Nanny Fran

Amélie’s Fifth Birthday

Wednesday 30th September 2015Wednesday 30th September 2015Baggie

A few short weeks after she started full-time education our second child Amélie turned five. This makes her one of the oldest in her class and her parents feel older than they think they are! Since this was Amélie’s first birthday in full-time education I decided that it would be nice to take the day off so that I could be there to take her to school and then be there when she arrived back home. This was doubly important because the weekend before Amélie’s birthday one of the MCR operators got married, this coupled with other commitments meant that we were a little short in staff levels on a busy weekend. This is my department, therefore I could not justify taking leave either for Matt and Sharon’s wedding nor to celebrate Amélie’s birthday.

Amélie however did have special visitors at the weekend in the shape of Nanny Fran and Aunties Liz and Mary. Since Nanny Fran and her aunties had come a long way and it was only the day before her birthday Amélie was allowed to open her presents. She, therefore, had two birthdays or, more accurately, celebrated her birthday for 48 hours – I am sure that is allowed! Nanny Fran waited until I arrived back from work however this did mean that she got caught in traffic and it took her 3.5 hours to return to West Bromwich, which made it an awfully long day.

So the big day arrived and to her credit Amélie didn’t wake too early. The promise of being able to open her presents if she got ready for school early spurred her on and both she and Éowyn were ready by 0815! If only it was like that everyday! Some of her presents duly opened she headed off to school (with a smile on her face, for the first time in a week) wearing her ‘I am 5′ badge.

The girls’ school has a healthy eating policy and therefore there are no sweets or cakes to be given out in class for birthdays. Although that is admiral if you can’t have a cake or some sweets on your birthday when can you? There is no policy, however, to stop one giving sweets and cakes out to classmates outside the school gates. Therefore, like some nefarious drug-dealer (and let’s face it sugar is a particularly bad drug) Amélie handed out bags of Haribos to her classmates as they left for home.

As I mentioned in the last write-up, Amélie has been getting herself upset in a morning saying that she hasn’t wanted to go to school. Much of this is because Amélie hasn’t made many, if any, friends. Most of the girls in her class have come to school via the same nursery therefore friendships have already been formed and Amélie has to break into this circle. She will. When she has been upset she has mentioned how much she has missed Georgia her friend from pre-school who attends another school and unfortunately Lucinda and Georgia’s mum had not managed to swap contact details while at pre-school. With a some luck Lucinda bumped into Georgia’s mum last week at one of the playgroups that she takes Ezra and her childminding ward and so snatched the chance to invite Georgia over for a birthday tea.

Amélie was shocked to see her friend walk up the driveway. Georgia was also pleasantly surprised as her mum had not told her what was happening or where she was going and this was Georgia’s first playdate so they were both very excited little girls. Sometimes birthday surprises are better than birthday presents.

Georgia wasn’t the only birthday visitor that Amélie had on her birthday evening. Nanny and Granddad came round with Uncle John and Auntie Margaret. Auntie Margaret received an education in current girls’ toys, in the U.K. at least. She learned all about Pinypons, Monster High Dolls and Fright-Mares. She will take this knowledge back home to see if this is same in Australia and thus be the cool Nanny in her granddaughters’ circle of friends.

Before they sat down for a birthday tea there was still room for more visitors with Uncle Michael and her cousins Lauren and Maddie popping in with more presents and a quick game of Ludo. What an exciting day!

The heavens seem to celebrate too for the day began with a lunar eclipse, that coincided with the moon at perigee (a so-called supermoon) and ended with N.A.S.A. announcing that liquid water has been found on another planet, our neighbour Mars. A very auspicious day to celebrate your fifth birthday.

Happy Birthday Amélie

Love

Mommy and Daddy

Birthday Balloons

Amélie’s new toys

Birthday joy!

Birthday glasses

Birthday dress

Siblings

Are you sure it is only six weeks?

Saturday 5th September 2015Baggie

August is always a lean month on Baggie and Lucy dot com mainly due to the start of the football seasons, which keeps me busy at work and the fact that, along with millions of other parents, the kids are to be entertained. Thus there is little time left for tinkering on computers and little time to keep you abreast of the trials and tribulations of the Bagnall family.

So with Éowyn heading back to school (Amélie has a few more days!), what has happened since the Bagnalls returned from Flookburgh and the Lake District? Six weeks is a long time so forgive me if there are omissions.

In an attempt to break the holiday up and prevent the girls from getting too bored we signed them up for a couple of courses. Neither of our girls are very strong swimmers, something that we want to rectify, so the first of the courses we signed them up for was swimming. Not that Éowyn really needed any encouragement but her best friend (from her previous school) Aaliyah was also signed up for the week. Thus the added incentive was that after every lesson she got to play with Aaliyah, a whole week of playing with her best friend!

It seems that the girls have inherited my swimming ability. It appears that I am denser than fresh water. In swimming pools (not the sea) my resting suspension is about 6 inches (15cm) below the surface of the water. Therefore to prevent drowning I need to keep swimming, hence I have never been a strong swimmer and it appears than neither of my girls have a natural affinity to water. Nevertheless it is an important skill to have and so once they are settled back at school we will be signing them up for more swimming lessons.

The second course, only Éowyn could attend for Amélie wasn’t old enough, and again attended with her best friend Aaliyah. Cheerleading isn’t the first course that one would naturally think of as a one week session but we thought that Éowyn would enjoy it. The idea of combining gymnastics with teamwork appealed to us as something that would also be good for Éowyn.

The culmination of the week’s work was a performance at the Rainbow Nursery summer fair in Lyne. Fortunately, the weather held off and so the field didn’t turn into a swamp. The girls’ performance was the first of many acts, which was nice as they didn’t get too nervous. Éowyn and Aaliyah were the youngest of the troupe and so didn’t do many of the over-complicated moves. Nevertheless Éowyn’s forward roll was executed to perfection and was steadfast as the base of the human pyramid.

Éowyn wasn’t over-enamoured with cheerleading, which surprised us somewhat, but it is possibly due to the fact that it was such a quick course: four days, all leading up to a performance. Therefore there was no time to develop the skills that she was lacking. If you could do a cartwheel, you did one in the performance. If you couldn’t, you didn’t. There was no time to teach them how to do a cartwheel, and I think that was endemic throughout the skills. In fairness, it was a taster session and thus wasn’t designed to develop skills but to use the strengths they already have but unfortunately it may just have put her off. We will see.

As alluded to above, August has not been the greatest of months weather-wise, in the UK at least. Temperatures below average, sunshine (and thus my electrical output) below average, rainfall: the fifth wettest August on record. Despite the Bagnalls usual stoicism in the face of such inclemencies even we decided not to incur the wrath of Indra (insert rain deity of your choice) that frequently and risk too many far-flung days out.

Lucinda took Amélie and Ezra to Legoland (Éowyn was having a play date). Fortunately, the rain deity of the day was looking upon the Bagnalls with kind eyes and it was one of the warmer days. Unfortunately, this meant two things: a) Legoland was packed and 75 minutes was not an unusual queue time and b) the wasps were out in numbers. Amélie currently has a real phobia around any kind of flying insect – to the point of hysterics if there is a fly in the house. Obviously, we can’t let that continue and are trying to help her overcome this problem, although with wasps she probably has a point!

Unusually for me in August, I managed to secure 5 days off in row. Unfortunately the weather was awful so we concentrated on jobs around the house and visiting friends in the local area. Nevertheless we decided that we would have at least one big day out. Initially, we thought that we would head to the seaside, however unsure that the weather would hold we decided to head to Frensham ponds.

Frensham Common and ponds cover about 1000 acres lying between Farnham and Hindhead. The common is heathland with two large ponds known as Frensham Great and Little Ponds, and great for wildlife watchers. But we headed there for its sandy beach and to bathe in the Great Pond. Angling and Sailing are also available for member of those clubs but there is a special area for swimming. Unfortunately, the weather was more Autumnal rather than Augustal (if there is such a word). Indeed shorts were a very bad idea as I sat freezing on the sand. Even paddling in the pond was out because there was a bloom of blue-green algae which meant that the pond was closed to the public. However, we made the best of the weather eating our picnic and building sandcastles and reflected that we were glad that we hadn’t headed to the seaside!

The flipside of 5 days off was that I managed to sign myself up for 9 days in a row. Therefore Lucinda decided to take the kids to visit Nanny Fran in West Bromwich. Although it was a flying visit (they were only there for two days) they all enjoyed themselves as they usually do in West Bromwich. I, however, was not having as much fun. I got home on the Tuesday night and decided to have a Chinese takeaway for tea. Now whether it was the Chinese takeaway (fingers point at the Prawns on Toast) or whether I picked up a bug I spent most of the night with my head down the toilet. Now, I now I need to lose a few extra pounds but that wasn’t the way I intended to do it. Unfortunately I had an important meeting the next day and so after a couple of hours of sleep I dragged myself into work, had the meeting then headed home. In a deluge. The rain was coming down so fast that the drains couldn’t cope and the car park at work and our street had inches of standing water. I got home crawled into bed and fell asleep until Lucinda returned home with the kids in blazing sunshine. For a split second I thought I had been asleep for days such was the difference in weather conditions.

The summer has also been a time for changes in the house. We have decorated our bedroom and en suite and Ezra’s bedroom. We have moved a couple of radiators around which has enabled us to change the furniture around in the house making the lounge more cozy and exposing the wall where we are going to have a chimney and wood burner installed. For if the summer is anything to go by we could be in for a cold and snowy winter and so the extra warmth from a wood burner would be most welcome.

The summer has also seen Ezra growing up. His speech is coming along and he is saying a new word nearly everyday. Although some of his phrases are rather strange. One that he spontaneously came out with was ‘I don’t like mayonnaise‘. Not sure why he said it, as we were not offering him any mayonnaise, so we laughed. This only agitated him further and started to get irate shouting ‘I don’t like mayonnaise!‘ I think we have the message!

This week is an important week in the girls lives. Éowyn will enter year two and the large campus of her school while Amélie will start full-time education. Both will be worthy of their own entries so stay tuned.

In preparation for Amélie’s first day, her teacher miss Snow came for a home visit. Amélie was very excited and showed her some of her favourite toys and more importantly her new school shoes. Miss Snow said that she thinks she has seen all of her new pupils school shoes. Must be something very important to all of the new starters.

With those teasers I will leave you there and keep an eye for those updates as well as the Flickr pages as there will be new photos uploaded in the next few days.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Can we drive this home?

Roar!

Piggyback

Olaf!

Hug a snowman

Igglepiggle

Ready to start

The troupe

The cheerleading troupe

The finale

And lift

Getting ready for the lift

And up!

All together

Cheerleaders

Prepared for the summer

Sunflower

Play-doh!

Rainy day entertainment

The iPad wears me out

I’ll just watch a film

Ready for the weather

Blue moon

The bedroom wallpaper

Ezra’s 2nd Birthday

Tuesday 17th March 2015Baggie

No signs of triskaidekaphobia or indeed friggatriskaidekaphobia on Friday 13th March 2015, for this auspicious day saw our son celebrate his second birthday. Ezra was born on the 13th March 2013 weighing 8lb 13oz, with all those 13’s there is no way he can be superstitious about that prime integer. Not that at two years old he has any inkling of the nature of superstitions or indeed that it is even his birthday. There is no doubt he will get used to the idea of having a birthday on a Friday 13th, indeed he only has to wait for 5 years and 2020 for it to happen again.

Unfortunately I was unable to take the day off work and both Éowyn and Amélie were at school, Ezra spent the majority of his birthday with his mum, but even his mum wasn’t able to spend the full day with him. This is because she has an even more pressing arrangement: an invitation to Éowyn’s Mother’s Day concert at school. Therefore while Lucinda spent an hour at a concert in her honour Nanny came to look after her youngest grandson.

We could not let Ezra’s day pass that easily though, could we? So I left work early arriving back home at 16:00 just in time to look after Amélie and the birthday boy while Lucinda picked up Éowyn and her friend Billy from Spanish after school club. Our neighbour’s boy, Blake, then joined us to make it a little more of a party atmosphere. Yes, they were both ostensibly Éowyn’s friends but both are boys and they know Ezra very well and to be perfectly honest Ezra hasn’t really got any friends.

When you have you first child you join the local N.C.T. club and meet new parents in the same situation, forge friendships and the children naturally become friends. Indeed Blake and Billy are children of friends that we met through our N.C.T. class. This is not the case with the second child, although there some from our N.C.T. group have gone on to have a second child giving Amélie a ready-made friend, but it is certainly not the case with the third. Thus Éowyn has had ready made friends since her birth, Amélie and, even more so, Ezra are going to have to go out into the big wide world and make their own friends.

Éowyn and the boys were a little hyper after a long week at school and so we had to mould that energy into games. Lucinda had set up a treasure trail for them, with clues pointing to the ultimate prize. With a bit of prompting they solved the clues and retrieved there Red-Nose Day related prizes. Yes, not only was Friday 13th March 2015 Ezra’s second birthday it was the 30th anniversary Red-Nose Day, a day that saw them pass the £1,000,000,000 mark.

After a rest for a party meal musical statues and musical bumps were the next focus for their energy with more prizes, this time in the form of sweets and before you knew it Ezra’s party was over. There was just time for him to blow out the 2-shaped candle on his birthday cake before bed and a well-earned rest for Mommy and Daddy.

It was not, however, Ezra’s only birthday party. The weekend prior to his birthday, was an F.A. Cup weekend (although less said about West Bromwich Albion’s performance the better) and as such there was no Premier League football (not strictly true as there was one errant match that had been rescheduled to take advantage of both teams lack of interest in the F.A. Cup). Usually this would mean a weekend off for me, however IMG doesn’t like me taking weekends off. This weekend saw the start of our latest acquisition Major League Soccer. Since this is the start of a contract and not really sure what we were going to get or exactly what we were doing with it, I went in to shepherd the first weekend.

Now for those of you for who the letters MLS or indeed Major League Soccer mean nothing, it is the United States version of the Premier League (although without being too unkind the standard is some way off the latter). So with evening kick-offs on the West Coast of the United States this meant overnights for yours truly. It has been a long time since I have done overnights and although in themselves it wasn’t too bad, I have felt jet-lagged ever since.

Nevertheless this did mean that although the day time was for sleeping, with three little ones this wasn’t going to happen that easily (although I did pretty well on the Saturday), we could do something during the day. Therefore we invited Nanny Fran, Auntie Liz, Auntie Mary, Great Uncle Michael and Great Auntie Yvonne for a celebration of Ezra‘s birthday.

Lucinda’s mum and dad were away for the weekend in the Isle of Wight else we would have made a bigger event, although with hindsight the fact that I had only had 3 hours sleep did start to take its toll and so I was glad there were only 5 guests.

I think Ezra enjoyed being the centre of attention although being the 3rd sibling he wasn’t the centre of attention for that long. His sisters hogged the limelight as much as they could. However, they were not the one getting presents and since it was his party we let him open the presents that we given him. He was very excited with his Peppa Pig Weeble set. As mentioned previously it is his favourite programme (although he insists on calling it Georgie Pig) so having his own Peppa Pig characters that his sisters have to ask him to play with gives him a little more power. He also received some more wooden track and a new train for his train set. Now he can play choo-choos with a bigger tracks and even had points so he can have a second route.

With all the new, boy-related, toys that he received for his birthday the toys that he has taken to bed and played with the most was, somewhat predictably, the cheapest. While buying Ezra’s birthday present Lucinda saw the first edition of a collectible magazine set. With all those collectible magazine sets, the first edition is 99p to entice you in. This magazine set was aimed at young children and was about my favourite subject as a small child, dinosaurs. With the first magazine you received an adult triceratops and a baby tyrannosaurus rex. We thought he might like them but did not foresee the fact that he will not put them down and they would take precedence over his weeble George.

With the advent of Ezra’s second birthday comes the next health care check up. When you have your first child you look in the books and the guidelines to make sure that your little one is meeting all the targets (or in Éowyn’s case exceeding them all), this becomes less important as the second and third come along. Nevertheless when a letter comes from the doctors wanting you to make an appointment to check on your third child’s development you start to look at the list of targets and mentally tick them off.

Ezra is meeting and exceeding them all except the target number of words. By a child’s second birthday they expect them to know 50 words. When we received the letter we though about all the words that Ezra says and could not make it passed thirty. Slightly concerned about this I jokingly said to Ezra that he needed to pull his finger out and start saying a few more words. He has taken that chiding to heart and is seemingly coming out with a new word or two everyday and stringing them together. We haven’t seen the health worker yet but Ezra now knows his fifty words and all is good.

Two days after Ezra’s birthday was Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday, whichever you prefer. As usual it wasn’t much of a rest for Lucinda as I was at work but, as mentioned above, there was a celebration at Éowyn’s school on the Friday before (Friday 13th, Ezra’s birthday and Red-Nose day – what a busy day). The Mother’s day concert started with songs sung by the children followed by cakes and cup of tea for all the mums. Not exactly relaxing considering everything else that was going on, but it is the thought that counts.

I will leave other family related news to the next update and let Ezra have an update all of his own for his birthday (well, nearly all of his own).

Peace and Love

Baggie