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.

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

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...

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...