Luton

At the departure gate...

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Paella, Pasta & Frogs Legs

Well, we're nearly off on holiday. It's 1.25am and packing is finished, the taxi is coming to take us to Luton airport at 3.30am, and the big decision is whether it's worth having an hour and a half's nap or just get in the holiday mood and have a whiskey & ginger. OK, I'll have one while I type..
We've got a lot of luggage, there's no getting around the fact that we don't travel light. 3 bags for the hold, albeit one of them is big but light, filled with beach towels and Lara's swimming paraphernalia. Then each of us has one cabin bag, Lara's is her cool Gruffalo trunkie:

And finally we're taking her pram too...

The itinerary has us spending tomorrow in Palma on board the ship, then it departs for Propriano in Corsica at 11pm. It gets there on Thursday morning, and then onto Civitavecchia on Friday, the nearest port for Rome. We've ducked the very expensive organised tours to Rome, and have booked our own train tickets, and we'll make up our own 4 or 5 hour walking tour on the day. From there we move up the coast to Livorno for Naples, then onto Cannes (Olga will be leaving the credit card on board the ship if we get off). Finally we visit Port Mahon in Menorca on Monday before we return to Palma on Tuesday. From there we transfer by coach to our hotel on the north coast, in C'an Picafort - a hotel I've visited before when I was barely a toddler. They have renovated it since then! We stay there for a week before coming home just in time for my birthday and our 5th wedding anniversary (already!)...

Next stop Britain's Got Talent

I never knew Lara had learned the words to Daisy, Daisy - next she just needs to get the chords right on the guitar, and we're in business. Olga and I can retire and live off the earnings of our rockstar daughter...

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Daylight Robbery!

When I came home from the gym this morning, the milkman had been and dropped off our usual Friday order - 2 pints of milk, 15 eggs, orange juice and bacon.  I left them on the doorstep as Lara likes to find them and take them to the kitchen, and went in for my shower. 15 minutes later I sent Lara out to the doorstep "to see if the milkman has been", and when we opened the door, the bacon had gone!! You can't really see our doorstep from the road, it's up 15 steps, so I'm still wondering if it was a passing opportunist, or someone who had seen the milkman drop off a bunch of stuff. Luda suggested maybe it was a cat, and Lara has run with this, claiming she saw the cat, he's called Percy and he's pink. 
I'm happy to let her believe Percy nicked our bacon... but it's really annoying!

Jabs, Rain and a Scarecrow

Last Wednesday was a jabby day. Lara had to have her boosters, one jab in each arm, and the little trooper didn't cry, and earned two choccy buttons as a reward from the nurse.  She did cry when we took the plasters off later that day, though. After Lara, it was the boys turn, as they had to have their kennel cough boosters at the vets; this is a nasal spray, and Mishka took offence at me putting him on a table in the vet's room, and he reminded me and the vet what a strong lad he is. Jackson was a different matter, he loved the attention, and had his spray and then a jab as well for good measure to boost one of his vaccines.
Here are a few photos and videos from the past couple of weeks:

With the sunshine and rain we've been having, the veg patch has gone crazy. Lara noticed that our neighbour had a scarecrow in their garden, and so Baba spent some time making one for our garden out of some of Lara's old clothes. In Russian it's called a "Chuchilla" (my phonetic spelling) and she lives in our veg patch now - maybe the only female scarecrow around? The garden is producing a lot of strawberries at the moment, which is no bad thing.

Lara decided on Sunday morning that 5.30am would be a great time to wake up, and although I slowed her down a bit, we were still downstairs having breakfast at 6.30am, which is much earlier than normal. It gave me time to write up our latest cricket match though, before Lara and I decided it had been a long time since we'd taken her bike to the park. The weather was terrible, cold, windy and wet, but that just meant that we had the whole playground to ourselves. Then we went shopping, and Lara got a nurses outfit and a cheerleaders outfit, complete with pom-poms, which worked out well, as she uses similar ones at gymanstics and so is deslighted to be able to practise with them at home. She was able to wear her nurses outfit when we got home from the shops as we went round to visit one of her nursery friends who is poorly with chickenpox at the moment, and Lara tried very hard to make Zoe feel better, taking her temperature and listening to her heartbeat.

Olga is away in Kazakhstan for another week; we've worked out that the best time for a skype call is while Lara is having her tea, given the five hour time difference.