Author: alex

Isa just got Lola to sleep. It’s the third try: she wouldn’t sleep at 9, as she usually does, so she got back up and played a bit more and came down to M&S with us to get a couple of last-minute items (grandma and Mike are coming to lunch at 1:30). Isa gave her another feed and put her back down at 11:20, but she wouldn’t have it and stood in her cot crying and getting more and more distressed. Eventually, Isa went in and calmed her down and stayed with her until, eventually, she dropped off at 11:55.

Now the new upstairs neighbour is moving in; banging up and down the stairs. Hope Lola doesn’t mind…

So, I may have been a little optimistic. It seems the confuser was having a little joke: working fine when upstairs but falling over as soon as it was put back in the cellar; even if you ran it’s power from the same upstairs socket. I put that in the past tense; I sincerely hope that’s not another manifestation of optimism as I have spent the last two nights (till 3:30am last night; till half one tonight) installing a new motherboard and getting the system to boot without having to re-install linux. I finally got it to do that (after initially getting kernel panics at the probe-ide stage) by going back a patchlevel or two with the kernel.

I got quite used to Ubuntu while sorting it all out; it’s dead handy just to be able to run it off the CD. I was quite tempted to install it, but that desktop would be wasted on the cellar. Maybe I’ll move to Debian, if I can find the energy.

Anyway, bedward. Tomorrow, I’ll put it back in the cellar and invoke all seven circles of superstition.

I felt this entry should be introduced with a shot of a turnip and here it is, as demonstrated by my beautiful assistant. A turnip at which, incidentally, our wee daughter turned up her nose. It’s a sad fact that Lola has quite gone off her vegetables and, while it’s easy to get her to wolf down bucket-loads of sweet, gloopy porridgey stuff at breakfast time, it’s very hard to get her past four spoonfuls of savoury thing at dinner.

Anyway, the computer has now stayed up all night (s’been up nearly 10 hours) which, given it wouldn’t get past 30m before, is pretty positive. The annoying thing is: I haven’t done anything except bring it upstairs. Is it just going to fail again when I take it back down? Is it just that manhandling it upstairs has caused something to re-seat? Well, we’ll see I guess; I’ll put off changing the motherboard for now.

I have got it reconfigured, though, so that this site and all my others are served from the internal network via port-forwarding from the gateway box, which is a step forward from running the webserver on the firewall. It’s not quite the 3-NIC DMZ setup I fancy but, frankly, there are only so many hours and most of them are filled, quite rightly, with Lola.

Anyway, it’s off to make Lola a pea risotto next. Making her dinner early as we’re off to Daphne’s 60th birthday party this afternoon and want to have Lola’s dinner ready straight away when we get back. Then there’s the blind to put up, the logs in the garden (I’ve done some *significant* pruning of our apple tree) to cut, a bit of shopping to do. Not to mention some retrospective blogging.

Computer is back up — whether it will stay up overnight is something else.

And whether it will survive back in the cellar is yet another thing.

But, for now: kip.

Today is Lola’s half-year birthday. She’s dressed in her fancy clothes and playing on the kitchen floor. Mum is getting a bit of extra kip in bed, having been on call, as ever, all night. Nonna has been up a while, preparing the ministron’ and the conicio (coniglio) for today’s lunch. Today, as you may have inferred from the date, is New Year’s Eve. Later, the family will be meeting at Bruna’s for the family do — we’ve excused ourselves on the grounds that we can’t leave Lola. True enough, but we also quite fancy a quiet time. Bruna’s a bit upset that we can’t make it.

Today is much colder. There is a very deep frost this morning, all the trees are white, including the mulberry tree which stands in the middle of the drive outside the house. Naturally, one of the first things we did this morning was to put Lola’s big ski body suit on and go out and dance round it singing.

“Here we go round the mulberry bush”

True, it’s not quite a bush, but you can understand why we can’t resist it. All my inlaws think we’re mad taking Lola out when it’s so cold; even though we do wrap her up in her (ex of Marco) big puffer-suit and put a wooly hat on and a scarf round her nose. Then again, they think we’re pretty mad for going out in it ourselves. Or for walking round the house without slippers on, or sitting on the floor. Bunch of wimps, these Italians 😉

Lola’s now sitting in her high chair having her “papa”; today we’re trying millet, after having fed her rice for the last ten days (this is a ground meal that you mix with expressed milk). She noticed the difference — you could tell from her look after the first spoonful — but she loves it and is eating it just as enthusiastically, if not more so, than the rice. I much prefer the millet; I’ve never liked the smell of ground rice. It makes me think of school dinners.

In a bit we’re off to Sme. We went there yesterday — got there, went to the bar and ordered coffee and tramezzini (which, it suddenly occurred to me means “between little halves”). At which point came the announcement that the shop was closing in ten minutes. We finished our snack and came home.

* * * [time passes] * * *

Well, we got to Sme in time for an hour and a half’s shopping today, which was just about enough to get around the place.

We’ve been here over a week, now, having arrived last Sunday in time for lunch. It felt more like “in time for bed” though, as we’d been up since 4am, having not gone to bed until 1am and our sleep anyway interrupted a little by Lola.

Sleeping too soundly?

Bed too comfortable?

Let me terrorise your dreams.

Call Lola on 22-222-222-2-22-2

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…..