2010, snow and babbling

To say the new year started with a bang is the understatment of the new decade. We spent New Year's Eve at the incredible wedding of our friends Ben and Izzy (Bizzy). If you shut your eyes and imagine what a winter wonderland wedding would be like, especially in a marquee attached to a beautiful old house (where the bride grew up), which was dressed by a professional art director (the groom), you'll get close to how it was. It was freezing outside but the marquee was toasty and everything was amazing. From the lovely service to the real trees and working fireplace / mantelpiece in the marquee to the snow at midnight, fake waiters who turned into opera singers half way through, the beef and yorkshire canapes and sausage and mash main, it was just perfect and best of all everyone was there. It's been so long since I spent new year with my closest mates and although we'll always see one or two groups of friends for new year this was a rarity. It was a great day we'll remember for long to come.

As luck would have it, Bizzy invited most of the wedding party on their honeymoon as well! The official honeymoon isn't until March so we all went to St. Anton for a ski and snowboard trip. Everyone else went for the week but ours was a flying visit. Just three days although if you saw my bank balance you'd think we'd been for a month. We had a great time and by chance the place I'd booked us into was less than a minute's walk from the chalet everyone else was in. A good job too when you consider a 2 minute taxi was €12!

Clare found it quite difficult towards the end with missing Jake, especially when we got a text from Easyjet saying our flight had been cancelled. She looked at me and said in a tone which meant she'd really, really meant it 'Get me home!'

So we booked on a BA flight which left only a couple of hours later than the original one and another €420 later we were home. I was hoping Jake would be excited to see us and he was, a huge smile across his face and he came over to us arms up and all was o.k in the world again.

It did us the world of good to go away and spend 4 nights on our own (albeit with 14 drinking buddies) but away from washing up bottles, changing nappies, shushing at 4am and so on and just feel young and carefree for a while. Being able to leave a building 5 seconds after deciding to leave it is a massively underrated experience.

Jake's started talking a lot now. To the point where we couldn't shut him up even if we wanted to. The nursery teachers mentioned that he does it as soon as he opens a book. I think he thinks he should be talking when turning pages as that's what we do with him, although we're obviously reading the words and he's babbling nonsense. I'd love to know if what he's saying makes sense to him and if it's frustrating that we don't know what the hell he's on about. It might be just practising using his voice or a bit of both. What's good though is that he's trying to make word noises; the books say that if your child isn't doing any of this or pointing at things and making frustrated 'uh' noises, it can indicate a potential speech issue. I still think he'll need some speech therapy but this is a good start. He's definitely starting to get the hang of 'dada' now, some 6 months later than normal, and he ran over to me the other day and shouted 'eh-lo' so it's good he's learning a) who I am and b) some social protocol. It proves if you say something a million times, eventually it'll sink in.

So, 2010 has kicked off and work has started again in earnest. I'm hoping for some good karma in that department and so far we're getting some decent enquiries so I just need to turn them into customers, should be simple! At the end of the month we'll find out if our planning permission has been granted or not. If it has we'll be doubling the size of the kitchen (which isn't saying much) and will be adding a small sitting area towards the back of the house. This area will be for Jake to play in, a new TV area for me to watch football in and somewhere to put all of Jake's miscellaneous crap. It'll be like a breath of fresh air as I've recently realised that this year will be my tenth as a homeowner and I've only had a dishwasher for one of those years. It's good to have lofty aspirations.