My Family and Other Animals

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Anton's Progress

Anton's 3 Peak Yacht race got underway yesterday, starting at Barmouth in Wales. During the course of last night he should have run up (and down) Snowdon. It's all high-tech stuff, you can follow his team's progress online, using these links. Becca reports that the sleepmonsters site seems to be the most up-to-date. His boat is the Kithros II

http://live.adventuretracking.com/tpyr2008

There is also the official 3 peaks site:

http://www.threepeaksyachtrace.co.uk/

and the sleepmonsters site (who do the tracking):

http://www.sleepmonsters.co.uk./racereport.php?race_id=6381

Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Lara's appetite

Lara's eating more diverse things now; last night for supper it was an apricot flavour yoghurt thingy, which was the foodstuff that has made the least mess so far. Olga spent some time in the kitchen preparing food for this week - broccoli & courgette will be on the menu, along with the usual carrot, banana and baby rice.
She's also sleeping very well. She had a late night on Sunday, when she didn't go to sleep till nearly 10pm, and I'd needed to give her calpol on Saturday night, but as usual that worked within 10 minutes, even without Mum's milk which usually ensures she's asleep within minutes. However, once she's off to sleep - normally around 7.30ish - she's staying that way until between 5-6am, although these last few days it's been after 6am, like this morning. Then she's also having good naps too during the day, like an hour and a half in bed with us on Sunday, which means she's rarely being grumpy at the moment. Famous last words....

I know, I know, I'm slow at updating this!

It's Tuesday already, where has all the time gone?! What have we been up to? Well, on Saturday I played cricket, which was a miracle given the weather at 10.30am. We scored 103 all out, with my contribution being a massive zero from three balls, batting at number three. I'm saying I was rusty after a month away from the game. 103 doesn't seem like a big total, but when you've played for The Green for a few years, you learn that on a damp, overcast day it won't be a formality to chase that down. Indeed it wasn't, as we bowled Amersham Hill out for only 92. A very satisfying result, given that they were a vocal bunch in the field, commenting on our slow run rate, and the most vocal of them was given out LBW first ball by his own umpire. Oh, I smiled!
Olga and Lucy went out for a meal and a few drinks on Saturday night; Olga was subjected to a chat-up line that involved the line "You're so beautiful, I'm trembling", to which she replied "You should be".
Sunday was a nice quiet day, some housework, a nice afternoon nap, some work in the garden then popping over to Reading to take Lucy home and see Anton, Becca and Eve. It was supposed to be an early night, but the evening was lovely so we lit up the fire in the firepit outside and watched the end of the Italy-Spain game, then watched a programme about Louis Theroux learning to gamble in Las Vegas - the wireless speakers I bought on eBay worked a treat so we could watch TV from outside, by the fire, with the door closed so the smoke didn't get into the house, but still listen to the programme.
Seeing as we missed an early night on Sunday, and I need to mow the lawns and can't do that if I only get home from work at 6pm, we thought we'd have an early night last night, but this time we got sidetracked by a programme on Sky One about Justin Lee Collins trying to become a professional darts player... I know how it sounds, but I like him and it was funnier than it sounds, but it meant that the early night vanished again, although I did still get up early, as planned, this morning.
Getting up at 6.15am rather than 7.30am is so much easier when the weather is nice outside. Lara was awake at 6.15 and very happy, so much so that I don't think she had breakfast and went back to sleep when I brought her up to Olga. I took Mishka out at 7, I'd been lookikng forward to the mornings when I could walk him with putting a hat, scarf & coat on! We're busy at work at the moment, and I wanted to get in early so I could get things done then leave by 4pm so I can mow the lawns (OK, start mowing, it's a two-evening job!). I'm on the bus today so Olga can have to car to take Lara swimming in Marlow; yup, when you need the bus to be on time it was 15 minutes late and standing room only...

Thursday, 19 June 2008

Lara Update

I guess I ought to give you an update on Lara! She's been sleeping OK since we got home, and is slowly recovering from the jetlag, in that she is waking later and later now, it was 4am on Monday, and is closer to 5am now. There has been the odd occasion where she's woken at 1am, but this has only been a one-off, thankfully, and she was back asleep by 1.45, after some time with Olga. We are trying what we usually do, which is bring her to bed with us when she wakes between 4 and 5am, she has a quick feed and usually drops off again, until 7am, which suits us; however, maybe it's the jetlag but this week she's consistently woken up "for good" at 6am, so we've taken it in turns to get up with her and take her back to her room to play, so the other person can have an hour of undisturbed sleep.

She's starting on mushier, non-milky food now too. We tried her on banana, apple and courgette on holiday (not all at once!), and banana was the one she hated the least. Since we got home she's been started on baby rice, which has gone down very well (literally), and tonight she's going to have carrott. Olga's tried it already today and reports that it's lovely. (Steamed, then liquidised with some water, apparently).

We also did some work on her sitting while we were in PK (my abbreviation for Petrokamensk), and she's OK at it now, until she gets tired, when she does more falling that sitting. So long as it's on a soft surface, she quite enjoys the falling though.

Lara's also been weighed today - we were interested to know how she'd be after 3 weeks away; although her feeding regime didn't change other than we introduced some fruit and veg, we thought that all the travelling and strange places might have reduced her appetite... but it seems not. The little fatty is 16lbs 10oz (7.54kg) which is still on the 75th percentile.

Here's a video of her this morning, demonstrating that she's turning into quite a bully...

Monday, 16 June 2008

We're back!

We made it back OK! I'll not get started on a long post, suffice it to say that Petrokamensk was pretty much what I expected it to be, if a little bigger than a village, but set in some spectacular scenery; it's hard to get across the size of the area unless you've actually been there, but it's big.
We had snowflakes falling in the first couple of days, although they didn't stick, but I did need to buy some warm socks and a better hat when we went to the nearest big town. By the end of the week the sun had come out and it was lovely.
The journey home via Ekaterinburg was one of the easiest flights I've taken from a non-European airport, with no queues and a plane that was barely a third full (we were assigned all six seats on our row).
Here are just a couple of photos from Petrokamensk and the surrounding areas, I'll be uploading a proper web album in the fullness of time, of course.