Holidays

In July we made a visit to my parents for a few days. We've already shared the beach trip with you, but now we catch up on the other activities.

It's just weird seeing the girls playing with my old toys. Quite nice that they enjoy them so much though.

Here are the girls with pretend umbrellas. Really.

My parents are thinking about a downsize of house at some point, so part of the trip was an exercise in sorting out some of my many things that are still stored there. This is the model railway that my brother and I put together - it's about 20x6 feet so doing anything with it is a mammoth task! In fact you can probably tell it's still not quite finished. We've made a start on sorting out some of the unused bits that will hopefully find a new home quite quickly.

I've also started sifting through my old drawings and school stuff. I'll probably post some more gems at some point, but I quite enjoyed this comment on something I wrote in P7 (so age 10-11). Good thing I dropped the crazy ideas :-)

A wee bit of golf at Fraserburgh with my Dad and Ian. To give you an idea of the skill level involved, a good trip is one in which we come back with more balls than we left with.

Something for the non-Scot readers - a sea haar coming in. The scourge of many an otherwise fine day.

Lots of fun with a cartie in the garden...

Also a bit of help for Dad, who in retirement is catching up on all those maintenance jobs. Fun with scaffolding ahoy!

I was quite impressed with how good a picture my phone camera seems to manage.

The main reason for the above picture though was to show you what Miriam was so fascinated by...

Finally, my parents have a clematis growing on the front of their house. It produces the most brilliant seed heads - I was trying to work out who they most reminded me of - what do you think?

Bed

With the impending arrival of child #3, we've moved the girls into a bunk bed. Words cannot express how exciting bed time became for the first few weeks (just what's needed when trying to sleep!), nor how long the time between going to the shop to look at the bed and actually receiving it and putting it together felt.

When it first arrived a couple of months ago, we felt that Miriam still wasn't quite ready for a big bed, so she stayed in the cot. My Dad was here at the time and he helped put it together, making the bed even more exciting. The first few nights it was just set up as a single (the bunk really being two single bed made to be stacked). Here's Naomi enjoying her first night...

Soon enough, I managed to finish the other bed and Naomi took her place at the top of the castle. She helped put the ladder together (really well as it happens) and is very good about climbing up and down carefully. The only issue is that now she's got ready access to the light switch.

A few nights ago, Miriam made the transition to big girl bed. Here she is enjoying a book on one of the last nights in the cot:

And here she is getting in to the big bed for the first time...

Naomi is now very happy to be sharing with her sister! Miriam was very good at not trying to escape, and both were very good the morning after. Long may it continue!

Anniversary

Jay and I have been doing the "traditional" anniversary presents since year 1. On the face of it, this can be quite fun, though some years it gets pretty interesting. I also suspect that now we're in to double figures it might get expensive too, unless some careful application of imagination is made! To make life easier we occasionally jump in to the US present list - you can get the gist of it all here.

This year was steel (11). Having already engaged the private services of a foundry to cast me something for the iron present, I felt that I'd scale back a little for this one. On the "boring" side, I got Jay a very big steel pot for the kitchen (something she's been after for a while). To make it more of a present, I went for a bit more thought on the card, which comprised a host of celebrity endorsements...

Here we have: Remington Steele, Lord Steel of Aikwood, the man of steel, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and the Krustyburglar.

Jay's contribution was on somewhat similar lines, although perhaps better thought out...

Comedy gold. Except that it's framed in steel.

Okay, we think similar things. Better get married or something :-)

Miscellany

After something of a busy summer with few blogposts, we've got a lot to catch up on. We'll make a start with a few assorted pictures that I've gather over the past couple of months that you might like to see. It's possible one or two will have appeared before but they're all good, so no matter. I've got a few other blog posts lined up - they should appear on a schedule over the next few days. Let's make a start...

As Naomi is a little older, we decided that we could replace the much-missed sunglasses that survived all of about five minutes last year.

Of course, Miriam latched on to them before long. Fortunately she does look after them pretty well for her big sister...

Jings crivvens help ma boab!

Jay and I made this for date night a few weeks ago. Yes, it was really good - thanks for asking!

I've helpfully added a teabag for scale. 

At the start of June I was asked to help with the MAF Big Picture by one of the people at our church. An afternoon of button pushing, who could resist? Unfortunately it was a tad wet that day, so the makeshift desk was set up in the boot of a car! Much fun.

Yes, another shot of the nice view from my office window.

No comment.

Naomi made this for her Auntie Fay's birthday. Both the girls are ridiculously good at crafty things (in both senses...)

Naomi en route to the shops.

Naomi has recently started a ballet class. Those who know her well will be very surprised to learn that she was somewhat happy about this situation:

Also, I just really like this:

We're going on a bramble hunt

Some days as a stay at home parent are an absolute joy.  While I am quite sure the children will start maiming each other again soon and I will change my mind, I have just had a lovely hour or so with the girls, so much so I thought I would share.

Earlier Miriam and I went to toddler group and on the way home this happened

This meant that there wouldn't need to be a nap at home later on which meant we could be free to go out and do something fun.  We decided to go brambling!

On the walk to a spot I knew had a few good bramble bushes Naomi started retelling the story of "We're going on a bear hunt" but changing the words so we were going on a bramble hunt.  She skipped along and looked for things that we couldn't go over, under or round.  She found grass, the river, a road and some mud! I was very impressed with her imagination (although I'm hoping to film her making up a story from scratch soon, she told the most amazing bedtime story last night about mice, gruffalos, monsters and dinosaurs!) and it helped pass the time while we walked.

Naomi was incredibly good at finding the brambles and her hands were small enough to avoid the nettles (I wish the same could have been said of me!)

Miriam had a go too

Although was MUCH more interested in eating them.

As you can see Naomi tried a few too...

Showing off her spoils...

I let Miriam walk some of the way home and she very much enjoyed having an opportunity to collect sticks.  She does love a stick!

Now I just need to work out what to do with all my brambles!

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!

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...