A catch-all for the day-to-day meanderings of these parents-to-be
Bring water and amaranth to a boil and simmer very gently for 24 mins, covered.
Add the big apple peeled, cored and cut into thin slices and a (very) little extra water and simmer for a further 12 mins. Blend and serve.
Lola’s verdict: double yum!
Take one tiny onion, a small carrot, and half a medium-sized red pepper and dice finely. Gently fry the onion and carrot in some olive oil, adding the pepper after a minute or two. When softened, add about half a pint of fresh stock and a handful of sweetcorn (I used frozen); simmer gently for 15 mins or so. Add about half a boiled chicken breast (eg, the chicken from the stock pot), finely diced, and about half a teaspoon of ground cumin. Bring back to a simmer then remove from the heat and add a big pinch of chopped corriander. Allow to cool a little before liquidising and passing through a sieve (to remove corn husk).
Lola’s verdict: yum.
Lovely springlike weekend. Buds pushing through on the trees; new growth breaking out in the garden. Lola in excellent humour, spending more time on two legs than all fours, though no independent steps.
Computer seems to be staying up. I should not be staying up, having done that all weekend and suffering now.
Suddenly, I’ve forgotten everything I was going to say, anyway. Did I mention Lola is really into pointing at the moment, as evidenced here. She also likes to point up at the flowers round the mirror in the sitting room and suck in air through her teeth in an excited manner.
You can still catch her saying “brava” (or “bava”, “bwava”), and she’s very close to a ‘mama’. And she has a fantastic repetoire of “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa”s.
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.