Birthday time again

Time flies...I think I've started most of my recent blogs with that! But it really does. It is already September. It is already September 2010! This year has flown by. Apart from my sisters wedding in California it's been kind of 'plodding on' year so far with no big highlights but no big lowlights either. We've just been enjoying being a little family :)

It's Henrik's birthday today and he is 3. Officially a big boy. He keeps telling us he is a big boy. Very sweet and very true. He's moved up to the pre-school room in nursery and is enjoying it so far. Today they were off on an excursion to pick apples from someone's garden and then make apple crumble for pudding. I also made a patch of cupcakes for him to take in with him to celebrate his birthday so they are all going to be buzzing with sugar by the time they go home.

I'm working from home today (having a tea break right now). It's nice sitting in the study, reading and every now and then watching the word go by. The sun is shining and the apple tree across the road is full of red ruddy apples. Autumn time is definitely here.

And I guess it's time to get back to my reading :)

Hello hello

The sun is shining. Henrik and I had a lovely morning on the beach wiht Rachel, Lily & Oscar. Only it was quite cloudy while we sat down and had our lunch...very chilly. But after we'd eaten we spent a jolly hour climbing around the rocks and rockpools on the beach. On the way home we stopped for ice cream on the sea front. It's fun living 5 minutes walk away from the beach :)

We are still diying in the kitchen. Last weekend we painted most of the walls white. Now we just need to finish painting the cupboards at the bottom and sort out the top cupboards and then paint them. So we are slowly getting there.

Henrik is chatting much more now. Very happily mixing finnish and english together. One night after we'd read his bedtime story we could hear him chatting to himself about a big big juna (train). He is still loving nursery as well which is good. He's made little friends there and when we drop him of or pick him up he points some of them out to us and tell their names to us.

We are off to the beach in the evening as well with the young people. The tide is high but hopefully it by the time we've munched a portion of chips it will have gone down enough for us to play some games and run around.

Time flies - still

Time does fly, it's ages since I wrote in the blog last - I blame facebook. Anyway, here we go. So no posts in March. Disaster. I had my 30th. I had my 3rd annual assessment for my PhD progress. So lots of things happened. I passed my assessment and had a lovely birthday too. We did go to the theatre as well at some point since the last post, Oh, what a lovely war in the Northern Stage. It was brilliant. We were both just at awe of the talent the actors and actresses had.

My sister Eeva got married too so we've been across the Atlantic. Henrik is becoming a little globe trotter, twice in US in the last 8 months. The wedding was lovely and we had a great time spending time with Bailey and his family and getting to know them.

We've also started doing 'Loving your kids on purpose' course at church which has been good but very challenging to some people. I love it. It works on Henrik which is even better and it even works on me. It's all about teaching the child to manage their freedom and make good choices. You can buy the book on amazon and I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone with kids or without kids. Danny Silk is officially my new hero.

Anyway, I've got plenty of reading to do, I had a productive day at uni yesterday and found lots of good articles to read...now I just have to get on and read them all! Henrik is having his nap so I am planning to take advantage of the quiet moment, just after I've finished writing this :)

Kitchen progress

The kitchen has been up in the air for the last little while. Since New Year David has bene fitting in new base cupboards and the last couple of weeks he has been mastering the art of cutting oak. Now all the worktops are cut and first two coats of oil are on. One more coat and then we can fix them on the base units and get the gas man to connect the cooker. The hob has been out of action since Friday last week so we've been just eating food that you can make just with oven so I'm looking forwards to having the hob back :)

But it is looking very good, then it's just the case of painting all the cupboard doors and tiling and then it's finally done!

New year

Time has flown and I've managed to go through the whole of January without writing a one single blog...terrible! Well, where shall I start?

We've had snow. Lots of snow. Twice. Henrik loves it. Last weekend the weather forecast was for few odd snowflakes but much to our delight we had 12cm/4in of snow when we woke up on Saturday morning. 'Big snow' was Henrik's comment. So we phoned up the local outdoor shop the moment they opened and reserved a toboggan and went and picked it up an hour later (by which time he had sold all the 57 toboggans he had in store and said that he could have sold antoher 20). We spent a jolly morning toboggan and larking around in the snow with our brand new bright green toboggan.

Big is definitely the in word with our young sir. On Friday night we went to ikea to pick up some legs for a kitchen base cabinet/carcass, it was a clear night with a full moon so the commentry from the back seat was 'big moon' 'tahti' (star) 'big, big moon' 'tahti' for most of the drive there. He is into making planes and rockets out of stick-a-bricks at the moment and this mornings creation was a 'big, big, geen (green) rocket'.

Another cute thing Henrik says at the moment is 'jingle bang' - chitty chitty bang bang!!!

Anyway, this is a start for a new year, will be back soon. Most likely with some more cute words by Henrik...