A Very Happy Birthday

It was my 34th birthday yesterday, and I had a great time. I was allowed a lie-in, and Olga had even arranged a day with very nice weather.
The morning was spent getting the place tidied up before our friends arrived at lunchtime. We'd not seen Rob & Lizz and their daughter, Juliet, since our wedding 2 years ago, so it was lovely to catch up with them, and see how Juliet had grown. We had a barbeque and a couple of drinks, just relaxing on the decking in the sunshine; of course there were a couple of photographs taken:


Rob & Lizz left just after 3, and at 4.30 Chris & Cara popped by on their way back from a camping weekend, returning our tent undamaged (I've not checked, yet, Chris!! :-) ) We just restarted the barbie, and went for a stroll down to the Wendover pub at the bottom of our road to see what it's like now it's been refurbished; it gets the thumbs up!

Lara had been very good all day, almost showing off to visitors how good she can be at eating in her high chair - she's not always so cooperative when it's just Olga & me!

It was still nice and warm outside after Olga got Lara off to sleep, so we relaxed on the decking with the fire burning, and I had a couple of glasses of the Lagavulin Single Malt Olga had bought me.

If I have to get a year older, it was a very nice way to do it!

Audio Books...

I'm trying out a new way to keep myself entertained when I'm walking Mishka - I've borrowed an audio book from the library, ripped it to my PC and then copied it to my phone, and I listen to it as I would any other music file (of course I'll be deleting the book from my PC and phone once I return the CDs to the library, I wouldn't infringe copyright law!!).
So, this all went swimmingly on Tuesday morning, Robert Hardy (of All Creatures Great and Small fame) was reading Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World. It wasn't till ten minutes and three "tracks" into the book that I had to stop to tidy up after Mishka, and I realised I'd not been paying attention and decided to replay the last track to refresh my memory. It was only then that I looked at my phone and saw I'd been listening to track 9, not track 3... yup, I'd left the "Random" setting active. The more worrying thing was I'd not noticed!

Lara Update

I was just beginning to wade through the Russia photos and found this one, definitely one of my favourites. It was taken during bathtime in the banya at Baba Shura's house.
Olga took Lara to Baby Massage as usual on Friday morning, and there was a set of scales there, so Olga weighed Lara, she was 17lbs exactly. After Baby Massage there was a Baby Singing session. Considering Lara now has a drum and a xylophone at home, perhaps a career in music beckons (as well as professional tennis and Russo-British Mediation and Translation).
Lara's favourite food currently, apart from Mum Juice, is yoghurt. We've found she prefers raspberries to strawberries, and is getting good at drinking water from her beaker.

Mim & Ed's Wedding

We had a lovely time on Saturday at Mim & Ed's wedding in Hampshire. Just the name of the village gives you an idea of the kind of place it was: Martry Worthy. It really was the kind of place you see on Midsomer Murders, which was slightly ironic given the identity of one of the guests - a certain Hercule Poirot, no less.
Anton, Becca and Eve were there too, and both girls were very well behaved during the church ceremony, even if Eve did let out a squeak at the "does any know of any reason why..." bit. After the ceremony the guests moved to Ed's parent's house, a quarter of a mile away. It really was something - I've been to other wedding receptions in country houses that have been smaller than this! The weather was doing it's best to help the afternoon along, and the clouds only closed in just as people were moving in to the marquee for the speeches anyway. The speeches were before the meal for a change, I discussed this with Hercule while we were in the queue for the gents, and we agreed it was to keep the drunken heckling down to a minimum. We then briefly discussed toilet plumbing when he vacated the lavatory. I think I made quite an impression on him.

The meal was lovely, and the wine was flowing; Lara was very well behaved, Olga was doing a stirling job, as usual, of feeding her at just the right times, and after a bit of a swing in the car seat, she dozed on and off for the rest of the evening, and was passed around a bit between some of the cluckier guests from time to time when she was awake.

Becca came to our rescue when it came time to head back to the hotel, I'd put us in a premier inn at the services on the M3, in the hope that you could get from the minor road that runs alongside the services into the services themselves, but rather annoyingly there was a big fence in the way (I'd spotted it when we arrived at lunchtime). This meant we'd be faced with an expensive taxi journey up the M3, past the services, and back down the southbound carriageway to get to the hotel, but Becca was driving and gave us a lift. The cars were parked a hundred yards or so from the house in a paddock, but those 100 yards weren't lit, and it was a spooky walk by Olga & Becca's accounts.

It was raining heavily on Sunday morning (it struck us Mim & Ed were lucky with the weather on Saturday and we were really pleased for them on that front) which poo-pooed my idea of climbing the perimter fence and walking down the minor road to Martry Worthy to get the car, so we caved in and got a taxi. We were home by 1.15, and with the weather they way it was, I couldn't mow the lawns as I'd intended (awwww, shame) so it was a nice lazy afternoon of TV and dozing for me & Lara. Olga seemed to miss out on the dozing part, for some reason.

The photos from Saturday are up there on the left of the blog.

Summer? Maybe..

Well, it has to be nice weather in Marlow today, I've got my shorts on at work.
I was a bit stiff yesterday, I'd played cricket on Saturday and Sunday - a League game first, in which we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory against Great Kingshill, then the Littlewick Green Cricket Club President's Day on Sunday. This is a 6-a-side tournament starting at 10am, with six teams playing in two groups of three with a play-off between the first, second and third teams in each group to determine final positions. It was my second year as a team captain, and our boys did well and finished third. The weather was very nice, apart from a brief rain shower during the lunch interval, where players and partners (and children!) enjoyed a buffet lunch in a large marquee, washed down with a glass of wine or three (for the players - I think wives and girlfriends were doing the driving!). I certainly needed the batting practise, having hit a brief 6 on Saturday (I still can't make it to double figures for the Firsts!), and I opened the batting for our team, and scored 28*, 27* and 28* in my three innings - the rules state a batsman must retire when he's scored 25, although he can return later if needed.
Lara was fine all day, Olga did a stirling job of feeding her at just the right moments, and was unlucky to have to take her for a stroll to get her off to sleep just as the lunchtime rain arrived.
We even took Mishka along, and although he spent half the day in the car (with the windows open and some water in a bowl!) he did also get some time to play about on the grass.
We got home in time to watch the second half of the football, and I must admit I was happy to see those bossy Germans beaten by Spain. Poor old Ballack - serves him right for always being the first person to give the ref a Teutonic mouthful anytime any of the Germans players felt the need to sniff the turf.
What else? We bought a new kettle! How exciting is that?! The old one blew up, tripping the master switch on the fusebox and burning a hole in the extension lead it was plugged into. We decided that, seeing as Lara is drinking cold, boiled water now, we should perhaps buy a half-decent kettle (oh, and we do enjoy our morning cups of tea), so we splashed out on one from John Lewis, which has a built-in water filter, fortunately using the same filter cartridges as the water jug in our fridge. Best of all though, it lights up different colours as the water is heating, from blue to purple to red! Gimmicky, I know, but it'll amuse Lara for 10 minutes when she's a little older.
Writing of Lara, she's been swimming again this morning, and went underwater three times, apparently, although it seems like she doesn't enjoy that bit so much yet. It must have tired her out, as she had a long sleep this afternoon in the park in Marlow. She's eating more yoghurts, brocolli, courgette, carrot & banana now, after a breakfast of baby rice, and to try and encourage her to chew we're giving her slightly-mashed pieces of strawberry (well, it is Wimbledon fortnight after all).
I finally finished mowing the lawn last night, after a week off. We've decided we're going to leave an area of it "fallow" for the benefit of creepy-crawlies and the fact Olga likes the "meadow" look. It's an area of lawn we don't use for anything, and if it reduces the time it takes to mow, I'm in favour of it! All this just in time for me to mow it again on Sunday, most likely... Although the priority now moves on to restarting work on the vegetable patch - I need to put a fence around it to keep Mishka off our plums or whatever else will be growing. We'll need to be thoughtful about where we sit Lara in the garden, as the crop of apples on the apple tree looks to be much more than last summer, and they're starting to fall now.