Well, I’ll never see that hour of my life again, but perhaps it was worth it. Damn you web games for your confounded addictability.
Archive for June, 2006
As I was driving through Halifax I noticed this sign in a small wood beside a row of houses. Although I wanted to knock on the door of number 37 just to see what the hell was going on the person I was with was convinced it was a trap set by a sociopath intent on eating our spleens. I might do it next week when we come back from our weeks holiday. I’ll keep you posted.
We never did father’s day when I was growing up. In fact we didn’t even do our parents’ or siblings’ birthdays. People often look at me strangely when I say this, and to be fair it’s probably the same look that I gave Leon Rudge at high school when he told me that as a Jehovah’s Witness he didn’t celebrate Christmas. Still, if you don’t do it you don’t miss it. I’m very glad Kerry’s family did however, as I now get to have all the attention and the gifts without having to had paid my dues as a child.
On Sunday morning Amy revealed each present to me with a triumphant “Happy Birthday!â€. Kerry Amy outdid herself this year with gifts centred on providing quality father/daughter time (a cooking with toddlers book and a book of child friendly walks). I then spent an enjoyable morning with her feeding ducks and shopping for the ingredients for a full English breakfast. The afternoon was spent sleeping in an attempt to catch up from a week of late nights and early mornings.
Life is good at the moment: I have a wonderful wife and daughter, with a no doubt wonderful son on the way. I’m settling into my job and sometimes even feel like I’m Making A Difference. Kerry’s promotion should hopefully ease some of our financial worries and my going down to three days a week will mean I’m going be able to spend more time with my family. I’ve made some good friends over the past couple of years and my social life has improved immeasurably. I love where we live and feel like we belong here. Sorry to sound smug, but life is good in the Hughes household
This Saturday I took another step towards my inevitable stardom. Jez, an old friend from college, is getting married next month and as part of his stag night his brother Rich hired a music studio. Jez and his more musical friends laid down the instrumentation and main vocals for “I get by with a little help from my friendsâ€, then Jez and his less musical friends (which included my good self) laid down the backing vocals. The whole experience was very enjoyable and the end product sounded rather professional even if I do say so myself. I was in the first batch of tone-deaf imbeciles to record the backing track and I was slightly hampered by the fact I didn’t really know the words nor the tune. I gave it my best shot however and my singing “try†when I should have sung “high†was thankfully lost in the general racket produced by my fellow artists.
I would like to put an MP3 of the track up here, but Jez has decided to delay the release until after the wedding. Lets just hope those damn files-sharers don’t get hold of it first and spoil our chances of making millions in royalties.
You can find more pictures of the session and the subsequent barbeque here. I didn’t take the camera to the pub we ended up at in the evening, so you’ll just have to picture Jez throwing up four times on the way home yourselves.
This is Nanny. She’s been gone a year now but I think about her all the time, especially when Amy comes out with something that sounds just like her. Amy knows who she is as there are plenty of pictures but that doesn’t make up for the real thing, which I was fortunate to have until I was 29.
Miss you x
I’ve not been on ebay for about a year and I’d forgotten how addictive it can be. Within the last 55 minutes, I have managed to look at 13 pages of maternity wear, put bids on 2 items and win one already! All this and try and remember what your passwords are for ebay and paypal with 6 minutes to go before the auction ends. I started looking at baby boys’ clothes, but seeing as I was supposed to be going to bed early tonight, I thought I’d better stop before it was midnight.
I was contemplating bidding on a top that was currently going for a snip, until I realised I probably wouldn’t go near it in a shop. Something attractive about the fact no-one has bid on it, until your sanity kicks in and you realise why! I had a decent selection of maternity clothes last time, but the person I lent them to managed to throw them away so I have to start again, joy. Oh well, it’s an excuse to buy more.
Amy has been without a nappy during the daytime since Saturday. We’ve been working up to the whole potty training thing for a while now, but we’ve been hesitant to fully commit, as Amy does not appear to have figured out that peeing in her trousers is a Bad Thing. With all the hot weather recently she’s been dressed in more free flowing clothes and we’ve discovered that while she’ll run around in wet trousers without a care in the world, she’s reluctant to just let go when wearing a skirt.
So now she’s graduated to big girls knickers and another piece of her childhood slips gently away. There have been the odd hiccup naturally: she needed quite a bit of persuading that while dogs are allowed to pee in the garden, little girls aren’t; and we’ve had an in depth discussion about how boys like Cameron can stand up to pee but girls have to crouch down (I know there are exceptions to this rule, I’ve even met someone who claimed she was one of them, but I saw no need to confuse the issue). She’s also developed a fascination with faeces. I am reliably informed that on a recent walk with her grandparents she stopped at every poo on the path and demanded a conference to discuss it’s merits and determine the animal of it’s origin. Still, it looks like things are going well so far and so the regular daytime nappy changing ritual is a thing of the past.
Well, for three months until the new baby is born anyway.
Ho hum.
I’d love to think I’d be able to do something like this:
But I have trouble enough remembering birthdays and anniversaries never mind an annual portrait day. I might hand the idea over to Kerry; she’s far superior at that sort of thing. It’s a terrible stereotype but it’s unfortunately true. If it weren’t for her I’d be in a perpetual state of perplexion, not having seen my glasses, car keys, or cash card since early 2001 and forgetting it’s customary to give gifts at Christmas. I think its fairly universal thing; I know I only ever get birthday cards from friends who have partners.
Thomas?.. Adam?.. Benjamin?…
We went for Kerry’s 20 week scan last Monday. I was in a particularly bad mood due to a combination of tiredness and generally being a grumpy bugger. Despite my grumblings about the lack of spaces in the hospital car park and me becoming almost randomly offended at relatively innocuous posters in the waiting room I ended up leaving the appointment with a warm wellspring of positively bubbling up inside me. There’s something about seeing various unidentifiable blobs suddenly converge to form an image of your unborn child that will do that to you.
John?.. Paul?.. George?.. Ringo?..
That’s not to say I didn’t nearly fall asleep on a couple of occasions. The room was dark, there was a gentle humming of equipment, and the scan took quite a while. There was a separate screen for Kerry and I to look at this time, which meant we didn’t have to dislocate our necks to see what was going on like at Amy’s scan. The radiographer was nicer too and took pains to point out what she was looking at.
Horatio?.. Granville?.. Pelum?..
Everything looked normal. The baby has the appropriate number of legs and arms, there were no problems with the heart or the kidneys, and things seem to be developing at the normal rate. Oh, and it’s a boy. Or at least she thinks it’s probably a boy. Kerry says that she had thought it was a boy for a while, but for some reason I’d got into my head it was going to be a girl. It took me a day to get my head round this switch of gender, but I’ve got it down now.
Moon Unit?.. Dweezil?.. Diva Muffin?..
If the baby was a girl it would have been called Rose. If Amy had been a boy she would have been called Finley. I wonder if there is a parallel universe out there somewhere populated by the people we would have been if we had been born the opposite gender. Until it is actually born we can’t say for certain what sex it is. Perhaps we should just call it Schrodingers Cat.
Actually we’re favouring Evan at the moment, but that could well change.
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