Some new photos

There are some new photos on the left now.

Back safe and sound

It was a busy week in Dhaka, hence no blogs posts, I'm afraid. The journey back was uneventful - no upgrade this time, but I travelled back from Dhaka to Dubai with a colleague, so it was unlikely they'd upgrade two people travelling together.
I got home around 7pm, and was greeted with a big hug and kiss from Lara. Her talking is coming on a lot now, still only stringing two words together at a time, but this is the norm now rather than the exception. It was great to hear "Hello Papa" over the phone or Skype when I called up, and she seems to have got over this habit of calling me Mama - phew!
I bought her a new squeazy duck pillow to replace the one Jackson destroyed, and this time I gave it to her straight away, and she seems to really like it. It'll get its first big test on Monday when we drive to Devon, but really I want her to get used to sleeping with it in time for her trip to Russia in January.
Lara was off nursery for a few days at the end of last week, with a tummy bug, but she seems fine now. The time at home with Lara gave Olga time to strip Mishka's coat (a job that is still going on as I type, Mishka is a very patient boy!) and even Jackson had his first spell on the groomer's table, and looks more grown-up for it.
I'm going to post this now, I've got some photos from last week to put up, and Olga took some nice ones of Lara, so I'll try to get round to posting them tonight, but at the moment Lara is having a long nap so we should try to get a  few jobs done! She had a disturbed night last night (Olga reports she was like that all week). I went to check up on her at 3am, after she'd been crying, but she was asleep, it was as if she'd been crying in her sleep. Other times Olga says Lara's been talking in her sleep, so I wonder if she's started to dream now, and the talking and crying is part of that, but she isn't actually waking up.
Time to start thinking about packing, too! The plan is to be away by 8.30 on Monday morning, and we have all day tomorrow to pack, so we really have no excuse if we're late.

Another Day, Another Dubai Airport Bar

I'm in a different bar this morning at Dubai airport, their Irish Bar, complete with Irish ballards on the stereo system. I've got a four-hour wait here (in the airport, not the bar!) before my flight to Dhaka. The clock says 10.35am, my laptop says it's 6.35am, I'm not sure what time my body thinks it is. It is traditional to have a beer when in an airport bar, regardless of the time (after all, it's 5.30pm somewhere), but even I had to relent when I arrived here, so I had an orange juice and a coffee. An Irish coffee, though :-) Seeing as it is rapidly approaching 11am local time, I think a beer will be ordered next, but I have to think of the bladder effect, I do have 5 hours on a plane soon enough. The beer is £6 a pint - I think expenses will cover it - but at least the internet is free.
It was a good job I chose to take the late flight last night, 10pm from Heathrow rather than the 8pm flight I got last time round, as yesterday was a busy day. We got Olga's passport application checked at the Post Office and sent off, then took the boys for a walk down by the Thames. We let Jackson off the lead, and most of the time he was well behaved, and came back when called, even when there were other dogs to play with. Olga only had to go after him once when we were downwind of him and he couldn't hear us calling him back, so he carried on chasing a spaniel. We hoped he might go swimming in calm bits of the river, and in doing so Mishka would be encouraged to go in, but as you can see from the photo below, they didn't go very far in at all:

They were treated to a bath at home, so we had to very nice smelling, if very fluffy, dogs in the afternoon. I did my best to electrocute myself fixing a new outdoor light, so Jackson can see where he's going when he disappears out of the cat flap in the evenings, but it all worked in the end without any painful disasters.
Lara did her best to look extremely cute before I packed up to go to the airport, I just had to post these photos:

Well, I think that's all for now. More from Dhaka later in the week....

Tree, Dva, Adeen.. Count!!

Lara's speech is improving day by day, she can recognise lots of things in her bedtime story books, she recognises the animals, can say what they are and what noise they make, and remembers how the story unfolds. At least this is the case with one of her "Spot the Dog" books, she shocked me one night when lifting up a flap and saying "Boo", when the image under the flap was Spot in the bath with a speech bubble saying "Boo"! For a microsecond I thought she'd read it, but of course she'd just learnt that that's what Spot says on that page of the book.
She's starting to string words together more, so we hear much more of "My coat", "My hat" etc.. rather than "mine!" and "coat". The current excitement is based on counting, and in the car on the way to nursery each morning she practises counting with Olga - in Russian, just to make it more interesting. I practise with her in English when it's my turn to put her to bed, or at any other time when it's just the two of us. Lara is confident with adeen (1), she loves dva (2) and tree (3), she struggles with chet-eer-re-yeh (4) quite understandably, but enjoys p'yet (5). We're working on 6 to 10, which she copes with quite well, except for vo-sem (8) for some reason, which so far this week has come out as "mornin'". For anyone who wants to practise, here is my phonetic version:
6 - shest
7 - sem
8 - vo-sem
9 - dyay-vit
10 - dyay-sit

Other funny behaviour we're seeing - she's using different tones now, she has different ways of saying "Misha!" and "Jack-jack!" when she's telling them to leave the room (Misha Out!) from when she's wanting to give them one of their toys ("Meeeshah"). She has started ordering us about - we've both been on the receiving end of "Mama, out!" and "Papa, out!", accompanied with a pointed finger towards the door. Once I've been told "Papa, sit!" when I got up from the dinner table. We've dispensed with her high chair now, so she sits on a booster chair at our new, smaller dining table. Hopefully this will help her at nursery, where the staff report that she has a habit of getting up from the table at mealtimes and wandering around, which can set of the other children off wanting to do the same. We think this is where she got the "Papa, sit" command from!

One final thing - happy birthday for yesterday to Olga's mum, and enjoy your reitrement when it finally starts!

A Trip to the Vet

Jackson had his 6-month free check-up this morning, Simon The Friendly Vet gave him a clean bill of health. He's raced up to 8.1kg now, from 5.something back at the start of October, we know there's nothing wrong with his appetite, he normally finishes off Mishka's left over food after he's eaten his own!
He had a rabies shot, which (along with being microchipped, which we had done while he was sedated to have his poorly leg fixed in September) is the first stage of getting him his Pet Passport. In three weeks we'll take him back and he'll have a blood test; if everything is OK, then he'll get his Passport and we can take him to Europe :-)
As usual, we took the opportunity to weigh Lara, and she's now 12.8kg, up from 11.75kg on the 9th September.