Busy times

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

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

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

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?!

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...