NCT

November’s sky is chill and drear, November’s leaf is red and sear

Tuesday 20th November 2012Tuesday 20th November 2012Baggie

As Autumn strengthens its grip on the land the leaves are changing colour contrasting against the uninspiring greyness that has been the colour of the sky for the last couple of weeks allow the Bagnalls to bring a little colour into your life. We find ourselves sitting pretty between the girls’ birthdays and Christmas and for such a dull and usually monotonous period of the year it has been far from humdrum in the Bagnall household.

In the British calendar Halloween is closely following by Guy Fawkes night (or Bonfire night) on the 5th November. A date which commemorates an unsuccesful attempt at regicide and mass terrorism by Robert Gatesby and his fellow plotters, including the eponymous Guy Fawkes who was caught readying himself to light 36 barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament by a team lead by Lord Thomas Knyvet. (As an aside Lord Knyvet is quite reknown around our corner of the world, as he was granted the Manors of Stanwell and Staines and his effigy is in the chancel of Stanwell Parish church). Bonfire and firework displays are put on throughout the country and we decided that we would try and see one this year. Unfortunately as I was working at the weekend we had to find one that was planned for the actual date which fell on a Monday this year.

Cleves School in Weybridge appeared to be the closest display and so my friends Andy and Al joined us on a trip to Weybridge. Hats and scarves were the order of the day as the November chill had begun and positioned ourselves at the edge of the school playing field to watch the display. There was entertainment beforehand with halloween themed stilt-walkers and band knocking out covers of 80’s and 90’s rock favourites. The display was not disappointing either and lasted at least half an hour. We were very impressed, although Amélie was a little scared by the loud bangs. There are quite a lot of firework related photos here. I would definitely recommend Cleves School display if you are looking for a firework display next year.

It appears that holiday to Puncknowle has had two positive effects on Amélie. The first, which in fairness was already well on its way, is the fact that she is now sleeping through the night. This means that Lucinda and I will have 6 months of uninterrupted sleep before baguette number three makes an appearance. It is amazing how much better you feel one you can get a good night’s sleep. The second is a big step forward and all off her own back.

On our return from Puncknowle we decided to buy Amélie a potty and to make her involved in the decision we encouraged her to pick one, a dinosaur potty was her choice. We put it in the lounge and thought no more. Then Monday morning she came downstairs and refused to have a nappy on. That was it. No more. Nappies in the day time are a memory. Yes, there have been a couple of accidents but to be honest the transition to nappy-free days has been rather painless. Yes, we do have to clap her everytime she goes for a wee, and she has even begun to take a bow when she receives the applause.

Lucinda is now back at work returning from her appendectomy and holiday. She had to see the company doctor and has been given a gradual restart with reduced hours. These return days have co-incided with my days off. So with our days out of sync it means no requirements for childcare, which has been doubly useful with Amélie potty training and the fact that she has come out in spots. Lucinda took her to the walk-in clinic (no appointments at the doctors) and the diagnosis came back as chicken pox. Fortunately both Lucinda (and it is not good if a pregnant woman gets chicken pox) and I have both had it as children. Éowyn has not had it so we feared the worse with both children going through it at the same time. However, Amélie’s case has been extremely mild (thankfully) and Éowyn has not succumbed to the pox. We have got away lightly. This unsynchronised days off occurs in six week patterns so the next time it will happen will be Christmas week. We both have jobs where public holidays mean nothing to whether we are at work and so it is with Christmas. Lucinda will be working on Christmas day itself and I will be working throughout the yuletide with the exception of Christmas day. The glamour of television.

Not that this will worry the girls too much. Amélie is too young to understand and Éowyn will have her imaginary parents and imaginary brother to look after her on Christmas day. Yes, Éowyn’s entourage of quasi-corporeal companions is still growing. As mentioned above she now has imaginary parents and when they are in the room Lucinda and I become Auntie and Uncle. As you can probably guess her imagination is well developed and her play is quite imaginative and quite regularly makes games up and even songs. She loves to hear stories and will ask you to tell her stories about when you were a child in addition to stories from books. Obviously she is a child of the 2010’s (whatever you call this decade) and so enjoys DVD’s and television programmes too and they all help to fire her imagination.

You may recall that in February I took Éowyn to the cinema for the first time to see the Muppets. Like her father before her she instantly became a fan. So not only do we own the film on DVD but also have the soundtrack on CD. This CD is permanently in the CD player in the car and whenever Éowyn is in the car she requests the Muppets. Not only does Éowyn now know all the words to all the songs, so does Lucinda, and I quite often find myself whistling ‘Life’s a Happy Song’ or bursting into ‘Me Party’ at inopportune moments. Now the fourth member of the family is hooked. ‘Daddy, Muppets please,‘ is the first thing that Amélie will say as you put her into the car. Although I love the Muppets and think that the soundtrack is excellent I think I have to try and find another soundtrack or album that they enjoy as much so that I can have some variety on my CD player in my car!

Julia Donaldson is rightly the Children’s Laureate and the girls enjoy many of her books, indeed Lucinda and I enjoy reading her books too. For those non-parents (and especially non-UK non-parents) her most famous book is probably The Gruffalo (a book I could probably recite by heart) which has made a successful leap to video with a 30 minute animated film. Another of her books has taken a leap into another medium: Room on the Broom , another of our favourites had been turned into a stage show. It is the story of a witch that allows a dog, a frog and a parrot join her and her cat on her broom. Doesn’t sound too interesting? Well there is a twist in the tale and you will have to buy the book to find out what happens.

We thought that Amélie was probably a little too young so we just bought tickets for Lucinda, me and Éowyn for the Sunday show at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-Upon-Thames with the other families of our NCT group. Unfortunately work is extremely busy for me at the moment and it is difficult for me to take weekends off so disappointingly I was unable to go. Rather than see the ticket go to waste we asked Éowyn who she would like to accompany her and mommy to the theatre. Her cousin Megan was the lucky recipient of the spare ticket. Éowyn was extremely excited to be going to the theatre (although I think she thought it was going to be the cinema). The show was excellent and Lucinda, Éowyn and even Megan thoroughly enjoyed it which made me even more disappointed to have missed it. The other members of our NCT group also enjoyed it and all of the children were well behaved throughout the show, which is nice to think that there are alternative ways to entertain our youngsters that does not rely on 21st century technology.

So since Lucinda is at work and it is time for some Daddy time I will leave you with a small selection of photos while I pretend to be a monster.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Scary Stilt Walker

Look at the pretty lights!

Now you look at the lights!

Inflatable Slides

The band

More pretty lights

Whizz

Bang

Ooo-ooo

Amélie’s Second Birthday

Thursday 4th October 2012Friday 5th October 2012Baggie

So a couple of weeks after we announced to the world that we are expecting our third child, our second child celebrated her second birthday. Yes can you believe that Amélie is 2 years old. This time in 2010 we were on the way to St. Peter’s hospital and thankfully the road conditions were not the same as they were this year as there were road closures and heavy traffic around the area and I can’t imagine trying to battle your way through heavy traffic with a wife in the latter stages of labour!

As a modern father I have (so far) managed to be off work on all of my children’s birthdays and Amélie’s second one was no exception, in fact I managed to organise myself the entire weekend off. Amélie’s birthday was last Friday and on Fridays Éowyn goes to pre-school and this Friday was no exception. However before we took Éowyn to pre-school she helped Amélie to open her birthday presents. Amélie obvious wasn’t entirely sure why she had presents but didn’t care too much as her big sister opened a Peppa Pig treehouse and nothing else then mattered. We did manage to wrestle it from her grasp so that we could take Éowyn to school before heading out for the day’s adventure.

With the impending third baguette due in March we have come to realise that Lucinda’s Nissan Micra is not going to cope with three car seats. In fact, most cars have difficulty fitting three car seats in, hence the proliferation of MPVs on the market. Unfortunately most MPVs simply replace the boot (trunk for my American readers) with two seats. This obviously is handy and does allow extra car seat space, unfortunately it usually means that there is no boot (or trunk) space, which when you have pushchairs and the general accoutrements that goes with children is a real disadvantage. Not all MPVs are made equal though and the balance is to find one large enough to accommodate the three car seats and the progeniture paraphernalia without feeling that you are driving a van (especially when you have been used to driving a Micra) and, possibly more importantly, without breaking the bank.

The model that seems to tick the majority of the boxes is the Ford S-Max (not only does it have seven seats and boot space but it is wide enough to get three car seats across the middle row meaning that as a family of five we could keep the back two seats down turning it into a very large estate car). So it was with this in mind that we took a trip to Car Giant in Shepherd’s Bush to look at their current crop. Unfortunately none of the ones that they had in seemed to be right and when you are spending that kind of money it needs to be right. There was one that had caught our eye when we looked at their internet site but unfortunately in real life this particular individual did not inspire love and affection from either of us so we decided that we would walk away and keep looking there are plenty more S-Maxes in the sea.

Returning back home, we picked Éowyn up from pre-school and then Amélie completed her birthday day at home playing with her new toys with her big sister. It is probably the first time that Amélie has things that Éowyn really wanted and I think that Amélie realised this and suddenly became very possessive of her presents. Time for a lesson in sharing, for both of our children.

A relaxed Friday afternoon melted into an equally relaxed Saturday morning. However there was a big family outing planned for the evening. Hollycombe Working Steam museum, near Liphook in Hampshire is, as the name suggests, a working steam museum with an Edwardian steam-driven fairground alongside the obligatory steam train and traction engines. It is open all summer long and although it closes for the winter in September and October it opens for evening admission which, with the autumnal dark nights, adds a magical element to the fairground. It is somewhere that Lucinda’s family try and visit each year but unfortunately we have not been able to make it for the last three years for one reason or another, in fact the last time we visited Éowyn was a baby.

We arrived at Hollycombe about an hour or so before it opened and Lucinda’s dad fired up the camping stove and cooked us all sausage and bacon sandwiches. We provided desert with Amélie’s birthday cake (a cake that she was unable to eat because it contained milk – so she had her own chocolate brownies that Lucinda made especially for her) before buying our tickets and heading into the museum. As we entered the museum we noticed that the steam train was running. This was the first time it had been running on an evening that the family had visited and therefore it was too good an opportunity to miss, so we paid our £2 and climbed onboard. This really whetted the girls’ appetites for the fair and so after disembarking we headed to the full size carousel. Again both girls thoroughly enjoyed it and Amélie didn’t want to get off. Fortunately there were plenty of children’s rides for them, a junior roundabout, juvenile dobbies, austin cars and the children’s chair-o-planes and they enjoyed all four. We were unsure how they would react to the chair-o-planes but we need not of feared, they loved it! In fact it was a bit of a struggle to get them off each ride and more than once they were the only children on the ride and made the operator send them round twice. I would thoroughly recommend a night trip to Hollycombe for kids, young and old and imagine what it must have been like for your great-grandparents visiting one of these at the turn of the 20th Century.

We ended the weekend in style at the Village Centre in Englefield Green at a joint 4th birthday party for Éowyn and the other children from our N.C.T. group. It was just coincidence that is was 2 days after Amélie’s birthday, it was planned to be somewhere in the middle of the span of the N.C.T.’s group’s birthdays. The Village Centre was a great venue for the party and was just the right size for the group that we had invited, it felt cozy without feeling too crowded and had plenty of room for games. Sharing a children’s party certainly takes the pressure (and the expense) off one family. We all had responsibilities for different aspects of the catering and we all organised one mass participant game each. As a consequence of sharing these responsibilities it meant that the stress was reduced (or at least shared across six sets of parents) and thus as a parent you could actually enjoy your child’s party. There were tears (it wouldn’t be a children’s party without them) but on the whole the children were very well behaved and we keep them entertained long enough to prevent any serious altercations. It was good to meet up with our N.C.T. group even though it was difficult to sit down and chat for any length of time,as a parent that is something that is now second nature.

Now work beckons and my mini break is over, the wide world of sport stops for no man, but before I leave you just an update on Éowyn’s quasi corporeal companions (imaginary friends to you and I). Dizzy, it seems, it a naughty boy but no bad deed goes unpunished. The other day Éowyn calmly informed us that Dizzy was in hospital. He had tiptoed out of the house and got squished by a car. Do not fear he is alright but it seems that his place in Éowyn’s affections has been relegated slightly and now there is a new brother called Connor. Connor it seems looks like an old man in a paper hat. When I suggested that Connor was an old man I was rebuked, ‘No Daddy, he just looks like an old man.‘ So now you know. He also will only wake up if you speak to him in Russian. Éowyn’s quasi corporeal companions are not limited to people, Russian or otherwise, she currently has a cat called Stephanie and a dog called Giggly. Either she has a fantastic imagination or she can see things that are hidden to us cynical adults.

Peace and Love

Baggie

What’s going on ‘ere then?

Birthday girl

Cheeky!

Hollycombe

All aboard the Steam Train

Love you Mommy

Wheeee!

Lucinda and her Daddy

Racing Car number nine

Zoom around the track

I am enjoying this, honest!

Shine on Harvest Moon

Can I help?

It’s working!

No one is watching

Be there in 5!

Birthday cake

And blow

Is that you Jack?

Look what I have got

Some bubbles for you

I win!

Young artists!

Smile for daddy

I’m just staying by the food

Chocolate Goatee

Fantastic party, hic!

The Olympics are here!

Monday 6th August 2012Thursday 9th August 2012Baggie

So after 7 years of preparation the London Olympics are here, and aren’t we doing well? 16 Gold Medals and still counting! Unfortunately throughout the build up to tournament I was a little nonplussed by it all, I didn’t apply for tickets and to be honest was thinking more about the impact it was going to have on me at work and its impact on being able to get to work. Both fears have been somewhat allayed in this first week. The traffic is incredibly quiet (even for August – i.e. school holidays) and apart from some long shifts at work it hasn’t been too bad! And now I really wish I had some tickets, even just to the Olympic Park. The girls are a little young to appreciate it but at least they would be able to tell their children that they were there!

It is always good when there is a major sporting tournament on because part of my work responsibility is ensuring that the television signals from those tournaments are arriving back at base in an acceptable way. That means I get to watch an awful lot of sport on television. It is my job! And whereas most people have to chose which one of the many Olympic channels that the BBC are making available to the general public (on satellite and through their website) I can watch all of them at the same time. The beauty of a monitor stack! And what do I do when I go home? Switch the television on and watch some more!

The week leading up to the Opening Ceremony was the best week (weatherwise) of the year so far with temperatures peaking over 30°C. However it was not to last and by the time the Opening Ceremony began we were back to 20°C and the chance of a shower. We are used to it by now, aren’t we? And three days of summer is better than none at all! The sudden increase in temperature and return to norm was accompanied in the Bagnall household with all of us succumbing to a summer cold, this made the girls a little miserable and they both keep waking up in through the night. Thus a disturbed week of sleep followed by some long days at work left both Lucinda and me exhausted.

Lucinda was so exhausted that she missed the Opening Ceremony and opted for an early night instead (she was working at 0500 the next morning, in fairness). I watched it at work arriving home a little after 0200, so we were passing ships in the night. The talk before the Olympics was how London would compete with Beijing’s Opening Ceremony. For the first 20minutes or so I was worried, and perhaps a little embarrassed, it was all a little too twee. Then the Lord of the Rings motif began and with more than a nod to The Black Country (O.K. it was the Industrial Revolution) complete with Olympic rings of ‘Molten Metal’. The James Bond/Queen sketch was genius and Mr Bean dreaming of Chariots of Fire very amusing. Overall is was fantastic, at times bewildering but definitely an Opening Ceremony to be proud of.

However you do not read this website to find out what is happening in the Olympics (Team GB doing really well) you read this website to find out what is happening in the world of the Bagnalls (or at least to look at the photos!). So what have we been up to? Obviously August is probably the busiest month for both Lucinda’s job and mine so holiday is not an option so we have to take advantage on days off to do things. So when I managed to get 3 days off in a row we filled them with a couple of trips.

The first was to visit my sister Mary and her new flat. She is still in Woking but has moved out of a large shared house into a top floor flat with one of her friends, Louise. We decided to be nosy and this enclave of the Bagnall family visited en masse. Éowyn loves to see her Aunties, probably because she gets so much attention and this time was no different. Children do not have that same sense of personal space that adults have and Éowyn quickly explored Mary’s flat. Then it was time for a game of hide and seek. Mary got bored more quickly than Éowyn, then Louise decided to take over. We then didn’t see either again. Louise kept Éowyn thoroughly entertained (or was that the other way round?). Indeed on the way home Éowyn if we could visit Auntie Mary the next day. I asked if she enjoyed seeing her auntie. ‘Yes,‘ she replied, ‘but I want to play with Louise.‘ Someone has a new best friend.

Then we headed out on a bit more of a journey, to Cranbrook in Kent, to pay our annual visit to friends of our that we met on our N.C.T. course. Ed and Marisol moved to Cranbrook not long after they had their daughter Frieda and so we do not see them that often. Frieda and Éowyn were the only girls that were born in our class so since Frieda has moved Éowyn had to grow up playing with boys. Considering that Éowyn and Frieda hardly know each other, their initial cageyness soon gave way to sororal closeness and were playing in Frieda’s room hiding from Amélie, something I think Amélie will have to get used to. It was a long day trip but great to see Ed and Marisol and were very happy they could see us especially considering the fact that Marisol is due to give birth any day now. We wish them all the best.

The biggest news to affect the Bagnall family though is that Jo, our childminder for the last 3 years has given us notice. We can fully understand why, we only give her around 8 days a month and that means that she can not take on other children who would give her more days work a month and in this economic clime then everyone needs to maximise their income but it is quite sad. Both Éowyn and Amélie love Jo and going to her house. Jo does so much with them and educates as well as entertains them so they are going to miss going as much as we are going to miss them going. It puts us in a difficult position for since we only need a few days a month it is almost impossible to find a childminder or nursery that will take children on a shift pattern (as opposed to fixed days) and that is why Jo was a godsend when our paths crossed (with thanks to Nanny Vera). Nevertheless we wish Jo well and thank her for three years of hard work looking after our brood.

The next few weeks are join to be very busy for me and so there may be a gap before the next update but before I leave you a quick update on one of the saddest stories that this website has bought you. In February 2009 a friend and work colleague Eilidh Cairns was knocked off her bike and killed by a lorry while on her way to work. The incident was put down to a tragic accident and the driver was free to continue driving. However the Cairns family have not been the only family who have been affected by his actions and this week saw him in court once again for causing death by dangerous driving. This, however is not the forum for this but if you are interested please click here for a more detailed write up.

Peace and love

Baggie