A very quick catch up - welcome to 2013

Life with two children, two dogs and two full time jobs is proving very busy indeed, hence the dearth of posts on here. By the time we've finished a day's work (sat in front of a laptop) then made tea, walked the dogs and got the kids to sleep, it's time for a beer or a glass of wine and flop down in front of the TV, so just at the moment the blog is playing second fiddle!

But, you do deserve a little update. I'd like to go into more detail but, well, we'll see. One day maybe!
In order to keep this brief, so I can go and have said beer, I'm going to use bullet points, and they are in no particular order:

• We loved our holiday in Canada (more updates to follow, I promise. And photos - lots of photos)
• Lara had the title role in her school nativity play - Whoops a Daisy Angel, and once she'd got her first line out of the way, she settled down and was very confident, even helping the other kids with their lines and where they should be standing on stage; she knew her part and all the other parts, it seemed. We were naturally very proud of her:

• She is still having skating lessons, skiing lessons resume next Sunday, she's at Level 5 now and is on the main slope at Chill Factore.
• She also attends drama and musical theatre classes on a Monday after school, and after today, will be adding 90 minutes of dance to this, on Wednesday after school. That's 30 minutes each of tap, ballet and jazz.
• Danil has had his two front lower teeth for ages, and over the last month or so his top two front teeth have started to appear, and will be with us in full soon. 
• His sleeping hasn't been great for the last 6 weeks or so, almost every night one of us has had to get up with him; almost certainly it's his teeth that are bothering him, though he did have an upset stomach in the run up to Christmas. It was significant that a couple of nights ago he went through the night without one of us getting up, for two nights in a row, though last night we were up again at 4am. He likes to watch BabyTV, a Sky Channel aimed at - you guessed it - babies. It does soothe him, and he can watch it for an hour in silence before dropping off. We know because we've watched him watching it at 3am. It's channel 623, you should try it. Plus it has no adverts!
• Yesterday he made his first meaningful progress in crawling forwards. Life will not be the same again now he's properly mobile.
• He had his first haircut on Friday afternoon, Lara's never had a haircut in a salon, so this was a family first, and we all trooped in to watch.

• We're still not unpacked in the house yet - we might have to accept that we'll never properly unpack everything before it's time to move out again.
• The dogs are being themselves, Jackson still gets too excited when he sees, but cannot sniff, another dog and he proceeds to nip Mishka in frustration, who nips back. They have had their salon time this weekend though, the downstairs bathroom here proving to be the perfect dog grooming room:

And finally, just a nice one of the family taken on New Year's Day...