Santa train

Yesterday we had a special day out with Noah to the Haverthwaite steam railway in the lakes to meet santa.
We took our seats on the very old steam train and there was a pantomime type show where santa's elves where playing up and the head elf told us there would be no presents, until we had done all of the "he's behind you" and "oh no he wont" stuff. We then all sang carols (quite bizare really if you think about it sitting on a victorian steam train in a carrige called ballbul singing with a group of complete strangers) we would have looked and felt quite strange had we not had a three year old with us as an excuse. Anyway Santa soon came along to ask Noah had he been good and what he would like for Christmas, Noah at this point is stunned and silent (at least not in floods of tears like last years Santa visit) And received a fantastic aeroplane with little people in it, he was made up. We then were given a glass of sherry to finish off proceedings.
The train took us back. Here a few pics from along the way.

Santa and his elves and fairy's

Noah and sue before we got on the train

Noah meeting Santa

Noah after he had met Santa and got his present

Why pay £5 for a barber to cut your hair!

WHY!

Noah is at that three year old phase everyone hears so much about before they have children, where everything you say to him prompts the response - WHY - its very cute and funny at times. I have started to write down some or the things he says to us. Here is a classic Noah example,

Mummy - Noah please don't touch the oven its hot!
Noah - WHY?
Mummy - Because its the oven its hot, we have just cooked tea in it, its Hot!
Noah - Can i put my hand in and see? (He says as he is opening the oven door and sue starts a panicked sprint towards him)

Noah constantly tests and pushes the boundaries about every half hour at the moment, every thing we say he insists that the exact opposite is true.

Noah - Can i wee outside daddy? (Fred has a love of weeing in the drain outside, he always has since he realised his outlet for this was portable its novel for him i suppose)
Daddy - No, because its cold, raining and dark outside and you are only wearing your underpants you will freeze to death sweetheart.
Noah - I wont! its not raining and not dark.
Daddy - You will, now go and wee in the toilet like a good boy.
Noah - But i want to! (he says as he is toddling off half naked into the garden in the rain, daddy in hot pursuit to bring him back in)

Going Going Gone!!!

These pictures were taken when Sue was pregnant with Fred. I was tidying up my picture files and came across this trio, God only knows why she had been making cakes I think it was nest feathering or something.

GOING

GOING

GONE.

Anyone know how to play fluffy bunnies (Pam)
Oh and i have found some pictures of Sue's swollen feet crammed into a pair of heals which she wont let me post, Genuinly hilarious if not slightly wrong. Please campaign to let this happen!

Photo post

Hello, well there isn't much news here this week with us, so i thought a picture post was in order, i have now got a file full of good pics of fred sue and me to post regularly, so here are five pics from recent months. I have a few video's i would like to post but they were recorded on my mobile phone and are in some bizarre file format so when i figure a wa to convert them i will post them.

Noah doing what he does best, climbing, this was taken in grizdale forest where they have the mother of all climbing frames he loved it (so did i as well)

This was taken on the beach at Arnside near Grandma's caravan He did it all himself, i tell you he is a genius in the making.

This was Noah and Sue at the dent folk festival this summer,

Noah and he best friend Henry in our garden.

Again at grizdale forest sitting on this wonderful sculpture made of tree's, its amazing and i remember it being there when i was a kid,

Wedding of the year

On Saturday my good friend from work Tony married Graham at the Clifton hotel in Southport. It was a fabulous day and fantastic to see two such lovely people tie the knot. The ceremony and vows were wonderful and they had arranged a wonderful reception with a band, cabaret and disco, the biggest chocolate fondue you have ever seen in your life and a roulette table for us all to try our hand at. We all had a cracking night to remember. Here are a couple of snaps courtesy of Rachal (cheers) as i for got my camera. congratulations.

Signing the register

A well deserved drink just after the ceremony, I think Tony needed it as i have never seen anyone as nervous in their life

Some hours later.

halloween and bonfire night

Hello, two posts in three days how long do you reckon before i start slipping again to once a month posts? Well we have a lot to show given that i have not posted in months. Over the last few days we have had halloween and early bonfire night. Noah dressed as a devil which suited him down to the ground, he went trick or treating to our neighbours and to his uncle Michaels house over the road. He got really exited when people put sweets into his little pot. here are some pictures.


This one of noah is cute i love the way he is rolling his eyes it accentuates the horns he would only wear them for a bit though we have found that he doesnt really like to have weird stuff on his head.















Tonight we have been to grandmas house for a bonfire and food which was lovely, no fireworks as the scare Noah and her donkeys so we all sat around and had sparklers and ate parched peas (renowned for there wind making ability, Sue was in her element after that)




This pic with the circles are were done by me playing about with slow shutter speeds on my camera and getting Michael to make frantic circles with his sparkler, quite cool though eh.

















Noah and His cousins Cameron (left) and Max(right) All the boys helped build the fire.














Noah with his grandad watching the fire.

Back after four months

Hello, Well i thought it was about time i posted something on our blog as it has been about four months since the last one. I have succumbed to guilt trips and bollocking's by Pam who somehow has the superhuman ability to blog 3 times a week.(good on ya though Pam we do love it).
I don't know what it is about writing these things i just find it difficult, I have come to the conclusion that just writing what you think is the best policy, the reason i fell out with blogging was that it took me too bloody long because i kept reading everything back and changing bits and so on. I suppose also when you immortalize something into the public domain you feel you should think about what your saying which isn't normally my policy as you probably know, so an element of self conciousness comes into the deal too. Another trouble i have had with writing these posts is that because only our good friends Pam and Craig in the US and my mum and dad really have read the blog up to now and no bugger bothered to get a google password in order to look at it, i ended up writing the blog as more of a personal message to the people i knew read it which isn't the point really because we have email for that don't we. So iam going to de restrict access to the blog and re invite all our friends and family to view it again.
Anyway this post every day for a month thing people are doing has made me think i should probably write more and it gives an opportunity to share experiences of life with our wonderful boy Noah through stories, pictures or video. So much time has elapsed since the last blog, you have missed a lot of what's been going on with us, so as well as current stuff going on with us i will keep going back to old pics, videos and the stories that go with them from time to time. Noah is growing and changing so rapidly there is a lot to include past and present so keep with me and i hope none of it gets boring because we all know what a nightmare parents are like when they get going on how wonderful there children are.
So enough of my ramblings, here are a couple of recent pictures.

This picture was taken at the Cambridge folk festival which we took Noah to for his 3rd festival. on our camp site there were entertainers and musicians, most of it geared up to kids which was fab, one day Noah had his face painted as a tiger which looked really cool, he was running around the camp site pretending to be a tiger and "roaring" at strangers. More on Cambridge to come, including video footage of him nicking my can of beer and necking it ( i hope social services dont read these things)


This photo was taken about a month ago when we were on holiday to the Lakes. We took fred off to the south lakes zoo for the day and amongst other thigs there was a penguin enclosure where the scuttle around your feet, i must have smelled of fish or something because they pecked me to death, Noah on the other hand got on great with them and i snapped this great picture which iam really proud of because you couldnt ever have posed for it. Oh and i later found out from a guide that the little buggers were in season and trying to mate with me. Lovely.

This litte pixie was photographed during a trip to a one day folk festival in dent (lake district) there was a stall with all manor of weird and wonderful hats and of course Noah had to try most of them on. We also bought him his first guitar here as a treat its a green ukulele, i will post a pic of him playing it sometime.

Thats it for now, i have already done what i said i wouldnt do and spend hours over this. will post again soon, and i look foreward to seeing some new dots on the clustrmap. Ta Ta

Oh a P.s - I have added a widget from one of my fav sites - last.fm - its a radio station where the music is compiled from people's similar tastes, i have nominated the band Shins, the site does the rest playing you music you already love based on your taste and music you dont know you love yet, fabulous idea eh. oh if you dont like the current track just flick to the next, if you like it leave the page running in the background of your browser it never stops. Ta ta.

Back in the land of the living

Hello and sorry it has been a while since the last post i have been on nights for two weeks and either sleeping or working pretty much so had no time. I am currently demented with watching big brother so have come to make a post out of the way and left sue to watch people argue and make a fool of themselves on TV.
We are all fine and not really much news from the last couple of weeks. Me and sue went to view Noah's school for his pre school enrolment which was really bizarre as it only seems five mins since he was a baby and all of a sudden someone is explaining what's on his pre school curriculum, how mad. sue even got a bit upset. It is a really nice school though and his teacher is lovely, he will start in September for an afternoon a week to begin with.

Update on the cat and dogs relationship, it has flourished thankfully and they can now be found cuddled near each other sometimes, here is a picture to prove it, Noah still torments him but in a manageable way, he hasnt had to sit on the naughty step for a while anyway. You can also see what an enormous cat jarvis is sat next to phoebe, he is going to be huge. Bless him he is lovely, he just wants to be fussed and sit on someone. Though he does drop the most horrendous farts which put even sue's to shame at times.

Me and Noah went off to windmill farm last week before i started nights for a day out to look at the animals and ride the steam train. we had a cracking day and the weather was lovely, the goats did scare him though at first when we had food for them, he ended up round my shoulders with fear when they all came to be fed, here is a picture of later on when we had built his confidence a little

We have had lovely whether recently and enjoyed being out in the garden we have had the pool out for Noah he loves it and refuses to wear any clothes, i managed to take a photo where he is covering his modesty.
I say we have had lovely weather though it has been raining today but i have just watched the 10 o clock news and the whole of Yorkshire seems to be underwater, they had a months rain in 24 hours, how grim.

Lastly a funny picture of Grandma being terrorised by Noah and his teddies the other day.
Ta Ta for now.

Donkeys and tomato soup

hello - just a quick one to say what we have been up to this week, and an excuse to post some lovely pics of fred.
On Tuesday me and sue took Noah to St Anne's near Blackpool to the sea front to ride the steam train and donkeys.
this is Noah's first donkey ride which he was rather apprehensive about to say the least but we managed to coax him on in the end. he was a mix of terrified and thrilled when it got going bless him.
I cant figure out how to embed the actual video on the blog page (help pam) so here is a link to the google vid site.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8404811498956515127&hl=en-GB


Otherwise we have been doing boring everyday stuff working tidying up and all that.
We have though had to introduce Noah to the naughty step (3rd stair in the house) as a way of telling the little trouble maker off. His first visit was after he squeezed the poor cats head and then sat on him after dragging him across the lounge by his tail. The second and third times on the step were also cat abuse related crimes, he is learning though and hopefully we will get to the point where we can just threaten the step to stop him. I didn't realize how defiant kids can be though a real learning curve.
Any way here are some pictures from the last month ish.

Noah on the prom at grange over sands
Tomato soup al fresco

Proping up a tree.

Here are a couple of the garden i took to post here, there are some people who haven't been home and visited our new house, and because i didn't send everyone a walk through type video as i said i would (sorry) this is to get you sort of up to speed, from a year ago.

This is our veg plot, its not quite finished, only the seat to attach to the blocks left to do now (oh and plant it properly) and a lifetime of weeding, hopefully we should be able to grow a lot of our own veg over the year. We had our first salad yesterday picked from the garden.









This is the view from the bottom of the garden, Pam i need your help with the lawn it looks fine but full of holes, moss, weeds what to do (and dont say flags) anyway we have some lovely rhododendron bushes which are really old and enormous which were a nice surprise as they had passed by the time we moved in last year.

OUR FIRST BLOG POST, AND ABOUT TIME TOO!!!!

Hello and welcome to our blog, I have been wanting to start a blog for some time now so that we can keep all you lovely family and friends of ours out there around the world up to date with what's going on with me, Sue and our lovely boy Noah. We all know how hard it is to keep in touch on anything like a regular basis with the mad and busy lives we all lead. I wanted to start a blog because i know how much we love to look at our friends Pam and Craig s blog to catch up with what they are doing and to see how the lovely Jack is growing. So I came to the conclusion that our family friends would like to see something similar. and here it is. I plan to post every one to two weeks so please keep checking for any updates (if you are interested that is)

So here are a few things that have been going on with us recently: -

Jarvis - We aquired another addition to the family on Monday this week in the form of Jarvis the cat.
His breed is a rag doll and we bought him from a relative of Sue's friend Louise after they bought him and he didn't get on with their Persian who is old and irritable and couldn't cope with a young cat wanting to play with it. he is really really gorgeous as you can see, the breed is derived from a Persian and they are the largest breed of house cat i think. They get their name because they are all floppy and docile (supposedly) also they are meant to be very good with children which so far is true. Noah being Noah wanted to pick him up and carry him around the house as soon as they met (poor thing) and Jarvis didn't complain and they are getting on very well up to now. Phoebe and jarvis is another matter though, Jarvis doesn't like phoebe as yet and tries to bat her and jump on her poor thing and she is cowering away from him at the moment, iam sure they will become friends though soon enough, Jarvis definitely wants to be the boss though so watch this space. We have named him Jarvis as his name was Harvey which didn't suit a cat to live with us, our last cats name was 'What ya doing' so it needed to be a bit different. Jarvis is after Jarvis cocker and James Jarvis the cartoon graphic artist. Will post some more pics of him and noah once both of them sit still long enough to get a picture in focus.

Long weekend away - We were away at the caravan in Arnside for the weekend just gone, and had a wonderful time chilling out with Noah. We went to the Ashton memorial in lancaster to look at the butterfly house, and had a lovely few hours wandering around Noah did lots of exploring and climbing.

We took Noah for his first ride on a train to grange over sands where we had a walk and noah had a play on the park at the sea front.

Also we did a lot of playing on the beach building sand castles (well Dad built sand castles whilst Noah tried to destroy them)
And Noah got his first fishing net, so we were trying to catch some tiddlers, all we managed to get where some dead crabs which had washed in with the tide, Noah was happy though.
This one is of Noah sat on a fallen tree posing for the camera.

Well thats it for our first blog entry, next time i will post a load of pictures which i have been meaning to shrink and email to people for ages.