Friday, 30 April 2010

The garden...

....is full of pretty things!

Wednesday, 28 April 2010

Battle of the Bands

Ian's band is not terribly good at organising gigs. This is probably because they are no longer students with nothing better to do! So they decided to enter the Battle of the Bands competition that our local venue, Fibbers, runs on the basis that they would get a gig or two and some people who weren't our friends would see them and hopefully like them!

They got through the pre-heats with ease and then the heats, and suddenly found themselves in the semi-final! So a bunch of us turned up to Fibbers to watch the semi-final and maybe even vote for them! (Don't get me started on the merits of asking punters to vote for the band that gets through. After 4 years of organising the university Battle of the Bands, I can definitely say that we have explored all options of "judging" bands, and having "who can get the most friends through the door on a tuesday night" as a measure of anything just doesn't work!)

But, friends and judges were on their side, and so Maybe She's a Clone have made it to the final! Not bad for a bunch who on the whole don't get round to booking gigs.

(apologies for the lack of photos - I decided that listening to the bands was more fun than coaxing the camera into taking decent photos in zero light)

Monday, 26 April 2010

A first weekend

So, having put a large number of boxes into our new house, what was our first thought? Lets have visitors! Actually they had been scheduled for some time, and it was just coincidence that they actually got to see the new house rather than being driven past it.

One of our visitors was an amazing house warming present from Mikey to Nathaniel:

Nathaniel was sensibly cautious at first, but soon decided that the crocodile was a friend!

If only we had photos of him hugging it, putting his arm between its teeth and then checking that it really was Mikey's arm that was coming out of its neck!

Nathaniel also enjoyed mf and ff and their interest in reading his current favourite book, The Tiger who Came to Tea.


After a fascinating trip to B&Q, first of very many in the near future, Nathaniel stretched out and went to sleep:

And left the rest of us to have a leisurely lunch in the sun. In our garden. Hooray!


After lunch we did some important repositioning of the fridge and its door and Nathaniel helped by sitting on my lap.


Then, on Sunday, it was the sailing club open day and we sat in the sun and chatted to people about how lovely it was to sail on the river, and even got to do some sailing ourselves.
All in all, it was a very pleasant weekend.

Friday, 23 April 2010

A garden!

We are far too busy mapping out the west wing of our new mansion to post, but here are a couple of moving day photos for you.



Thursday, 22 April 2010

We're in!

But have we no internet at present so no pictures and am writing this on my work smartphone so know idea how it will turn out! We should be back up & running early next week so you can all get to see it then. It's huge in comparison, so we can now just hoard all the stuff we intended to throw out before we moved but didn't get round to....!

Move was pretty much stress free and we were in and done by just after 3pm (professional movers are well worth the money!) and the Small Man seems to have coped fine so far. We'd explained to him that we were going to be moving to a new house ("nu ha") and picked him up relatively early from nursery so he had time to explore and acclimatise. He went to bed last night, asked to get into his cot and went straight to sleep and was fine until morning. When he woke up I think he wasn't sure where he was and so was a little disgruntled but was ok really. He is enjoying all the new things to explore (read "pull on or bang").

The garden is fantastic and bigger than we remembered although this means we're going to have to expend a lot more effort on it to keep it looking good (or even just tidy)! It also has some good hiding places for small people. And we have trees... with real birds and everything! The garage will also be great for sorting out the boat (another project for the summer) and we also have a shed with veranda. We think we'll turn it into a beach-hut style cocktail bar for the barbeques....

The price we pay for all this is some VERY 70s decoration, electrics that pre-date Edison and a rather weird boiler & hot water arrangements. Just you wait for the pictures - you'll think we've photoshopped them (or you'll say, "oh yes, a bit like our house was..."). We also have no shower and haven't quite worked out how to get any water that's above "luke warm" to come out of the taps. When you need to have a bath to wash, and the bath is an old style enamel(?) one that sucks all the heat out of the first 40 gallons of water you put in, this means your bath is effectively always cold. Our friend Colin is coming to look at installing an electric shower asap....!

It's all good though. We'll greatly miss living in South Bank (with corner shops, butcher, baker, fish & chip shop and plumbing store all within 90 seconds walk) but we will have a larger than average house, a large garden of our own, a street that's quiet enough for small people to fall off their bikes in and Hob Moor Stray just 90 seconds away. We also got to hire a van which is always fun to play with!

Expect many posts about some trivial aspect of the new garden which we are fascinated by....

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

The view from my seat


Lets just say that we have a few boxes! Earlier in the day, our bedroom looked like this:

Obviously it is only the doorway, but we couldn't get any further in. Notice the important items that should always be retained; a lax stick, and old and rather rubbish hoover, two witches broomsticks and several carefully preserved posters of late 90s britpop bands.

Don't expect to hear from us for a few days. The phone and internet will be cut off tomorrow, and will not be reinstated until Friday and Monday respectively. And we'll have a new number, though I don't know what it is yet. Will keep you all posted.....

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Contracts...

....have been exchanged. Moving is imminent.

Saturday, 10 April 2010

Photos

Bored of photos of a small man yet? I may have gone overboard today.

Anyway, for those of you that are still interested, here is Nathaniel playing his Sleeping in the Cot game.











Pig-faced, Ugly.....

Spring, spring, spring

Its been a proper day today. The sort where it was sunny right from the word go and it was nice enough to play in the yard immediately after breakfast. Ian and I took turns in going for runs in the cool morning sun and the other person got to watch Nathaniel doing important things.




Here's one I made earlier

I decided to continue in my "have egg boxes, will create" theme, by making some picture frames for Nathaniel. The idea was that these would be displayed at Nathaniel height in his bedroom and he can pick them up and carry them round and do important shuffling. Each week we will have a new theme.

So I spent a happy nap-time (hooray for 2 hour naps), playing with pritt stick and PVA and cereal boxes and coloured paper and remembered all the things that you know when you are 6 but forget in the subsequent years. Things like if you pritt stick something, you inevitably get some on your working surface, and that residue sticks to the front of your item leaving a wierd translucent smear that you'll never get off. And that if you get even the tiniest bit of PVA on your fingers, you leave traces of it everywhere and your fingers get covered in minute particles of carpet hair (if you are silly enough to do your making on the floor).

Anyway, the prototype was a success, and I managed to create two more in approximately one fifth of the time in order for Nathaniel to enjoy this week's theme, trains.
From General 2010


We have a photo of a stream train, a photo of a modern train (from the company that runs a good proportion of the trains that stop at York station), and a print of a Monet painting featuring a train. All very nice. And for future weeks I have prepared pictures on the themes of owls and tractors. (NB Its hard to find interesting representations of tractors. Its pretty much photos of tractors in green english pastures or dusty american fields or nothing).

And as expected, Nathaniel was delighted and did lots of stacking and sorting and carrying and explaining to us that what he had in his hands were "tray, awuvva tray, AWUVVA TRAY!".


He was so attached to his new pictures that he was both confused and slightly upset when I removed the prototype because my sticking was not really up to scratch!

Monday, 5 April 2010

Big fish

Now that we are a suburbia-dwelling, child-having family, current culture dictates that we must spend our bank holidays sitting in traffic jams, driving to an overpriced leisure facility to be over-stimulated.

We attempted this by a trip to The Deep in Hull with two other families. Fortunately, it being Yorkshire in April and hence 2 degrees centigrade, there were no traffic jams and so we had fun driving in convoy along smallish Yorkshire roads and sending each other silly text messages about the view.

And The Deep was wonderful. I shan't bother describing it - you can go to their website and get the gist. But we greatly enjoyed it!





Nathaniel decided that although looking at the fish was fun, what he really wanted to do is to get in too!

He was less convinced by the magic pond, a computer generated, projected image of water on the floor, complete with fish that swam around. The clever bit was that it was all projected onto a touch mat and the swimming fish "reacted" to your presence. If you chased them, they would scatter! I had fun "creeping up" on them, but Nathaniel showed some of his trade-mark cautiousness. He'll happily stroke a giant dog, but he is freaked out by computer generated, A.I. fish. Not all that silly really.

"I'm not sure about this"


We had fun taking arty photos of other people's children. Maisie wasn't this angelic all day!


And like any good day out, Nathaniel enjoyed the simple as well as the fantastic. Lunch was had (by some careful table bagging), surrounded by three walls of glass overlooking the Humber. And there were tables to climb on. Repeatedly.


Oh, and we saw some fish....

Friday, 2 April 2010

Complicated games

Nathaniel has invented his first complex toddler-game, ie one that has several stages, doesn't directly involve toys, and has to be repeated ad infinitum.

Step one: Ask to be lifted up onto the bedroom window sill and draw the curtains (without falling off)!

Step two: Ask to be carried to the cot. "In co(t), in co(t)"

Step three: Lie down in the cot holding on to the nimmy-blanket and go to sleep "slee(p)"

Step four: sit up, stand up and ask for the curtains to be opened; "ope ca, ope ca"

Step five: Ask to be lifted out of the cot; "daaaawn, daaawn" (while pointing at the ground).

Then repeat!
And again.

And again.

Its lots of fun. Really.

Doesn't make great photos though, so here are some other things we've been getting up to.

Doing busy things with two watering cans at once:


Building towers:






Sunday, 28 March 2010

That March kind of feeling

March is never a good month for us. It is the month of National Science and Engineering Week and so one of the busiest weeks (actually we do a two-week festival, just to be extreme!) of my year. Hence, everything else goes out of the window and poor Ian has to cope with a birthday which is almost totally overlooked! I also find that I have very little time for blogging!

But now the festival is all safely over, so here are some highlights of the last few weeks.

We enjoyed the spring-like weather with many outings to the park and have become obsessed with the grown-up swings which are much more exciting than those safe baby swings!


The warm weather also meant that everyday could be a triking day, even if it was raining.


We had friends around to play and had lots of fun outside "painting" the yard (with water) and building flower pot castles (some toddlers' features have been (poorly) disguised to protect their identities).


We had many cups of coffee and croissants and plates of bacon and eggs at York's most Chelsea-esque (but totally wonderful) coffee shop, the Pig and Pastry. We pass the P&P on pretty much most days and Nathaniel has taken to leaning towards it and making hopeful "In there?" noises every time. It is a truly wonderful cafe, but you have to limit the amount of lovely coffee and ridiculously tempting sticky-gungies that you have there. On this Saturday morning we timed it just right so that we got a seat (a mean feat at any time), and Nathaniel enjoyed his view into the kitchen. He also enjoyed the coffee!





So despite lots of busyness, it has been a most pleasant March!

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Outside

Spring is officially here! The dafodils in the garden are blooming and you can go outside without the wind nipping your cheeks!

Nathaniel and I celebrated with our first visit to the Very Young Friends of West Bank Park, a toddler group that meets in the park that will soon be round the corner from us. It wasn't really a venture into the unknown - the group is run by a good friend, and we already knew most of the children and mothers at it!

So we poddled off to the park in rather too many layers to learn some new songs and look at some frogs. Today we all went to the pond and watched the frogs do what frogs do at this time of year, and made houses for suitably themed cuddly toys (chicks and ducks and owls rather than purple dinosaurs) out of sticks and straw. Well, everyone else made houses. Nathaniel learnt how to operate the gate from both sides (you have to fit your hands through the gap in a specific way to lift the latch from the other side of the gate), and let people in and out of the wildlife area. Is he just the son of two scientists, or just not not inclined towards ducks at the moment?

After learning a new song about a farmer and a tractor ("trac-da-da-da, trac-da-da-da TRAC-DA-DA-DA!"), we went to see our friend Paddy's favourite hidding place - a hollow tree accessed from a hole in a hedge. It took Nathaniel a while to decide that he wanted to push his way through the hedge, and in the mean time he spent a very jolly time picking crunchy, dried leaves, holding them up high and dropping them. They floated on the wind and swisted and turned as they floated down. Cue giggles and clapping of hands.

Its too complicated to catch this on a rubbish phone camera (I am really tempted to go and buy a decent phone that has a reasonable camera on it), but here is the picking of leaves:

Friday, 5 March 2010

Talking

Nathaniel's speaking is really improving! He has got to the stage where he is repeating the last few syllables of everything you say, especially when it is entirely inappropriate eg
Tassy: You know, censored is a real chunk!
Nathaniel: chunk, chunk

So far, his limit seems to be about four words as long as they don't have too many syllables. My favourite is him repeating "Things that go" which is one of his favourite, and my least favourite, books. (It is really boring - its four pages about trains, planes, cars and boats, and has rubbish text and not much to talk about in the pictures. But each page has a two part jigsaw embedded in it and N likes to take out the pieces and stack and rearrange them in important ways.) He say "Ings a goooo...." Its really cute!

As far as words that he will use independently go, apart from sticking mainly to one syllable, his biggest problem is that he hasn't managed to grasp that the ends of words are important. He focuses on the first starting consonant and the primary vowel sound. Therefore buggy is bu(g) and banana is ba. There is a sort of sound of the next consonant, but it's not fully pronounced. This means that things are normally understandable (at least by me and Ian) if you have the context. If you are standing in a room with a bucket and a buggy you have to look for hand signals!

But it is surprising how many words he knows well enough to be able to do their first syllable. Some of the weirder ones are sleeve (sli), combine harvester (ha(r)) and trap (tra). Should he ever actually visit a farm, he'll be able to converse happily with the far-far (farmer), tra(c)-ta, caaw (cow), la (lamb), shi (sheep) and gay (gate).

Although he can get Da's attention, he knows that his real name is Da-dee and will say it proudly for you if you ask. He will also say Dee-da hopefully.

He is also putting words together. Mainly this is "more something" (eg tscheese, bre(d), hat (satsuma), bra(n) (bran flakes), "biy biy something" eg bu(s), ta(t) (cat), da(d). and "no something" eg ba(t) (bath), taw (towel). He has also progressed onto "no more something"

Of course, we are already regretting letting him talk at all. His favourite meal is breakfast where, in addition to the boring shreddies and pillows you can also sometimes get bra(n) (Bran Flakes) and kay (Special Kay). He knows where the cereals are kept and will point at the larder hopefully asking "more kay?" several times a day!

We are also enjoying teaching him how to say things like offensive stereotype (he made a good stab at that!) and evil multinational (he made some good attempts at this while going round tesco!).

So he is a generally happy boy and is finding that more and more he can get what he wants, especially when that is, "no more bre(d), dow....(n), more soo (sofa), boo(k), ki(s)". Yes, that is a accurate transcription of the sixty seconds that occur ed at the end our snack this afternoon!

And no post is complete without some photos. So here he is enjoying being able to play outside this afternoon.