The huge drumstick (again)

I can have my drumstick..


... and eat it too!

I remember one of the first posts I did on the blog was a picture of Matty holding 2 huge duck legs and trying to eat them (a bit unsuccessfully since at that time he only had 2 teeth!). Things have changed a lot since then...


A long time ago..

He really looks quite different now - more hair (which stands up just like daddy's), no bib, and a lot more teeth! The recent pictures were obviously not posed, and he managed to finish off half of the drumstick all on his own (and insisted on chewing the bone at the end, just like mummy). It's nice to have a 2 1/2 year old..

Artwork at the tube

Tube stations didn't use to be a place for suspicion & terror.. I took these pictures on the 4th of July, just before the first incidents happened. I was on the way to meet L for lunch, and while waiting for the train at Gloucester Road, noticed the fairly interesting background.

It's called "The Ten Silhouettes", by David Batchelor, and looks better in real life than in the photos. I tried to do a photostitch in the 2nd pic, but there's obviously some angle distortion.. London is really quite a nice place to be, and they have lots of these cool impromptu/temporary exhibitions all over the place. It's sad that there are those who don't see the beauty, or even try to destroy it...

Sit Ups

Helping daddy with sit-ups


Matty's turn now..

Once in a while Matty helps daddy with some sit ups. He weighs down his feet and also helps to count how many have been done (or rather confuse Luke's counting). There's lots of balancing and giggling, and then Matty gets a go at it. Having no abdominal muscles to speak of, he cheats of course -- he usually ends up twisting his body & levering off his elbows to get off the ground. And even then, he only manages about 3 before he collapses! It's quite funny to watch.. Of course you'll never catch me doing sit ups =)

We're all ok..

Yesterday was quite a surreal day. It started off normally enough, until Luke called from work & asked me to turn on the TV to watch the news. Quite confusing to figure out what had really happened - power surges? 6 explosions on the tube? 3 bombs on buses? Then slowly a clearer picture emerged, and it was not a pretty one.

50 deaths doesn't sound like very much compared to hundreds or thousands. But if you think of the impact of just 1 person dear to you dying, the impact starts to hit home.. Thankfully nobody I know was hurt in the blasts, or even directly impacted by it (apart from Luke who took an hour to walk home from work yesterday).

Oddly enough, today doesn't feel that different from any other day. Luke went to work, Matty went to nursery, I picked up some groceries at the supermarket... Guess the return to normalcy is part of the human response to tragedy and disaster. At times like this I am grateful that God is in charge of all things. If it is His will, He will keep us safe through even the worst of events. And if not, then we'll just go to meet Him a little earlier than expected...

My cool train set

Matty loves setting up his train set. Every couple of days, he'll come with his request "Mummy (or daddy) please set up the tracks and the roads and Thomas and Annie and Clarabel and Bulgy for Matty to play with please mummy" [Aside: Yes, that is his idea of a proper grammatical sentence. One wonders how his little lungs have enough breath to finish such a long convoluted sentence, but then I guess he must inherit some of his dad's genes =) ]

Then mummy the engineer gleefully figures out what huge convoluted tracks she wants to create this time and sets about building them with great gusto! It's actually quite fun and it turns out different every time. In fact, I recently went and bought some "track adaptors" so that I could make more interesting routes for the train. Not that Matty realises or cares - he just wants anything that the train can run on...

After that is all done, Matty gets to run the train on the tracks and stop them at the stations. There's also a small grey road system for the bus to go on (but if you look closely at the top picture, you'll see that he's put one of the train carriages onto the road for the bus to push up the slope -- he always does that for some reason.. odd little boy).

So, if you have kids, you must always get them toys that you don't mind playing with yourself. Makes life a lot more fun...