In need of a mute button

I've written in the past about our lovely (and she is lovely, despite anything I might write) daughter Fifi and her volume. There are two things toddler boy puts his fingers in his ears for, one is the hand dryers at public toilets and the other is when his sister hits full stride.

Last night the lil thing slept rather well. She went to be exhausted at 7pm, as per usual. When she does this she normal wakes up at 5ish but this morning she woke up at ten to seven. You would have thought she'd be all rested and ready to go, cheerful and happy. But no. There were many many tantrums in the hour before she went to the childminders. The first was a tantrum when she ran out of milk in her sippy cup. This continued when I went to refill it rather than her mummy. This subsided but was soon replaced with the getting dressed tantrum that revolved around not wanting to wear what she was given and escalated into a wanting daddy to get her dressed rather than mummy tantrum. This in turn became a wandering around behind people making a fuss general state of affairs which continued until she stuffed her chops with about half a kilo of Shreddies and I bundled her into her snow suit.

We had a lovely walk to the childminders, full of smiles, talk of cats, snow and the lack of cars and it was great. Then she realised that she had to stay at the childminders and kicked off again as I fled.

Wifey is so much better at this than me, while I was busy thinking the grumpy little sod, she said "It's upsetting because I don't know how to help her." If I'd been driven have as mad as wifey has by the incessant loud crying, I'd wouldn't be so sympathetic!

The Shrug

Neither Wifey nor I tend to shrug, so when I picked up the nippers from their lovely childminder today and the boy approached me and said, "But Hanne wouldn't let me watch me little Ben 10 film" with a woeful expression and the worlds largest shrug.

We'd actually allowed him to put a DVD in his bag to go just to get him out of the door. Most of the time this sort of gentle appeasement gets him out of the door and he forgets about it ten minutes later. This time however he remembered and although he didn't ask Hanne to watch his DVD, felt put out in that special 3 year way that he hadn't been able to watch it.

Funny little lad :)

The Cooperative Membership Fund

Whenever I see the words Co-Op I always get confused about the use of hyphens, capitalisation of the "Op" and various other trivialities that really don't matter. What does matter is what the Co-Op are doing  with their rather excellent Cooperative Membership Fund. Basically the Co-Op shares its profits with its members (it's the principle behind a cooperative) twice a year and some of those members chose to give a percentage of their share of the profits to a charitable fund. So far this year £1.2m has been added to the fund. Wow, that's a lot of generous people isn't it? It's proper local too, the projects funded in an area are funded by donations in that area- a real tangible link between what's given and what's happening, which is  important in my mind as it stops giving fatigue. Grants vary from a minimum of £100 to a maximum of £2,000. To successfully apply for a grant  a group must carry out positive work in the community (it does not have to have charitable status to apply). And the project must also address a community issue, provide a long-term benefit to the community, support co-operative values and principles and ideally be innovative in its approach.

So if you want to set up a local brass band like that lot have, it's a good place to start. Round here we could do with something that gets the local kids off their Playstations and outside in the summer, maybe a project coupled with some of the local forest planting that's going on, aimed at getting the youngsters enthused about sustainability and the like. It doesn't have to be rocket science as long as it meets the criteria.










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Next and the 12 Days of Christmas

As a timely reminder that you don't have to go out into the cold and the Official pre Christmas Scrum to do some seasonal festive shopping, Next have launched their 12 Days of Christmas Campaign.

As well as all the clothing you expect from Next (without a word of a lie, I'm wearing a pair of their trousers as I type this), Next Online also sell a varied range of toys (including Peppa Pig, Ben 10 and Toy Story 3), video game consoles and pretty much anything else you could want short of a pint of Bailey's to calm the nerves on Christmas Day (drink responsibly folks).

Wifey and I have already sworn a blood oath we will not venture to the shops at the weekend until the new year now since Fifi has decided at 23 months old a push chair is too childish for her and will likely get trampled until the crush of rampant consumerism on the High St. We've got our food shopping covered thanks to Tesco Online but the internet is having to come up trumps with Christmas pressies this year.

Changing Rooms: Toddler Edition

The boy was the first born so he naturally got the second biggest bedroom after ours. When Fifi came along, she got the next biggest and all was well. Until a couple of months ago at any rate. We'd already started talking about redecorating the boys room since at three and a half it was perhaps a little embarrassing for him to have a nursery border and curtains up. Something with pirates wifey said, something with spaceships I chipped in and the discussion continued.

The boy kick started something a bit more radical however by turning from the easiest sleeper into a child you had to wrap in his duvet and peg it to get the door shut before he unravelled himself and hurtled out of bed towards his vanishing parent. Rational discussion has really been out of the question but without a shadow of a doubt, he's taken a real dislike to his bedroom and "there might be scary monsters".


Wifey began tentatively discussing the prospect of a room swap with Fifi a month or so ago and he seemed very keen on the idea, even though it would be a move to a room of about two thirds the size. A month of talking to him about it hadn't put him off so this weekend I sought the peace of my MP3 player and started shifting furniture around whilst the kids drove wifey up the wall.

It's surprising in both terms of weight and quantity how much stuff two children with a combined age of 5 have already accumulated. I started at about 10.30 in the morning and didn't finish moving the furniture around until about 3pm. Of course that meant I had to move all the assorted piles of crap from everywhere first, and some stuff needed moving two or three times due to space limitations. Good job I used to be world class at Tetris.

So the move is more or less done now, bar some tidying up and its time to look at new furniture. The boy has expressed an interest in a high bed with a den under it and we thought this would be great use of space. At the moment though we've only seen what I consider the bottom end and the top. At the bottom for under £200 we could get a rickety IKEA high bed. The display model wasn't brilliantly screwed together and wobbled with the boy on it. At the other end, for four times the price, was a lovel Flexa system. It was sturdy enough to be almost indestructable, it had lovely touches like rounded edges to stop nasty bumps but it cost more than we spend on a week long family holiday and we've baulked at the price. I can understand how long it will last but well over £600 for a kids bed is a high hurdle to take.If anybody has any other recommendations I would dearly love to hear them.

Fortunately one other decision was easier to make, removing Fifi's lovely Mungai Mirror wrecked the wallpaper (it was over a bad join so it was inevitable in a way), so the whole wall now needs repapering. Fortunately thanks to the lovely patient people at Walltastic, I have an enormous wallpaper mural of Spider-man to put up. I've done a lot of wallpapering in the past, including a couple of walls of patterned paper (and a staircase that required the use of planks and ladders but that's another story), so I'm hoping it will be fairly straightforward as it goes up just like normal patterned wallpaper. Theres a picture below for your delectation: how can a 4-at-Easter-year-old not love this?!

Review: Cebeebies Song Time (is the Bane of my Office)

With a couple of notable vehicular exceptions in Thomas and Roary, the BBC has absolutely all the great children's telly theme tunes at the moment. Of course none of them compare to the incomparable Jamie and the Magic Torch but things were just better when we were kids.

Cebeebies Song Time has two CD's packed with 50 really catchy tunes you will find yourself humming. It's a double edged sword really: the kids get to boogie to their favourite catchy theme tunes and you don't have to sit through the actual show that you're bound to have seen a dozen times because even with series like Teletubbies, where they've made over 300 episodes, they only seem to show the same ten shows on constant repeat. On the other hand, you will, I absolutely guarantee, find yourself wandering around the office humming "What's the story in Balamory?" or "3rd and Bird". In fact I reckon if he were still alive, Jonny Cash could do an awesome country version of 64 Zoo Lane. Shame, that's one we'll all miss out on.

Anyway, Cebeebies Song Time is out now to buy from all reputable retailers, including Amazon, for a more than reasonable £9. Go on, you're kids will love it and you'll drive your work colleagues up the wall.

Ample Bracing Time

Since you all had a dry run to iron out the creases in 2010, I've decided that 2011 is a good time to make my grandiloquent appearance at Cybermummy. How many times in your life to you get to make a  grandiloquent  entrance anyway? And it is all thanks to the top chaps at Appliances Online who have kindly sponsored my attendance.

As a mature and only slightly excitable adult, I'll bring a sense of decorum to what can only be described as the shenanigans that occurred last year. Joking aside though, this years Cybermummy was a ground breaking event for parent bloggers and it looks like next years will be even better. Because I'll be there. Obviously

Hexbug Nano

When I was about 9 years old my brother and I had a small black and white portable television we shared. It was tuned via a dial and had a pull out on/off switch. We had it alternate evenings on the understanding it was turned off by 9pm at the latest. We probably spent more time tuning it than we did watching it.

One night I was watching the snooker on it in the dark. With practice you can watch snooker on a black and white telly you know. The balls are distinct separate shades of grey. At least you tell yourself they are and when you're 9 things are easier that way.

The shriek I let out when two woodlouse scuttled out from under the bed and over the back of my hand was almost enough to turn the air blue, which was definitely more colour than the TV had.

Ever since then I've been a bit reticent of insects and that was the reason I was a little hesitant when the Hexbugs turned up. They look like proper bugs, especially the black one. SHUDDER. A Hexbug is about the size of your thumb, powered by a button battery and once switched on quite unnerving but blinking clever. It moves around by vibrating and skitters about on its little rubber legs in a very convincing manner. The clever part is its pathfinding. If the Hexbug bumps into something, it backs off and tries another way. We built mazes for them out of Lego and Megabloks which was impressive enough but got downright freaky when we put two or three of them together. 

Suddenly I was 9 again and the woodlice were out to get me! Hexbugs cost £8.95 each or you can buy a 5 pack for £27. They are definitely a unique toy and really encourage thought in kids- we had great fun "testing" how clever they were with mazes and tunnels. And I had fun putting the black one on peoples desks at work. Naughty me eh?

Snow, or...

.... the onset of Fimbulvetr as the television would have it. Fimbulvetr, in case you didn't know (and I didn't until this morning, I was up very early and quite bored), is the harsh winter that precedes the end of the world and puts an end to all life on Earth, according to Norse mythology. Basically, it's a hefty winter that comes before Ragnarok and the death of all the Gods.

 Obviously the denizens that write and present the news are well up on their Viking culture because THIS IS IT! We've already seen people on the telly showing us which collapsible shovel we MUST have in the boot of our car to dig ourselves out of snow drifts. We know it's getting colder as they've shifted poor old Carol Kirkwood outside, denying her the warmth of the studio because it might SNOW!

The media panic over all of this is always amusing but it's the kids I feel sorry for. This is the first year that Fifi is old enough to really enjoy it (last year she just screamed when her hands got too cold) and the boy is avidly awaiting two feet of the white stuff to do his sledging again. I can't help but think they'll both be bitterly disappointed, thanks in the most part to the media frenzy over it all. As early as last week they were telling us we'd have snow in the South East by Wednesday. This then dropped to Thursday, onto Friday and is now a "maybe" for Saturday. Try explaining that to a small child.

My life with the Boy...

...at this precise moment in time involves nothing more than transforming his Transformer from a car to a robot and back at indeterminate intervals.

There should be more to parenthood than that surely?

An eventful week

Crikey, a lot has happened since I put finger to keyboard in a meaningful manner.

It all started with a day of projectile vomiting from Fifi really. And things went on from there. Fifi will be two in January and she's working hard on getting to the terrible twos early. This involves a lot of tucking her hands under her armpits when she doesn't want you to hold her hand or go somewhere; it also involves a lot of bottom lip pouting action and finally quite a bit of random acts of aggression- on being told she couldn't have a biscuit the other day she stormed off into the sitting room and began throwing toys around. This is completely unlike her mother, who is such a sweet natured temperate sort of person, I'm beginning to think the anger gene might be recessive.

On the other hand, after a couple of weeks of truly terrible speech therapy, the boy has suddenly come on in leaps and bounds. His vocabulary has increased markedly, his concentration likewise and his general attitude is quite different. All in the space of about 4 days. If he was a character in a computer game, I'd say he'd levelled up. I'm fairly sure it's not just us either as other people have noted it. Even the speech therapist was amazed on Friday when he came in, sat down, and did 5 worksheets straight off with no fuss whatsoever.

As for us, we're drifting along from exhausted state to even more exhausted state. Fifi is teething a bit for her last few teeth and we've had a couple of late nights recently ourselves that haven't helped. Typically Fifi slept in quite late yesterday when the boy was up at 6ish. I don't know how they know, they just do.

Dell in the sitting room

In the years BC (before children), I used to build my own PC's. They were designed for gaming and little else. As long as they were quiet enough that that I could slink into bed at 5am after playing games all night without waking wifey up, that was all that mattered. They didn't look good, weren't well built but were cheap as chips and did exactly what I wanted them to do. The biggest risk to this was tripping over the assorted piles of crud on the spare room's floor. Things change of course and now with two small children, one of the things we spend a lot of time doing is reviewing about three or four hundred million (or so it seems) photos of the kids and uploading them to various photo printing websites. That, and watching high definition video clips of... the children. Obviously a beige box in the spare room isn't really suitable for this any more, especially since i) I get no time for gaming and ii) if I did get time for gaming I wouldn't get a chance since it would be occupied by wifey and her online twiddlings.
Although my 5 year old Dell Lattitude laptop is still going strong, we've decided it's time to get a proper family computer. I'm well aware that with kids the computer should be in a communal area as its important they don't have unsupervised access to it because of the risks of online bullying and inappropriate content. Consequently the form factor of the computer is actually important for the first time. A beige box in the middle of the sitting room isn't really an option any more.

This is where a machine like the Dell Inspiron All In One desktop comes to the rescue. The gubbins of the computer are actually built into the screen, saving oodles of space and making the machine look smarter and fit in better in the living room. There aren't any compromises on specification  either, so you can still use it to edit the family videos and do all the stuff I used to do with my horrific beige box.  Some of the higher end models have a touch screen, which, after a good hand wash, might even be good for young children to learn with. Providing you keep them away from jam sandwiches of course.
Now days a good computer should be about enabling you to do stuff without compromising the space it's in or the experience you're having. I see plenty of people on twitter complaining how slow their "craptops" are, time to think about something a bit different. You can find out further information here and even watch a video here.



www.dell.co.uk/all-in-one

Further information can be found here

the youtube Video




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"Cheese roll"

Our two little ones can both be very similar at times but for a lot of it they're like chalk and cheese. Wifey often says the boy is a lot like her; he likes his peace and quiet and if he hasn't got anything to say, he doesn't say anything. Fifi on the other hand, the theory goes, is a lot more like me in that she talks incessantly.

Well I'm not one to take offence at that sort of thing because it's fairly true- I do tend to talk a lot. Sort of a reverse of how it was when I was a nipper really. I was a very quiet and introverted child and have been ,making up for it ever since really.

Fifi not only has my love of talking, she also has my volume. And then some. What she tends to do at the moment (and she's not two until mid January), is construct fairly simple sentences like "Mummy, Want Milk", "Mummy Want you Now" (emphasis Fifi's, not mine) but recently these have become longer and a bit more embellished.

The embellishments, thanks to her tender years often don't make sense. She has started using "Pinky Ponk" as the end to some sentences. Most notable though is her use of her brothers favourite breakfast, "Cheese Roll!", as punctuation.

So now days we can have a conversation that goes something like this:

Fifi: Dadda, cheese roll, me love you, want cuddle pinky ponk.
Me: Come here and I'll give you a cuddle. Do you want your tummy tickled?
Fifi: No way! Cheese Roll!

I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to know whether at any point in time if she actually wants a cheese roll...

But me want Iron Mans arms!!

Thank you Burger King kids meal. Thank you for the Iron Man that shoots its legs and arms off when you press a button on his chest. I don't remember that from the film.

If the Boy loses these arms again and has me tipping the house upside down looking for them AGAIN, I might cry. You have been warned.

Dangerous? Mostly armless

Things I have done today by 9am

Eaten biscuits in bed
Been handed train track
Assembled train track on bed
Had a tea party
Hunted high and low for Iron Man's arms (don't ask)
Had a nice cup of tea Wifey bought me
Supervised an enormo-poo from our three year old
Changed an even bigger one from our resident turd factory Fifi
Watched a bit of match of the day
Lead shouts of goal on the aforementioned match of the day
Written a blog post on my iPhone :)

Film Friday

Because there's a tendancy to watch what's the latest thing out there, I've decided that it's time to share my inordinate knowledge of film with you all. My Film Friday will be a mixture of kids films and adult films (NOT that sort you smutty so and so) from yesteryear that you no doubt missed, or have forgotten about.

To kick things off, I'm going to start with Titan A.E. This is an animated film from Don Bluth (ex Disney dontcha know) that was one of the first to mix computer animation with traditional techniques. It's a sci fi story with elements borrowed from all over the shop but it's great piece of exciting entertainment. The voice talent is pretty hot too- it has Drew Barrymore, Matt Damon and Bill Pullman amongst others, as well as having a certain Mr J Wheldon credited as one of the writers.

The film is rated PG, there is a modicum of violence and some of the themes aren't suitable for the really young but the animation is top notch stuff, as you would expect from an ex Disney chap like Bluth. If you've got kids that like Space Ships but don't want them to get wrapped up in the endless amount of Star Wars Clone Wars stuff, then for £3.25 from Amazon, this is an excellent alternative.

So Very Shoes

note the bare feet

When Hercules undertook his twelve labours there were some pretty hefty tasks he had to do. A quarter of them involved slaying, eight of them collecting something and one of them was a bit girly, he had to do a spot of cleaning (well it was a stable but you get the drift).

He got the gift of immortality for completing these labours but in many ways he was short changed. To my mind he should really have got something a bit more practical because even if you're immortal, standing in a shoe shop on a Saturday morning is a terrible, terrible drag.

Fortunately for me, unfortunately for Hercules, about 3 millenia too late, Very have a great range of men's shoes by French Connection. The great thing is, as well as not having to queue, and try on the faded display shoe, there are free returns, so if a dozen awkward paces in the shoe shop aren't enough, you can yomp round your sitting room to see if they're comfortable. If the shoes aren't, you've got free returns. I've not actually bought a pair of shoes instore since a particularly truculent store manager refused to give me a discount when the display shoe was so discoloured it was actually a different shade of brown to its boxed twin.

Hercules, he got a raw deal didn't he? Immortality? Pffft.

So this....

....is the reason our old washing machine ponged mightily when it used to drain. "Yuck" is the word that springs to mind. We cleaned it regularly but the water is so hard round here, I suppose it just wasn't dissolving the detergent properly.

Yummy

Wordless Wednesday- Hanging tough!

Just hanging around

The death of our washing machine

When Wifey and I moved in together 8 and a bit years ago we had to buy all our white goods. I had plenty of AV gear and computers, game consoles and the like but didn't own so much as a kettle. Last Thursday was a bit of a watershed as the first device bit the dust.

Our washing machine has had hard use, especially in the last 4 years since children came along. Last Thursday it stopped spinning part way through a wash. It was a bit of a dilemma really as it didn't seem worth getting an engineer in to fix something that old.

I ended up doing a bit of googling and found out it was likely to be the brushes in the motor that had worn down. I ordered a couple of replacements for the grand sum of £8. It took a few days for them to arrive, causing wifey to go beyond the call of duty and hand wash a few pairs of my pants. When they finally came I set aside a whole evening to sort the thing out.

I started at around 7ish and had the washing machine doing a full wash with a great spin less than an hour later. It didn't last. I fiddled again and got it spinning. Then the pump got blocked by all the gunk I'd loosened. I cleared the pipe (and ended up puking in the process as I got a mouth full of gunk). The floor got wet and gunky enough that I ended up in just my pants. Finally I got everything working, only for the LED to pack up.

The next morning it gave up the ghost again and now we're waiting for a delivery of a new machine. We've opted for the exact model thats just died on us- 8 years is bloody good for a washing machine!

Panasonic 3D Tv's & Avatar 3D Blu Ray

As you may have spotted from the odd post on my blog, I am a bit of a film nut. At the moment this generally involves watching Titan AE, Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Tinkerbell on a continuous loop but it's better than nothing and a small price to pay for two mostly adorable children.

We've recently instigated Saturday Night Movie Night to see something a bit more grown up (I wont use the word adult as that has an entirely different connotation!), so our blu ray player is getting a bit more of a workout. Which is nice and civilised at the same time.

The Boy and I have been pretty lucky this year, we've been to a fair few preview screenings of kids films. I'm sure as he grows up he's going to wonder why all cinema viewing isn't done in 20th Century Fox's private cinema at Soho Square. 

It's odd then that the first time we saw a 3D film was a couple of months ago when we were invited to the West End to see Despicable Me. I fell foul of 3D in the 80's, and the beginning of its recent reintroduction via some 3D horror films just had me thinking "Gimmick" loudly.

Too many axes coming out of the screen at you, too many forced stabbings and scenes composed and included purely to be 3D put me off to be honest. A film, even a bad one, is about visuals and story to me and to put one in front of the other because of 3D marked it out as a gimmick to me.

Well, I'm a big enough man to admit when I'm wrong. Despicable Me was was great fun and the 3D wasn't too in your face. The flicker of the passive 3D system wasn't brilliant though and I didn't realise it didn't work properly if you didn't keep your head level.

Dear Father Christmas...

Panasonic invited a few bloggers to Pinewood Studios to have a shufty at some of the new Viera 3D TV's and blu ray players that are out soon. Sadly as a result of this trip my house isn't full of brand spanking new Panasonic gear but we did get our travel paid for and the pastries were very nice. Perhaps I can put the expenses towards a nice new 42inch 3D plasma telly. Lordy, it was impressive. 

Panasonic use an active 3D system for their tellies, which in many ways is better than a lot of what is used at the cinema with polarised glasses. Some of the footage we watched, like excerpts from the Olympics in Bejing and Moon River in concert were really subtle. The technology was used to enhance the experience rather than being the experience in itself.

Panasonic make a big thing about being involved in 3D from "glass to glass", they make the cameras that shoot in 3D, provide editing facilities, 3D mastering, blu ray production and the TV to watch it all on. In fact pretty much the first chap to fiddle with their cameras was Mr J Cameron. You might have heard of him, he made one of my favourite films, Aliens. Apparently he's made some films since, including one about a large boat sinking, and another one about some blue skinned dudes that don't wear much. The latter is of course Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time and one that's lead a lot of people to re-evaluate 3D.

Plonking the 3D glasses on and synching them with the telly immediately had me wondering why we put up with the passive 3D at the cinema. It's in a different league, no flicker, you can hold your head at whatever angle you like and the picture isn't disturbed.

HD tellies have come a long way since they were first  released on an unsuspecting public. A lot of the early HD ready TV's had poor contrast, didn't do "proper" HD and showed poor standard definition stuff. Now days things have come on a bit though, and Panasonic boast that their plasmas will do 100,000 hours before the constrast drops noticably. A few years ago, it was a tenth of this and you had to contend with image burn (the Sky logo or whatever could burn itself onto your screen) which is now also a thing of the past. The 3D glasses are rather natty too, fit over normal specs, sync with the telly and just work. Kudos to Panasonic for doing them in 3 different sizes too, the smallest will do kids from 6 years old, sensible given the first batch of 3D blu ray movies includes Ice Age 3 and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

The big news, other than the awesomeness of their 3D TV's and blu ray players, is that due to all round cleverness and their integral part in the whole 3D market place, Panasonic have exclusivity on Avatar on 3D blu ray until Feb 2011. So basically if you want to see Avatar in 3D, you're going to be buying a 3D package from Panasonic, or waiting for a bit. From the kit I've seen, I can't think this is a bad thing though. Panasonic are always winning awards for their plasma televisions and the stuff seems to work well- I've got an 18 year old 21 inch Panasonic CRT in the loft and it still works fine. Panny actually make all the stuff involved in their tellies too, they don't buy the screens in from elsewhere and use the brand name to command a premium price.

So the one remaining biggie is the price. I wasn't surprised that the 65inch flagship model cost over £4,000. I was surprised that the 42 inch model (TX-P42GT20B) costs a smidge over £1,100. You get a lot of telly for that money, and Panasonic also build in HD Freeview and HD Freesat to their televisions, which saves a few bob on a separate decoder (over £100 for each actually, which is scary). Needless to say, the new bundles on offer from this week are even better, offering the 42 inch TX-P42GT20B telly, a 3D blu ray player and surround sound system for about £1,500. Given the extortionate price the cinema costs now days, this isn't all that much. 

Panasonic in a couple of brief hours have thoroughly ruined television for me though, I've got to go home now and watch all the same stuff in standard 2D. Even the high definition stuff has lost it's lustre.

Perhaps if I have a rummage down the back of the sofa I can scrape together a few pennies..

Skiing with and without little l'uns- sponsored post

In 4BC (Before Children) we went on a rather epic skiing holiday in Austria. I should say at this point neither of us had ever been skiing before. Most of our holidays had involved a rather large amount of outdoors but nothing as adventurous as bombing it downhill at silly mph. Still, we were young(er) and foolish and thought it would be a laugh. I'd never realised how exciting Austria ski holidays could be. Never considered holidaying in Austria to be honest. The summer brochure made the walking holidays look good too

We spent two or three days on the baby slopes and that was funny enough. Wifey fell off the drag lift a few times and couldn't get up, so had to be helped before they could start the lift again. There's something acutely embarressing when you're being watched by twenty people glad it's not them having to be helped up.

The lessons lasted all morning and were bizarrely packed with plenty of people from the Irish Republic. It turned out we'd found the only English travel company that took people to that particular resort. Still, once I's schooled myself not to talk like and episode of Father Ted they were great to learn with and I don't think I've laughed so much at falling over and really hurting myself since.

We did of course spend most of those first 3 days with small children weaving in and out of us at speeds that distressed me mightily. The same continued after we progressed on to the scarier runs that were up in the clouds. That first day we got on the cable car up to the heights was a bit daunting I can tell you. If you've met me, you'll know sometimes I forget to remain standing up and trip over my feet a bit. I held my own on the red runs though and even managed a 200 metre ride on by bottom. There's nothing more humilitating once you've ground to a halt and found your limbs still attached and unbroken than to look up the hill and see your ski a few hundred feet distant. It's a long walk. The bruise only came up when we got back to blighty but sitting down for a week was painful to say the least.

It's something we've talked about since the boy has born 3 and a half years ago, given how fearless the little kids seemed zipping around, how we should take the pair of them skiing when Fifi hits 3. That's only just over a year away now, so we'd better get out skates on and start saving up. I think we'd probably look to go back to Austria, as the skiing was good and the gluvine better. In terms of Austria ski holidays, I've been recommended Inghams since they do some good family ski holidays.

I can well imagine the boy doing about 90mph downhill, he gets close to that on his scooter as it it...


although this is a sponsored post and I've been paid for the links, the content is 100% me. Including references to my bottom.