, then Luda's horse Backstage came 10th, but the rest of our horses failed to finish the race (though they did all live to see another day). Lara had good fun picking the horses, based on the colours of the jockeys' silks:

Lara's been at home between Monday and Wednesday rather than at nursery as she's had a bad cold, so Luda's been busy entertaining her. It wasn't too distracting for us working in the loftroom, we were expecting more visits from Lara but the weather was good which meant that she could play outside with Luda much of the time, even with her cold.
She's gone back to nursery today, they're gearing up for the Royal Wedding there, there'll be an afternoon tea party the day before that the parents are invited to.

Busy times

2011-04-06T20:00:00.002+01:00

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!

Random things

2011-03-25T16:05:00.001Z

Here's a bit of Lara on her bike at the weekend, she's more confident now, but either gets bored or tired quickly, so the longest distance I've seen her ride is probably 50m before she stops and wants to rest or do something else.

And here is Lara and Olga giving Jacksy a bath after a particularly muddy walk a few weeks ago...

And finally, last night Lara helped us with our king prawn chow mein, and even had a go with the chopsticks, and to be fair on her, she wasn't terrible with them!

Gruffalo Day

2011-03-25T15:47:00.001Z

Lara's costume was a great success at nursery last week, it was worth Olga staying up past midnight making her "claw-gloves" and then putting the purple prickles on Lara's furry gillet the next morning.
Lara was allowed to play the role of the Gruffalo when the kids read the book together at nursery later that day, and she even won a Gruffalo colouring book in the charity raffle.

Struggling for news.. gym, Olympics, Infinity and a party

2011-03-16T20:47:00.000Z

Not much to report again in the last week!
Lara managed one forward roll at gymnastics yesterday, which is a personal best for her. Having bottled out of going on the rings last week, claiming she was scared, she was happy to try again and completed two backward-roll things. All this enthusiasm inspired me to get onto the Olympics website and apply for tickets. So, I've applied for four tickets for the gymnastics (naturally) and the athletics, hopefully Beth Tweddle & Jessica Ennis will do us proud. If there was an Olympic medal for combined snorting and dirty-looking, Olga would be a certain gold medal winner for her performance when I pointed out that tickets for the beach volleyball started at £20... I did apply for 2 tickets for one of the men's basketball semi-finals, on the off chance we might see the USA play, and Olga and I were both decent players back in our day.
All this internet work was done using our new super-duper BT Infinity broadband connection. I've gone from 3.1Mbps to 33Mbps in a single bound. Given that the wireless signal has to travel up two storeys and through walls a foot thick, it won't make that much difference to our day-to-day lives, but hey, the BT engineer said we were the first on the street to have it, and any improvement is a good thing. And stuff does download quicker now, and we'll make more use of BBC iPlayer, and hopefully Luda will watch some Russian TV streamed on the net when she arrives in 16 days and 18 hours...
We got to say hello to the parents of Lara's latest Best Friend, Harrison, on Saturday, at a birthday party for one of the boys in her room. There are many more children in her room now than there were in the Marlow nursery, so it was quite a busy party, but I got involved with the Hokey-Cokey and musical chairs. Lara needs more practise with that, she didn't quite get the sitting-down bit.
Tomorrow is Gruffalo day at nursery, so I've printed out a mask for her, and Olga is painting it as I type. Apparently Olga's created an outfit to go with it, I'll see it in the morning, but I hope I don't need my fingerless gloves, as they've been sequestered....

2 weeks? Already?!

2011-03-09T20:44:00.004Z

Wow, time has just flown by. 2 weeks since our last post, sorry about that. It's a reflection of busy days for Olga and I, and the fact that nothing really spectacular has been happening at home.
Let's sum it up quickly:
Olga's trip to Kazakhstan has been postponed until April. We're both really enjoying the new jobs, it's interesting to be learning new stuff, and I've found that I'm not quite as thick as I thought I'd become - I'd had it easy at my old job, I knew it all inside out and rarely had to engage my brain; I was worried I'd forgotten how to use it, but these past two weeks have reminded me that I can learn new things and also contribute ideas based on 12 years of experience.
Working from home is going really well. We've got the morning routine sorted, so that Lara is usually at nursery before 8am, and Olga and I are at our desks before 8.15. There have been a couple of times when the weather has been lovely and springlike in the afternoon, so one or both of us have walked with the dogs to the nursery to collect Lara. It's nearly 4 miles there and back, and takes just over an hour, but the dogs like the walk, and it's been nice after being sat at a desk for much for the day (although we can sneak down to put a load of washing in, or let the cooker repair man in). We usually let the dogs come up and join us for an hour or two in the afternoons to give them a change of scenery - so far the phone hasn't rung (or should I say the laptops haven't rung - we work on skype a lot) so we've not had to chuck them out in a hurry.
It's also meant there's been no problem for Olga and I to go to the gym when it suits us, and to take Lara to gymnastics on Tuesday afternoons. She really looks forward to going; last week she was very confident on the rings, but this week she bottled out of them, telling me later she was scared:

We need to help her with her forward rolls too, she just can't get the hang of them!

That's about it. Off now to carry on watching Season 7 of 24, we need to finish it before Olga goes to Kazakhstan, normally it takes us 3 weeks. We're on hour number 6 next...

Gym Bunny

2011-02-23T15:23:00.003Z

We both took Lara to her second gymnastics class yesterday, so I could see how it all worked, as I'll have to take her whilst Olga is away in Kazakhstan next month. She was just a little bit shy going out into the sports hall with the other kids, but soon relaxed. It helps that there is another girl from her room in nursery who goes, Jessica, so the two of them stuck together for the warm up. Yep, they have a proper warm up, running and jumping and stretching, then they split into small groups and move around different pieces of apparatus, such as the beam, parallel bars, and rings. Here's a video to give you an idea, hopefully I'll take a few more over the next few weeks. I did take a good one of her on the rings, doing a sort of backward-roll thing (I know all the technical terms), but I lost the recording, doh!

The End of an Era

2011-02-20T23:04:00.006Z

So, Friday was my last day working with Tigress software. In different guises, and under different companies, I've done this since September 1997. In that time I've worked with IBM for 10 months, then PGS until 2003, then the company went independent until 2006, and since then with Geotrace. From tomorrow I'll be joining Olga at Flare Solutions Limited, run by some of the guys who recruited me for IBM when I was finishing my Masters at Keele University.
It hasn't quite sunk in yet that I'll not be seeing the same faces, other than at the odd reunion in a pub or whilst working in some random oil town. The receptionist at Tigress has known me since my first day on the job, when IBM shared the same office building in Maidenhead as PGS, who went on to buy the bit of the Tigress software IBM had owned, and that I was working on. I've worked with 8 of the 9 people left working for Tigress in Marlow for over 12 years, and in this day and age, in a technology company, that's quite a family atmosphere to leave behind.
In those times I've seen places that most people with my middle class Lancashire upbringing would never see, starting with Maracaibo in Venezuela (my first foreign trip), when the oxygen masks came down on the flight from Miami to Maracaibo. With hindsight, it probably wasn't great preparation to spend the day before a long trip to a strange country, representing your company for the first time, watching England play South Africa in a Test Match at Headingly. More than a couple of red wines were put away during the day, and I remember the struggle to get into the taxi at 6am to go to Leeds Bradford airport (I bet Anton and Becca do too?!).
Atfer that the trips to, erm, shall we say "interesting" places followed thick and fast... Lagos & Port Harcourt (Nigeria) a few times, Port Gentil (Gabon), Pointe Noire (Congo), Tehran, Aberdeen, Almaty (Kazakhstan), Tripoli, then some more desirable postings like Cairo, Dubai, Houston, Oslo, The Hague, Copenhagen, and my favourite place I ever visited for work - Zagreb. Let's not forget Tyumen, and the trip to a hot spring where the water temperature was +43 deg C and the air temperature was -17. That was before I'd met Olga, and subsequent trips to Tyumen were even more fun as I met Olga's family and later we took Lara.
In all that time I almost exclusively travelled in economy class, and this became a feature of travelling with Tigress; the Gabon trip was all business, and I was upgraded on BA on the way back from Maracaibo, and once I had to go to Jakarta at short notice and the only seats left available were in business class. This was one of my favourite trips, but also had one of the worst moments.. I went all the way there and back in business, including my only time upstairs on a 747, with BA from Hong Kong. However, I'd been advised by the well-travelled boss of Tigress that I should enter Indonesia on a visitor's visa, as time was short, and when I tried to leave to get my flight to Hong Kong, wearing my shirt and tie and carrying a laptop, the passport official saw his chance for a quick buck. It cost me $100 and almost a new pair of boxers after an "interview" in a sweaty office before I was allowed to embark. Two days in Hong Kong and my upper deck return flight more than made up for it. Hong Kong is my favourite city of any I've visited so far, for work or pleasure. It's a cliche, but watch the laser light show from Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel if you're ever there (don't stay in the Peninsula Hotel, if the price of the drinks in Felix are anything to go by).

(Felix Bar, not my photo, but you get the idea)

Rather spookily, the BBC has just put a video on their news website about the light show today.. I did spend more time in Hong Kong either side of a two week trip to Guangzhou and Beijing, where I took speed tourism to new extremes by visiting the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall at Badaling in one day.

Even with economy travel, I did save up enough airmiles to visit my friend Katan in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, a return trip on BA costing my £57 in tax plus my 50,000 miles, and I stayed in his flat in Ipanema.

It tells it's own story that it was only in August 2010 that I earned my first airline Silver card, with Emirates, as I made my third trip to Dhaka (Bangladesh), and the chances are I'll not get to benefit from it before it exipres in 6 months time.

Of course, I couldn't mention Tigress without mentioning Olga. The boss had met Olga in Russia and on a trip to Kazakhstan, and on his return to Marlow he told us about this fiery blond the Tyumen office had hired, who attacked a Kazakh taxi driver with a high-heeled shoe soon after arriving at Almaty airport. Months later Olga would insist that at no point did her shoe come off, although she will admit to giving the said taxi driver some earache, but the myth had been born. This was Olga, and don't mess with her. I was very interested in meeting her, and could have sworn that malicious people were at work when I had to carry out the follow-up installation visit to Almaty during the very same week when Olga would be visiting the Marlow office - I was actually seriously peeved about it, and I'd not even met her yet! Someone upstairs must have felt sorry for me, and Olga's visit was extended, so I did get to meet her, and I wasted no time in inviting her to watch the Russia v Portugal Euro 2004 football match at a pub in Marlow (16th June, Olga! I looked that up, I didn't remember it. Well done Chris Rose for being my wingman). I proposed at sunset on 25th May 2005 (Liverpool beat AC Milan on penalties after being 0-3 down at half time - I've still not seen that game!) on the lip of the Grand Canyon during a 3-week tour of the USA, and we married in July 2006. Lara came along on December 10th 2007, and we took her to the Tigress Christmas Party 4 days later.

Back to this week, there was a leaving card and some drinks on Friday afternoon, but I couldn't clear my office in time, and had to go back in yesterday morning. A fitting way to say a quiet goodbye to a job that I've really enjoyed, and has given me a lot, but now is the right time to try something new and exciting.

It's a small world in the Oil & Gas business, and the chances are good that I'll bump into old faces in airport bars (not lounges) in unpleasant places.

Olga and I will move on from having different offices in the same building, to sharing the same office at home. I'm really looking forward to learning something new, to being out of my comfort zone, and helping Flare be successful. The fact I'll get to work with Olga every day is a bonus that money can't buy. Having said that, she is bugg*ring off to Kazakhstan in March for two weeks. Some things never change.

The flight class does - she's going Business....

Sorry this has gone a bit, but I wanted to write this for myself, it'll be something to look back on in my retirement!

Jackson takes Lara for a walk

2011-02-20T11:20:00.005Z

I took the kids out for a walk today so Olga could get some work done, and Lara wanted to try taking Jackson for a walk. We've let her practise a little bit with this in the house, and I thought that, with a bit of clever work with the leads, she'd be OK to try out in the real world today. She had two goes, this was the first, and more successful, attempt. Jacksy did pull her over on the second go, but thanks to the backup lead, he didn't escape and Lara was fine, although she was happy to give him back to me after that...

London 2012?

2011-02-15T23:35:00.002Z

Olga and I have applied to be volunteers at the Olympics, but Lara has gone a stage further today, starting her gymnastics training. There's a gymnastics club very close to her new nursery and Olga took Lara there this afternoon for an introductory lesson, and Lara absolutely loved it. Besides the expected running and jumping, she swung from rings, climbed on parallel bars and balanced on a low beam.
The photo is nothing to do with her gym class, she just made me laugh when I saw her after her bath on Sunday!

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Late night party animal

2011-02-12T23:38:00.000Z

Auntie Lucy has come over today for her birthday drinks. Olga and Lucy took Lara to the park, shops and pub this afternoon while I rearranged the home office - we've had to buy a bigger desk for Olga! She's already outgrown the one she had, so I'll have that one, but this has meant a big reshuffle today in the office. It's also getting its first test as a bedroom, Lucy will report back on the comfort rating of the new sofa bed in there. Lara was allowed to stay up and join in the Chinese take away we ordered, so she's had wantons, spring rolls (or spring sausage rolls as she called them), prawn toasts and house special chow-mein. I've only just put her to bed at 10.50pm, and she was still pretty perky then, but she's asleep now, and to encourage her to have a lie-in tomorrow, we've put her black-out curtain up. Whilst she's never been one for getting up before 6.30, hopefully tomorrow she'll aim to beat her personal best of something like 10.20am.

Storm in a teacup?

2011-02-04T12:39:00.000Z

I splashed out last weekend on a weather station for the garden - rainfall, wind speed, temperature, humidity, I can measure them all now. It all goes to my laptop in the office then up onto a website, you can access it here. Check out the "trends" link for graphs showing all sorts of clever stuff.
If global warming is true, you'll find out about it here first!

Splish splash and chopsticks

2011-02-03T21:00:00.000Z

One of the benefits of our new jobs is a gym allowance, so we have both joined our local gym, which also gives us access to the leisure centre swimming pool (think the Brittas Empire, you're pretty close). While Olga had her gym induction on Sunday I took Lara to the teaching pool for an hour. It was just time for her to play in the water, she's not been in a pool since we were in Holland last June, so this was just an excuse for a splash around and remind her what fun it is. We enquired about lessons for her, they're not at great times, but once we get settled into this "working from home" routine, we'll find time to take her. In the meantime we bought her some goggles and a float, as the other kids in the pool had these and Lara will need them soon enough. She loves her goggles!

We're getting her used to them by encouraging her to wear them in the bath, last night she had a shower, and loved lying on her back under the spray of water, with it splashing onto her face. We'll probably go again this Sunday - I need to take the plunge and start my training regime; sadly I'm really looking forward to getting a sweat on in the gym, I don't think I've been remotely fit since well before Lara was born, and it can only be a good thing. I'm even going to take a Pilates class! My core stability is about as stable as a Middle Eastern government at the moment, and it gives me all sorts of back problems, so I reckon Pilates is the answer. It was invented by a bloke, you know!!

Lara seems to be really enjoying her new nursery. When she came home on Monday I asked her if she wanted to go again on Tuesday, and she was really excited and shouted "yes please!", which I think is a good sign. Yesterday, to celebrate the Chinese New Year, the kids had stir-fry vegetables & noodles for their afternoon meal, and they all had a go at eating with chopsticks, I would have liked to have seen that. Apparently Lara particularly loved the noodles, so we'll give her a try at those at home one day. She already likes poppadoms, and has had fajitas before, so it all adds to her international experiences. The nursery has some ideas that are new to Lara, like she wears her slippers there rather than shoes or trainers when she's inside, and on Tuesday night she asked "May I start now?" before tucking into her tea, and that must be something they do at nursery, as we've not taught her such good manners!

Work-wise the home office is nearing completion, a new sofabed arrived this week, as Luda will sleep in the office after she arrives on the 2nd April for her 6-month stay. All our new screens and keyboards and suchlike have arrived, so the place does look more like an office now, and Olga has been putting in the hours up here this week - so long as the internet connection stays up, this working from home thing looks like a winner!
I've got 2 more weeks of limbo between doing little bits for Flare and finishing things up for Geotrace before we'll find out what it's like when we're both working in here...

Settling In? C'est bien, non?

2011-01-27T23:41:00.001Z

Lara had her second settling-in session at the new nursery yesterday, I left her there for 90 minutes in the morning, and when I came to pick her up the kids were all playing outside, and I was able to watch her for a few seconds before she saw me, and she looked really happy, and not at all nervous or shy. Her new key-worker, Lilian (no sniggering from those Shamless watchers out there!) said Lara had been absolutely fine, she'd struck up a friendship with another girl on a settling-in session, and they'd sat in on the weekly French lesson, although Lara flatly denied this later when I interrogated her in my perfect A-S Level Business French. After that I took her to her Marlow nursery, where she handed out the "leaving cakes" she'd helped to make on Tuesday night:

Tomorrow she has a 3-hour session including lunch at the new nursery, then her final afternoon at Marlow. It'll be sad to leave there, the staff have been very good with Lara, and she's really enjoyed it, I don't think we can recall one occasion when she's been upset at the idea of going to nursery. OK, sometimes recently she would have preferred to stay in bed, but once she's up and dressed and fully awake, she's always been excited about going.
The new nursery, like Marlow, would like us to bring photographs of family & pets in to help settle Lara if she does have moments of homesickness, and I'm afraid I've gone very "Competitive Dad" on this one this time, although Picasa does make this sort of thing pretty easy, but here is Lara's "Comfort Card":

They wanted photos glued to a piece of A4 card, I might have got a bit carried away, but at least I've tested out our new office printer.

The home office, nearly there

2011-01-23T23:47:00.001Z

We've still not finished getting the office ready, but fortunately Olga's first day tomorrow will be at our boss' house. My part of the office is in need of a bit of filing:

And tonight, when I tried to get up to finish the tidying up, I was pinned down to the sofa by my boys:

Next stop - Tour de France

2011-01-23T23:37:00.000Z

I took Lara to the park today with her bike; she's not been on it for at least 6 months, probably more, but somehow she knew how to ride it. Last time she basically sat on it and we pushed her, but today she told me "put my helmet on, put my feet on the pedals, and hold the handles", and she could ride confidently (so long as we didn't go uphill, then she needed a push). After we got home I asked Olga if she had taken Lara out on her bike and shown her how to ride, but she hadn't. We asked Lara if she had cycled at nursery, and she said no, and we've not seen any bikes there, so we can only think that she has picked it up off the TV, as plenty of the characters in the cartoons she watches ride bikes. Anyway, it was great to see and will make trips out all the more interesting now, as we won't have to "helicopter" over her while she's on her bike in the park:

No New Nursery Nerves

2011-01-19T23:19:00.000Z

Wow, nearly two weeks - time is flying at the moment, I'm busy at work trying to clear my task list and write handover documents, and Olga is making the most of her time at home by setting up our home office. This has involved an awful lot of moving "stuff" from one room to another, and quite a lot of stuff will go onto eBay or freecycle.

Olga took Lara to her new nursery today for her first settling-in session; an hour of playing in the pre-school room whilst Olga stayed with her. She was absolutely fine, the other children made it easy for her to play with them, and we've got no great concerns about how she'll be when she starts there full time at the start of February. She has two more settling in sessions next week, that I'll take her to when I'm on gardening leave.

The boys have recovered fully from their operations, and whilst we're yet to test them out off the lead on a walk, they did skip past me out of the front door one evening when I was talking to our neighbour, but they came back when called (OK, after a few moments of investigating the neighbour's garden)

Trying out the new camera phone

2011-01-07T09:34:00.000Z

This new phone is easy to use in some ways, and in others it'll take me ages to work things out. Lara was able to take a good photo of Olga last night, and then she posed for a nice one for me:

Olga's One Day To Go

2011-01-06T23:48:00.001Z

Tomorrow is Olga's last day with Geotrace after more than 6 years. Hopefully there'll be no emergencies in the morning, her handover seems to have gone quite smoothly, and there should be a couple of shandies in the pub at lunchtime. She'll be having two weeks off before starting with Flare on the 24th January.
I've got a few more weeks to do, but hopefully I'll be at home on gardening leave from late January for a couple of weeks. Our toys have arrived already, nice big Dell laptops and HTC Desire phones, so we'll be customising them for the next few evenings. We're used to laptops, but the phones (I've got the HD, Olga's got the Z) are a great novelty, so I expect to be posting up to Facebook with annoying frequency over the next few days.

Boys update

2011-01-06T23:35:00.000Z

The boys seem to be OK after their operations. It's been 2 weeks and we've only just decided to relieve them of their buster collars. Those collars might not have survived much longer anyway, I was repairing them on a daily basis with gaffa tape. We're still waiting to see a big improvement in their behaviour around other dogs, but we have to remember that this wasn't going to be a miracle cure. It'll definitely be easier on the boys when we're working from home so they can interact with us more.
Here are a couple of pics from earlier this week:

Christmas in Radcliffe, back to work then New Year at home

2011-01-06T23:10:00.000Z

As you can imagine, things have been rather hectic these past few weeks.

We drove up to Radcliffe on Christmas morning (2 hours 40 mins - this will be relevent later), and had a lovely, traditional Christmas Day - a great turkey dinner, time to open presents before watching the Queen, then entertaining Lara. I even managed to get through the day without a nap, not bad since we'd got up at 6.30. We had to wake Lara up, and when we asked her if we should go and see if Santa had been, the reply was something like "Not yet, I want to stay in bed"!!

Lara took to her roller skates with great aplomb, only falling over a couple of times, and even then she managed to fall gracefully. Her balance is good, and when we took her out with the boys for a walk, she was much better at staying on the sledge whilst Mishka pulled her along at a sprint, managing a personal best of about 80 metres in one ride.

On Boxing Day we took Lara to the East Lancashire Railway for a trip on a steam train. Depending on which side of the train you are sitting, the scenery was either dramatic snow-covered countryside or industrial sprawl, but Lara loved the steam engine, and the driver gave an extra long toot on the horn whilst we watched it pulling away after we got off, which delighted Lara.

The journey home on the Monday took rather longer, more like 5 hours, which scuppered our ideas of starting the job of turning our bedroom into our new home office. On the Tuesday we drove into the Cotswolds to meet up with Catherine, Nick, Elizabeth and William for a lovely pub lunch and to swap some more presents.
Olga and I were back at work from the Wednesday to Friday, and Lara came with us. It would have been nice to have had a quiet couple of days there, but we were both pretty busy with trying to clear our "to do" lists before we leave.

On New Years Eve we did our usual thing, we got a load of food and drink in and had a little house party, just the five of us. Lara went to bed just before 10pm, but Olga and I saw it through until nearly 4am. It was Olga's turn to get up with Lara, and whilst she's a very good sleeper, Olga was expecting to be getting up around 7.30. It was a lovely surprise that the monitor stayed quiet until 10.15am! Lara really is a teenager trapped in a 3 year old's body when it comes to sleeping. Either that or Mothercare don't get enough praise for their cotbed and mattress, it must be very comfy. We only recently took the sides off her cot, just after we got home from the Lake District, and we were worried about her sleeping less, and wanting to get up and wander about, but if anything she is actually sleeping more since she had a "proper" bed. She hasn't once got up and left her room, which is good. She does wake up and help herself to a drink of water from her bedside table, which cuts down on the visits Olga and I had to make to see her in the evenings.
The next night was even better - we put her to bed early by her standards, around 6.30, and I was expecting to be up at 7.30 as usual, but as it was I had to go in and wake her up at 10.20! That's just crazy. But we're not complaining!

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T00:40:00.000Z

Merry Christmas! This year has been the first that we've been able to get Lara excited about the whole Santa Claus thing, but also she went to sleep tonight without any great hassle. She understands that he'll come down our chimney tonight and leave her presents though...so she's left him and Rudolph presents too.

We had to take Lara to work today, as her nursery was closed, but we were expected in work. Olga and I are in offices on opposite ends of our building, and Lara occupied herself running from one office to the other, or watching DVDs under a desk in my office:

The shortest day but a busy one

2010-12-22T12:05:00.001Z

Yesterday might have been the shortest day of the year, but we made the most of it. Lara's cold and cough gave her a disturbed night on Sunday night, so on Monday night I slept on the floor in her room to save us all waking up as Olga or I got up repeatedly to supply sips of water, tissues and hugs. After a dose of nurofen at 4am she slept through until we woke her at 9.15 to go and see another nursery, this one at the bottom of our road. In the meantime I had taken the boys to the vets for their "procedure".
Lara looked very poorly during the nursery tour, so after that we took her to our office rather than her nursery, and almost immediately got an appointment with the GP, so we headed back to Wycombe, where she was given a prescription for antibiotics. Back to the office, and she spent the afternoon lying on the sofa watching DVDs whilst we decided which nursery to choose out of the two we'd seen. With the choice made (we've opted for the one that is a mile or so from home rather than the one at the bottom of our road) that meant more forms to fill in, then it was back to Wycombe to collect the dogs. The operations had gone well, they were both fine, if a little dopey from the anaesthetic, and both of them struggled to get used to the big collars they have to wear to prevent them from licking and chewing their stitches. In order to give them some peace and quiet (that was our excuse) we headed down to the pub with Lara, now feeling a bit brighter, to have drinks with an ex-colleague who was in town for the night.
So, we're hoping for a quieter few days now, we're just keeping an eye on the weather on our route up to Radcliffe on Saturday. There seems to have been a dump of snow overnight in the Midlands and Cheshire, but so long as they don't have another one on Friday night, we expect to be able to go up to Grandma & Grandpa's as planned (get peeling those sprouts, Grandma!!)

Spare a thought for the boys on Tuesday!

2010-12-19T23:48:00.001Z

Yep, we've finally come to the decision that the boys are just too hard to handle when they encounter other dogs out on walks, and the best thing is for them to pay a trip to the vets. We'd always hoped to breed from Mishka, he is a pedigree Airedale after all, descended from a Champion, and to be fair to him, he's not the bad one. Jackson, who has pedigree parentage but is a cross between a border terrier and welsh terrier, just goes mental when he sees another dog, and this sets Mishka off too, and the only fair and sensible thing is to have them both "fixed". To make it easier on them, they're both going to be operated on on the same day, Tuesday, so they'll both be feeling sorry for themselves at the same time, and there won't be a case of one of them wanting to play while the other just wants to feel sorry for himself! They should be fine within ten days, so they'll have a few days at home this week to recover from the op, and then a few more days being pampered at Grandma and Grandpa's house, so long as the weather doesn't make driving up there a pain in the bum.

The poor lads!! But it's for the best...

New nursery time

2010-12-19T23:37:00.000Z

Tomorrow we're looking at two nurseries in High Wycombe, as once we start working from home, it won't make any sense to drive the 5 miles to Marlow just to take Lara to nursery. One is at the bottom of our road, so that's a big plus, but the other one gets a better Ofsted review and would be closer to some other activities we'd like to take Lara to, like dancing and gymnastics. It'll also be interesting to see how Lara copes with moving nursery, and how she settles in. It might teach us a few lessons about how to handle it when she moves up to starting school.

6" in 2 hours

2010-12-19T23:31:00.003Z

I went to Uxbridge yesterday morning to pick up some furniture for our new home office, and finish my Christmas shopping. The journey there took 25 minutes, the journey back took more than two and a half hours. It was lovely to walk around the shops laden with bags and with heavy snow falling, with christmas music playing (there is a time when it'a OK!) but I hadn't thought about how it would affect my journey home. At first I tried to avoid the M40 but after covering 200 metres in 40 minutes on the A40, I turned around and risked the motorway, and it was pretty easy. At least for those of us not in German rear-wheel drive cars. I passed one uphill section of the M40 with at least 30 cars parked up, and the vast majority were BMW and Mercedes. There are times when an eight year old Japanese 4x4 can prove useful.
Today we didn't bother risking the drive to the supermarket, we just put Lara in the sledge and dragged her there, then put the shopping in it on the way back while Lara was in the back-pack carrier. It sounds silly, but it's something I've always wanted to do, dragging my child along in the sledge, listening to her really enjoying it.

For Olga it was nothing special, it's normal procedure for parents where she grew up.
It didn't snow at all today, so we'll be going to work tomorrow as usual, so long as Lara is OK. She had a high temperature on Friday afternoon and would have been sent home from nursery had nursery not closed at 4pm because of a bit of afternoon snowfall.

Nativity 2010

2010-12-16T23:24:00.004Z

It was Lara's nursery nativity play this week, and Olga and I went to watch this afternoon. The costume for her room was Angels, and she really did enjoy dressing up, much more than you might think from this photo!

If you've got a spare 2 minutes and 47 seconds, this video compilation shows that she did enjoy it!

(There's a smaller version for slower internet connections here)

And finally, here's a "team" photo:

Lara's friend Chloe (with the dark hair and gold tinsel) must have spotted me taking the photo and pulled her best pose.

Couple more from the Lakes

2010-12-16T22:59:00.001Z

Another photo and video from the Lake District that I have found on my phone... this was before we even got to the cottage on Day 1.

Here's the proper use for a pet dog in snowy weather:

Lara, 3 years + 6 days

2010-12-16T22:51:00.001Z

It was Lara's 3rd birthday last Friday, but I'm only just getting round to mentioning it. We had a little family party at Grandma & Grandpa's house on the way home from the Lake District, then Anton & Becca brought Eve and Tess over on Sunday to play and go for a pub tea. Eve gave Lara a great little monkey that Lara has named "Nina" (quite imaginative, not sure where the inspiration came from), and they have been inseparable since.
Lara has understood what her birthday means (presents!) and she knows that she she answer "Three" if someone asks how old she is, rather than "Two".
Here are some pics..

Warmer today

2010-12-09T22:32:00.000Z

It was a positively barmy 5 deg C today, and more cloudy, so we had a quiet morning in the cottage, then went on a 5 mile walk in the afternoon, as the snow was melting. It wasn't as photogenic a day as yesterday, so I only took one while we were walking:

And another one once we were back home, where Jacksie kept an eye on Lara while she had a makeshift bath:

Tomorrow is a big day, Lara's 3rd birthday, so we'll be packing up from here in the morning, and head back to Grandma and Grandpa's house for a small party in the afternoon. Lara appreciates that it's her birthday, but I'm not sure she knows what's in store tomorrow...

-18 is a bit much

2010-12-08T23:35:00.000Z

We woke to a shortage of water this morning; the -18 deg C overnight temperature froze the water in the supply pipe to the cottage. The owners supplied a large container of water for us, and by the time we came back in the afternoon, the temperature had risen enough for the water to be flowing again. This evening we have had problems with the boiler, as the overflow pipe froze, but this was fixed with a kettle full of hot water and a tea towel round the pipe for insulation. High technology!

In the meantime, we drove over to Keswick. The weather was amazing, clear blue skies, with temperatures hovering around -7, and this made for some great photos. The drive along minor roads was a little hairy in places, but the lack of traffic on a December Wednesday morning meant trundling along at 30mph maximum wasn't a problem. It just gave us more time to admire the scenery.
Once in Keswick, we headed to Ashness Bridge. It's one of the most photographed places in the Lake District, and if you have a look at the updated Web Album, you're bound to recognise the view up to Skiddaw. We didn't have it all to ourselves, but it was certainly quieter than during August Bank Holiday weekend. The boys were able to run free for a while - Mishka had his saddlebags on, which prevents him for sneaking through small gaps as well as saving me from having to carry our flask of soup, amongst other bits and pieces. We spent a couple of hours there, enjoying the view, playing with the sledge, and watching four RAF fighters zoom past up the valley, not much higher than us.
After a quick trip around the shops of Keswick, we headed back to the cottage, where Lara demolished a huge tea and hit the sack, probably for another good night's sleep.
Check out the updated Web Album for today's photos, and here are a couple of videos to give you an idea of the conditions...

Sledging (and not the cricket type)

2010-12-07T20:02:00.003Z

We arrived yesterday afternoon at the cottage we're staying in this week, just north of the Lake District. The roads were mostly clear, apart from one side road which was blocked by a tractor, and the farm hand driving it suggested that the road would be impassable, so we had to find another way. I had to smile, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the bad guys in the movie Deliverance. I'm quite glad we turned around, I wouldn't have wanted to get stuck at his farm!
The cottage is lovely, Lara has her own room at one end of the building, complete with an en-suite and even a Freeview TV so we can put Cbeebies on before bed if necessary. The lounge, with christmas tree and woodburner, is at other end, next to our bedroom. Right outside are fields where we can take the boys (on their leads, there are sheep around) and where we took Lara yesterday afternoon for her first proper go on a sledge. She absolutely loves it, not scared at all, and can't get enough of it.
It snowed again overnight, and today we didn't venture very far, just to a field that the cottage owner suggested is the best local sledging place. We had it too ourselves, and could even let the boys off the lead. We couldn't resist the chance to attach the sledge to their leads, and when we had a go later in the afternoon back at the fields next to the cottage, we got more adventurous and had both boys pulling Olga and Lara. Mush!!!
We hope Lara sleeps as well tonight as last night - nearly 14 hours, from 6pm to 8am. She's had a more active day today too, so there's every chance we'll all get a lie in.
Anyway, here is a new Web Album with some photos and videos, and I'll update it as the week progresses (Click once on the photo to go to the Web Album page, you can play the videos there).

Russia 2018

2010-12-03T01:29:00.000Z

Russia were clearly deserved winners of the race to host the 2018 World Cup. Why the BBC decided to annoy FIFA 3 days before the vote with their Panorama programme puzzles me. Clearly FIFA are a corrupt organisation, but expose them after the vote, not before. We have no right to host the competition just because it's "our turn", and it's fair to allow countries to host the Finals who haven't done it before. It was rather arrogant to assume that sending Prince William and David Cameron would be enough to convince the voters. I thought the Belgium/Netherlands bid would be a good choice, but FIFA don't like "joint bids". As for Qatar, they will dismantle many of the stadia they will build for the Finals in 2022, and reconstruct them in Third World countries, which seems to be a great gesture.

Hot in Oz, Cold in Wycombe

2010-12-03T01:14:00.000Z

It's going to be in the low 30s (centigrade) in Oz for the 2nd Test tonight, whilst it was 14C in our house when I popped home to check on the boys today at lunchtime. No-one cared what the temperature was when Australia were 2 for 3 after 15 minutes though. I like to think Olga is the lucky mascot, she only got home from 4 days in Oslo an hour before the game started, and look at the result. Since she went to bed, we've not taken a wicket.

We've only had a sprinkling of snow here, which has been just as well really, as it would have made the mornings a lot more complicated this week while Olga was away, as the boys still need walking before Lara can go to nursery. We got the routine sorted this morning, just in time for Olga to come back! Olga's likely to travel more with her new job than she does currently, so I had better get used to it, although at least then I'll be working from home so I won't have to worry about the commute to work.

It seems I'll get my wish of snow in the Lake District next week, which is good. Hopefully the roads will be fairly clear, but the car has been serviced 2 weeks ago, and I had the tyres checked today, and it's been given the all-clear, so I'm happy that we'll be able to deal with most things Mother Nature will throw at us. I really hope we can go on a few nice walks where we can let the boys run about in the snow with no-one else around, then head back to the cottage, fire up the woodburner and cook a lovely dinner.

Lara has recovered from a cold she developed over last weekend. I had to stay home with her on Monday, which was interesting when I had to have a video call with my soon-to-be-boss whilst sat in the car on our drive while Lara had a lunchtime nap after we'd been for a quick drive. She made me laugh today when I came into our lounge this morning wearing my Russian-style hat that Olga's mum bought me in St Petersburg last year, she smiled a lovely smile and cracked: "Nice hat, Papa", followed later by "Cool dude".

Where does she learn these things?!

48-3 now. It's all Olga's fault for going to bed. I joked with her that it could be 311-3 by the time I wake up in the morning....

Breaking career news!

2010-11-25T22:02:00.003Z

Here's some big family news.....
Both Olga and I resigned from our jobs today!
In case you don't know, we work at the same company, indeed it was where we met. I've worked there for 12 years, and Olga's been there for six, so this was a very big decision, but we were approached by an old colleague from my first job with IBM, way back in the mid 90s, who offered us both exciting new posts with his company. It's a bit daunting, leaving a comfortable job with people you get on well with, but it's time to try something that's challenging and new, and the fact it's with people I already know made the decision to leave Tigress that bit easier.

It'll take some time to sink in - we'll be working from home, so the first thing is to convert a bedroom in to an office!

Wow.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

2010-11-25T21:46:00.000Z

I hope the snow lingers in the north of England for the next 10 days until we head off on holiday, at least on the hills, then the roads can be clear. Snowy mountains but blue skies, that would be ideal.