A Window on our World
I bet you had all thought that I had forgotten about you. It has been three weeks since an update so what has happened? To be frank not a huge amount. I have been using up my annual leave and taken weekdays off but with Éowyn at school and boxes to unpack we haven’t done anything exciting apart from settling into our new home and getting the house ready for Christmas.
As quite often happens when you have been very busy and suddenly get some time off, the body waves a little white flag and all the bugs it has been fighting suddenly take their opportunity and you fall ill. That is exactly what happened to me. Nevertheless we are finally getting boxes emptied, furniture placed arranged and pictures hung. There is still a lot to do but there has been progress and the Christmas tree can take pride of place in the lounge.
The time off has also given me time to write Christmas cards, go Christmas shopping (mainly, it has to be said, through the medium of the internet) and attend the girls’ Christmas plays. The first was Éowyn’s. In these days of political correctness gone mad, in order not to offend non-Christian religions the school is unable to put on the traditional nativity. Absolutely nuts you have to agree. Indeed, one of the mothers of the other children (who happens to be a Muslim) said that she is more offended that they don’t put on a Nativity play because they think that she would be offended. Anyhow it is what it is and let us not get too distracted from the fact that the children and the teachers put a lot of hard work into the performance.
So, if it is not the Nativity what was the play? It was based around the Nativity but the main protagonists were the stable boy and a talking shrew. The stable boy was being advised by the talking shrew to ensure that the hay in the manager that the unnamed baby was to be lain in was soft so that the baby wouldn’t cry. The usual suspects were there: Shepherds, Angels, Wise Men and Cowboys (!). Éowyn was a cowboy (cowgirl) and had a line to deliver ‘Joesph tried to find them a safe place to stay.‘ We were both very proud of her because she delivered her line with a real projection such that you could hear every word of her line and in addition, she also put some intonation into the line so that it wasn’t flat – way above her tender years. Obviously we would say that. The play was actually very good and all the children performed well, especially considering they were 4 and 5 year olds. There were plenty of songs (none of which I knew) and they all sang well, it was actually thoroughly enjoyable.
The Christmas play also explained Éowyn’s Christmas song that she had composed. I was putting them to bed one night when Éowyn said that she had written a Christmas song and would I like to hear it. I thought this is a good idea, Slade apparently rake in £800,000 per year for Merry Xmas Everyone. It is something that I have thought about myself, indeed I have written lyrics to a Christmas song, just need a musician to make it work and you never know. So I sat in eager anticipation for Éowyn’s song. It started off really well with stars and presents and snow but then deteriorated into cows in a field (not an animal traditionally associated with Christmas) pooing and there was poo everywhere, then the traditional hero of Christmas – no not him, or him, or them, or him, i am obviously talking about the stableboy who cleaned up all the poo and put it in the poo dustbin. A few sleigh bells and maybe a glockenspiel solo and we may just have a hit on our hands. There have been worse Christmas songs.
Amélie may not have written a Christmas song but she was in a Christmas production of her own. Amélie’s Christmas play was a week later and was the more traditional nativity story. Amélie was an angel and was one of the few children to have a speaking part. ‘They all bowed down before the baby Jesus‘ was the line she delivered with aplomb (for a three year old). Again a lot of effort was put in by all the children (and the adults!) and the encore to the play was a toddler mosh to the song of 2013 (if you are three years old): What does the fox say?
We returned home (after a quick cup of tea and a mince pie around Nanny and Granddad’s) to decorate the Christmas tree. A little later than usual but we wanted the house to be sorted before we decorated for the yuletide. We are very happy with our new home but we probably need a few more now that we are in a bigger house.
Although happy with the how this year has turned out there was a slight disappointment that happened at the end of last month. All year I had been looking forward to the arrival of a comet. It was in this update that I was hoping to write about comet ISON, the heavily body that was going to be ‘the’ comet of our generation. I was even hoping I could take a good photo of it and post it on the website. Unfortunately comet ISON was a sungrazer and on the cusp of being big enough to survive the close encounter with our star. As it approached the sun there was a day or so of confusion over whether it had been destroyed or simply lost its charge (earthing or more accurately sun-ing itself in the sun’s corona). It became known as comet ISON, ISOFF, ISBACKON, ISDEFINITELYOFF. There are still a couple of comets in the sky indeed the past few weeks have been an unusually active time for comet watchers as four comets were visible simultaneously with binoculars: ISON, Lovejoy, Encke, and LINEAR. So as the title of this post states (and the Christmas song lyric quiz for 2013 – award yourself 10 points if you have got it) a ray of hope flickered in the sky, unfortunately a tiny star did not light up way up high (not without binoculars anyhow). However regardless of that a child was definitely born this year.
Ezra’s obviously a little young for a Christmas play but his time will come. He is content with pulling himself up on his legs when there is something to grab hold of. Then stretching those arms of his, Mr Tickle-like, until he can find the exact thing that you don’t want him to have. Anything he can find that is smaller than his mouth will be chewed. He is quick, too. Put him on the floor and he will be exactly where you don’t want him to be before you have a chance to turn around. He is still very well behaved though. He only cries when he is hungry or needs a nappy changed. He goes down at 1900 and will sleep through tip 0500 before his stomach wakes him up. Then he will go down for a nap at 1000 for an hour or so. He still has his cute smile and when I come home from work, the one thing that can be guaranteed is a smile from Ezra. What more does a dad need?
So with the Christmas tree up, the annual trip to the cinema to see the Hobbit done and presents bought, it only leaves the wrapping to do and the food to buy. I will leave you a paltry set of photos and remind you that the annual Christmas message is due up on the website on the Northern hemisphere’s shortest day: 21st December. There will also be a write up sometime between Christmas and New Year so stop by and for those of you that I will not see: Merry Christmas.
Peace and Love
Baggie
PS. I am not allowed to post any of the photos from Éowyn’s nativity but there are some of Amélie as an angel and some from our annual Christmas card photoshoot.
After an early hat-trick of updates at the beginning of November this site has been a little quiet. Three weeks into our new home I thought it was perhaps times to rectify this and give you a little insight to the life of the Bagnalls in the new Bagnall manor.
November was always going to be a busy month. A wave of productions were due to relocate from Chiswick to our company’s new base at Stockley Park and a number of these involved Live Operations (and hence me and my team) including the Football League Show. Therefore if there was one month I didn’t want to move home it was November. Unfortunately fate conspired against me and so a busy month at work coincided with the move. With no opportunity to take leave, the relocation of the family was done on days off and hence we are still mainly in boxes.
Although I, personally, have not had much time to settle into the new abode it does feel like home. Again that is despite the fact that we still have dozens of unpacked boxes and the heating isn’t working. Yes, the biggest problem that we have faced is the fact that the temperature has dropped close to freezing point over night and the heating has serious issues. We have had heating engineers around who both have confirmed that the system is full of gunk and thus the hot water is not filling the radiators. The good news is that the boiler works as does the pump, however that hot water is not reaching the radiators and thus downstairs, especially, is barely warmer than outside. Unfortunately due the design of the hot water system it is not the easiest of systems to service and that design is part of the issue, there are lots of turns and u-bends where gunk can gather. Fortunately phase one has begun and now the radiators take the chill out of the room (I wouldn’t say it is tropical but at least it is a step in the right direction) and hopefully the chemicals in the system carry on dissolving the gunk and allow the hot water to do its job.
Apart from the heating, we are as much in love with the house now as when we first looked round it. There are only a couple of minor annoyances that we hadn’t noticed when we looked round: a) the kitchen light switch is located behind the door, so as you walk into the room, you have to then close the door before you can switch the light on. Why do people do that? It is so annoying, surely when you are designing a room you automatically place the light switch on the opposite wall to the door hinge so that you can open the door with one hand while simultaneously turning the light on with the other and b) the hot water tap in the downstairs shower room (hark at us – downstairs shower room!) opens clockwise and closes counterclockwise which is the opposite direction to every other tap in the house including the cold water tape on the same sink. These are minor annoyances and the kitchen light switch will be changed when we manage to scrap enough spare cash together to redesign the kitchen.
The girls have settled in well too. They do not notice the cold (something that we have to watch for as they wander downstairs with no dressing gown or slippers on). They do not seem even to miss the old house, which is nice. They have settled in quite quickly and both are happy to use the extra space that the house offers to run around and play hide and seek. Their playroom is coming together and now we have just got to encourage them that their toys live in there (or in their bedroom) and are to be put away each night in the new boxes we have bought them. Let’s see how that goes.
So while I have been busy at work, the girls have been busy at school. Éowyn, especially has been excelling at school, she has begun to read and write and is brilliant at breaking words into their letter and then blending the sounds together. It is great to sit with her and see how excited she is when she reads a sentence. It is quite exciting for her parents too! She also has a line in the Christmas play, but more of that in the December write up. Needless to say there is plenty of practising She knows it off by heart and now we are working on projection. Éowyn wants to take it one stage further though and has started making up some actions to help emphasise the words, building her part up! We have a little diva. There is no truth in the rumours that her rider includes 23 orange smarties and a bunch of daffodils.
Although it has been a busy month at work, there was one ‘dark weekend’ and my friend and colleague cleverly chose that weekend to get married. John and Sara have lots of friends that have small children so their wedding was organised with children in mind and as a consequence my invite also included an invite for Éowyn, Amélie and Ezra.
John and Sara were married at St John’s the Evangelist in Blackheath and therefore the shortest (it turned out not to be the quickest route) was to drive through the centre of London. It was a great opportunity to point out the Natural History Museum, Buckingham Place, The Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London. There were colouring books and pencils to keep the children entertained during the ceremony and afterwards there was cake and bubbles. Then it was on to the reception at Devonport Hotel at Greenwich. This is where the beauty of the S-Max comes into its own. One of my colleagues, Matt, was going to have difficulty getting from one venue to the other, so with our seven-seater beast we could offer him a lift.
Now, Éowyn and Amélie have started to make up their own language and phrases. Bongo, bongo Stylee is one of them (it means something that is very good), others are more nonsensical. One day going to school they were talking to each other in one of these made up languages so I started to join in and they thought it was one of the funniest things that they had ever heard. So now they will ask me to talk in my made-up language.
So on the way to reception the girls requested that I spoke my made up language. So I strung together a line of vowels and consonants into an amusing set of words and they started laughing. Matt thought that he would join in and copied what I had done. Amélie, however turned to him and said, ‘Matt, you’re not even funny!‘ Put into your place by a three year old, how we laughed!
Ezra, too can be amusing and seems to be a ladies man. He is forever trying to catch the eye of the ladies and with his blue eyes and cheeky smile he tends to melt their hearts. Sometimes he is not content with just a smile though. In a restaurant a week or so ago, he had caught the eye of a couple of ladies and they were cooing over him. However they turned away from him and begun talking to each other, Ezra was not happy. He started calling out to them, getting more and more agitated. When they turned to see what he was doing, he immediately stopped shouting and just looked at them and gave them a big blue-eyed smile! He is going to break hearts if he continues like that! His latest smile is even cuter as he screws his eyes up as he grins. I will try and get a photo.
Unfortunately we have all been fighting a winter cold. Éowyn was the first to succumb, although we were not convinced at first. The Bagnalls are the kind of family that do not stop for a mere cold, so when Éowyn had a bit of a cough we gave her some cough syrup, wrapped her up warm and sent her to school. We were surprised when Lucinda received a call on a Tuesday afternoon to say that Éowyn had vomited and would we collect her. Lucinda asked her why she had vomited and Éowyn told a different story, namely that she had accompanied one of her friends to the toilet and (I quote Éowyn directly) ‘She did a smelly poo and it make me sick.‘ Therefore thinking that there was nothing in it, we sent her to school the next day. School must have thought that we were bad parents and immediately called Lucinda to collect her again, saying that when a pupil had vomited they needed to be off school for 24 hours.
Thursday morning came and we sent her to school. Her cough had got a little worse but nothing too much to worry about. However at lunch Éowyn had a coughing fit while eating and once again vomited. So the bad parents were called back and they requested that Éowyn stay at home the next day. Thus Éowyn will not receive a 100% attendance certificate for the next half term.
So as we settle into our new home we haven’t had many visitors (we are still in boxes and it is a little cold) but the first of my friends to visit has one of the longest journeys. Sanjiv, was over in England for a couple of weeks from his home in New Delhi (India for those of you with an F in geography) and we managed to meet up (for the first time in ages) and he came round to look at our new home and also to meet the family. Éowyn was a baby the last time he met them, now we have Amélie and Ezra – how scary is that? It was good to see him and it illustrates how we let life get in the way of living, years seem to pass so quickly and before you know it, friends’ children are going to university. Surely I am not that old? Although I have just ‘celebrated’ 18 years at IMG. I can now employ people that were not born when I started at IMG in November 1995!
With those thoughts I will leave you and see you in December!
Peace and Love
Baggie
PS Apologies for the lack of decent photos, have been a little busy, I will try harder for the next update.
