Julie's Boggle

Christmas 2008 feels like something I need to sit down and think about.  It was most enjoyable, but also went so quickly once it started!

With Tom’s schedule being somewhat more flexible at the moment, we originally planned to avoid the traffic by leaving on the Monday of the Christmas week.  Then a nasty 24-hour bug ripped through the ranks in the 3 days or so prior to departure , and we counted ourselves lucky to have only lost one day.

Jon’s general enjoyment of the packing process (and all the glorious potential for UN-packing that it provided) didn’t exactly facilitate a speedy departure, but fortunately the trip itself went really well, bringing us into York round about tea-time on Tuesday.

The next day was Christmas Eve already.

Tom and I assisted with putting up the Christmas decorations and minding the babies (to the festive soundtrack of radio and TV carols), while Simon did last minute Christmas shopping and collected the Christmas chicken (a magnificent Yorkshire bird, tipping the scales at over 7lb!) from the thriving local butcher down the road.  (Apparently they open at 4am for people to collect their pre-booked meat, and there’s a queue!)

After another quiet evening engaged in the shared favourite pastime of playing board games, it was Christmas!  Jon and James let us sleep in a little and then it was off, through wonderfully quiet streets, to the Christmas family celebration at St Mikes in central York.  A service which neither of the two little ‘uns particularly enjoyed for reasons they couldn’t articulate.

In a gesture that gives away a lot about the respective ages of our party, we left the present-opening until after we got back from church.  And even then, it wasn’t until the Christmas chicken was safely stuffed and in the oven, and glasses of mulled wine had been distributed.

Christmas 2007 was mostly a non-event for 6-month-old Jonathan. This year though, it was fun seeing how he was ready for the next stage: learning how to open presents.  Better still, he even spent time enjoying the gifts themselves.

(By contrast, 7-month-old James was perfectly content with the marvellous rustling of discarded wrapping paper. )

The timing of our Christmas dinner had to be adjusted several times during the course of the day, but miraculously it all came together around 4pm. When not only was there a delicious meal on the table, but we also had both babies awake, well-rested AND ready for an early supper.  No mean feat!

As is our Christmas tradition, we all packed up on Boxing Day and headed off in the direction of our respective families (for us that was Tom’s cousin who lives in the Wirral, near Liverpool), armed with packed lunches of Christmas leftovers in sandwich-form.

And from there, after enjoying some family catching-up and a great Boxing Day tea, it was back out into the clear and frosty night and off to London.

Fortunately the screaming sessions of last year‘s trip home were not repeated, and even though Jon was awake for most of the trip, the occasional grumbling from the back was along the preferable lines of “quietly disgruntled”, rather than “very-VERY-annoyed”.

[For a pictorial version of our little trip, feel free to browse this album.]

Communication with babies is always rather hit and miss in my opinion.  They all develop at different rates, and even when they do understand the words, there’s still no guarantee that they’ll modify their behaviour accordingly!

While various people have tried to assure me that babies “understand more than you think”, I confess I’ve remained sceptical where Jon is concerned.  In my experience, he’s always been very good at cheerfully ignoring most forms of verbal interaction.

But these last couple of months, Jon has entered a new phase where we can finally see the results of him processing things we’ve said.  It’s great!

At first, Jon took us quite by surprise.  An early example was when I asked him, rather whimsically, “where are your shoes?”  To which he responded by doing an about turn and crawling off into his bedroom.  When he got alongside the middle of the bed where we change him, he pulled himself up, grabbed his shoes from their customary resting place, and came crawling back with them, one in each hand.

Clever boy!

Since then he’s grasped a number of phrases, many of which make our lives easier.  “Close the door, please” is a useful one when he’s just let himself and a chilly draft into the bathroom, and “let’s say grace” silences the squeaks and whines when he’s waiting at the table to be fed.

At the same time, Jon has been working on his own -less verbal- communications.  Most particularly with an endearing little pointed finger, occasionally punctuated with a grunted “Der” (“there”?) or a generic chirp to draw the appropriate attention.

The pointing, which can admittedly be a little primitive by itself, is then refined with a stern head shake and appropriate frown, to indicate a definite No! if we’ve got it wrong and proffered an incorrect article. This being the case, the little finger will shoot out once again.

Being able to tell us precisely what he wants is equally exciting for Jon. The other night in the kitchen, he spotted the oven gloves (which he rather likes to put on, it’s very cute ) hanging out of reach, and he very clearly pointed them out for me.  The look on his face as I got them down for him was sheer delight.

Other coarser forms of parental direction involve grabbing an adult hand, and dragging it to where it needs to be applied.  Be it opening a lid, pushing a difficult button or putting an intransigent puzzle piece into its rightful place.   (This is usually when the adult in question has ignored the obvious verbal hints in the form of frustrated whines.)

Of course communication, as adults have shown countless times, is a flawed process with ample room for misinterpretation.

And that’s completely aside from the ability of each party to induce vexation by independently choosing to ignore the communication at will!

But after 17 months of us talking at Jon and him crying randomly at us, I think both sides are rather pleased with the current state of progress.

Here we stand at the dawn of a new year: the first day of the first working week of 2009.  Or rather, the last day of the first week, because the rest of the week just, er, disappeared while I wasn’t looking.

I don’t personally buy into the whole New-Year’s-resolution-culture, but it does seem as good a time as any to put a peg in the ground and start anew with the good intentions that ran aground in the old year.

From that perspective, 2009 is full of promise, and I’m trying hard to set myself some personal goals to help with keeping life on track, rather than just flitting about aimlessly, lost in a mire of different projects.  Which does happen all too easily.

To start with, I’m going with “making more of each day”.  To enjoy time with Jonathan — taking time to interact properly with him — and to be more efficient at getting things done around the home.  I’m also aiming to be more focussed (and ideally less perfectionist) in my writing so that I can get more out in less time, hopefully without sacrificing too much in the way of quality.  I’m going to try to blog more frequently too.

As part of being more efficient on the domestic side, I’m trying out “meal-planning”.  Woo-hoo! A concept that had always seemed rather daunting when life was piling up around me, but having taken stock of it all over the holidays, I’m now determined to persevere with it for at least a few months.

The incentive for the meal planning is getting to try out lots of new recipes.  (A pleasant couple of hours was spent going through all my recipe books and making a list of the ones that looked worthwhile.)  My goal last year, to try one new recipe every week, worked out well for the most part, but I’m hoping that forward planning will put the process on rails!

Lastly, as a very positive start to the new year, we FINALLY made the break with Pipex (our ISP of many complaints) after another couple of weeks without service at the end of 2008.  Our new ISP is KeConnect who Tom specially picked for their customer service reputation, so we’re looking forward to a good year of broadband connections! :party:

Happy 2009, all!

Life is never dull, especially if you live in a converted Victorian house whose structure and fittings are anything from 0 to 120 years old. Our most recent adventure has been tracking down (over a period of months!) a leak coming through our bathroom ceiling light fitting.

We started by suspecting our own plumbing, and vetoing that by switching our water off and observing that the leak continued.

The suspicion next fell on our upstairs neighbour’s worn out sealant in the shower/bath. So our neighbour fixed the sealant. The leak continued.

(We learned later when we removed some wall panelling and found dried up water damage that this was indeed causing a different, smaller leak which we had indeed fixed).

We found a bad seal on the waste pipe from the upstairs sink, but that wasn’t it. We also fixed the upstairs toilet cistern which was very slowly pouring water through the overflow pipe. Still the leak continued.

So we became cunning. We mounted a webcam and a mini-Maglight on a stick, attached the webcam to the laptop and made ourselves a crude endoscope, which just fit through the light fitting in the bathroom ceiling, and also through the hole in the old Victorian ceiling above our 1980s plasterboard ceiling. Paydirt!

Our little camera showed us a badly corroded pipe which had been sealed off in the most rough and ready fashion.

But how to access the pipe? It was under a tiled floor and above two ceilings! Well, part of the problem solved itself because the Victorian ceiling collapsed onto the plasterboard ceiling which in turn became very soggy and was in clear need of repair itself. So in the end it was a no-brainer, we had to go through the ceiling.

And so today the plumber came and that is what he did, and this is the piece of pipe he removed:

I’ll leave it to you to think up adjectives describing the mindset that puts such a piece of workmanship between a tiled floor and a double ceiling.