Category: journal

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…..

I love this pic.
Just been uploading a batch of pics from Isa’s mobile. Isa’s just got back from the Queen’s where Bethan was having birthday drinks. Lola’s been asleep, only waking briefly at half ten for a three-minute cry. I’ve been sitting quietly in the sitting room listening to the random stream on the mp3 player (www.mserv.org) and playing along on the guitar a bit. A rare pleasure; I really should dedicate more time to that. I could pull a bit of spare time from that box of it I’ve got stowed away somewhere…

Well, no pertinent title comes to me at present. Nor does any well-constructed, thought-provoking and entertaining content. So we’ll just run with the “whatever comes into my head as I stumble over the keyboard” approach. OK?

Isa and I both have new mobiles — hence the rash of dubious photos here and on flickr. That’s dubious in terms of image quality, not subject, of course. In fact, Isa has taken some great pics of Lola with her phone (which has the more impressive camera — they’re both 2MP jobs, but the one on her Nokia 6233 is better than the one on my K610i).

Lola, meanwhile, has had a nasty cold all week with rivers of snot joining the flow of fluids from her body. Isa bought a special device (a snot pump, perhaps) from the chemist to evacuate her nose of the stuff; I was a little worried her brains might follow but it seems safe enough. It’s like one of those dust blowers you see photographers with: a rubber bulb with a nozzle on.

Her cold makes it hard for her to sleep, so she wakes up more at night and spends the days a bit whingy. Poor mite. She manages, most of the time, to keep smiling, though. *hug* It means she’s spent less time in the gym, so hasn’t perfected her rolling back onto her back trick yet. She has done it once but we were looking the other way and turned round just to see her lying on her back with a slightly bemused expression on her face.

Starting to feel properly autumnal now, with a chill in the air of a morning.That said, it’s still pretty warm and mild-mannered and I’ve not neededto put a coat on yet. Isa has, though; which has caused much amusement in Crouch End as she wanders around with her coat done up over Lola’s sling, leaving Lola with just her head poking out.

It’s getting colder of a night, and Lola’s sleeping in a summer sleeping back. Last night she just had her (thickish) HK pyjamas (from Tina and Mike) on inside the bag, so perhaps she was a bit cold. I see Isa put a blanket over her after the 4am-ish feed.

I hope that wasn’t the cause of her fairly extensive crying, as that’s something we could easily have resolved earlier 🙁

Seems a bit early, but I wonder is Lola teething. She’s stuffing everything into her mouth, gumming down hard, and emitting drool by the gallon. And she was sounding in pain when she cried earlier and, unusually since we started the “leaving her to cry a bit” thing, she didn’t settle back down easily.

I can hear she’s still awake now, after her feed. Hope she drops back off.

Is the current (and very approximate) weight of our little bundle-ino as registered by our bathroom scales.

Today has been hardish. It’s the first weekend since Nonna went home and Lola slept very little last night and was overtired most of the day. Still, we had a good time, with Jenny, Ped, Raphie and Luca popping in this morning, followed by Daphne who had her hair done and then stayed for lunch (ham and pea risotto). Daphne’s really lovely and it was great to see her.

Tonight we’re starting on a new stricter routine for Lola, to try and encourage better sleeping habbits (ie, breaking the association with falling asleep on the nipple). She went to bed (late) at eight and, when she woke at 10:30, we didn’t rush in and feed her, but let her cry for five minutes before going in to reassure her of our presence and then leaving her again. She cried for a few more minutes and then went back to sleep — so that’s great. It’s now 12:30, and I’ve just heard her wake again. She can eat now…

Oh – and she fed from the bottle this evening! Result!

g’night

Soon now Lola will be able to roll over on her own… Lola has *fat* thighs!.. Dad’s getting chubbier, too — put on 10kg in since Lola was born… Lola’s had some fairly heavy cradle cap, which Mum has currently defeated with oil, copious brushing and interminable picking… Lola also has *fat* calves.

Lola wakes in the morning and lies there for an hour, happily talking to herself… Lola still loves her baths, but my does she hate getting dressed after… Lola dribbles like crazy — she’ll soak a bib in an hour or so… Lola is getting more and more into her hands; she’s learnt (in the last week or so) to bring them together and will grab things and pull them towards her mouth (or just stick her hand in her mouth); often she lies there staring at her hands which she puts in front of her face, one behind the other, like a kung-fu fighter… Naturally, Dad often reciprocates, making appropriately Bruce-Lee-ish noises…

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.