Fan Art

My daughter loves Steve Cole's books, specially the Astrosaurs, so her drawings are full of dinosaurs. I'm not surprised since her two favourite topics at the moment are dinosaurs & space and these books combine both. However I find it slightly ironic that she doesn't even glance at all the pink, sparkly, super-sweetness-oozing kitten, fluffy bunnies or fairies books targeted to girls of her age; but goes straight for the ones packed with action and darker colours.

Back to work

My husband went back to work on Wednesday. He worked today (Saturday), will be working tomorrow and the next two-three weekends (both Saturdays and Sundays). He may get one or two Wednesdays off instead. During the normal workdays he’ll be leaving home at 7am; if we are lucky, he’ll be back by 7:30pm, but anything between 8 and 10 is more likely. Getting through every day is relatively easy. The hard part is how little time the four of us get to spend together.

Seven weeks!?

On Wednesday I couldn’t remember how many weeks old Max was, so maybe it is time for an update before all the details disappear from my memory.

In the first two weeks I would occasionally forget for a minute or two that I have two children, while at the same time feeling that Max fitted so well into our family making the life without him seem like a distant memory. (At times I wonder if I truly remember how life before kids feels like – is it really possible that I was able to sleep in until 10? Or stay up all night to finish reading a good book? Eat a bowl of ice-cream and an orange for dinner? Travel to a different country for a week with a tiny backpack? Go out on any night of the week at the spur of the moment? Think myself super-busy when I could choose how to spend huge chunks of time?)

Anyway, back to life with two kids. Unsurprisingly I found parenting a newborn much easier the second time around, though at times I still wish they would come with a precise user manual. First time was hard as both of us had close to zero experience of taking care of a child and had no-one around to help out; not only the learning curve was the steepest I have ever experienced in my personal or work life, but we also figured out a lot of things by trial and error. The great advantage was that we were able to find the parenting style that suited us without having to sift through the overloading input from others. Nevertheless the first weeks of Katya’s life were hard, truly hard work made worse by the greyness of the English winter. Inside my mind the days and nights of those weeks turned into the never-ending exhausting dusk. Looking back I can tell that I was very close to sliding into the postnatal depression. This time around there was hardly a cloudy day since Max was born making it easier to get out, to stay cheerful, to enjoy life.

Of course the easiness of the taking care of a tiny baby is offset by having to find time, energy and wisdom to meet the needs of the older child and my mum was (and is for another two weeks) a great help with Katya, who is experiencing so many conflicting emotions towards her little brother and us, her parents, and is slowly adjusting to the changes that his arrival brought into her life. She is very eager to interact with him, to hold him, to play with him. In the first few weeks she would in turn get frustrated at his unresponsiveness and overexcited about tiny things like him holding her finger. Luckily he is changing so fast and the longer he is able to stay awake and happy the more positive moments they are able to have together. He loves her singing and stares and coos at the painting she did, which is hanging next to the nappy changing mat. She is eager to show him the world and cheers any new thing that he learns to do.

Max is growing so fast. At the six-weeks check-up he was 5 kgs and 61 cm, which puts him into 98th percentile for length. He has outgrown many of the 0-3 months cloths. He tries to put his fingers/fists into his mouth. He knocks over and bats at toys. He loves tummy-time. He looks at the world in fascination, instead of being irritated by bright light. He smiles and his smiles make our world a much more joyful place.

Random

I love spring, but I feel restless: I want to move, change my life, travel, discover new places, try something new. Feeling restless and taking care of a newborn doesn’t make for a great combination.

I used to laugh that my parents moved to a different side of the country from their families, I moved to a different side of the world from them and so my children will have to move to a different planet to keep up the tradition. Suddenly with all the talk about the private space flights and the new interest in the developing of the space technologies I’m starting to wonder if travelling (and living) beyond Earth will be a possibility for my children. And if they do move far away would I, who would happily run away from home to join the Starfleet if it existed, be able to understand and accept?

Speaking of Star Trek – forget about transporting to a surfaces of the different planets, wouldn’t it be cooler if you could beam a fresh clean nappy onto your newborn in the middle of the night? “Beam it on, Scotty”

On Wednesday morning the nappies seemed to fit just right, by Wednesday evening they were leaking and looked a bit small. Of course I just bought two packs on Tuesday morning, so now we have one pack of newborn size one nappies left over.

In the last few months my daughter started to preface her future dreams with “When we move to Australia and have a big house…” I suspect this is due to the combination of our friend going back to Sydney, my talk of homesickness for Australia and spending online time researching the property prices in Melbourne. So far we have
“When we move to Australia and have a big house, can we plant palm trees at the front?”
“When we move to Australia and have a big house with a big backyard; we can have 4, no 5, chickens”
“When we move to Australia and have a big house with a big backyard; we can plant an apple seed and see what will happen”
“When we move to Australia and have a big house with lots of big trees we can build a tree-house” (there is one in the local neighbourhood not too far from us, which must be the envy of all local kids.)
“When we move to Australia and have a big house, baby and I will be able to sleep in one room, so the baby doesn’t get scared at night”
“When we move to Australia and have a big house, we should also have some rabbits, so we can brush them and spin yarn from their hair” (She wanted to try spinning yarn out of our hair, but I had to tell her that we’ll need sheep fleece or angora rabbits hair. At least there is no talk of keeping sheep as yet)
Between her dreams and mine the definition of the perfect home is becoming very precise. In reality if we ever move back, based on the current property prices in Australia, we’ll be lucky to buy a shoebox.

Ironically eight months previously she was adamant that she doesn’t want to live anywhere else in the world as this is our home and we belong here.

Where to take a tourist in London?

My sister is here for a two-week visit, which I know will feel all too short.

And where do you think we took her on her first day in London?


To the closest farm.

Two weeks later

As of today we have a working fridge! And an oven (though I didn't try using it yet, there are too many controls - may have to read the manual)

After two weeks of odd food, Katya finally asked for peas. She loves frozen peas and good luck to anyone, who offers to heat them up - warm peas trigger bouts of loud screaming. After explaining my inability to produce frozen peas, we went in search of a place that has peas on their menu. No luck (to my horror I found out months ago that the local pub serves tinned peas with their fish & chips! yuck). But fortunately the local veggie shop had some fresh garden peas and they were met with enthusiastic approval.


Now I wonder how long it will be between Katya realizing that the fridge is working and asking for the frozen peas.

In last few weeks

Was it really more than a month without posts? But I guess you know how it is – I didn’t post for few days and there were more and more topics I wanted to write about, so I kept on postponing until tomorrow and with every day it was getting harder and harder to find time to sit down and start typing.
It’s been busy few weeks:
We painted the guest room, which will become the study/studio at the end of this summer. Katya helped, so it took much longer than expected.

I finally made something from Weekend Sewing book by Heather Ross - one headscarf for me and one for my daughter. I'm planning to make few other things from that book, maybe even next week.

Paul from Oz and his lovely girlfriend stayed with us and on their departure gave Katya a box of LEGO DUPLO . She loves playing with it and so do I.

Few other friends were in London for few days, but we didn't get to spend as much time with them as we would like.

My mum managed to get to our house despite Tube (underground) strike and spent three weeks with us. Every morning she managed to tempt Katya into hairbrushing by promise of braids.

We went to Chatham Dockyards and Maritime museum at Greenwich, which reminded me that I find naval (especially Arctic exploration) history fascinating.

While my mum babysat, my husband and I went to Browns for high afternoon tea (delicious, relaxing and fascinating part of English culture) and to see new Star Trek movie, which made me want to run away from home to join Starfleet.

I got a box of books at the Amnesty International book sale and one of them, Mog in The Dark by Judith Kerr, became Katya's new favourite. I'm so glad I no longer have to read "Railway Series" stories everyday.

We are slowly adding plants to our garden, but I came to accept that it will take years to get it to the harmonious state.
Katya seem to like wakeing up shortly after sunrise - it's not too bad during long London winter nights, but is pretty early (even for me) in summer. Tomorrow she'll be up at around 5:30, it's almost 10pm now and so it's time for me to go off to bed. Sweet dreams to you all.

Easter in Photos

Unlike Driftwood I was very disorganized this Easter, so we didn't have an Easter Egg hunt or new crocheted chicks to play with. However I baked two lots of hot cross buns and strangely enough the one made out of mixture of plain, rye and self-raising wholemeal flour turned out much better than the traditional one (I wasn't experimenting - just run out of plain flour). The four days ended up being packed with activities:


We saw newborn lambs at the Woodlands Farm


We went to a fair where the Little Girl got to ride the little trains, while persistently asking to go on the biggest, scariest, fastest and craziest rides.


We drew on the train to Royal Tunbridge Wells. (I just love the look of total concentration on her face when she draws - I suspect I look very similar when I draw.) We didn't get to see much of the town, except the main shopping street that took us to the Spa Valley Railway, where we spent a lot of time looking at and riding the trains - everyone in our tiny family seem to be a train nut - Railway Series is the current reading favourite and The Little Girl wants to change her name to Thomas, James or Percy (train characters from the above book).

Somehow we also managed to walk, run, play and feed birds & squirrels in the local park. The last one thanks to a stranger, who kindly gave a small bag of left-over peanuts to the Little Girl when his older children lost interest in the tiny overfed fury creatures.