Finally got through the past few weeks. It's been very busy at work, with preparations for the official opening of the building. It's been a learning curve, as I've been working with acrylic for the first time since CDT:Technology lessons at school! Fortunately, I've had a plastics manufacturer to do the tricky bits, so it's just been designing wall plaques and a unit to hold a 19" digital photo frame.

That all finally went up last week. Friday was another day of very heavy rain leading to flooding in the area, so the University sent people home early. Unfortunately, with the opening happening on Saturday, my boss and I ended up drilling the wall mount for the digital frame shroud, and wiring it in! We finished at about 6pm, by which time the rain had eased, which made the thought of motorcycling home more palatable.

Saturday was the opening event itself, which all went swimmingly (pun intended), and staff party in the evening. Sunday was a fairly lazy day, and today feels much less stressful! Actually, we did have some nice respite last weekend, when we when to visit Tim and Kev in Fleet (hello chaps!) for some R&R, a trip to an animal park, and somewhere new for Jess to disassemble!

Meanwhile, Ros has been suffering with an infection on her chest, which has left her rather wiped out. Poorly bunny. I've told her to go to the GP this week, as she can't keep things up like this Fortunately, Jess and I seem to have got away without it. Jess has been rather cheerful this past week, which has struck us as a change. To be honest, she's been a bit off-colour (aka tendency to grumpiness) for the best part of two months; pretty much since the MMR reactions. So, it's nice to see her chirpy again. She managed to give herself a superficial burn on the arm by walking up to the grill a couple of weeks back, but seemed remarkably chipper even with that. (We, on the other hand, felt terribly guilty and like thoroughly bad parents for not stopping her getting that close.)

Jess is babbling lots, with the usual "Daddy", "Book", "Bye-bye" etc, but is also managing to give us tantalising hints of more complex word connections. The other week, I was singing Old MacDonald, and sang "...had a duck" - at which point Jess said "Quack!" That stopped me in my tracks This week I was counting: "one..., two...", and she said "dree", which was similarly impressive.

It's remarkable to see how connections are forming in her head. On Friday morning, I took her downstairs first thing, to give her a cup of milk. After she'd drunk most of it, she toddled across the kitchen, and pulled a pair of oven gloves off the peg and brought them to me. I thanked her (slightly bemusedly), and put them over the back of a chair and returned to making a pot of tea. She looked at me, exasperatedly, and picked them up again, and toddled over to the oven and pointed. "Ah!", said I, "you want breakfast". Fortunately, she's not yet learnt to roll her eyes heavenwards...

Anyway, I've got some newer pictures to post, so I'll try to do that later. TTFN.