I don’t tend to do these but think I may this year.

Yesterday I went running on my own for the first time. I’ve been a few times now and still don’t particularly enjoy running but am determined to keep trying on the basis that it’s exercise that you can do anywhere with little kit and it doesn’t take too long – the idea being that it should be harder to put off doing.

Having said that, if I am going to do it I need to do it more regularly because running once a month or every six weeks as have been doing means that my legs never get used to it and I’m walking around gingerly for the next few days.

So.. New Year resolution #1

Go running at least once a week, hopefully twice, and enter in the 10km run in Barcelona in April.

I’m not going to have a long list of NY resolutions that won’t happen – once this one has been achieved I’ll post my next resolution.

The frenzy of Christmas is slowly waning, it’s bitter sweet after all the build-up but really I’m quite happy to start getting back to a bit of normality.

The kids in Spain have got it sorted, in the UK we have Santa and then Christmas presents from the family. In Spain the presents start with Caga Tio, a strange Catalan creation which is essentially a yuletide log which is fed fruit leading up to Christmas and then on Christmas eve the kids beat it with sticks while singing a song. The log then poos out presents. Strange but true!

Christmas morning of course starts with Santa. The tradition in Jo’s family is that Santa gives all the presents from us, and that presents from the rest of the family are from the respective person (although we know people who have ALL the presents from everyone go through Santa, which strikes me as a really bad idea). I’m not keen on this tradition as I can’t then say ‘I thought you’d really like this’ or anything coz it doesn’t come from me, apparently.

Then after Santa comes the family presents. The tradition in my family is that we open presents after lunch and this is something we’ve adopted for our kids. This was under pressure this year though as we were hosting Christmas for Jo’s family who all open their presents first thing in the morning. There were mutual rumblings on the day but we muddled through without major incident.

In the UK that would be the end of the presents season but here we still have the Kings to come on the 6th January. It’s worth noting that people pick and chose the tradition they want – for the Catalans they tend to prefer Kings to Santa. It’s difficult when the kids know that their friends are getting presents from Caga Tio and the Kings, so we give token gestures so they can join in.

I should really post something about Gabe and Olivia, will look into adding something to their sites.

Esmé’s now really getting into her play mat where she lies down and plays with the hanging things over her head. She’s also getting more vocal about what she wants – i.e. she wants to sit at the table and be included and not stuck in a baby chair (understandable!).

We’ve regressed a little on the sleep routine somehow – she woke 3 times last night, we’re hoping it’s just a growth spurt.

It’s on the news that BS’s mum has had to pull her book on parenting after Britney’s 16 year old sister became pregnant – the irony of it!

I’m just surprised that it took the pregnancy to make a difference, who would seriously buy it???

Not posted anything for a little while: we were in the UK for a long weekend 6-11th (kids almost refused to get off the plane when they saw the weather, but had a lovely, family intensive, few days) and then in France last weekend.

We had a really nice time in France, drove through a blizzard which the kids liked. I was going to post something more substantial with photos to backup, but the damn cat has now chewed through the USB cable which connects the camera. It’s not a regular USB cable so I can’t just use another, so the photos will have to wait.

I’ve heard of dogs trashing a place when they’re on their own but haven’t heard of cats doing the same.

We rented one of these while over in the UK – it’s the car that Jo would like when we replace our existing car – was it any good?

Good points:

• seven seats
• good boot space (when the back seats were down)
• comfy enough

Bad points:

• Underpowered
• Over engineered indicator system*
• Integrated stereo

*This was a really annoying feature: when indicating the indicator level would always center itself whilst still indicating. This was OK when turning a corner as the indicator would reset itself once around the corner, but when on the motorway it was a real pain to turn off – by trying to manually re-set it, it invariably starting indicating in the other direction. To make matters worse the indicator lights on the dashboard were entirely hidden behind the steering wheel meaning that I was continuing having to duck my head to check whether the indicators had turned off correctly.

The integrated stereo is down as a bad point as I’m a soon-to-be new recruit to the digital music scene (i.e. I’m getting an ipod!) and there’s no way of using it with the built in stereo.

The indicator feature is sufficiently annoying that I wouldn’t want to buy this car.

It’s actually 3 more days till she’s 3 months but I’ll be away..

She likes to sit on my knee at the table when we’re eating and is now able to balance herself quite well. She’s started trying to sit up and it won’t be long before she manages it, albeit a bit wobbly.

She’s very smiley and happy.

Her eyes still haven’t settled down. Gabe and Olivia both had very dark eyes which eventually settled down into brown, but the jury is still out on Esmé’s – I still think she might end up with blue eyes.

I just can’t believe that Same Difference got more votes than Hope, what’s going on?!?

SD are just AWFUL.

I actually quite liked Hope and thought that they had the most commercial potential of any of the entrants.

We’re now rooting for Rhydian – he’s got a great voice, seems like a really nice guy and blazes his own individual trail without a care, which we like. I don’t really see who his audience is though..

Our cat, Misha, has a very bad habit of chewing cables.

In recent history she’s chewed through:

- Robert’s laptop power supply

- Several mobile phone chargers

- Both the power supply and the telephone connection on our new walkabout phone

- The power supply to the baby monitor

- The aerial to Jo’s stereo that she had for her birthday

- The USB connection to my PC video

Bad BAD cat!

I’ve now bought a Conceptronic Notecam which has the advantage that it can plug directly into my USB port without any cables

It also came with a retractable USB cable which you can use if you want to put it on top of your screen (or anywhere not directly plugged into your USB port), but Gabe and I managed to break that this morning I’m still hoping to find a way of pushing the spring back inside..

The only other things worth mentioning are that it has 3 night lights for lighting up your face (good feature) but that I had some trouble installing the drivers – all sorts of errors going on which seem to have settled down now.

I finally got round to making Olivia’s site live: Aged 5, going on 15.
She chose the theme, I chose the title