Cycling, Foxes & School

On Easter Sunday I was determined that we'd head out as a family on our bikes. The easiest place to cycle around here in complete safety is around Dorney Lake, where the 2012 Olympics rowing events will take place, it's very near Windsor.
I fitted our new bike carrier to the spare wheel on the back of our car, and loaded Olga's new bike and my bike on to, most likely going beyond the recommended weight limit, but after gingerly driving for a few minutes it was clear that whilst the bikes were moving ever-so-slightly, they weren't going to fall off.  Lara's bike went in the boot - it'll be an interesting challenge to fit the dogs in the car when the time comes that everyone - them included - head off for a cycle ride. That's for another time, though. This trip was about getting Olga comfortable cycling with Danny strapped to her in the BabyBjorn, and using our Trail-Gator to hook Lara's bike up to mine.
Happily it all worked out really well, and despite the weather the adventure was a complete success, and I can't wait for some better weather so we can explore further afield. Eventually we will try with the dogs attached, you can buy special fittings for attaching dogs to bikes, using a spring to dampen any sudden movement they might make. We might actually get a basket for Jackson, and he can have a free ride. Mishka would be quite happy trotting alongside me, I think, though I will practise without Lara's bike attached first!
Here's some footage from the afternoon:

The other big news after Easter was that we found out Lara has got a place at our first choice school for September, Chepping View Primary School. We're assuming at the moment that we won't have sold the house by then, and that Lara will be going there. I'm excited already about buying the school uniform she'll need! We need to find out her exact start date so we can book a holiday just beforehand, making the most of the last time we can go on hols before paying the school-holidays-rip-off-premium prices!

Finally, we noticed last week that the local fox has given birth to two cubs, and they spend some time each morning playing in next-door's garden. Altogether now, awwwwwwwww:

Saturday morning heaven

 A quick post that should have been uploaded on Saturday morning....

This is what Saturday mornings should be like!

5 week report

Another 10 days fly past, everything seems to be moving so quickly at the moment, weeks just whizz by. Between the normal routine of Lara and the dogs, and work, we obviously have the extra fun invoved with Danny, I'm back working full time, and we're still trying to sell the house (we've had a couple of second viewings, some rather disrespectful offers refused, and another second viewing coming up on Saturday morning), but there are still only 24 hours in a day, just as before.
Good old Evernote to the rescue, I note down things I should blog about after they've happened, so let me go through my list, in no particular order.
OK, Danny first, of course. We had our last visit from the Health Visitor on Tuesday, and Danny is weighed in at 5.02kg at 5 weeks. This puts him firmly on the 75th percentile, and he has definitely grown into himself now; we've already retired some of his clothes that he's grown out of, and he's onto size 2 pampers. His jaundice is almost gone now, his eyes are properly white (and blue!), though he does seem to have a small hernia. His gunky left eye now seems to be almost back to normal, with very little if any yellow discharge after sleeps.
Here's a good way to compare how he's filled out, a photo from when he's four days old, and one when he's four weeks old:

Other notable Danny-related things - last Wednesday when he was just under a month old, we had our first go at me feeding him from a bottle. Olga is expressing at a rate that makes me think we'll need to buy a chest freezer to keep it all in, so it seemed sensible to have a go at using some of the resource. He took it very well, and it let me catch up on some recorded TV while Olga grabbed some well earned uninterrupted sleep. I got up on Sunday morning with him at 6am and took him downstairs to repeat the process, and it worked well then, so we've agreed to make that Sunday morning plan a regular thing, so Olga gets a lie-in, and Danny and I cann watch Match of the Day, or a Grand Prix as it was on Sunday, with a bottle of milk.
Just after his 5th week anniversary we decided we'd try him sleeping in his own room. It's right next door to us, and between a monitor and an infrared IP camera, we can see and hear him. That worked really well, so he's officially moved out of our room now. Last night, his second in his room, he slept uninterrupted for six and a half hours between feeds, a personal best by some two hours. This might be something to do with the Infacol we've started him on before feeds, to help him with his windy problems - he's been quite a grunter after feeds, straining a lot, and Infacol seems to be helping.
He continues to be erratic in his feeding patterns, he can go 3 to 4 hours during the day between feeds, but then the next day he'll feed almost hourly. We're not too bothered about it at the moment, he can feed when it suits him, though we'll start to try and get him into a routine of longer feeds with longer gaps between soon.
It must be a second child thing, but I've realised I've not taken too many new photographs of him in the past two weeks - I will resolve that before the next post about him! Here's one from this morning, but it's mainly about Olga multitasking!:

I think I'll do a new post about Lara and other things...

Happy Easter

It's a rather cloudy and dull day here today, and most of us have a cold, including Danny, but Easter eggs were handed out anyway, and Lara - to her credit - hasn't eaten any chocolate yet (it's 10.30am now), but she has tucked into marshmallows.
We decorated some hardboiled eggs yesterday in the Russian style, ready for today:

She has a surprisingly good knowledge of religious topics, and gave us the full story of Easter a few days ago, including about Jesus being put on a cross next to two thieves. We're not religious types, so this teaching must have come from nursery, which is interesting, I only presume the kids there are taught about other religions too. Anyway, here she is with one of her eggs with a Russian church on:

Danny is still growing quickly, and eating well. There's no routine yet, other than him feeding every 2-3 hours when we're just milling around at home, though he does go longer when we're out and about, when he's soothed to sleep by the rocking motion in the pram, car seat or baby bjorn.
He has got Lara's cold now, but other than making feeding a bit slower than normal, it's not bothering him too much.
Despite the rather iffy weather today, we're hoping to go on a simple bike adventure for the first time. I bought my bike last summer, and on Thursday we bought one for Olga too, so we're all ready to go out as a family. I've hooked up a "trail-gator" to my and Lara's bike, so she can ride when she wants, and when she gets bored or tired, we just hook her bike up to mine and I tow her along. If it starts to rain before we set off,
Lara was interested a little in Olga's new bike, but enjoyed the box a lot more:

I can see us abandoning that idea though, and just staying at home all day, watching TV and eating chocolate. So, a normal Easter Sunday :-)
Finally, Happy Birthday to my sister, Catherine, 21 again today!

3 Week Report

Today marks 3 weeks since Danny's arrival. Olga and I feel like it's been about one week, time has flown really quickly.
As soon as I posted my last entry I remembered loads of things I should have included... and listed them in Evernote on my phone. I mention this because that's how I was able to keep a pretty accurate record of what happened on 13th March, because I jotted things down in Evernote as they happened. I normally use it for creating shopping lists as I'm wandering about the house, but it was very useful on that day, and for listing things I should blog about.
We took him to be registered on the Friday after he was born, but not before I'd registered him for his hotmail.com email address - it might be a year or two before he can use it, but danil_armstrong@hotmail.com is his, so he can keep in touch with Lara (lara_armstrong@hotmail.com).  We submitted his passport application on Thursday 29th March, with this photo:

 

It's not fair that his passport photo will be better than mine, is it?

Something I should have blogged about but shamefully forgot was how I couldn't help feeling guilty after Danny came along all healthy and well, at the same time as those poor parents in Belgium were grieving for their children, killed in that coach crash in Switzerland. And on the Saturday evening I was listening to the radio, to the Bolton v Tottenham FA Cup match when Fabrice Muamba collapsed. That seems to have turned out well for Fabrice, and is testament to the "never give up" attitude of the medical staff involved. Those two events put our little bit of good news into sharp focus that week.

At home, it hasn't all been about Danny of course. Poor Lara has been suffering with a cough for a month or more now, though its severity fluctuates. 3 weeks after first reporting it to the GP (she'd already had it for 2 weeks then), I took her back to him and he prescribed antibiotics. We're 2 weeks on from that now, and she still has coughing fits in the night that nearly make her sick, but they're not every night, and during the day she's mostly OK, although we did keep her at home yesterday after a particularly bad night. So, it seems we'll just have to tough it out, Lara just accepts it as normal now, which is brave of her but perhaps not necessarily the right thing for us all to do.
Jackson made sure we didn't forget about him - one night last week I let him out into the back garden for his usual post-dinner comfort break, and after 15 minutes he'd still not popped back in through the cat-flap like he normally would. I went out and called for him, and got no response at all, which is most unlike him. I went up our back garden and he wasn't there, but I found a gap in my "dog-proof" fence that he must have worked on over a period of time, like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape. He wasn't in the neighbours gardens either, so I had set off up our street, trying to call him in a way that he could hear but without the neighbours having a giggle at me looking for my escaped dog. I'd gone about 200 metres and heard a familiar jingle of dog-tag-on-collar, and sure enough, there he was, trotting about on the pavement on the other side of the road, calm as you like. He did seem happy to see me, and came bounding over. It would have been annoying if he'd beenn run over just as he ran across the road! Anyway, I repaired the fence the next day, and he's been captive ever since.

Anyway, back to Danny.  I'll try to be brief; Danny's day revolves - as expected - between feeding, pooping, sleeping and then waking briefly for a look around. Those periods when he's awake have been getting steadily longer, and he has found his voice now, and let's us know in no uncertain terms when he needs a trip to Cafe Mama.

Health & Feeding
He is feeding on demand at the moment, we're not bothered about routines yet. The Feed Baby Pro app is proving very useful in keeping track of his feeds, not just how long since the last one, and how long that was for, but of course we can track how long each day he spends feeding. On this last Saturday just gone, when we had a fairly quiet day, he fed for 5 and a half hours during the day. He seems to last between 2 and 3 hours without a feed during the day, and at night can go as long as 3 and a half hours between feeds. If we're (OK, Olga!) lucky with timings, this means Olga is only waking to feed and change him once between Midnight and 6am, though this is not the rule, there have been many nights when the poor girl is up at 2am and 4am too!
What she's serving is clearly good stuff though! These are his weight measurements so far:

Birth: 3.44 kg
5 days: 3.22 kg (weight loss was expected and is normal)
10 days: 3.62 kg (back up again, and beyond his birth weight)
20 days: 4.14kg (half a kilo on in 10 days!)

The only thing we need to keep an eye on is his jaundice. He was jaundiced at birth, and that was fine, Lara had been too, and we just expected it to sort itself out in a couple of weeks, and the good weather we'd had recently meant he'd been getting a lot of exposure to sunlight. However, the health visitor came yesterday, and thought that perhaps as he was still jaundiced after 3 weeks, we ought to get him checked, so he went to Wycombe hospital today for blood and urine tests. The blood tests have come back normal, which is good, so for now we'll just keep giving him as much sunshine as possible, and see what happens.

Grandma Visits..On the weekend of 24th/25th, my mum came down to visit, and we had a lovely time. She was fully loaded with presents for both grandchildren, and the weather meant we could go for a lovely walk down by the Thames in Marlow on the Sunday.

Things are moving along nicely with our holiday plans for the summer. Mum's flight down to Gatwick from Manchester is booked, and we've booked a hotel near the airport for the night before the flight to Majorca. Exciting times ahead!!