Weekend of Luxury

Helen had a lovely evening meet with Bryony and Kath on Friday evening. They met at The Cellar and had a wine and lots of baby adoration happened. I enjoyed a cheap but delicious heat it yourself Indian meal from Morrisons. I've been enjoying my curries all the more for how infrequent they've become with Helen avoiding them through breast feeding. When Helen got home we watched Pete winning Big Brother 7. It was the last episode so we can have our evenings back now.


On Saturday I worked in the morning, then we headed off to Woking to help Richard & Emma house sit. We got there at 4.30pm and were greeted by Mike, Claire and her daughter, Bethany who is 5 years old. John and Rowan were there with a sleeping Madeleine. We also saw Fiona and Jim with their son Daniel. Fiona is a friend from Nottingham but we hadn't met little Daniel before. Emma, Madeleine and Daniel were all born within a week of each other! It was fun comparing babies and stories. Fiona and Jim had to go fairly soon after we arrived.

Emma enjoyed being cuddled by the other parents. She gave some smiles and has started now to copy facial expressions of other people.

We played some chasing games in the large garden. Later in the evening we ordered some pizzas and watched The Simpsons on the massive plasma television. We had lots of enjoyment from the kittens that lived in the house. They'd only been there a month and were still not allowed outside. That didn't stop them trying to escape. They had the biggest scratching post I'd ever seen!

We went in the hot tub that evening and turned on the bubbles and jet streams. There was even a fridge beside it with cold beer and chocolate inside! We stayed in there until wrinkly, then I jumped into the swimming pool which felt really cold in comparison. I felt quite Scandinavian!

When we'd all had enough of the hot tub, we played Battlefield 2 on four computers that had a LAN (Local Area Network) so we could play in the same game. We were the Americans trying to capture islands in the Second World War.

We called in a night fairly soon after midnight. During the night we had a feline visitor, a senior cat whose bed we were sleeping in. She was very understanding about the mix up and settled for sleeping in between Helen's legs. Emma slept in her travel cot that Helen had bought at a large discount on Friday. It's a Mama and Papas one and it's very quick to assemble and put away.

In the morning, Richard, Mike and I had a game of Lord of the Ring; Battle for Middle Earth on the computers. Richard fairly soon got the upper hand, so I was quite pleased to be called away to help with looking after Emma while Mike took over and got beaten comprehensively.

For lunch we went to a nearby pub that is in the Vintage Inns chain, like one of our favourites in Portbury called The Priory. The service was equally quick and efficient and the food excellent. Richard and I went off to check the pressure in the Astra's tyres while the food was ordered and found the passenger side front tyre quite flat. Emma had noticed it looked a a bit flat. Richard reinflated it but when we got home it had already dropped from 33 to 30.

Bryony and Andrew dropped in as they were visiting Clevedon. Emma gave Andrew some lovely smiles.

Helen gave Emma a bath in the Tummy Tub to calm her down today and she was sitting up in it more than ever. She's been quite burbly, almost chatty when she gets excited.