family

we had lunch with my old housemate Paul and his wife Liz. lovely food and lovely company. marvellous. (liz is very pregnant hence the profile bump shot)

paul is also completely mad:

esther has come up with a brilliant plan. she’s going to wear a star on her hand for 24 hours. where does she get such great ideas from ? it’s a performance art thing i recon.

by the way, the lent activity is still going well.

last sunday esther lost £1. we spent ages looking for it. eventually we found it. it was in the turnup on her skirt at the back. very much like looking for spectacles which are balanced on your head all along. sort of.

we’ve been on holiday for the last week so there’s been no real time updates since last saturday to the blog. best i’ve had is minimal text access to email.
anyway, i’ve got tonnes of pictures (i took about 500 photos and have saved about 350). so expect a few days worth of mega-blogging before it’s back to business as usual.
here is where we stayed near Thomas Hardy’s birthplace near Dorchester. The place was built by his dad and was very good !

i took the girls to a garden centre this afternoon. we walked past this shed a kezia pointed at it and said “that’s a sad one”. so we decided to go in and cheer it up.

it’s been a family day. here are kezia and esther playing piano (sort of):

then esther ran round with my coat on pretending to be a bat:

my god-daughter made me a lovely card (with integral envelope):

esther likes to wear a leotard to do a jigsaw. jane was relegated to the floor.

today we went to Hampton Court Palace. It’s riddled with history. esther and kezia really enjoyed it.
pity it was absolutely freezing and esther forgot her coat …

esther guided us to the centre of the famous maze and back out again.

here is kez and esther next to an oversized cut out of Henry VIII.

leave people alone with kids toys and they create fantastic things.
here is some fuzzy felt art. i was very impressed. whenever i try and create anything it’s usually rubbish (often quite literally)

the artist:

kezia has teeth coming through. this causes random misery (for all involved). it also makes her cheeks quite rosey and red

esther took this photo. i was very impressed. esther (age 4) is better at taking photos than kezia (aged 2) is at driving a car with a steering wheel in Midtown Madness 2. both activities are good fun to watch.
it’s even funnier when we play a network game with esther and kezia both trying to drive. esther can just reach the foot pedals on my computer and kezia sits on my knee at jane’s computer.

my mum got esther a game for christmas called Ghostly Galleons and it’s most excellent. normal kids games are a bit boring or noisey and run out of batteries.
This game is a bit like snakes and ladders but there’s an element of skill as well as luck. and it’s quite exciting when you move the pirate and the boat spins round and various player’s pieces going flying off in to the ‘sea.
esther and her friends love it. and kezia likes spinning the little spinner and putting her person on the top of the mast.

when you’ve got the game you then need to learn to speak like a pirate

jane and i have been married 8 years today. and 8 jolly years it’s been too.
this year i’ve been very uncreative, but last year i made this lovely photo (which i framed):

and this little card:

here is brother edd in my office. he popped in for an early morning cuppa.
but the machine didn’t vend tea and he didn’t want to dunk a tea bag (he has standards) so the tea remained unmade and he sat there quietly.

i really don’t know why, but i’d forgotten all about slicing loaves of bread. i guess it shows how much i get involved in the domesticity at home. we often get sliced bread and french sticks and other stuff which doesn’t require chopping in the same way.
however, working from home this morning i decided i needed some toast. and there was the loaf ready to cut. however, i’d forgotten about jane (my wife) and my incompatibility in this area.
She cuts at an angle whilst i go for the straight up and down cut. i think it’s to do with how she squashes the loaf with her non chopping hand. to ‘right each other’s wrongs’ we have to chop a wedge shape off, to reset the loaf, and then start our own style

so, once again i am reminded that there are generally two solutions to potential disharmony:
solution by ommission (i go nowhere near the bread (or have my own bread) and therefore don’t cause any trouble)
solution by technology (we buy sliced bread)

my mum used to tell my brother and i that mushy over ripe bananas were what you got given in hospital to make you well. they became known as hospital bananas.
it never occured to me that maybe the reason we called them hospital bananas is that they could make you ill and you’d end up in hospital.
whatever, nobody likes the brown gloopy bit of a banana do they ?

i’m usually pretty useless when i arrive home in an evening. my 1hr 45 minutes commute can often be quite miserable (though it’s at least more bearable since i dumped the tube for walking).
the best bit about the commute home is the reaction from esther and kezia when i walk through the door. they are (usually) so excited to see me. it’s a real ego boost.
today they were even waiting at the window, waving down the street as i approached the house.
hoorah for jolly kids !

update: ooops, just in case anyone thought otherwise, hoorah for jolly wives too. especially jane who it goes without saying i’m also very glad to see each evening. it went without saying, so i didn’t say it. but now i have.

this is one for all you scottish people who say “wee” rather than “small”.

update: after i posted this kezia did her first ‘wee’ in the toilet today. it was her idea and we thought we’d just go along with her plan. we thought it was probably just an excuse to extract large quantities of toilet roll and do the flushing.
anyone who’s got children will know the implications of this:
good – the end is in sight for nappies
bad – the next few weeks will be quite damp for all involved and going out for day trips will get more tricky.