We went to Halifax to the optician this morning – daddies’ eyes are OK it seems, the recent batch of contact lenses are apparently faulty 🙁

We then tried to park the car to go and see Grandma, only to find nowhere to park AND the rain simply got heavier and heavier – so we aborted and went home (no umbrellas or other water resistant goodies for the push chair etc.

Yesterday we went to Sheffield’s Meadowhall and watched a little 3d story and we were then fortunate enough to meet Father Christmas – the boys were given a little gift from the main man, and had their photograph taken with him.  Elliot asked FC for a rocket and some cars 🙂  He was not as shy as perhaps we expected him to be.

Tomorrow, weather permitting we will head to the Christmas market in York – hopefully the train will take us there.

Two days of the week down, and Simon has three days out on holiday 🙂 Hooray

We are going to relax at the shops, maybe find Father Christmas, have lunch out, go to the opticians (boring…) and maybe head out to Christmas markets in York – train ride – yay!

The rain has just not stopped this past few days – there are really serious flooding situations in Cumbria presently – amazing how quickly the rain can cause serious issues – 6 bridges have fallen in the last week, and 1800 are under scrutiny 🙁  To be evicted from your house right due to flooding must be crap generally, but less than a month before Christmas means that you are unlikely to be spending Christmas at home – total bummer.

For the first time in what seems like weeks and weeks, we went swimming this morning.  Elliot can still manage very well on his own with his armbands, but has forgotten a little bit about the importance of using his arms when swimming 🙁  Oh well, what can we expect having had such a long time off?  Olly still really seems to really enjoy the water.

Unfortunately not long after entering the water we noticed that Elliot was struggling with his right eye – beginning to gung up with yellow crap.  When we finished, and had breakfast we head out to the drop in medical centre in Wakefield City Centre.  Daddy dropped mummy and Elly off at the door and went to park the car.  By the time Daddy had parked, got Olly out and head to the centre, mummy and Elliot had seen a doctor and got a prescription.  Perhaps this part of the NHS works REALLY well  – or certainly it did today.

Another thing – Oliver is too big for his current Jane Strata car seat BUT is too small (really) for the new BMW seat we have for him – just typical :-(.  So, we have used one of the mamas and papas seats that Grandma had for Elly and Tyler when they were younger – this seams to be a suitable winner – it is just the right size for him for the time being.  It is a massive change for Olly as it now means that he is allowed to look forwards when sat in the car – so he spent the entire journey just looking around at all this new stuff that he has not been able to see in the car before.

He is currently in bed, having had a swim, big breakfast, ride out in the car, more scooby lunch, milk and you guessed it ….. no sleep.  We expect he will sleep until 5pm and then not want to go to bed tonight 🙁

On that subject, we have finally managed to knock the 11pm dream feed on the head, so Olly is now having his last big milk feed at around 7:30pm, and then going to bed – he awakens @ around 6:30am and asks to get up at around 7:30am.  We are presently pretty happy with that 🙂

Still not decided what to do regarding the Californian adventure….

The rain started yesterday – a total washout of an afternoon yesterday :-(.  It seems to have continued through the night and has rained pretty much all day today.  The great news is that all those reservoirs that were looking (in fairness) a little too empty given the time of year, will be suitably filling up as we speak.

Daddy and Elliot went to daddy’s day at Little Starts Nursery this morning, so that Elliot could show daddy all the things that he does at nursery.  We played with the letters and number on the magnetic board downstairs, and then when upstairs to play with the diggers and trucks, with sand and stones.  We also played with the animals and finally the Thomas train set before leaving just before lunchtime.

We bought some new phones for in the house this afternoon, since we seem to be missing most calls in the house as the telephones that we did have appear to not always ring :-(.  So we have some shiny new Panasonic phones to try.  Over the years we have tried Binatone, Phillips, BT (twice, no three times) and they all seem to last just over a year and then die (albeit different deaths, they have all died in some form unfortunately).

We will need to program the damned numbers into them, since (like all the other phone manufacturers – in our experience) they do not allow the user to extract the numbers from an existing phone- they will copy / duplicate out to their own type of course.

We all wish you a wonderful day.