The Man in Black

Jacob's first black item of clothing:-


I think he looks ever so cool in it :)

I also managed to get the boys to pose long enough for this photo:-


It degenerated into a wrestling match shortly afterwards. Worth noting the colour of Sam's eyes; I think he's channelling Paul Newman .....

Bye Bye Baby

I've just converted Sam's cotbed into a bed; while I was putting the cot bars away, I spotted the old changing table that used to be attached to the top of the chest of drawers in his bedroom. And on Sunday, we sold our tandem buggy on eBay.

Slowly, the trappings of babyhood are going.....

ps Adrian and Solveig, Jacob says that next time you come and visit you HAVE to bring him back his Bumbo after you stole it :))

Scooters FTW

For the last 2 or 3 days we've been having beautiful weather - finally - but bizarrely, when we drove to Rowntree Park yesterday, we found that it was closed due to flooding. We haven't had much rain of note for over a week, but last weekend the Ouse was spread out over its flood plain as we drove over it on the A64. I guess it takes the park staff a few days to get the park back in order once the rains have subsided, but it did seem odd to be standing there in the bright sunshine after a week or more of dry weather looking at a notice about flooding.

The main reason we were heading off to the park was that yesterday morning Jacob and Sam's new scooters were delivered and we needed to go somewhere to try them out. Although I've been muttering to myself recently about how many toys they have and how spoiled they are, I decided to buy these for fairly practical reasons. At the moment, when we go to nursery in the morning, Sam goes in the pram and Jacob rides on the buggy board, but imo, he's starting to be a little bit old/big for the board; the paradox of Jacob is that he's far too lazy a boy to walk every morning, but he will happily go on a scooter. This is probably because he sees quite a lot of his friends doing the same thing and there's nothing like the example of his peers to get Jacob to do something (if only I could arrange for him to see them get their hair cut with clippers and drink milk out of a proper cup!).

Anyway, he had a whale of a time with his scooter in the Museum Gardens (the one safe public space that wasn't flooded) and even though he had a tumble after going a little too quickly down a slope, he was a brave little soldier and didn't cry. He carried on scootering once we got home and even took it upstairs a couple of times to scoot round the landing on it. At the moment, he's begging to use it again and I'm refusing as Doug is having a much needed lie-in and I don't want Jacob arriving at his bedside on his scooter :) One of the good things about the model I've bought is that it folds and locks, which renders it useless to Jacob unless I unlock it for him. Excellent scooter usage control system!

So tomorrow we're going to give it a whirl. I'll set off for nursery 5/10 mins earlier than normal so I don't end up getting bad tempered if he can't go as fast as I want or if we struggle crossing the main road etc. We're supposed to be having an outing somewhere today, so no doubt the scooter will come with us and I'll try and get some photos of him in action. Unfortunately, Sam is having a little difficulty getting the hang of the scooter and is a bit frustrated by it - but he'll get there, no doubt - Jacob was bossily demonstrating how to scoot to him most of the afternoon!

Tesco Online

I can't actually encapsulate this in 160 letters because it's one of those things I find really irritating, and because it's grocery shopping it means it's really irritating on a weekly basis.

And the cause of my irritation? The fact that the Tesco online shop does not work properly in Firefox.

Every week, I go to the site to book my delivery slot and 9 times out of 10 when I click on an option, instead of serving up the appropriate webpage I get a dialogue box asking whether I want to save the page. Something with an .aspx suffix, which (as I understand it from Doug) should actually be spelled .shit.

And so I have to trog off to Internet Explorer and use that. Which I don't want to do, as I understand that it is a VERY BAD THING and WILL TURN YOUR LAPTOP INTO THE EVIL COMPUTER FROM WARGAMES. Or something.

Anyway, I find it really irritating that the UK's biggest supermarket can't make its online store work in the UK's second biggest browser, one that is used by almost 20% of the population.

Every little helps? I think not.

Is Twitter the new Blogging?

A question that has undoubtedly been asked before by much shrewder minds of the 2.0 generation.

It occurred to me earlier that I have hardly blogged of late, and that's probably down to two things:- a) I haven't really done much that warrants a blog post (not that that usually stops me) and b) Twitter. It seems that a throwaway sentence of less than 160 letters can replace a blog post of 160 words plus quite adequately.