Month: September 2006

I spent my first night away from Lola last week when I flew to Rotterdam with some of the other techy guys from work to do a couple of days training. It was really good – we got good stuff out of the training, and we went out for slap-up nosh and a (good) few beers (having Jeremy’s birthday as the perfect excuse).

We flew out in a Fokker 50 (one of VLM’s) from City airport; it’s a great little plane and it was quite something taking off over docklands, then following the Thames downstream till we flew off the coast.

I did miss Lola — especially around bathtime and in the morning. Isa texted on the second day to say Lola was laughing and, in fact, had laughed so much it had given her hiccups. That was the second time I’d missed her laughing. Earlier tonight was the third — she laughed after I’d gone to fill her bath. Bah, it’s so unfair.

Being something which Lola says occasionally and we say a lot. Along with ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, lu-lu-lu-lu-lu, and their ilk.

We’ve just returned from visiting my parents in Watchet, Somerset. It was the first time I’d seen their new house, which they moved into just a week before Lola was born, and it was the first time my dad had seen Lola. And it was a succession of firsts, of course, for Cesarina (aka Angela, aka La Nonna Cicina).

We had a fantastic time. Lola travelled really well and didn’t fuss in the taxi or in the train — and she absolutely loved sitting in her baby-seat riding shotgun with Dad in the camper. We went out a lot in the camper, with Dad picking picturesque bits of the locality to visit, a trip before lunch, then another after. We went to Minehead, walked up a quantock, visited one of the stations on the West Somerset Railway, strolled around Watchet harbour… All that, and we held a reception for Lola on Sunday afternoon. By which I mean Dad had told all the local relatives and friends that they were welcome to come round and see Lola on Sunday between 3 and 5, and Mum made scones and cakes and laid on tea. St John and Christine, Felicity and John, Liz and Juan were all in attendance. Liz bought Lola a fabulous red elephant, which can be seen hanging from her ankle in the pic below, and some lovely pink pyjamas.

Mum and Dad’s new house is great. I thought it might be odd and a little sad (evoking memories of a family home which no longer exists) but, in fact, it felt like home; partly because it was filled with all of their stuff, partly because it’s a very comfortable and sociable space, and mostly because Mum and Dad live there ;-)  I hope we get to spend a lot of time there with Lola, walking the Quantocks, pootling around on the railway, and playing on the beaches.

Is what Lola now weighs, according to our not-especially-accurate bathroom scales (calculating the diff between Isa and Isa+Lola).

Sta arrivando oggi.

This morning, Lola would pull into a sitting position without her head dragging behind her. And when I lifted her to splosh her bum in the bowl of warm water she was more interested in a spot of assisted walking than in bending her legs to sit in the water.

Lola, I realised last night, has stopped making the odd, high-pitched, back-of-the-throat, inhalation-based noise that she used to make a lot while sleeping and, somewhat less, while awake. It was a very distinctive and amusing little call which I would wander around emulating. I wonder will it pass from memory — I don’t think I have a recording of it.

Her vocalisations have changed so much already since her birth. Her crying is different as are her various sighs and moans. And she has a whole new vocabulary; she’s not quite bablling yet, but she has a whole range of vowel sounds and is starting to get the hang of a few consonants (‘g’, ‘m’, ‘n’). When she gets excited she invariably will start chatting away.

Happy Tuesday,

this is a quick blog entry by email.

Perhaps.

Tsk–it is some considerable time since my last post. I blame the relentless onward march of time and my failure to inject a large enough quantity of significant events into it. Actually, putting on a less flippant face, I am not a fan of the modern malaise of attempting to rush through insanely full and varied itineries; great imperatives hanging over us all the time. Though some of those imperatives are hard to sidestep when entrenched in our mad economic/electronic pseudo-reality.

But I’m not here to witter on about that. I’m here to celebrate our daughter’s continuing adventures in life. Lola gets stronger, calmer, and cleverer by the day. She grows more independent, happily lying in her gym or sitting on her chair eying up her dangly toys, cooing and gooing to herself. She’ll sit on my knee now (with support, of course), a position she wasn’t keen on before; and we play at pulling her into a sitting position from lying down.

She’s started to touch things, and will reach towards toys when we’re playing with her; the other day she was reaching out to the elderberries I was showing her as we toured the garden. Tonight, for the first time, she gripped a toy (a two-handled smiley-face mirror-rattle) we were playing with–the jubilation of which moment was only lightly tainted by the fact that she then proceded to whack herself in the face with it. Later, she held on to her tiny doll, Wendy (who, by convention, always says, “Hello Lola, have you seen my tuba?”), when we were changing her for bed.

Nonna Cicina is coming next week (that’s Isa’s mum, to the uninitiated) and is staying for three weeks. In the middle of which we plan to take a long weekend and go and visit my parents. So my dad will get to meet Lola; and Lola will be entertained by all her grandparents at once.

Bleh. Fade…

Good night.