Life is good

So it's been a while. It's not that I haven't had the time to post anything, although it's obviously been very limited to brief moments in between baby demands. It's just I haven't had a lot to actually blog about. Every time I think of a suitably pithy topic, and make a mental note to remember to write about it, Gemma will roll over, or start gurgling, or require a nappy change and the thought goes out of my head never to return. Occasionally I have moments of slight guilt that I ought to be updating this blog at least as regularly as I do my baby's. But having said that, life is really too short to be worrying about stuff like that. And now she's 6 months old I am reminded every day how fast the days, weeks, months go by and to make the most of them at the time.

And oh we do! So life is good, really good. I have a beautiful, happy daughter who seems to love nothing more than making an unholy mess with any vegetable or fruit purees we put near her mouth, and who as I type is laughing and jigging up and down in a wonderfully contented sounding way in her door bouncer; we've just been on a fantastic family holiday - our first as a family - to Canada, where we were so lucky to have great friends who put us up and put up with us and made everything so easy and comfortable for us. We have our health, we have enough money (just...) to enjoy our lives and we have lovely families and friends to support us and laugh with us. I'm sure if I were back at work I wouldn't be quite so ready to blog about how great things are, but shhhh no talk about work until January and we still have the rest of the summer, autumn and winter to get through before then!

In other news, the garden is not too bad this year despite virtually no attention beyond an occasional mow of the lawn, and courtesy of the Childrens' Food Festival held near us a few weeks ago, we have a variety of veg on the go - chillies, tomatoes, dwarf french beans, aubergine and courgette. Caterpillars have had one of the bean plants already but the others seem to have escaped and I am especially interested to see if we can manage to get an aubergine from the plant we have. Almost all the hollyhocks flopped and broke after some hefty winds and rain recently but everything else is looking good and it will just teach me to stake them properly next year. In the house, we're getting our sash windows renovated next week and then the top room re-plastered the week after, which will bring us just about to the end of the refurbishments we've been doing since we moved in 5 years ago. We're spending the next few weekends catching up with old friends, grandparents are visiting next week and early August and Gemma gets underwater photos taken at swimming tomorrow. All in all, not a bad lot of things on the go!