Rotisserie lamb on the bbq

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Sofia's first horse ride

Sofia's first horse ride, originally uploaded by Racmol.

...in the wilds of North Kensington, just 10 minutes drive from home. She's super keen to sign up for lessons - parents just a little concerned about the inevitable upgrade from hamster to pony...

In other news, Will now does Brazilian Ju Jitsu on Saturday mornings and kicks a rugby ball around the park with Dad in the afternoons. Home for apple pie afterwards today - thank you Mr Sainsbury.

Donkey rides a penny each...

First donkey ride, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Or thereabouts. It was a very wet Queens Park Day this year but we still had a good time. Pics of Sofia and her donkey plus candy floss on flickr.

We grew a peach!

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Miraculous NW London peach. 2 others waiting to fall from the tree.

Look out school, here I come!

Look out school, here I come!, originally uploaded by Racmol.

First day of Big School today for Mr. W. I would tell you more about it but I have already fallen asleep on the tube and in my armchair today and I'm now falling asleep over the keyoard! 

Dotto turns 6 months old...

IMG_4277, originally uploaded by Racmol.

...and celebrates with a hedgehog cake courtesy of Mr Sainsbury (no, we didn't really let him eat it) and a change of gender. Or more accurately a change of name, since he must always have been a boy. Once we actually bothered to tip him upside down to inspect, it was pretty clear.

Family of 4 at No. 44

IMG_4288, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Amazing what you see when you're home alone in a quiet house. I had thought the fox had moved away when the garden got ripped out, but I see now she's just been busy the last few months.

Still living - much bigger and bolder...

Still living - much bigger and bolder..., originally uploaded by Racmol.

Planting the flowering cherry

Planting the flowering cherry, originally uploaded by Racmol.

One of those 'I was there' moments outside my work

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Dot enjoys a small snack

Dot enjoys a small snack, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Dot is a calm hamster. She really likes sleeping in the daytime. She likes to play at night and she kind of makes a little rustle rustle tap. By Sofia.

Introducing Dorothea (Dot)

First pet, originally uploaded by Racmol.

So, we have news! After two weeks of extensive research and many hours on Amazon, we are the proud owners of one enormous cage (designed for ferrets), occupied by one very small hamster.

We went out in the snow this morning (I know - it's mad - nearly the end of March) to choose a Syrian hamster, clutching the Minimals small animal carrier that had arrived earlier in the week in one of the (many) boxes from Amazon.

We meant to choose a male hamster, as the hamster book says males are less bitey than females, but the guy in the shop suggested we look at this girl who was a little older than the others (13 weeks) and very friendly. So we all took it in turns to hold her and she seemed a bit more robust than the tiny jumpy males and not freaked out by Willy so we brought her home and now we have our first family pet.

She has her own covered toilet, which she seems to be using - apparently they are very clean animals who like to choose a specific place as a toilet. In any case hamster poo is just small black pellets and not offensive at all.

We quickly discovered she can climb right to the top of the cage so we may have to string up some hammocks to avoid her injuring herself if she falls. (Clearly I have been spending too much time on hamster forums!)

Tomorrow we will be getting her out to handle her and hopefully not losing her around the house...

Northern Lights odyssey

So we're back from our adventure in Finnish Lapland and we can all say we've seen the Northern Lights. I know this isn't the steadiest photo you've ever seen but somehow it's the most atmospheric and it was taken just on the path outside our cabin.

We left home at 7 am on Saturday and spent most of the day getting there - flying first to Helsinki then on to Ivalo and then getting a minibus to Kakslauttanen. In my mind, I'd thought that it was a romantic exaggeration to say that the resort was just a collection of log cabins in the forest and that really they'd all be clustered together around the restaurant complex with covered walkways but actually they are dotted about in the trees. Here's a shot of ours, complete with sledding inhabitants.

The sledding was fun! So we did quite a bit of it. 

We were glad not to have stayed in the romantic glass igloos as apparently they were pretty spartan - just a bed, and then a walk through the snow to the communal toilets and showers. Some people we met seemed pretty disappointed to have paid extra for the experience. 

The first two nights were cloudy and we met lots of people who had not seen the Aurora at all during their stay. Finally on the third night it was clear and Jules and I went for a couple of walks (individually) before Jules decided to have a final look before bed and discovered a huge green stripe in the sky above our cabin. So we got up and had a proper look and got the kids up (as we'd promised to). They were unimpressed - but then we had just grabbed them in their pyjamas and carried them out to look, not wanting them to miss it. And of course it wasn't quite the multi-coloured display that you get in Brother Bear. 

Jules went on a snowmobile safari on one of the cloudy nights and then, when it looked like our last night would be clear, we booked a Reindeer safari for Jules and the kids and a snowmobile for me, as there was only one sled available for the reindeer one and we couldn't all fit. 

Unfortunately, Sofia was violently ill at the dinner table just before the reindeer safari left so they pulled out. Willy had also vomited in the night a couple of nights previously and now Jules has it - I really don't know how we could get ill when we basically ate toast and jam for four days, interspersed with meat and potatoes but anyway. (Soft-boiled eggs one day, Jules says.) The only good thing to be said was that they didn't get charged for the trip, despite the strict no cancellation within 24hrs policy. 

As you might expect, once we had snowmobiled up on top of a mountain, and waited in the cold for an hour, the Aurora came out properly and filled the sky from horizon to horizon with the shimmering waves of green that you hope for. So I got to see what I'd come to see. I got back and showed Jules the photos and he said: 'You're horrible.' 

The funny thing was that Jules was adamant he did not wish to go on a husky safari and did not understand why I was determined to make my family freeze to death on such an expedition.  Afterwards he said that it was the most fun of the entire holiday and he would love to do an overnight husky trip into the wilderness. Secretly he would love to have his own team, I think. 

It was quite fun, in an exhausting sort of way. My passenger (Sofia) was way too light a load for our team and I spent a lot of time standing heavily on the brake so as not to run over the team in front, who had an adult and a teenager as passengers and an adult male driver. 

The huskies are Alaskan huskies, not Siberian, and bred with quite a few other things, as you can see.  Sofia and William were a bit of a tourist attraction in their snowsuits - a few people asked to have their photos taken with them. We had to explain firmly to Sofia that there was no such thing as a girlie snowsuit, just one that keeps you warm. Willy coped pretty well with his pink and purple suit, in the end, once we pointed out that it had planets on it. 

Sofia has a new arctic fox, called Snowy and Willy did have a toy snowmobile called Pusher until Dad sat on it in the plane and now he has a new blue car instead. 

Back in London it was 1C today and we foolishly went kite flying without gloves or hats and nearly died. Luckily we live close to the park.  

The school run...

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

From bad to worse...

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

This doesn't really do justice to just how heavy the snow is at the moment, and I have to go and pick up William soon (which I will be doing by train).

If anyone is wondering why I'm not blogging:

We have no bathroom.

Or living room.

Or dining room.

The shutters were finally coming today but the van went into a railing and decided to go home to Brighton.

I have had eight cold sores. Four remaining.

And a bacterial infection requiring antibiotics.

We have to move out again next week so the hallway ceiling can come down.

So I am not really in the mood for posting pictures of sunny New Zealand.

First day on the new bikes

Garden with new turf - phase 1 complete

photo, originally uploaded by Racmol.

Half-marathon recap

Jules before the race, originally uploaded by Racmol.

So, we both survived the half-marathon, some more triumphantly than others.

Here is Jules before the race kicked off, and if anyone wants to giggle over a selection of random horrible pictures of us running, they can type our names into marathon-photos.com, under Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon 2012.

Jules managed to injure himself about five days before the race, with what the GP diagnosed as a small tear in his plantar fascia, but then decided to run anyway and stormed home in 1 hour 55, 12 minutes faster than last year.

I thought I was going ok but I must have miscalculated the average speed I was aiming for as I ended up two minutes slower than last year. And of course by the time I realised I wasn't going to quite make it, I didn't have anything left to sprint with. So I still have unfinished business with that course - will have to train into a state of elite athleticism for next year!

It was a beautiful autumn day in Hyde Park, aside from the fact that a lot of the park has been thoroughly trashed by the Olympics and won't be returning to grass any time soon.

We have been without our living room and dining room for two weeks now and it looks like there is at least a week to go before we can move back in. Even Willy is saying things like 'I miss our old house' and 'I don't like this house - it is too stupid!' which I think sums up how everyone is feeling.

Still at least the builders have stopped hacking the plaster and covings off and have resurfaced the walls - it looks a lot better than it did a week ago.

Two months today until we leave for New Zealand!

Garden clearance - phase 1 underway

So this week we've had the gardeners in to clear our garden. It's a 3-phase plan, phase 1 being to tear down the broken fence, clear all the unwanted plant matter and convulvulus, move the roses to the side beds and turf over the old rose beds, the vegetable garden and underneath the fruit trees. Once the turf has grown in, they are removing the old concrete paths and shaping the lawn into two long ovals (a figure of 8), with stepping stones as in our old place. We are also going to get a tree surgeon to reduce the ash tree at the end by a third as it's casting a big shadow.

I forgot to take pictures of the piles of rubble after day 2 but anyway, here's the before and after of the clearance.

Obviously the before looks a lot more appealing than the after, as it's all in flower in midsummer, but it will actually be great to be able to walk from the patio onto the lawn without having to squeeze between the rosebeds and the holly tree (which has gone). And the garden feels much bigger now you can imagine actually using the back half of it.

Here's the back half of the garden, which was once covered by convulvulus.

In the ultimate dream world phase 3 the garden studio and spa pool would be where the shed and back patio are just visible at the top.

Sofia is very pleased that the heavily pruned bay tree is now climbable and Willy has been having a whale of a time, running about with sticks and 'helping' the gardeners. 

A golden day at the rowing

Jules flies the flag, originally uploaded by Racmol.

The alarm went off at 5.30am yesterday and we leapt into the shower before our babysitter arrived punctually at 6. Our timetabling was probably a bit on the paranoid side as we were in Slough waiting for the shuttle bus by 7am and arrived at the venue after a long walk through the Windsor race course just after 8.

We were greeted by armies of happy smiling volunteers and the happy smiling actual army, who performed the world's most efficient security check (take note Heathrow - it's really not that difficult!)

We made our way down to Lakeview Lodge, where there was a big woodchipped area at the edge of the rowing lake that people had set up their picnic blankets on. To get a little extra height, people had made little mounds out of the woodchips and were sitting on them like nesting penguins - I think Jules took a picture of them from the rear which I will share when we download it.

The website had gone on about healthy and delicious food being available at the venue. I did see that the coffee and donut stand had a porridge or granola option but the rest of the stands were fish and chips, hog roast, sausage in a bun and pulled pork. Delicious yes but I'm not so sure about the healthy part. And then there was this sign saying alcohol would only be available from 9.30am which seemed a bit of an arbitrary time to start drinking - not until after breakfast??

So after our healthy and delicious breakfast we made our way to our seats and then discovered the first two hours were full of the F to B finals i.e. sorting out how every boat in the competition ranked, all the way up from the bloke from Niger who finished 33rd out of 33 (to a massive cheer from the crowd) after taking up rowing three months ago.

Our seats were probably only 50m from the end of the course so we had a great view. It's a very strange spectator sport - you can't even see the boats until they're about 500m from the end.

And the rest is history - we cheered on our guys surrounded by cheering English people cheering 5 seconds behind us (ha!). Don't know which was more impressive - the distance that Bond and Murray won by or Mahe Drysdale's close finish.

Hoping to take Sofia and Willy in to watch a bit of the women's marathon tomorrow morning.