Not a good week

I got a cold from my mother-in-law via my son, which has now turned into a secondary infection as per usual, and conjunctivitis also from my son and husband plus other ailments I can't mention. Oh joy!

My laptop was pronounced dead by the local PC repair place. They offered me a newish IBM Lenovo for $1300 but I may as well hang out for one bought pre-tax from Dell. Probably be better than the old for half the price.

On the bright side, Ryan continues to entertain although he's been a bit picky about food lately (maybe contagious too). Keeps hanging out for jelly.

Almost 2 years

Ryan turns 2 on Easter Sunday. He has a remarkable number of clear words now - it must be close to 200. He now tells us what to do! "Mummy sit", "Daddy drive", "open fridge", "over the bridge"

It seems from some web trawling that my old boss has severed his ties with ANU. I wonder how the newer personnel are working out. Seems most of the women have left! I don't really miss that place apart from them.

I've been uploading some photos from France. It's been good to look at some of the trips and walks we did again. Pat may go to Sophia and Brest in June but I don't think I fancy flying 24 hours with Ryan.

Ryan at 18 months

HPIM1232
Originally uploaded by Robubble.

Here he is exploring the full potential of our furniture.

Update

We are well apart from the usual rounds of coughs and colds that come with babies. I had two in a fortnight including while we were away in Falls Creek. Our longest break away for ages! Yes, it was a long drive from Sydney but we stopped frequently, except when Ryan was asleep, and stayed overnight in Canberra.

The parents-in-law have both retired and are gallivanting all over the place. Before skiing with us they went to Queensland and have now gone to visit their other grandson in Indiana. The grandson, Murray is only 10 days older than Ryan. His parents are going to use up their US annual leave to travel with them. I'm envious of the travel. We'd like to go to NZ next year but we have to book it or it'll never happen.

My Mum retires at Christmas so my parents may spend more time with Ryan soon.
He's just stayed overnight with them for the first time so we could go out to dinner for my birthday.

He's very engaging at 18 months. New words and actions appear on a daily basis. It's very easy to get him to laugh and it's infectious.

Falls Creek

HPIM1212
Originally uploaded by Robubble.

Ryan with JennyG's riding parka for waterproofing.

Skiing

We went away for a week with the in-laws to Falls Creek via Canberra, ostensibly to ski. The season was as bad as we've ever seen it so the four of us only skiied two half days each, taking it in turns to look after Ryan. We did a few walks with him in normal shoes - no snow boots necessary.

Walking and weaning

Ryan stopped breast feeding and started walking in the same week at the end of May. He is almost up to running. He loves swings (laughs delightedly) and went down the slippery slide backwards by himself several times today, very happy with himself. This despite me waking him up prematurely and having a cold.
We were all counted on the Australian census tonight. The online form worked very well.

Conversation all gone dry

My skills in this area were never the best but now they seem to have deserted me. Probably something to do with spending all my time in the company of a person who's verbal output consists of a parroting of animal noises. I say 'baa' he says 'baa'. My Dad claims he said 'out' the other day but he hasn't repeated it. Any suggestions for conversational enhancement accepted.
Ryan, said boy, is now one and is content to get about on all fours, especially with knees up bum in air. He's in no hurry to walk unaided, which is fine by me. He's fast enough already. And he's usually a very happy smiling companion.

Back 1 year

We've been back in Aus 1 year this month. It's flown by with the baby boy arriving in April.

I made contact with a colleague from Sydney Uni. He's gone to Arizona to work with another ex-colleague. Makes me *start* to think about working again or at least start getting my brain back in some shape. How do you start to catch up with academic reading? It's necessary to pick a pretty narrow topic, of real interest of course, then go to it. However, it's not that easy to get hold of some articles if you aren't in an institution with subscriptions to journals.

Better go. It's late on Christmas Eve. Handel's Messiah is playing on the TV and the boy is peacefully asleep (until he wakes between 2 and 4 am for a quick liquid snack). Long day tomorrow driving to the rels for Christmas lunch.

Time consumer

HPIM0913
Originally uploaded by Robubble.

Here is the reason for less blogging. Ryan at 5 months just loves standing up.

Ryan is almost 3 months old