Thursday, June 21, 2007

Big Session, Tiny Dancer

Sunday was my second Father's Day as a dad.

After a morning playing in the tumble drier (see photo above) we drove to Leicester to the Big Session, a folk music festival, to meet up with Anne's mum and sisters (and partners).

It had rained for the first two days of the festival and the ground was wet and muddy, but the weather was good on Sunday. ThingOne was in her element. Not only did she have aunts and grandparents to entertain her, there was live music. I don't think she's seen a band before, and she loved bouncing around in our arms (the tents and auditorium were too busy for her to run around much when music was on).

I was elsewhere at this point, but I was proud to hear from Anne that ThingOne went especially mad with her dancing when a band did a cover of the Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere".

ThingOne even chose a hat at a stall which she insisted on wearing. We've not had much luck with getting her to wear hats, so that's a good sign.



There's some video on my YouTube "channel" (link on the left hand side of the blog) of ThingOne at the festival. I don't think it captures just how much she enjoyed it, but I find it fun to watch her bounce about anyway.

On Monday (while I was away on a course in Staines) Anne was running ThingOne's bath and found ThingOne in our bedroom. ThingOne had turned our radio on, and was listening to I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue on Radio 4. Anne said it was the funniest thing ever to see ThingOne dancing enthusiastically to Tim Brooke-Taylor singing "Teenage Dirtbag" to the tune of The Ash Grove (a traditional Welsh folk song). Anne was laughing so much ThingOne ended up having quite a deep bath that evening.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Wet weekend

Ah, a rainy weekend. We're off to a music thing in Leicester tomoorrow which I understand will be partly outside. I hope it dries up by then.

Anne was at Yoga this morning, and ThingOne and I did our customary trip to Sainsburys, followed by going to the cafe in the supermarker afterwards. I had a coffee and scone and ThingOne had water and a muslei bar. There are a lot of nutters in Sainsburys cafe, but I needed a break after being made to feel like I, and all the other customers, were in the way of the staff in Sainsburys. I used to work in Sainsburys in Welwyn Garden City when I was at school, and in Uni holidays, and I'm sure I wasn't so resentful of customers. (I probably was.)

I think I wrote the word Sainsburys too many times in that paragraph.

I got soaked on the way home, but ThingOne was warm and cosy under the rain cover of her pushchair. I'm now writing a blog entry wearing just pants and T shirt while I wait for my shorts to dry (yes, I was wearing shorts - it looked like it was going to be a nice day this morning).

Blog admin: If anyone uses RSS (or "atom") feeds to read this blog you may have noticed loads of old entries appearing in the feed. Don't fret - I'm not experimenting with time travel (or...am I?) (no, I'm not). I'm just updating the links to photos. When I moved server in April all my entries still pointed to photos at the old address (kent-taylor.port5.com) but they should now all point to www.stephenkt.co.uk. You'd think there's be a faster way to do this than by editing and republishing every entry with a photo, but I couldn't find one at Blogger. Hrumph!

Here are a couple of photos of ThingOne (now with a little hair!) to brighten up this otherwise-dull entry. Here she is showing her early maternal side:


Here she is showing the folly of her method of eating bread with spread on it (ThingOne's method is to shove the bread spread-first onto her face):