Videos

I have a couple of videos I thought you might like to see.  One is of Naomi, she had been telling me all about stars and planets but fairly soon after I started filming it became about Christmas (and before you hear the end, she does normally answer Jesus to that question, I'm sure she just answered this way because it was going to be on record!).  The other video just shows various things Miriam is up to, in typical baby fashion it was much cooler before I turned the camera on!

Zurich

Last Friday I was in Zurich - one of our partner airports is Flughafen Zürich, and a visit was arranged so we (there were three on the trip) could see first hand how the airport actually works. It was a very useful trip from a work point of view - I have a much better understanding of the problems that we're working on, we have a couple of new problems that might be interesting to solve, and we have seen the people there in person so it'll be much easier to share data and ask questions remotely from now on.

The trip there was quite "interesting". In short, all these things happened:

• flight out was overbooked and we got bumped on to a later flight, so several hours to kill at Edinburgh airport
• just missed bus to hotel so needed to get taxi there
• one of our group was almost unable to check in at hotel as they wanted our booking reference number, they didn't have a printed copy, and that's the one day when the university email system wasn't working well enough to retrieve it
• taxi didn't appear when ordered at airport - cue most animated conversation in German I've ever seen between hotel manager and taxi company, followed by scariest taxi ride ever (and I've been in an Italian taxi)
• lengthy question session by UK Border people for one of our group
• burst tyre five minutes from my house in Stirling

Still, we got there and back in one piece, and I did very briefly manage a quick trek into the centre of Zurich while waiting for the return flight. Here is some Swiss scenery:

Lake Zurich

PS: I'm told that Naomi answered "Zurich" to the question "where's your daddy today?" :-)

PPS: I'm quite entertained that this can be classed as a "day trip"!

Christmas excitement

Here are a few of our preparations for Christmas, it's proving lots of fun this year as Naomi is understanding better what is going on.  She is very excited and can engage with some of our traditions and fun.

One thing she was very excited about was getting a Christmas tree.

Here we are having chosen the tree (as a side note, Sandy had the day off work and it turns out that Monday morning is an incredible time to buy a Christmas tree, the queue was non-existent!)

Here is Naomi making some decorations for the tree.  She wanted to make it sparkly but the decorations were in the attic and I wasn't in a position to get it down on my own so I said she could make some things for it

Here is the tree with the decorations Naomi made

Here is the tree with a few more decorations including a star that Naomi made with Daddy yesterday.

We will be up in the North East for a fair wee while over Christmas and New Year so looking forward to catching up with you soon...

She's a walker!

Miriam has had the longest nearly walking phase I've ever known, she looked pretty close about 6 weeks ago but she has now mastered the basics and is now trying to perfect the art.

So here goes, enjoy!

Docs

In the bath last night Naomi was having a lot of fun with her hippos. They were having a lot of adventures but at one point the pink one wasn't feeling well.

So, here we have the blue one being a doctor,  the link one in the doctors bed,  and the whale being, well,  a whale.  What else?

I like this stage of development :-)