Rock the Moose

We bought Astrid a second-hand IKEA rocking moose for Christmas. She has always liked her moose but now she LOVES her moose! She drags the moose over to herself and tries to hop on and is constantly crawling over to it and trying to rock it herself. She is pretty good at holding on herself but still needs a reasonable amount of supervision. Another 6 months and she might be able to reach the ground and rock herself. She does swing her legs back and forward and try to rock it herself which is incredibly cute. Any moose rocking gets huge grins.

Crazy May Weather

Apparently it's been the coldest May in over 50 years here, and the second coldest on record. With many below zero nights and heavy frosts I'm not overly surprised. It's certainly felt much more wintery than the end of Autumn should. Given we barely had a summer the early onset of Winter seems kind of appropriate. It turns out our garden is a little confused too.

At this time of year many of our spring bulbs are popping their heads up getting ready to flower late Winter/early Spring. I noticed this week though a few are already flowering and it's still Autumn not even Winter yet. I've noticed quite a few of our spring stars and daffodils are coming out. It's nice seeing them at this time of year but I've never had this happen before. I guess all the cold overnight temperatures have made them think it's July not May.

Astrid @ 11 months - rugging up to walk the alpacas

It's a bit chilly walking the alpacas at the moment. As a result small babies need to wear woolly jumpers and fluffy hats. Of course how you get a baby to keep the hat on is a mystery! Hopefully she learns to keep her hat on, for more than 5 minutes at a time, by the time we get to Switzerland. Hat by mummy, jumper by great-Nanna and cuteness by Astrid:

The last week of Autumn

Not many leaves left now..... They are rapidly falling into a big wet heap on the ground. Winter will be here next week. Here are a few pics of our Japanese maples and Forest Pansy's looking their best.

Our Paris Digs......

Our Paris apartment is booked now! Yay, we have somewhere to stay. Since we are travelling with a baby we decided that we will base ourselves in Paris and do some trips to other nearby countries for a few days at a time. We are also planning on seeing some other areas of France. Given we are going to be there for 2 months it is more economical to get an apartment for that time. Even though we will be spending some nights in hotels when doing our side trips it is still cheaper to have an apartment than pay for hotels the whole time. Plus, we get more space, somewhere to leave our things and cooking and washing facilities.

 The apartment search was long and annoying. We wanted to be somewhere fairly central (not that hard in Paris) and to have at least a separate bedroom and living area so that when the munchkin is sleeping we can watch tv/use the computer etc. We also wanted an adequate kitchen for the masterchef and washing facilities for all those nappies. Of course if budget was no option we would have hundreds to pick from. We started out looking at the cheaper end of the scale and had a few options but they were rapidly booking out for the time period we wanted. This was a little irritating since we had found places in early Feb but the agents weren't interested in doing bookings that early. I would have thought for 2 months guaranteed rent they wouldn't have cared about it being early, but apparently I'm not a French real estate agent. In the end most of the cheaper apartments had major sticking points. Such as: 5 flights of stairs with no lift, being the size of a shoe box, being in the middle of nowhere, no baby cot/babies allowed, or just looking damn uncomfortable.

We slightly upped our budget and had a whole new range of options. Most of them could still fit inside our main bedroom but that was better than something the size of our walk in pantry. We did heavily utilise google maps to calculate the distances from all potential apartments to things we wanted to see and were fond of google street view to check out the local area to make sure it had the right feel and a healthy supply of cheese shops and bakeries within walking distance. How did people ever trip plan without the internet? After many comparisons and much debate we finally settled on an apartment in Marais-Les Halles. The deposit has been paid and contracts signed. I'm still not sure how I'll contain a small wandering Astrid in such a small space for so long but the upside is it won't take long to clean :) Here are a few pics of our temporary home come October.......

Astrid's cake smash

We decided to do a cake smash to get some cute photos for Astrid's 1st birthday party invites. Apparently you get strange looks from your 9.5 month old when you plonk them in front of a sugary cake at 9am and let them smear it everywhere. She was quite happy to participate but thought it was very odd behaviour on the part of her parents. At any rate we got a bunch of great photos. Way more than we needed.Total photo shoot time was about 4 minutes. Time to clean the baby was about 25 minutes. Time to clean the house about an hour and a half. Note to self, do not allow a small child to destroy an item containing both cream cheese and hundreds and thousands on the polished wood floorboards! I think there might still be some hundreds and thousands stuck in the joints.Here are a few of the many cute images..........

Astrid @ 10 months - Churros and Cino's

I'm a bit behind on updating Astrid's photos. She is 11 months today but on her 10 month 'birthday' we went out for churros and cinos to celebrate Granddad's birthday. She seemed to enjoy it!

House of snot......

It is currently the house of snot. We all have colds. Luckily Astrid and Anto are nearly better. I still feel blah. It's amazing how a simple cold can make you feel just awful. Chasing after a cranky sick baby is particularly unfun, especially when you are also cranky and sick. Lucky she is cute......

Awesome Autumn

I never get bored of taking photos of the Autumn leaves on our trees in our garden. Here are a few from last week. They are looking even better today so I'd better get some more.....

The Maiden Post

So, I have finally got our blog up and running. Well, I set it up months ago but I am finally actually posting. I plan on actually finding time to write the odd post so people know what we have been up to, and more importantly adding some of the many many photos I have that are currently on my computer and not being seen by anyone.

We will also be adding travel updates from our big Europe trip later in 2012. I believe my geeky husband has another blog set up ready to go for that, complete with maps and other interactive thingy doobey wackers but I'll link to that later. Let's just see if I can manage to get some posts on here first........