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.