Kite Flying

It probably wasn't really the best day for it. Rather cold, rather damp, relatively still ie not much wind. Silly, that!

But we went anyway and had a fun time on the racecourse with Ian's christmas kite. Nathaniel said "ti(te), ti(te), ti(te)" a lot (he has forgotten how to say the letter C, so now we see a lot of tats and tars). We got it in the air easily enough, but then did a lot of crashing. Not sure whether that was because there was not enough wind to get it high in the sky and therefore stable or if it was just user error. We had fun though!

Being Great

This week we made a list of some of the reasons why Nathaniel is great. Here is a selection:

- He likes interesting tastes - he licks chutney off toast. His favourite (and unfortunately mine), is the Yorkshire chutney that we got for Christmas.

- He loves the phone (which he calls "Hone") and picks it up, puts it nearish his ears (more often than not it ends up at the back of his neck) and says "Hello!"

- When told that it's time to do a new activity (eg time to go outside, or go and change his nappy), his first action is to say and wave goodbye to the thing he is looking at/playing with.

- He gets very excited when he sees Daddy walking down the street on his way home from work.

- When walking along the road, he'll try and stop at every car and point out their indicator and try and open their front doors.

- He likes to dunk! Bread in soup, peas in ketchup.....

- When he wants some food he collects a bowl or plate from the cupboard and puts it on the highchair tray.

- He makes tea in the tea caddy full of tea bags by dribbling in water from his sippy cup.

- After the nursery staff have told you about his day, he takes the report paper from them and reads it to you "Blah, b-ll-ahh, wubble, wubble".

- He asks for specific songs and rhymes by starting the actions for them. His favourites at the minute are the snowman rhyme and "Dance, Thumbkin, dance".

Here are some photos of general fun:
Being upside down:


"You there.....!"


Hugging Daddy

Being busy

The great thing about Nathaniel is that he is now old enough to be interested in all sorts of boring, everyday activities! This weekend we spent some time in the yard trying to sort out Ian's ailing bike and Nathaniel enjoyed helping.

There are lots of interesting places to explore:


And things that move in interesting ways:


You can help with pumping up tyres:


And then have a go yourself:

Spring is coming

Well, it's trying!


In other news, Ian finds the cause of his rapidly deflating tyre:

Not a pot hole after all.

Trains and burgers

We have now officially reached the stage where a cold, wet Sunday afternoon starts to pose problems. You can't just stay in the house because you get bored, but the park really isn't that fun. Unless you have got a prior adventure arranged, you don't have many options.

But, someone in their wisdom (the government!!!) decided to make all the national museums free, so off we went to enjoy the railway museum at the tax payers' expense! Thank you tax payers!

Our route to the NRM goes through the station, so we got into the mood by watching several long London trains arrive and depart and even got to see a Virgin train leave on time! Nathaniel, unsuprisingly, did a lot of "tra, tra, tra, tra, TRA!"

And then onto the NRM. There was a brief wobble when we got him out of the carrier and put him down in the great hall. To be honest, its pretty overwhelming when you are a full grown adult. Trains seem so big when you are at wheel height.

But we got into the Japanese bullet train, and Nathaniel had fun storming up and down the isles and then lead us out to explore.


I'm not entirely sure how obvious it is to a 16 month old that some of the big hunks of metal are actually trains. After all, they don'l lok much like modern trains, and from 2 ft from the ground they are mainly giant pieces of oddly shapped iron. But there are lots of interesting textures to feel and shapes to find, all of which is fun.


There are also lots of giant, brightly coloured wheels. They are totally recognisable and interesting.


But one of the best things about the NRM, especially on a deserted Sunday afternoon, is that there is lots of space to charge around, most of which is totally safe, so you don't have irritating parents running after you taking way interesting items that you have picked up (note to self: Marks and Spencers, though fun, is not an ideal playground).


Nathaniel declared the outing a (blurry!) success.


And the great thing is that we only went to half of one of the rooms! There are plenty of other rooms that we haven't even glanced into! By the time we have worked our way around them, it will be time to come back to the Great Hall and Nathaniel will have a totally new take on it! Expect many, many, many more visits!

We wound our way back through the station (still more "tra, tra, tra, TRA!" - how many trains until he gets bored?!), and started to walk back through the sleet, when we passed a pub pumping out the most delicious smell of beer and burgers and chips. We are not great at being spontaneous at the best of times, we tend always to have a well thought out and prepared plan, so we decided to act on whim and head back into town for some food. After smelling those burgers, it could only be to the Gormet Burger Kitchen. After all, we eat horribly healthily normally!

So we had a lovely evening consuming delicious burgers in a deserted restaurant. Nathaniel played with straws very well, and ate all his food off a ceramic plate with no breakages! Obviously our love of eating out is improving his table manners, as yesterday we ended up in the Pig and Pastry for lunch and Nathaniel coped with their breakables as well!


All in all it was an extremely satisfying solution to a miserable Sunday afternoon!

Appreciation

Moving house is a bit like having a hair cut. As soon as you have absolutely decided on it, you start to really appreciate what you've already got. Today, while most sensible people were hiding from the freezing mist-drizzle-sleet (yes, all of those at the same time) inside, Nathaniel and I decided to go out for a walk in the meadows behind our house. It was actually his idea - he brought me the carrier just as the sleet started to splatter the windows.

But as the obedient parent that I am, I put us all in coats and snowsuits and gloves and hats and scarves and took us all outside. And I'm very pleased that I did. It was lovely. The sleet accomodatingly stopped and left us in a thick cotton-woolly fog. There was no-one else around and we had the fields to ourselves. Even the sheep were absent. We enjoyed squelching through mud (Nathaniel has read the Bear Hunt book about 3 times a day for the last week, so he is well acquainted with mud), and watching the crows silently flap out of the gloom and catching the drips from the bare branches. Everything was muffled except for the occasional cry of "boa(t), boa(t)!" and "bir(d), bir(d)" (Nathaniel hasn't quite mastered the final consonant of words yet). We had such a nice time.

I wanted to take photos of how pretty it was, but I think even Ian's swish camera would have been hard-pressed to capture the wierd dusk-like qualities of the stillness. My phone didn't really do a very good job:


Then we came home and made rooibos (Nathaniel's favourite drink at the minute) and toast and bramble jam. Much fun!

Eating

Nathaniel has suddenly worked out how to effectively use his cutlery. He now gets frustrated if his food can't be simply stabbed with a fork or scooped with a spoon, and most meals are relatively tidy affairs until he gets tired and irritated with how slow the whole process is.

Breakfast:

Loud noises

Nathaniel has always taken a robust view towards things that alarm him. He usually uses the "hide-behind-a-parent" method, but also regularly employs the do-it-til-its-not-scary method which bodes well for the future!

When he got scared by the pop-up crocodile in a birthday book, we had to read it at least 5 times a day while he cowered behind us as the final crocodile page loomed. His alarm at hoovers has lead to him being totally obsessed with them and seeking them out in everyone's houses.

But until recently we hadn't worked out how to deal with the food processor. For months, I have been using it in the living room, mounted on an insulating bean-bag tray while Nathaniel is asleep. But then the other day, I decided to see if he was still bothered by it and discovered that it was now quite the opposite. He enjoyed the "brrrmmmm" so much that he has been trying to get it out of the cupboard ever since! He points hopefully at it asking "brrrmmmm?" and brings the blender jug attachments to you. If any part of it has been left on the draining rack, he'll stand in the kitchen for hours pointing at it and brrrrmmming at it and will retrieve you from the living room, carefully taking your hand and leading you to it.

Here he is enjoying us whizzing up some butternut squash soup.

Here it comes:


How exciting!


Its quite loud


"Why has it stopped?"


"More!"


"More!"

Too much detail about houses

I don't want to jinx the whole thing, but as we haven't spoken to a lot of you, I figured that you might want to know about the impending, hopefully, move. Maybe if I blog about it then it will have to happen!

So, after 12 years, we have got up the energy to consider moving out of South Bank. We deserve some sort of medal for that - after three houses on the same road, its hard to break the habit!

But after much deliberating we realised that we were never going to be able to afford a house in South Bank with a third bedroom (for Nimmy to live in for a bit), a garage (for the boat to live in in the winter), a dining room (so Nathaniel learns table manners) and a garden (for me to live in!). But we love South Bank! We love being 7 mins cycle and 15 mins walk from the centre of town. We love being down the road from the marvellous butcher and baker. We love having the open space of the racecourse on our doorstep. We love being 5 mins walk from countryside and sheep in fields. We love being so close to the river and to Rowntree Park. We love having several different, pleasant walks into town. We love living so close to loads of our friends. But its time to be adventurous!

So the new (I feel I need to put "hopefully" after every mention of it!) house, is in Holgate, a whole 25 minutes walk from where we presently are. Here is a pretty map to show you. Pink splodge is South Bank, blue is Holgate.


It's much more suburban and much less terracy. It's a bit scary in that way. But it has advantages. We can have a big garden. We are 1 minutes walk from Hob Moor (a giant bit of moorland where cows graze and there are grasses to run in, trees to climb, streams to bridge and dog walkers to annoy - loads of photos and nice maps and stuff at friendsofhobmoor.org.uk). We are 3 minutes from West Bank park which has mainly the same advantages as Rowntree Park (minus the zip line) but the added advantage of much better, thicker woods with little glades and picnic benches. We can live on a quiet road where you could ride your bike if you were 7. We are still only 7 mins cycle or 15 mins walk from town even though the route is less pleasant. And we can have a house with space and not be mortgaged up to the eyeballs.

So its not too bad. Here is my justification of moving to suburbia - all the green bits are bits of open space that we like to use. The arrows point to the rough location of our houses:
South Bank


Holgate

Could be a whole lot worse!

And the house. Well. I swore I'd never live in 70s suburban hell, but things change... It has big windows, and a study and sun room and out-house as well as a living room and dining room. It has three sensible bedrooms and the potential to extend and create a fourth. It has a garden. A south facing, open aspect garden with grass and trees. Trees!! Its pretty cool!

It does need a little DIY. Well, a lot if you are not fond of 70s patterned carpets, brown walls and faux-brick fire surrounds. But I am chosing to delude myself that we will enjoy the whole DIY process this time! Either that or all of you will have to come and stay and scrape, paper and paint a wall each!

But the garden. Did I mention south-facing and open-aspect? Let me mention it again!

Just keep all your fingers and toes crossed for us.

Storage

As previously mentioned, we have managed to make our house look vaguely saleable mainly by filling up our friends' houses with boxes full of junk. The boxes have been moved several times, but now we have really run out of friends with spare rooms, so we had to resort to storage.

Yes, in theory we have sold the house so we could move it all back here, but to be honest, I don't want to! Its quite nice being able to see the walls and floors and occasionally find enough space to roll along the floor (Nathaniel's favourite game at the minute). There is also the fact that we've not really missed most of it and so this has been a good exercise in identifying that which should really go to the tip/charity shop.

But for the meantime, its been put in a "quarter-garage" in Pickfords' nice storage facility. Nathaniel helped do all the moving this weekend and had a whale of a time! Who would have though that a giant, sparcely furnished warehouse could be so much fun!

He ran up and down the corridors pointing out doors - "dawr, dawr, dawr, DAWR, DAWR!!!!"


He played with keys and tried to unlock things:


He was generally very merry!


P.S. The downside of using my rather useless phone to take photos is that everything comes out like a Crimewatch graphic! Have you seen this man......?

Like buses

For ages no-one wanted to buy our house. And we were sad. But now, two people want to buy it! Hooray!!

With your best Lloyd Grossman accent....

Who lives in a house like this?


Well, considering that it's present owners have accepted our offer, it looks like us!

More details to follow!

Fun in the snow

There is even more snow now. The chimnea (pictured before) is now pretty much covered. Our leaking gutters have created beautiful icicles.


They are fun to break off and play with!


Yesterday we took the litte boy sledging on the slope by the city walls. We had no sledge (everywhere is sold out), so first I experimented with a tea tray:


It was pretty good, but not very stable for little boys. Fortunately a family nearby had moved on to snowball fights so we borrowed a sledge. Nathaniel wasn't too impressed with being dragged around on it!


But sledging down the hill was totally different!


You can't really see his smile, mainly becuase most of the time he looked like he does on his other favourite equipment, the zip wire - very concentrated! But when he reached the bottom of the hill he pointed straight back up and demanded more. So we went faster and faster!





Today we went back to a steeper bit of slope with a group of friends and Nathaniel conveniently had a long nap in his buggy so we could play! Its so sad that we didn't have a camera! This bit was much longer and steeper a slope and had a brick wall at the bottom to aim for. Actually there was a gap so that you could escape onto the frozen road - a very safe exit strategy!!

No-one had a sledge so we used the trusty tea tray, a cardboard box once containing a convection heater (with a good shiny surface), a silver sheet thing that you use to protect your car windscreeen from frost, and the piece de resistance (can't find how to do accents) - a body board!

It was brilliant! The body board went the fastest, and by the end Ian was scaring people by whizzing down on his kneeses and carrying on a good 15 metres down the road.

I'll try and get some of the photos that the others took, because this was seriously good fun!

Snow

There is lots of snow. Lots and lots of snow.


Enough snow for someone to build a giant snow bear. Did his head fall off (it was there yesterday), or did someone knock it off (its over 6ft in the air)?


Its all rather pretty

The right way to watch Battlestar Galactica

For this hobby you will need
- one DVD of Battlestar Galactipus
- one laptop
- one giant screen
- one business-grade projector
- one stereo plus speakers
- several bodge-cables and connectors that you never knew existed
- two sofas
- a few bottles of beer
- a bottle of red wine (drink it now, there'll be no time later)
- a box of thornton's chocolates that are a bit too fancy for everyone's taste
- a bowl of rice crackers
- five members of a family that takes it's sci-fi a bit too seriously!



We are kings of all Battlestar Galactipus watching. Look on our wonders and despair!