Things that make you go Ooo!

Firstly the kind people from Virgin actually refunded all our telephone calls for the last month due to the problem caused by an engineer plugging our cable into the wrong box - hence giving our telephone number to someone else. They are forgiven.

Secondly my dad's skoda broke down twice in 2 days! Firstly the very nice Skoda Emergency repair people came and replaced something in the starter. The car seemed fine after that until they reached the Edinburgh bypass when the whole thing conked out completely with a burning smell. Pooo to all the numpties who laughed and said things like "that's what you get for buying a skoda". I'd like to point out to those very thick dullards that actually it's got a VW engine (so na na na na nah!) Stick that in your exhaust pipe and smoke it.

Emily's favourite sound this week is "oooOOOooo". Mostly said when looking at lights.

How to occupy a boyfriend for 3 hours

I made the terrible mistake of showing the Dude my latest game craze http://www.candystand.com/uk/play.do?id=18048

I haven't seen or heard from him in over 3 hours!

Weekly Newsround

Well this week I've mainly spent working hard on trying to finish a current project at work. I haven't done much else apart from maybe cycle to work and back, lunching with the Ladies (Lisa, Mia and Conchita). Mia is certainly filling out and I love how she can now hold eye contact with you, smile and coo, it makes me go all gooey.

Lisa and Paul have asked me to be "supportive parent" at Mia's naming ceremony in October. I was stunned when Lisa asked and of course I said yes - trying to hold back the tears of course! How wonderful was that - I'm going to be Mia's "god motherly type person".

I gave a pint of blood yesterday - first pint in about 2 years! Nerve wracking to say the least but hey it wasn't that bad and I'll definitely be going back in December to donate pint number 16 :) I met some fellow workmates at the session and found out that Chuan has already donated over 30 pints! Wow what a fellow.

Last night I went to Teri-Aki in Cambridge with some people from my office. I had a beef curry dish, followed by some sushi. Yummy yummy! Now I know I shouldn't have been doing this but I did proceed to start drinking my usual JD&diet coke and we all headed across to the Pickering to continue drinking until closing time. At which point you would have thought I would have keeled over - oh no no no I managed to remain relatively soberish compared to some of the speech slurring persons and general drunken tom-foolery (ahem Alex - he only looks about 12 - honest!). The taxi ride back to Cambourne was fun with Chuan (I can give a pint of blood and still knock back 8 tequila slammers) falling sleep in the taxi and then snoring at Mark's house. Matt once again looked like he could have carried on, but judging by his msn message this morning maybe he is slightly worse for wear!

Anyway it was a great night - and no one was hurt in the making of a great evening :)

Busy Bee

I've been so busy shampooing carpets all weekend I've even got blisters on my thumb. So when you come to visit you aren't allowed to walk on my carpets, ok?

It's been hard work lugging a heavy carpet cleaner around the place and up and down the stairs. I feel totally knackered, and I ache so much. I don't think my body has had such a thorough work out (mind you I did ache after playing football earlier this week - maybe I'm more out of shape than I think I am!)

Anyway I'm pretty chuffed I've managed to clean the carpets - there were a few odd stains in Emily's room and the bathroom. I think the bathroom ones were from some little person using their toothbrush to clean the floor, and another slightly bigger person having a nose bleed.

Another busy and entertaining weekend over with :( Oh and I finished Harry Potter - anyone want to know the ending?

9pm Girl

Ok it's now 9pm, I've been lying in bed for the last hour, reading the last chapter of Harry Potter and watching some docu about the notorious GFB (sorry that's Gina Ford Baby torturer). I think she's slightly potty.

Last night was ace, Tosha and I went out for dinner and a few drinks, ahem which turned into a few more drinks and some dancing. Sharing a double toilet, and then walking home at 2am.

20 hours later and I've almost recovered, and I've been shampooing carpets all afternoon - hurrah!

That is all

2 am Girls

it's 2am we're dru k and blogging - oh dear. just as well as the web cam is not connected

The long Goodbye

Today the Dude and Emily head up North. I'm going to miss them loads and the house is going to be so empty and quiet, it's been eerily quiet with just Phoebe gone. It's a bit scary. I haven't had a week to myself for a long long time. So to help me pass the time and keep out of trouble (yeah!) tonight I shall take my pc apart and check out that components I need to buy to upgrade her. Sadly she only has 1 gig of hard disk left and I need to take all the photos and videos off and store them somewhere safe.

On Thursday I'll be babysitting for Lisa and Paul (at least I can get my baby fix). Friday night I'm all set to go out with Tosha for some drinks. She's going to be spending the night so I hope the evening goes really well and we have some good laughs. Saturday will probably start off really late and really slow (hehe), I've got to pick up a carpet cleaner and get set to clean all the carpets in the house. Saturday night I'll get items ready for another car boot sale, hopefully get rid of all the stuff I have left over from the last one. Sunday afternoon maybe some Tae Kwon Do then off to bed early for some well earned rest.

Well thats the plan - who knows what will really happen!

Here's some added cuteness

I got her a new high chair as we were getting pretty fed up with cleaning the other one. At least this one allows easy cleaning (well most of the food just drops onto the floor!). It was a bargain too, only £10.50 from ebay :)

Toys Galore

Once again I have come up top trumps with some more new toys and books for Emily through the Freecycler website. Check out her stash!

And on another note - look at the mess!

She has no fear!

Updated

I've updated Emily's photos on photobucket and I've also added in some photos of Phoebe

Sunshine

The sun has got her hat on, hip hip hip hooray!

The weather has greatly improved this weekend, making Sunday to hottest so far and too hot to actually sit in! This weekend we've mainly been indoors - mainly because on Saturday I did my back in and took to bed for the rest of the day with some mighty strong painkillers, and today Drew was too tired after night shift and it was just too darned hot! Hot I tell ya!

Thanks again to some freecycling I managed to get a hold of a small swing for Emily

And this is a picture of Emily's Evil twin... Nasty!

On line

Hurrah Ntl/Virgin managed to sort out our crossed lines and have swopped back our original telephone number! Even though I did have to email 2 MD's from Customer Services and speak to one very nice Michaela (VP's assistant). All we have to do now is ensure that we haven't been charged for the other customers calls over that weekend!

Feh!

What the heck have NTL/Virgin done now - well they've given our home number to some new customer. What a complete shower of idiots! So we apologise to anyone trying to reach us at home but please use our mobile numbers until I blog that we have our original number back!

After a long phone call to customer services - nothing changed in our predicament - we were going to have to wait until the 11th before they could get an engineer out to fix it. In the mean time any calls I make would be on the other customers bill and vice versa.

So kick butt, I emailed 2 MD of Customer Service's explaining what had happened. An hour later I got an email from one of the Directors Assistants saying that she was passing this onto his team. Later on that afternoon I got another call from Michaela, who is the VP's assistant, saying that she is speaking to an area manager and was was hoping to get this problem fixed within the next 24 hours. She also agreed waiting 2 weeks was just ridiculous. We're still waiting...

OMG!

Emily will be 1 in 6 and a half weeks! Can you believe it, time goes by too quickly. Can someone please make a pause button so I can enjoy this phase more?

I'm already thinking about birthday parties, shall we have one at home? Shall we do the Brewster's (yuk!). The only reason I say yuk to that is that Lisa and I had some lunch there last week and Jesus the food was awful, Lisa had a Mediterranean platter which was plastic prawns, cold cooked vet, and some mozzy cheese chucked ontop of cold tomato slices - even those weren't drizzled some some oil and basil!. My soup was ok, but had a thick scum on top indicating that it had been sitting under the heat lamp for some time. Phoebe had been outdone by 2 chicken nuggets on her plate (even though I did point to the large size on the children's menu when I ordered). None too pleasing lunch all round and I certainly wont be recommending Brewers food to anyone. Good thing was I did complain and the manager was very apologetic and removed most of the food items from the bill. But still poor Lisa had very little to eat. :(

On the road to recovery

Well after 10 days of feeling utterly crap I'm finally starting to feel better. Whatever it was it was nasty, damned nasty and I hope no-one else gets it.

So what have we recently been up to - well we had a BBQ on the 7th - which was successful. The kids had a fab time running around playing with the bubble machine, pinata and the chocolate fountain (boy you should have seen the mess). We finally made it to bed at 2am.

Next we took my local pack of Brownies (notice I said pack - as in like a pack of wild animals) off to the butterfly farm. I forget how many times I told them not to run, wait and finally told of them off for running off. Pah kids!

Anyway here are some photos of butterflies, I love butterflies!

This one hitched a ride on my bag, sadly I had to force him to leave as he didn't pay the fare.

This one I managed to photo was outside (a real live wild butterfly!)

3 headed goat

The pack!
OK so he isn't a butterfly but still kinda nice

Still here

This viral thing is still affecting my sleep. but I'm glad to say that the throat spray is helping to alieve the pain. I've lost 2 lbs over the last week as I'm struggling to eat (for once)!

Sick as a parrot

Turns out I have some strange viral infection that has hit my nose, throat and eyes. It's been making life hell as I've constantly have a sore throat, my eyes are now all crusty and my nose feels like some one has taken the cheese grater to it! I now have 3 medicines to take, 1 nasal spray, eye drops and throat spray.

I feel like a toxic dump

Apologies

Normal Service Will Be Resumed...

Shortly

Pout

More BBQ Photos

Emily
Jack - EXTREME CLOSE UP!

Paul trying to deny that he isn't really into kiddies toys!
It's a BEAVER!
The boy who blew bubbles
And the girl who enjoyed them
Gabi and Andrew - mull over the idea of baby-napping (I did say they could borrow her for an entire weekend!)