A bit of transition

You'll notice a few changes on the blog. I'm thinking the look and feel will be a bit fluid over the next week or so as I experiment with the 'Googleified' new features.

Happy New Year

Christmas was a quietish affair this year, but as usual everybody in the clan had there fair share of presents, food and alcohol so a big pat on the back to all involved.

Harrison was a little more involved in proceedings this year but clearly still has no concept of how Christmas works. 'Here Harrison, have a present from Mum/Dad/Granny etc..' is not a cue to pick up discarded wrapping paper and leave the room. Bless him though. Once the debris cleared he actually seemed to genuinely enjoy playing with his new toys, although this mostly involves bashing.

New Year is next on the list and for the first time in ages, we're having a quiet one. We'll be driving down to Cornwall this afternoon to bring in the New Year with a sea view. As ever my parents will be putting us up, which mostly makes a relaxing time for Fi and I.

Happy New Year to you all.

Better late then never

Aren't you all sick to death of me having to apologise every time I post here? It's been aaaaagggeeeess since my fingers touched this page (saucy). No excuses - I just plain suck.

So, Harrison is 14 1/2 months old now and finally started to walk in a normal(ish) fashion about a month ago.... it's all great but hell, the crawling was easier! Over the past 12 months or so people have been warning us, saying things like 'oooh wait until he's walking, he'll be into everything', whilst sucking through their teeth at the same time. I truly understand what they mean now. The kid is relentless - bouncing around the room from one forbidden door to the next bookshelf from which to rip everything from. Hours of fun and I wouldn't change it for the world.

What else is new? Christmas is just around the corner and for once our preparations are going well. We'll be in Bath again this year so it should work out relatively calm. Looking further ahead, we're off to the slopes of Copper Mountain in the middle of January with Rachael and Paul. Hey, Colorado natives, what's this place like??? We missed out on our winter sports last year with the arrival of Harry so we're really looking forward to it.

Savour this. Hopefully I'll post again soon but on current form I'll be back in the Spring

Engage

A couple of months back, Marie and Jason bought me a pair of tickets to see The Tempest for my Birthday. Now, I'm not a great Shakespeare fan, largely because I don't understand most of it, but this was not just any performance. A couple of Saturdays back, four of us went to Stratford-upon-Avon for the day to take in the perfomance with Patrick Stewart playing Prospero at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Call me a simpleton but I've admired Patrick Stewart since... erm Star Trek TNG. I've grown out of it now but his presence on stage is unmistakable. Fi and I have seen him once before in Ibsen's 'The Master Builder' and although starstruck then, this was far more epic! Although lengthy at close to three hours, I was moslty engrossed, no doubt helped by the remarkably comfortable theatre seats. Too comfortable for some it seems. Both Fi and Jason dozed off for at least a couple of minutes at some point during the performance.... obviously Patrick Sterwart was not on stage at the time. Make it so.

Harrison continues to develop as all babies should. He is so very close to be able to walk now and will happily hold one of our hands and toddle around the house and garden with us. He's taken a couple of unassisted steps, but they are always done whilst falling over. Of course he turns to us and smiles as if saying 'I meant to do that mum/dad'.

With just eleven days before his first Birthday I find myself amazed at how quickly the last twelve months has passed us by. Never a dull moment with kids you see.

Camping in North Devon

We decided to go camping last weekend with Denise, Tom and Hannah. Denise chose a lovely campsite near Lynton and Lynmouth called Channel View Camping and Caravan site and off we all went on Friday afternoon. Somehow against all the odds we managed to get everything in the car (we did have to go through everything and pick out stuff we definitely could do without and it took us 3 days to pack the car!) and after packing Harry in his car seat alongside everything else, we set off to pick Andy up from work. Normally we go with our usual group of friends so it doesn't matter so much. We just stuff bits in other people's cars but because Denise and Tom were coming down from Meriden we had to be brutal in our packing.
The plan was to meet them at the campsite. They were going to be leaving a couple of hours before us so we asked them to get us a big pitch. However they left an hour later than they planned and we left earlier so as luck would have it we met them at the services just past Weston-Super-Mare. We decided to follow Denise and Tom and after 2 or 3 detours and quite a few muppets on a not very to easy to overtake road we got to the campsite about 7.30pm. Not great when it's ridiculously windy and you have 2 tents to put up, a baby to feed and a toddler running off every 5 seconds. We finally put children to bed and had our tea in the dark about 10pm. Thinking everything was ok we were looking forward to bed both of us being completely knackered. But oh no, because as bad luck would have it, the combination of us talking outside the tent, the tent pitched on a slope so he kept rolling to the bottom of the travel cot and it being bloody windy, the boy woke up about 10.45 and wouldn't go back to sleep screaming the tent down. Mum and dad being very very tired and cold bundled him into the car and went off for a drive with the heater on full blast. Harry didn't sleep but we were very tempted to sleep in the car. However it didn't come to that and when we finally got out of the car and put Harry in his cot he drifted off to sleep...bless! He did the same thing the next night but he went back to sleep about 11pm, woke again about 5am and lucky for him got to share mum and dad's double sleeping bag - a tight squeeze I can tell you.
You'd think camping in August based on the previous few weeks weather would be fine so we omitted to take our ski jackets and the like. Oh how stupid we were. We wore the same clothes for the whole weekend because they were the only warm clothes we had. Harry was ok because when it comes to packing I always have to make sure he has 3 times as much stuff as he needs and we just try to pack the bare minimum so it fits in the car.
Overall the trip was good. It was really nice to spend some time with Denise, Tom and Hannah, and we went to a part of Devon that I have never been to before. The scenery was very very dramatic, more like Wales or the Lake District, and I had a really good cream tea - that made it all worth while.
Moral of the story, don't pitch your tent on a slope on top of a headland facing the wind unless you want no sleep ever. Oh and we need a bigger car!