Monthly Archives: January 2002

Well – not much to say today as we all were a bit tired yesterday & fell asleep putting Jack to bed. He’d spent most of the day round at Hamish’s house. Louise’s mum had come over, but I’m really sure he will have seen her much. She does lavish a lot of attention on Eve anyway, so I’m not sure that the day would have been that different. Apparently Andy (Hamish’s dad) came round early (well – before Jack was dressed) & asked if he wanted to go into town with them. Eve was kinda keen as well, but she did not go, much to her disappointment. She was apparently brought round with well-buttered toast. She likes butter. When she has been sitting on the work surfaces in the kitchen & the butter or marge is in site, she has been known to dip her hand in for a lump. She tried similar with the Marmite jar & managed to stuff a good lump in her mouth once. She did to spit it out (as we would normally expect) but did say to Louise, “Hot…”.

Noted an interesting development from apple – picked up from a newsgroup – a rumour of a successor to the Newton. I use an eMate – newton – an apple made pda – to type this lot. The eMate is the sort of sub-noteboook-pda thing they made – interesting hybrid… Anyway – It seems that a mac ‘rumours’ site has posted up pictures & little quicktime movies of an apple pda prototype called iWalk on their site.
Dunno if it will ever see the light of day as a production model, & I certainly won’t be able to afford such a toy, but, ah, it created a little bit of a techno flutter in me. That said – it also could all be fake – elaborate fake, but fake…

Another false alarm last night – this time at 1:40. Louise was woken by strong Braxton Hicks contractions & was worried for a bit. Not the panic of last time. She left me dozing in bed wondering what was going on & went to get a hot water bottle for her back (I did offer to go & get it.. I did!). She says the baby started wriggling about & the contractions abated & she fell asleep again.

Train home

Brain was not working this morning. Dull head, not from having been awake in the night, I’m sure, (I was not awake that long) but probably just a general thing. Curiously, with Louise ranging about in the night, the kids slept through again.
When I got home Hamish & Amber were playing as well. Then Hamish wanted to go home (I think he perceived a slight when we asked him not to do something). He suggested that Jack come over to his house, as Jack did not want to go, so I went to check this was OK (it was) & then Eve wanted to follow Amber as well. So Louise & I had the house to herself for a little while… weird. Queue mad bout of tidying up after finishing of a crossword.
Further weird was that Jack decided he wanted to come home, but Eve wanted to stay there a little longer. Jack & I hoovered the stairs & then hoovered the stairs to the attic with the Lazarus dyson, & then washed the filters for it when I realised that they were so clogged that the suction it was giving was minimal. I went to get Eve when tea was ready. Was initially greeted with a couple of defiant “No!”s, but she trotted back to ours without any further encouragement. She really does like plying with Amber. Before they went off to her house Amber & Eve were pushing dollies in pushchairs, (actually amber’s pushchair was the baby walker with the dolly asleep in a toy shopping basket, but hey). “Bye-bye!… Catch a bus.” they say & stroll off to the back room” No doubt similar play at Amber’s house. It’s all quite encouraging if they need to spend some time there while Louise & I dash off to the hospital in the next few days due to new baby arrival. Called Louise from work & she does not think the baby will be long waiting now.
Jack was ‘naughty’ last night before bed. He’d had a good day in general & we were playing with building bricks in their room before we got round to running the bath. I popped downstairs for something or other & Jack was rolling about on his bed. Louise took his shoes off because he was in danger of knocking the wall & marking the wallpaper. He was resistant to the idea & Louise explained that it was to stop the wallpaper being damaged. He immediately decided to pay too much attention to the wallpaper. Louise warned him against messing about with things & came downstairs to get the milk for their bath time drink… That might have been what I went down for, as the bath must have been running. Anyway on returning upstairs we found him picking a little hole in the wallpaper! Louise was upset with him, I remained calm (no point in both of us raging). He was in tears quickly as he really dislikes being told off by Louise. They were only tiny bit of paper he took off, but it looked bad. Eve starts to get upset that Louise is upset, (“Mummy fed up!”) Jack is crying & I walk off downstairs… Time to get some glue. Stick on the bits taken off with PVA glue – which I think will be sufficient. I’ll need to paint over it again to ‘hide’ it better though. Louise is immediately regretful that she lost her temper… she almost never does with them even under extreme provocation. I think she was so shocked that he would do such a thing after he has been so responsible & generally good of late. Jack has a cuddle a calm down with me & a few words as to why it was such a silly thing to do – for which he makes no attempt to try to make excuses for, & conceded that it was wrong (which I take as encouraging).

Happy New Year…
It’s so cold out his morning it’s taking an age for my thought processes to kick off…
No, Paul – it’s because you’re tired…
Oh, right…

Our town goes firework crazy in the first minutes of a New Year. Even if you wanted to sleep the New Year in, you could well have difficulty. It didn’t wake Jack, but Eve stirred.
I’m not really sure why, but we don’t celebrate New Year that much… I guess I have an aversion to hangovers. We never celebrated as a family when I was a kid maybe mum & dad needed to convince us that it was ‘just another day’ so that they could run the pub with ease. I don’t ever recall being woke up by the pub’s New Year ‘bong!’ but that may be wishful thinking.
So, I had the day off work yesterday – which was nice. I did daddy practical things – like putting up a shelf (ooh – drilling) & getting the old dyson to work (actually – I’d rewired it earlier & was stumped why it did not start working again… but I just had to change the fuse – duuuh). Jack enjoys this sort of activity, so it kept him occupied for a while, on an otherwise potentially tedious day. He watched an animated film all the way through in the morning. Sat on my knee most of the way through it. It was called “The Lion of OZ” & I had seen it before, & it is …OK as these things go, but I was mildly surprised that he managed to keep his attention on it for what must have been at least near an hour. Eve was good as well – she played around us for the most part. She is good like that though. She’s quite capable of occupying herself with some form of play, be it with dollies, snipping cards, Jack’s cars or trains, or her little playmobil house.
Brain shutting down – train snooze beckons…