74 posts tagged “kids”
Sébastien left on Boxing Day after six months with us. It's always sad to say goodbye to an au pair. But now Vanessa's here!
She arrived last Sunday. She'd been on our radar for a while now, since we started looking in fact. We accepted her after she'd accepted another position, so that didn't work out. then her position fell through, but by then we'd accepted someone else. You know, that sort of thing.
Sébastien was from France with connections to La Réunion island so the Arran weather was a bit of a shock to him, poor soul. He adapted pretty well though.
Vanessa's from Germany and has perfect English. Better than a lot of the locals here! She's survived her first week with the kids and they love her. She's here until June.
It was the Highland Games yesterday in Brodick. The morning was wet through to about midday and then it cleared up pretty much for the afternoon. There were five pipe bands over to the island, including one from Brittany. They all got off the 11 o'clock boat and I got to see them marching along Brodick main street from the Post Office. I closed up at 1-ish, got home and got Lorraine and the kids into the car and back into Brodick.
It was a great day watching the pipe bands, especially the mass band when all five marched round the playing fields. There was all the usual Highland Games events: caber tossing (see pictures), hammer throwing, beer barrels. I didn't see any Highland dancing strangely enough, but it could just be that there was some and we missed it. I think Freya would have enjoyed watching that.
The only annoying thing was the high number of wasps, evil things that they are. If it's not midges, it's bloody wasps. Ugh!
Anyway, it started winding down so I brought L and the kids home around 5-ish then headed back out for the march back through Brodick to the ferry terminal. There was a really heavy downpour as the bands were marching, so they were all wet through. Didn't seem to spoil their fun in the slightest though and the finale was great, watching all five bands cutting loose in the ferry car park, passing whisky round and just jamming. I was really wishing that I had my camera with me then and wishing even more that I had a 70-200 f/2.8 VR. That's my dream lens right at the minute.
Anyway, it was a fun day out and I'm looking forward to next year's already. Nothing gets to me like the sound of a pipe band, so imagine five of them playing together!
It was a good day today. Work went reasonably well, with the Co-Op coming in with their banking just before the time when it would have meant chasing my tail to close, although I did still end up chasing my tail anyway. But this isn't about that, it's about the afternoon. I got home around 2.30pm (not bad for a Saturday) and Freya was ready to hop into the car and go back in to Brodick for the church fair. We got there around three and it really was pretty mince to be honest. It's good for me to be seen at such things though, being, as I am, the subpostmaster and Freya enjoyed it and I enjoyed spending time with Freya. There were some silly games and they were reasonably fun, but the bric-a-brac or white elephant or whatever you call it, puhleese! Truly dreadful stuff for sale; to call it tat would be doing a disservice to the word tat. There was, however, facepainting, always a favourite of wee Freya, so we queued for all of about five minutes and then she got a snake painted on each cheek.
I told her she could do anything she wanted to do as it was daddy-daughter time and we were out to have some fun. She decided that she wanted to go to the swings in Corrie, the same ones that we visited a year or so ago when over on a recce mission and doubling as a visit with grandma and granddad. So I banged on Shostakovich's 10th symphony (annoyingly playing in only one speaker cos my car stereo has decided that that's how it's gonna be) and off we went to Corrie. We spent only 10 minutes or so given that we had to go shopping after that and it was getting pretty late. Freya was happy with that though, but did say that she would have preferred it if Hamish and Mummy could have come too. Bless.
Between the church fair and the trip to Corrie, I popped in to the bike shop to ask about components and repairs then dashed home to throw both of Lorraine's bikes in the back. We got a great bike seat for Hamish and fitted it to the good bike last week. Freya's bike attaches to the back of the good bike so Lorraine has been taking Freya to nursery school that way, with her on her own bike being towed and Hamish on his wee seat on the crossbar. But, being the grumpy little sod that he can be, he decided the other day to resist the bike seat as he wanted to stay at the park and, in the process of his tantrum, he kicked the good bike over and it landed on the dérailleur . I had the bike man look at it today and it's worse than we thought: the rear dropout is bent so that the hanging bit of the dérailleur catches on the spokes. The frame is aluminium (6061 tubing, whatever that may be) and the bike man was of the opinion that bending it back would snap it. So the good bike is now out of commission and I'm going to have to seek out a frame repair man to see if it can be fixed. As Mick Hucknall of Simply Red so aptly put it in the eighties, money's too tight to mention and buying a new bike frame isn't something that we can manage right now, so hopefully it will be fixable. It's just one of those things, right? I'm sure we'll laugh about it later, right? It's just not very funny right now .
Anyway, despite that, it was a good afternoon and we both really enjoyed being together. Being a dad really can be the best thing.
The shows are in town so I took Freya along last Sunday while Hamish was having his nap and Lorraine was busy trying to meet her deadline. It was a lot of fun but very expensive. Here's a nice shot I got of Freya coming out of the bouncy place.
I've created a video slideshow of Hamish's second year starting from his first birthday when we were at Disneyland Paris. I used Lightroom to select the images -- it's great for that kind of thing as you can select all photos between two dates and then filter down to specific tags, in this case Hamish. Then use colours or flags to narrow down the selection and finally export out to jpg.
Once that was done, I imported into iPhoto 08 and did a slideshow that way, but it really doesn't give you very much control. So I tried it in iMovie and that worked a lot better. I'm used to the more traditional non-linear editors, specifially Premiere Pro, so iMovie looked a little weird at first. I did some of the online tutorials on Apple's site and it was then really easy to get the music imported, adjust the duration etc. I think the iApps are really great for creating media like this and the suite of apps goes together really very well. It's a shame that Lorraine hasn't the time to learn how to do this as I'm sure that she would enjoy it, particularly as she's got the 24-inch iMac; I'm doing it on a Macbook!
The hardest part of the project was picking out the music. Lorraine did help with that.
And finally I got it uploaded to the web. I tried Vimeo this time rather than YouTube as I'm not keen on how YT compresses video. Although Vimeo seems to have done the same sort of thing. I'll perhaps try different export settings from iMovie and see if that makes a difference.
The next thing to do is the same thing for Freya's third year. For each of them their birthday spans the move from Lux to Scotland so it's an important year for us all. Once it's all done, we're going to put it all on DVD for sending to friends and family.
It's really great having all this digital media and I could see my photography improving through the year as I picked out the photos. And Lightroom really does rock, seriously.
So, without any further ado, here are the fruits of my labour. Enjoy!
My mum and dad came to visit today and it was wonderful to see them.
My mum has had MS for many years and is more or less completely
immobile now. My dad also is not in great shape and is constantly
hooked up to an oxygen bottle. One of my mum's carers and her husband
brought them over in their black cab. It's big enough to get my mum
into in her wheelchair and my dad had his folded up. It's about 40
minutes to the ferry from where they live and then an hour's crossing
so it really was a big day out for them.
Freya was excited about them coming so we set off to meet them from the
ferry around 11 this morning. We went straight to the Post Office and I
showed them round my little shop and it was really nice that they were
able to see it. Bear in mind that my parents have not visited my home ever
because I've pretty much lived abroad for the last 10 years since I
finished university. In fact, the thought came to me as I waved them
goodbye that it is the first time ever that I've waved goodbye to them
from my own home. It's always been the other way round right up
until today!
After the PO we came back to the house and had some lunch and then
retired to the living room to watch Freya painting her my little pony
and having a blether.
It's always inspiring to see my folks and how they cope but
particularly when they show that they can still make trips like today.
Thanks for coming mum and dad!
So our wee boy is now 2! I managed to get out of work at five and get round the supermarket to get some shopping and bits and pieces for a birthday tea. Freya and Rachel tried making a cake this afternoon but it didn't work out very well. Hamish didn't mind though. He had fun blowing out the candle and even managed to do it all on his own and then give himself a round of applause. Well done our little man!
Here's the card I got this morning from Freya and Hamish for father's day. I almost sprayed my tea over the dining table! Nice choice, kids!
:)
Lorraine was doing some gardening tonight and the kids were sitting on the grass. The light looked right for trying out some fill flash so I got my SB800 and tried taking a few shots but none really worked out; they were all over cooked. Guess I need to learn how to dial down the flash, although I thought the TTL (through-the-lens) was supposed to adjust the flash automatically to give the right exposure?
Whatever. Here is a couple of shots anyway.
I went to Holy Island for the first time today with Freya and Lorraine's mum (Lorraine had to stay home and carry on with her translation work :(
It was a great trip and a wonderful place to visit. It would be nice to do a retreat there one day. The peace and tranquillity there makes the Isle of Arran seem like a city centre and it was weird getting off the boat on our return and stepping on to the "mainland" of Arran!
We didn't manage to get there in time for the Lama's talk at 2.30, which was a shame, but it was still worth making the 10-minute crossing. Next time we'll go with Lorraine and Hamish too, maybe take a picnic and do some walking.
