Tuesday 19 August 2014

And so it begins...

As you can read about here (in case you'd forgotten) Naomi started nursery last January and went every afternoon.  I asked a while ago, though, if she could change to a morning place as I had noticed she was getting too big to take to the toddler groups that I still wanted to be able to take Miriam (and in time bump) to.

So, today after 1 week of chicken pox and 7 weeks of summer holiday, Naomi (a VERY excited Naomi) has returned to nursery but instead of afternoons we now have a morning place.  With this starts our life of getting out the door first thing in the morning with a time we need to be there!

Most of the time it is likely that Sandy will do the drop off so that I am not trying to get two (or three) children out the door but today we all went together!

customary first day of something photo
Miriam and now are having some special time just the two of us (before the baby comes and spoils it ;-) ) and is enjoying being able to play without fear of attack from her big sister


I asked her to look at the camera, she adopted this position but was saying cheese at the time!



Friday 15 August 2014

80

Following the theme of number-titles for blog posts, I've gone with 80 for this one. It may be in reference to Phileas Fogg, or the number of photos, because this is (finally) my summary of my epic journey to Beijing and Vancouver last month. This was to attend the two biggest conferences in my field, GECCO and WCCI - so most of it was pretty hard work. Largely networking and seeing what's happening research-wise at the moment. However, I did take about a day or so out in each place to rest (15 days straight conferencing is too much and gets counter-productive), so I took the chance to see a little of both places. One of the perks of the job!


It was also fun in the sense that I got to do some time travel. I flew 1/3 of the way round the world each time, crossing the date line. This meant that between Beijing and Vancouver, I took off shortly before midnight on Friday 11 July, and landed at about 8pm on Friday 11 July. Needless to say, my mind took a while to catch up wit hreality once I got back...

Sorry this is quite such a long post. Hopefully my attempts to cover the amusing side of things will help somewhat...