Edward says….

“With so many new exciting new foods and flavours to discover, it’s best to try EVERYTHING!”

Today started rather early as Edward decided he was ready to get up quite sometime before 7am. The frustrating thing is that when he does wake up early he’s usually back sleeping within an hour and a half! Just too late for us to go back to bed! So he had his milk and we watched the Hoobs and a few other tiddlely peep type programmes. He does like Thomas the Tank engine and Noddy! Good old classics! And a little while later he was off to sleep!

During the week we decided that Jack and Elise (J & E) were old enough to go to the park on their own! So this week they have been practising going out and remembering to come back on time – so far I don’t think they has forgotten once! Of course they love it – their first real taste of freedom. The park is a couple of hundred yards down the road and is split in to two parts. One part is small football pitch where they play football and the other is a traditional park with swings and slides etc!

They have made some friends and really enjoy going out – they also visit the horses and ponies in the field next to our cottage. Elise is horse mad – really really horse mad! Lynn took them both to a stables near her house a couple of weeks ago for pony club which they really enjoyed but the kids who went were all much younger than J & E. So we’re not sure if they are going to go again! Anyway it may not matter as they have been invited to help out around the livery yard over the back of us. They are thrilled. Not only do they get to groom and muck out horses all day but they will also to ride as well on occasions. The other kids there are nearly all the same ages as J & E. Jack plays football a lot with a boy called Ben and some other kids from the village but also enjoys working with the horses!

The only problem is that they come back stinking of horses! I had forgotten just how much you smell of horses when you’re working with them. Elise was really smelly when she came back for lunch, so much so that whilst she was standing in the garden telling Sarah and I about her morning adventures Cypher came over, cocked his leg and wee’d over her legs! Elise was shocked and we fell about laughing! With that lesson learnt we instructed Jack to change his trousers before he came in for lunch or he’d risk the same treatment!

So J & E are very happy – tomorrow they will be going swimming with Tony. More practice for the Pier to Pier race in July!

I popped out to get some dog food and a few bits from Tesco and came home with a rotary line dryer for the garden as well, it was 1/2 price in Homebase. And at about 50p a load to tumble dry it will pay for itself in saved electricity in no time at all! The only problem was getting the base stake in to the ground. Our back garden is laid out to gravel and seemingly the gravel is on solid rock! Eventually I got the thing into the ground only to find that it was really on the wonk when I put the airer on! The daft thing is that after spending so long getting the thing in to ground in the first place when I pulled up the airer to put it away the base stake came straight out of the ground! So tomorrow we will pop to Wickes and get some cement!

This evening saw the welcome return of Doctor Who, this was followed by home made quiche and bed!

Well I thought that it had been longer since we posted here! Anyway as usual I’ll blame time and the lack of it! But in reality the main culprit was BT Total Broadband. Our broadband connection had been on and off – mainly off or slow as dial up for the last 6-8 weeks. It seems to have sorted itself out now. We are still waiting for a courtesy call from BT to see how we are doing! I expect it will be us that contacts them first when we demand compensation for the rubbish service we have experienced.

Some of the highlights of the last week have been as follows:

The kids and Sarah going to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ performed by the Shakespeare for Kidz company. Evidently it was great! I didn’t go hence the in-depth review!

Sarah has transformed an area of rough ground at the end of the house into a lovely garden. So we have visited a few garden centres and picked up a few select plants which will give it year round structure and colour and later on we are expecting some plants to arrive in the post from earlier offers we saw. Lily of the valley, jasmine, clematis, fuchias, heucheras and others that I can’t remember now!

We have also moved some the potted plants we brought with us in to the new garden which leaves most of the plants in the back yard of a Mediterranean style. So we are going to continue that theme with hot / dry planting in pale terracotta pots – we haven’t finalised the plans yet so this will be a long term project. We did get the OK this week to hang our baskets on the house so we are looking for to a fab display again. We have got some trailing sweet peas coming so fingers crossed they will look and smell great!

We had to order 1000 litres of oil this week as our December order was running out – hopefully this order will last until the end of November.

I have finally found a resting place for my laptop in the kitchen so I set up pc desk with my TFT monitor and 2.1 speakers and then discovered I couldn’t get a wireless signal – it was only two feet away from the previous place but no, it wouldn’t connect so I dug out some Ethernet cable and wired a connection from the router to my laptop. Which is great – it feels like I have a real home for my computer now! All I need to do now is clip the cable properly to the skirting board! More importantly it frees up the kitchen table for the kids studies!

Edward has been making lots more cute noises this week – mainly based on the mwah mwah, ma ma MA, da dwah daaaa, mwah theme but he has been much more vocal! He is desperate to get on the floor and crawl around, he almost got on his knees this morning, when he does I’m sure he’ll be off, racing around. Then nothing will be safe! He has already developed a fagin like approach to removing things from drawers when you’re not looking (he would make a great pick pocket) the funny thing is that he opens the drawer first then has a look and chooses something he fancies and picks it up. It is not a random rummage it is done with real purpose! He will be nine months next week. I just can’t believe where the time has gone. I know the pregnancy seemed to race by but now it is going so fast.

Our washing machine stopped working last Friday, it was over five years old and had been fixed a number of times before so this time we got another one. It came on Thursday at 7am! And has been in constant use ever since, although now I think we are pretty much up to date with the washing! The great thing is that I still don’t really know how to use it as Sarah has done all the washing! The thing lights up like a Christmas tree but is as quiet as a mouse – shh, super quiet technology. It also washes much more per load and only has a cold water feed so it will save us a fortune in oil. The previous one had a hot water feed and every time it wanted some hot water the boiler would fire up and drink some more oil! And that was only for a 30 degree wash – but we do do loads of washing. Now with the warmer weather here we will get a rotary line for the garden so we won’t have to run the tumble dryer so much. The new line will probably pay for itself in just a few months!

Next time I post I will go through some figures about electricity consumption. We seem to use more electricity than any one else in the country, at least twice the average household according to our bills.

I think that has covered most things for now!

The blurb down the side of the blog was obscuring Edward’s face!

So this is just a random post with a photo to move the group shot down…

Edward has had fun playing with Aunty Kirsty and Jack and Elise have had fun following her around and generally being her shadow for the last 24 hours.

They are currently initiating her into the world of Shrek and Shrek II if there’s time – it’s been a very relaxed and slobby agenda….just the way everyone likes it!

It’s a nice time to come to Lowick as everything is beginning to burst back into life, leaf and bud; the days are getting longer and noticeably warmer – summer will soon be here! Which means that Edward’s first birthday will soon be here too, in a mere 17 weeks in fact! At the end of this entry are some photos of our plants coming back to life.
Jack and Ellie have had fun this week dissecting an ox heart and pigs’ eyes – I stopped short of hauling them into the butchers so they could watch him gouge the eyes straight out of the head….I thought it might put them off a bit. We’ve taken lots of photos of their efforts and they can now tell you all about the anatomy of the eye, can label the various chambers, valves and arteries coming in and out of the heart and show you the way the blood flows through the heart.

Next week will have more a physics slant to things as they have asked how batteries work – so that’s what we’re going to have a look at. I’m sure you can make your own battery using water so between now and Monday I shall be looking up lots of interesting things to look at and do with regard to batteries and perhaps alternative ‘power cells’, I still really fancy making a potato clock

Simon is having a HUGE battle with BT….STILL! Our super-fast broadband is now half the speed of dial up and trying to get any sense or swift action out of BT is proving to be more difficult than walking on water. Today is their last chance to fix the problem before he takes our complaint to the higher level complaints team….I wonder if they’ll actually prove to be any more useful…

It’s nearly time for lunch so that’s all for now.

Sarah x

It is incredible and unbelievable that he is 8 months old today. He is just the most fabulous little person. He has started to mumma mum mum ma. It is clear and distinct, this morning Noo was preparing a carrot for him at the sink so had her back to him when in the loudest, shoutiest voice he said “Mum” it was really funny!

He does say dada but it is not yet so clear or obvious when he is saying it. Here are some pictures that Noo took today.

He has just woken up so I’ll leave it here for now!

I am trying to get the feed to work with a reader so that it will automatically let you know when a new entry has been posted – if you subscribe that is! So this is really a little test entry to experiment!

Today Noo, Edward and I ventured in to Northampton whilst Jack and Elise went swimming with Ding.

We were after a new ‘stroller’ type pushchair for Edward and Toys R Us had a bargain. £130 reduced to £69.99 including a parasol, rain cover and foot muff. It is black and red and is really easy to push around! Edward loves it too – he went for a spin around ‘Where in the World…?’ (PC World!) which was in the next retail park down the road!

We got a couple of bits from Where in the World and here’s a first for us! their prices are generally cheaper online so you can reserve it online and collect in store paying the online price. We weren’t sure which products to go for so we couldn’t reserve it before we went but we did check and found out that there was a wireless hotspot in the car park. So we found the products we wanted, left the store, found the hotspot, logged on, via the laptop, using our free BT Openzone account, ordered the products online, went back to the store and saved ourselves £10!! Bargain!

On Thursday Noo took Jack and Elise to Stanwick Lakes, the nature reserve we visited a couple of weeks ago, as there was an activity day for kids. Jack and Elise made a bird box, a nut feeder and a fat ball each! Sarah will post the photos later! They also went on the nature trail and got a prize for finding all the clues.

Yesterday Sarah took all the kids to her Mum’s for lunch and stayed the rest of the afternoon so I was able to get several hours uninterrupted study in – it was fab! The only problem apart from missing them was the more I study the more I realise I need to study, there is so much to learn – esp with the web development. One tricky thing is trying to come with reasonably simple ideas for web pages that I can practice on. So if anyone has any bright ideas or challenges for me then let me know it would be really good practice!

I’m off now as it is now Sunday morning allbeit just but it is time for bed!

Jack and I are going to a computer fair in Kettering tomorrow (Sunday). We haven’t been before so we’re hoping it is a good one!

And it’s only 8am!

Yes – for the last 3 nights Edward has slept through the night – hurray!

It has been a long 7 months of broken sleep but a week ago Sarah and I decided not to feed him when he woke up. Which he usually did around 12 and 4 – 5, he could have water but no “mit milch” (formula). It only took a 2 or 3 nights of ‘trauma’ and hand holding from Sarah to get through it, that’s Edward’s hand not mine! The other part of the plan was to fill him up during the day so he couldn’t possibly be hungry during the night!

He seemed somehow to have got his eating upside down – he’d eat more during the night than he would in the day – so we changed that around! He has now progressed on to more lumpy food – although it does take the little fella a while to ‘chew / mash’ the lumps with his gums! He still doesn’t like our home cooking, instead preferring jars of food. (He still has formula at least 3 times a day)
He does have some absolute favourites – egg custard and fromage frais (not together!) He likes squash but doesn’t like to drink it out of beaker with a spout – he’s far to grown up for that – he went straight to drinking out of an open cup! He’s so clever.

He does have really hurty teeth at the moment so his cheeks are really rosy red and he’s chewing anything he can get his hands on and dribbling constantly!

The bigger kids and Noo are still doing the gym/swim every day and thoroughly enjoying it, there all feeling fit and healthy.

I’m studying hard as much as I can, as you know I started my pc technician course again with the 2006 objectives. Although the same, it is different, the modules are in a different order and the information is, to state the obvious, much more up to date! But the new studying routine is paying off as I have achieved 100 in each of my first 5 assessments!

The assessments don’t count toward the final certificate, they are simply for revision purpose!

My other studies are going well too – web design, most of that studying goes on between 9.30pm and midnight! Still I really enjoy learning about the web – it is here to stay and I believe that it will become so much more important in time to come. Some believe that it will do away with the need for having a powerful pc, as much of the work we do will be done online. You can already use word processors, spreadsheets, calendar programmes etc on the net for free, saving your documents online as well. So one day you could have your own online desktop, so instead of storing your files on your pc you will store them online and access them from anywhere. And with the increase of wireless networks you should be able to get to your ‘stuff’ from anywhere using any wifi device, whether it be a mobile phone, pda or small laptop.

On another note, I threw away the flowers that Mum gave us when she came over – they have lasted for ages!

Right then it is off to Tesco!

We woke up to snow this morning and it kept falling until mid-afternoon.

Me and the kids walked up through the park to Drayton House, it’s only a 10 minute stroll but the wind was whipping through the park making it SO cold – so we turned round and came home.

I’m off to eat dinner now – so I’ll leave you with some snow piccies.

Sarah x