Month: November 2006

Yes, it’s another marathon cooking session: stock (chicken, braising steak, beef bones), bread (which we hope will not object too strongly to having the salt kneaded into the (pre-prooved) dough, as we forgot to add it before), and a big pot of ragú. That should see us through much of the week.

A little earlier, I lowered the mattress in Lola’s cot. She’s started crawling now and, judging by the way she can clamber over our legs, it wouldn’t have been long before she hauled herself up and out of the cot.

Isa and I are not feeling too good today (nor were we yesterday); some sort of head-cold. I wonder if we caught it from Lola: she’s had a red nose for the last few days. Or perhaps the red nose is congenital, and she caught it off my Mum 🙂 Which reminds me, I keep looking at Lola these last couple of days and really seeing my Mum.

What else? Oh – next weekend we’re off down to Somerset with Tom and Esther to see Mum and Dad. That’ll be great; and, in some small way, a little bit Christmasy, as we’ll not be seeing them at Christmas due to our being in Italy. Tom’s going to drive us; which makes the whole thing much, much simpler.

Yesterday, Mum and Dad waved goodnight to Lola over the webcam. Dad set his up on Saturday ,while we were chatting for the first time on IM (Yahoo Messenger), which prompted me to go and dig mine out. Incredibly, it Just Worked(TM) when I plugged it in. So we all had great fun waving at each other while talking on the phone. Which seemed easier than trying to work out the audio stuff over the computers, too — especially given Dad has free calls of an evening.

Let’s see. Isa has started going down to the Haelan Centre with Lola; not working yet, but working out what she’ll be doing and getting Lola used to being there.

It’s ramping up towards Christmas (perhaps that, combined with the shortening days, is why I’ve not been blogging so frequently; or perhaps it’s just predictable dwindling motivation as it stops being a new toy…) and we’re spending time trying to get the cards done (homemade, we plan) and pressies sorted. It’s only a few weeks before we’re off to Italy. Lummy.

Yesterday, we went down to an old Baptist hall on Jornsey High Street to drop in to a ‘Winter Boogie’ held by a local Steiner nursery. We were a bit too over-tired to really enjoy the hectic mess of sword-wielding toddlers (one Steiner-type mum was telling us how the children can’t play with guns, but are allowed wooden swords, which seems far more dangerous to me). Anyway, it was a nice enough kind of affair, reminiscent of my (more rural) childhood. I kind of like some of the Steiner ideas — we might consider such a nursery as there as it weren’t too fanatic.

Also this weekend — I AJAXified my internal mp3-jukebox webapp thing. It is now a positive delight to browse through albums and queue individual tracks from them. Hooray.

Lovely November weekend: bright, crisp, beautiful autumn light and smell
in the air.

Saturday: Francis (with Maurice) for haircut in the morning. Went for a walk
in the afternoon, down to Priory Park with a couple of lentil salads for
lunch. Sat by the kiddies’ (now empty) paddling pool and watched the
kids playing. Then walked back to Crouch End and did the food shopping
and struggled back home weighed down with meat and veg.

That evening, made stock and ate some of the chicken with the stock
vegetable in a kind of warm salad. With toast and Isa’s chutney: most
good.

Sunday: strained and froze the stock; made ragu; pruned (well, nearly
razed to the ground) the bush in the garden. Had ragu for lunch; lola
with us on her chair on the table. In a very good mood.

Then I took Lola down to Priory Park in her buggy; sat and had a coffee
by the paddling pool. Back home and then down to Anne and Ben’s for tea;
Lola again in excellent mood throughout.

I had a fantastic moment yesterday when Isa put Lola down on the floor to demonstrate her new rolling-from-tummy-to-back manoeuvre. Lola was slightly loathe to perform (well, it was the end of her day; she’d just eaten and was ready for her bath) so I got down on the floor as well and rolled over as a demonstration. At which, Lola burst into laughter, obviously delighted by the spectacle. Whether that delight was prompted in some way by the recognition of the fact that Dad was doing the thing that she had learned to do, we didn’t know but it was an interesting theory. Anyway, she did oblige with a roll but seemed more interested in watching me doing it. Of course, I was happy to perform and was rewarded with waves of laughter every time. Fabulous stuff, particularly as that was the first time I’d heard her laugh properly.

In other news, as you can see, Lola’s had a few friends around. That’s been going on a while, actually — every week Isa hosts a little get together with some of the new Mums she met at the Yoga for Pregnant Women.

What else… Lola is currently very grabby: she’ll reach for everything, though she won’t hold stuff for long before it drops. She is pretty vocal currently, with a tendancy to emit very high-pitched squeaky noises. She’s very good at going to sleep at bedtime: for weeks now she’s been going to bed, still awake after a bath and a final short comfort-feed, and falling asleep quickly usually without crying, though sometimes with a brief cry. She normally wakes very briefly at half-ten and cries for 15 or 30 seconds before falling back to sleep, and then wakes for a feed around 3am. Since the clocks changed, she’s been waking a bit earlier than before (perhaps because she’s going to bed earlier); that’s a bit of a drag as we’re generally trying to get those last few precious winks in at 6am…

Speaking of which… ZZZzzzzzz…..