Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! This year has been the first that we've been able to get Lara excited about the whole Santa Claus thing, but also she went to sleep tonight without any great hassle. She understands that he'll come down our chimney tonight and leave her presents though...so she's left him and Rudolph presents too.

We had to take Lara to work today, as her nursery was closed, but we were expected in work. Olga and I are in offices on opposite ends of our building, and Lara occupied herself running from one office to the other, or watching DVDs under a desk in my office:

The shortest day but a busy one

Yesterday might have been the shortest day of the year, but we made the most of it. Lara's cold and cough gave her a disturbed night on Sunday night, so on Monday night I slept on the floor in her room to save us all waking up as Olga or I got up repeatedly to supply sips of water, tissues and hugs. After a dose of nurofen at 4am she slept through until we woke her at 9.15 to go and see another nursery, this one at the bottom of our road. In the meantime I had taken the boys to the vets for their "procedure".
Lara looked very poorly during the nursery tour, so after that we took her to our office rather than her nursery, and almost immediately got an appointment with the GP, so we headed back to Wycombe, where she was given a prescription for antibiotics. Back to the office, and she spent the afternoon lying on the sofa watching DVDs whilst we decided which nursery to choose out of the two we'd seen. With the choice made (we've opted for the one that is a mile or so from home rather than the one at the bottom of our road) that meant more forms to fill in, then it was back to Wycombe to collect the dogs. The operations had gone well, they were both fine, if a little dopey from the anaesthetic, and both of them struggled to get used to the big collars they have to wear to prevent them from licking and chewing their stitches. In order to give them some peace and quiet (that was our excuse) we headed down to the pub with Lara, now feeling a bit brighter, to have drinks with an ex-colleague who was in town for the night.
So, we're hoping for a quieter few days now, we're just keeping an eye on the weather on our route up to Radcliffe on Saturday. There seems to have been a dump of snow overnight in the Midlands and Cheshire, but so long as they don't have another one on Friday night, we expect to be able to go up to Grandma & Grandpa's as planned (get peeling those sprouts, Grandma!!)

Spare a thought for the boys on Tuesday!

Yep, we've finally come to the decision that the boys are just too hard to handle when they encounter other dogs out on walks, and the best thing is for them to pay a trip to the vets. We'd always hoped to breed from Mishka, he is a pedigree Airedale after all, descended from a Champion, and to be fair to him, he's not the bad one. Jackson, who has pedigree parentage but is a cross between a border terrier and welsh terrier, just goes mental when he sees another dog, and this sets Mishka off too, and the only fair and sensible thing is to have them both "fixed". To make it easier on them, they're both going to be operated on on the same day, Tuesday, so they'll both be feeling sorry for themselves at the same time, and there won't be a case of one of them wanting to play while the other just wants to feel sorry for himself! They should be fine within ten days, so they'll have a few days at home this week to recover from the op, and then a few more days being pampered at Grandma and Grandpa's house, so long as the weather doesn't make driving up there a pain in the bum.

The poor lads!! But it's for the best...

New nursery time

Tomorrow we're looking at two nurseries in High Wycombe, as once we start working from home, it won't make any sense to drive the 5 miles to Marlow just to take Lara to nursery. One is at the bottom of our road, so that's a big plus, but the other one gets a better Ofsted review and would be closer to some other activities we'd like to take Lara to, like dancing and gymnastics. It'll also be interesting to see how Lara copes with moving nursery, and how she settles in. It might teach us a few lessons about how to handle it when she moves up to starting school.

6" in 2 hours

I went to Uxbridge yesterday morning to pick up some furniture for our new home office, and finish my Christmas shopping. The journey there took 25 minutes, the journey back took more than two and a half hours. It was lovely to walk around the shops laden with bags and with heavy snow falling, with christmas music playing (there is a time when it'a OK!) but I hadn't thought about how it would affect my journey home. At first I tried to avoid the M40 but after covering 200 metres in 40 minutes on the A40, I turned around and risked the motorway, and it was pretty easy. At least for those of us not in German rear-wheel drive cars. I passed one uphill section of the M40 with at least 30 cars parked up, and the vast majority were BMW and Mercedes. There are times when an eight year old Japanese 4x4 can prove useful.
Today we didn't bother risking the drive to the supermarket, we just put Lara in the sledge and dragged her there, then put the shopping in it on the way back while Lara was in the back-pack carrier. It sounds silly, but it's something I've always wanted to do, dragging my child along in the sledge, listening to her really enjoying it.

For Olga it was nothing special, it's normal procedure for parents where she grew up.
It didn't snow at all today, so we'll be going to work tomorrow as usual, so long as Lara is OK. She had a high temperature on Friday afternoon and would have been sent home from nursery had nursery not closed at 4pm because of a bit of afternoon snowfall.