Babies, beaches and more babies.

Baby update.  She starts nursery next week! Holy moly. That light at the end of the tunnel just got a whole lot closer.  Just two mornings a week, so hardly opening up a whole new world for me, but still.  Two will become three, will become five, will be boarding school before she knows it.  (That’s what she gets for coming out with this, after months of us yearning for a full sentence from her:  “YOU NO COME MY PARTY!” Any slight, and we are NFI’d. “Me have party.  Big party.  Big Amow-Woof-Woof party.  Dada come.  Yaya come.  Deddie come. MAMA NO COME.  Mama MEAN.” )

In other news, we fled Singapore last week, three hours’ drive  up the Malaysian coast.  So, if you live in London (and managed to find a time of day with no traffic, and a route with no road works) it’s a bit like you driving to... Poole?  Weymouth?  Anyway, somewhere coastal and beachy.   Which is, I think, where the similarities end. 

(Listen, if I can’t show off on my own blog, where can I do it?)  Of course, because we had children with us, it was less Paradise, more Paradise Lost.  The usual refereeing and cajoling and berating and trying to work out the best sleeping arrangements, and cut feet and insect bites and sunscreen in the eyes etc.  Also, the most atrocious table manners I’ve seen outside of the zoo’s Orang Utan enclosure.  But still, LOOK AT IT:

(If you want to know why we moved to Asia, that is why.)

Much excitement when we got home – not least because we’d had a return car journey devoid of any vomit – to find that these little balcony dwellers (aren’t nests amazing?  How do they do it? I’ve got hands and opposable thumbs and I can barely make my bed*):

Had turned into this: 

I must admit to having gotten a teeny bit choked up.  Little babies!  But then I got a grip and called the nursery to confirm the Baby’s start date.  AND THEN, giddy with the whiff of FREEDOM I went online and looked up jobs.  But it turns out that I am good for nothing, and so I did something equally optimistic, and loaded a few books onto my Kindle. 

First up:  Elizabeth Is Missing – about an old woman losing her marbles who spends a lot of time shouting at her daughter.  Hmmm.

(*Theoretically speaking, of course...)