Pox II

...of course it was only a matter of time before Lydia also came down with The Pox. At least that's all the children now. Lydia coped with it very well but it was BAD and all were left very tired!

Miriam made a get well card for her sister!

The Pox

Just what you want when cooped up in the house by the snow. Oh dear.

Sadness

Naomi's just had her one-year-old injections and although she's now more protected against measles and other such horrors, is feeling a bit miserable this week. Rightly so, I've seen the three sore bits where the injections took place!

One nice thing though is that she's become a bit more clingy and evenings this week have mostly been about hugging. She's also learned to do kisses fairly recently, but doesn't yet understand that one's mouth should be closed for this, so it's not as pleasant as it might sound...

In other news, I've finally finished building my birthday present, the legendary K'Nex ferris wheel, which can be seen in any good toy shop's window, and now also our dining room. Awesome.

Illness

Over the last few days we've all been pretty ill. Naomi had it first, and was mostly on the mend by the time both of us had it - it even resulted in me being off work for a couple of days (highly unusual). I won't go into gory details, but it appears to have been some kind of virus that made it pretty hard to think about anything, or to keep in any food consumed. Not good. :(

Anyhow, over the weekend Naomi had the bug, and she was starting to show signs of being dehydrated. This led to a visit to the doctors, who gave us a course of rehydration stuff, with instructions to keep giving her 5ml of it (syringe into the mouth) every ten minutes until a wet nappy arrived. At the end of this exercise we were in no doubt that our daughter dislikes being given fluid in this way! Come 9pm - an hour and a half past normal bedtime - she was clearly most confused that the routine had been changed and the look on her face was heartbreaking. It will be really good when we can explain what's happening to her.

We ended up returning to the doctors, and as it wasn't clear what the problem was, were referred to Leicester Royal Infirmary for our first parental rush to hospital following birth-day. In the end all was declared to be well enough for us to return home (about 2am) - and I'm happy to say that as of today we're all feeling much better. This is particularly good as I'm off to Ireland next week for a conference and illness would not have aided the situation at all...

Naomi also continues to learn about toys and playing, and here she is demonstrating some basic percussion skills. We're most impressed with this :)

Of course, toys don't need to be sophisticated. After eying up mummy's Diet Coke* bottle she entertained herself with it for nearly 20 minutes yesterday. Mostly a combination of bashing things with it and sucking on it, but all terribly fun.

(*other fizzy sugar-based beverages are available)

Campus

So I have a nasty little bug (or possibly hayfever, but probably not) and haven't slept much the last couple of nights, even when the little one has been managing to sleep just fine. Pleasingly, especially as she's in our room while our friend Cat visits, she's only woken up once each night this week - although last night was an exception. Cat looked after Naomi while Jay and I went out for an hour or so of "couple time" - unfortunately Naomi woke up while we were out and was NOT impressed that we weren't in. This may be the reason she was up more than hourly last night (though she also has a bad cough just now which won't have helped) - with the result that I and very much mummy are both very sleepy. On a happier note at one point in the night she really got the hang of the "b" sound, saying "bubububub"* a lot. She's getting pretty close to "m" now :) *(I think this translates from baby into English as something to do with Markov chains, but why she'd be talking about stochastic processes is beyond me... Equally I could have misheard and it's actually something more like "give me food". I guess we'll never know.)

On a still cheerier note, more on how nice the campus is where I work (and more so as we move into summer). This week I've had two occasions to walk down to Holywell Park - which is a chunk of the campus the university acquired from British Gas a few years ago when the latter stopped using it as a research base. The first visit was to the research staff conference, something Loughborough Uni do once a year to encourage researchers from different departments to work together - all very encourgaing and it got me all first up for more research to come! Here's a couple of pictures I took as I left the conference - plush or what? :)

This morning I was back down there, having finally managed to link up with someone at the computer science department. It looks like I'll be giving a seminar down there on my work some time, which I'm quite excited about. Just have to come up with something to say now - but all good academics have a lengthy talk up their sleeves so that should be alright.

Finally, I note that RGU's new campus is now under construction. Quite pleasing to see it all take shape, in part as I was still one of the student governors when the plans were all approved. Maybe at some distant point in the future I'll be working there... In the mean time there's a nice fly through video on you tube to have a look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lb3faaDRk8

Feet

Currently Jay and Naomi have a cold. Fortunately I seem to have got away without catching it so far! Anyhow, the little one has a proper blocked up nose - it's heartbreaking seeing her sniffing away and getting upset about it as we can't tell her what the problem is. She does however continue to grow and is starting to really look at things now; you can see her following bright objects with her eyes and the other night her dummy fell out and she was peering at it so hard I thought it was going to climb back into her mouth itself...

One of the things we wanted to keep track of is just how tiny she is just now. In the hospital there were adverts for companies who would take imprints of your baby's feet and frame them for you. Of course - to anyone from our corner of Scotland the idea of paying someone to do that is just one step too far, so the other night just before bath time we took some purple paper and white paint and did it ourselves. Here's the results:

Step 1: apply paint...

Step 2: apply paper...

Step 3: observe results...

Just got to put them in a frame or baby book of some sort now.

PS - still more presents arriving! Thank you all for being so generous. We are starting to send propoer thank you letters but it's taking a while...