Pippin’s words

Owen and I sat down yesterday and thought about all the words that Pippin says now, and it is quite a list! I’ll share them with you to give you an insight into our little boy, who is one and a half in just a few days! The first ones in the list are the ones he says with most frequency.

mummy

daddy

car

no

oh no!

bye!

poo

hot

hello

cracker

moo shoe (he has some slippers with cows on them. we call them this)

please

book

boot

wood

uh oh!

teeth

baby

bath

cheese

door

bowl

woof

CD (honest! He begs us to play music by saying CD)

bowl

baa!

shower

hiya

up

bag

duck

sheep

nanny

cat

bear

bounce

I’m sure there are others that he says that I’ve forgotten, and I’m sure there are loads of other words that he says that we just haven’t interpreted yet. He chats a lot, and it is frustrating that we don’t understand all of what he says, because he is obviously trying so hard to communicate with us. He certainly understands us!

Here are a few recent photos of the little tacker.

The Season to be Jolly

I hope you all had a fun Christmas and New Year. We three lived up to our name and had a very jolly old Christmas here in mid-Wales.

Christmas makes a lot more sense here than it does in Australia. It’s cold, and so all the imagery and traditions to do with Christmas that we’ve grown up with are actually relevant. We have seen robins in the snow, there is holly growing outside, the pine trees are the only green ones around etc etc. It just makes sense that at the darkest and coldest time of year, you need a very warming celebration to keep you going.

People really get into Christmas here too, which is fun. We received more Christmas cards than we every have, mostly from people in our village who we don’t even know! There are lots of Christmas parties and a few weeks before Christmas there was a street fair in Llanidloes for the official switching on of the Christmas lights. Santa, or Sion Corn as he is known in Welsh, arrived in a sleigh pulled by huskies and they turned on the tree lights. We were hoping for a huge party that went on for hours, but not much more than that happened. We did get to buy roasted chestnuts from a street vendor and have hot chocolates with brandy and home-made mince pies in the cafe though. Here’s a picture of Bec, Owen, Pippin, Uma, Mela and Ari in front of the town tree:

Pippin wasn’t that impressed though…

no matter how much Uma and Ari tried to cheer him up!

He did have a lot more fun at his playgroup Christmas party though, dressed up as Clifford the Big Red Dog (thankyou Melissa for this cute outfit!) He was the only child who cried when Santa gave him a present though – that’s my boy!

We had a real tree, which was so nice and loads of fun to decorate. We had a few bought decorations, but we also covered the tree with things like gingerbread men, cinnamon quills, popcorn garlands, holly and mistletoe. (Owen and I had fun hanging mistletoe around the house in strategic places to ensure lots of festive kisses!)Here’s our tree:

I enjoyed doing lots of Christmas baking, as it actually felt good to be in a kitchen with the oven on at Christmas time, as opposed to the insanity that it is to do this in Brisbane. I made my first ever Christmas cake, and covered it in homemade marzipan, and it was yum!

It is true when they say that Christmas is more fun with children – we had such a good time on Christmas day, and Pippin seemed to really enjoy himself too, although he had a few moments of present chaos, tearing paper off presents and discarding them, then grabbing another. Mostly he really enjoyed receiving his presents, and he has been playing with them a lot since Christmas, so I think we, and others who gave him gifts, made really good choices. We gave him a gorgeous little wooden tractor and trailer, a set of wooden sheep with a shepherd and sheep dogs, a little wooden car and a few books. Here he is playing with his sheep set:

We had a wonderful festive time, during our first Christmas in Wales. There was no snow at Christmas, but we did have a snowfall a few days after. It was really cold for a few days after Christmas, with temperatures not rising above zero for days on end. The river behind our house started to freeze! Not quite enough for ice skating, but very pretty nonetheless.

We are thinking about trying to head back to Oz for Christmas in 2006 – what a different experience that will be to what we’ve just had! It would be so good to see everyone though, and to have a Christmas with those other Jollys at Helidon – we missed them! We’ll keep you posted. Lots of festive love to you all!

Winter hasn’t even started yet part 3

Last Thursday night, cold white stuff started falling from the sky.

The next morning, the world was covered in a blanket of snow.

We had great fun taking Pippin out for his first ever play in the snow.

He threw a snowball, and here’s the photo just after it left his hands. (of course)

This photo is beautiful, but does show one of the effects of the cold.

Here Pippin inspects our car. Owen didn’t drive into work that morning!

Here are some photos from our walk around the village.

And you know, winter hasn’t even started yet!

Scrabble yn Gymraeg

It was my birthday on Tuesday. Owen gave me some smashing presents, including a sewing machine (!!!!) and a couple of great books. He also gave me Scrabble yn Gymraeg, or Scrabble in Welsh, which I have actually mentioned previously (see Moot entry). I was terribly excited about this and we played a game that night.

It takes a bit longer to play than English Scrabble, at least it does when you are just a beginner to Welsh. We had an open dictionary policy, and we trawled our dictionaries for almost every go. I was very proud when I was able to have a go and play not just one, but two words, which I already knew were words. (Gyda – with, and athro – male teacher.)

There were some great words played, eg:

‘etholaf’ – I elect

‘ffydd’ – faith

‘techneg’ – technique

‘mwg’ – smoke
‘jariau’ – jars

Here’s a picture of the board: (Click to get a bigger view!)

We didn’t quite finish the game before our brains started to melt down and we had to go to bed. At the end of play, I was ahead, though Owen had been gaining on me in the latter part of the game. He didn’t do so well in the first half – perhaps this could be because I have been studying Welsh and have a better idea of possible word formations… but Owen will probably argue that it is because for the first part of the game he had four double d tiles in his hand. Now, you might think that ‘dd’ would be pretty easy to play in Welsh Scrabble, because heaps of words seem to start with ‘dd’, but one of the rules of Scrabble yn Gymraeg is that you can’t play words which are mutations, and everyone knows that words that start with ‘dd’ are actually mutations of words starting with a single ‘d’. I was telling a friend yesterday about our strict adherence to this rule, and she said we should probably ditch that rule till we get better at it, which would certainly make the single ‘l’ tile easier to play as well… but it doesn’t seem very hardcore.

A note on mutations – just about every word mutates in Welsh, and there are a bunch of different kinds of mutations. You might have noticed that the ‘Gymraeg’ in Scrabble yn Gymraeg starts with a ‘g’, whereas you thought it started with ‘c’. Well generally it does, until it mutates. That’s a soft mutation. ‘C’ can also mutate to ‘ngh’ in a nasal mutation and ‘ch’ in a spirant mutation. Of course.

Winter hasn’t even started yet part 2

It’s 1 degreee C at the moment, which means that it is a bit warmer than it has been lately. The frost isn’t as heavy on the ground this morning, but for the last week, the frost hasn’t lifted off the fields behind our house, as the sun hasn’t reached them. In fact, the full length of one side of the valley has been covered in frost for a week, while the other side looks green and sunny (well sunny for a few hours a day!)

We went out walking in the frost on the weekend – here are a few pictures. (I hope they work!):

The forecast is for snow for this Thursday and Friday. And winter hasn’t even started yet.

Blog bugs

A couple of people have said lately that they can’t see the pictures in the blog, and now I can’t see them either. I’m not sure what’s happening, and I’ve written to wordpress.com to see if they can help. We’ll see what happens. Does anyone have any clues?

Winter hasn’t even started yet…

Today is our second day of frost. We woke to find the ground covered in a much deeper layer of ice than we had on Monday. Owen had to spend ages scraping the ice off the car before he could go to work. The windscreen wiper water has an anti-frost additive in it to make this job easier, but when he first tried to use it, the water wouldn’t come out as the tubes were frozen. It is now 2 in the afternoon and the hills behind our house are still covered in ice, as they haven’t seen the sun all day.

We’ve been told that soon the sun will disappear from our house for three weeks, as it won’t rise high enough for us to see it over the hill. We met a woman just down the road though who says she loses it for six weeks, and we’ve also met a chap on the other side of the village who says he loses it for months!

Tomorrow the maximum temperature here is predicted to be 3 and the minimum -1. And you know, Winter hasn’t started yet.

Blog feed!

In a recent email, Melissa said that it would be good if there was some way that you could be alerted when there was a new post to a blog, so you don’t have to check regularly, only to find that there’s nothing new, or check infrequently, and find so many posts that you couldn’t be bothered reading them.

Owen and I have tried to find a way that you can receive an email notification when a new blog is posted, but we haven’t found a way. BUT we have found a way that will enable you to see if there are any new posts to any blogs you’re interested in, and it also allows you to get other cool stuff eg news headlines. This might be old news to some of you, but I thought it was pretty cool.

What you do is go to www.start.com and customise the page to show the things you want to see when you open your browser, then just go into your brower options and make start.com your start page. If you make someone’s blog one of the links on your start page, you can see every time you open your browser whether there is a new post, without having to receive annoying emails.

To add my blog to your start page, enter the following link into the ‘add feed’ spot on the page:

http://jacintaj.wordpress.com/feed/

To add Owen’s blog to your start page, enter this link:

http://www.jollywebs.com/wp/?feed=rss2

 If you want to have headlines from an online news source on your start page, go to their website, locate the RSS icon, and right click on the icon. Copy the RSS location and then paste it into the ‘add feed’ spot on your start page again.

As I said, I’m sure this is very old news to some people, but if you are like me, you might find it useful. I have added headlines from the BBC and ABC to my start page, so I might actually start knowing a bit of what’s going on in the world. I have also added ‘word of the day’ and ‘astronomy picture of the day’ to enhance my nerdiness!  

Chair!

This morning Pippin and I were having breakfast, and we were getting towards the end (I’d finished, Pippin was at the stage of just smearing his porridge over the table) when Pippin started trying to get down from his chair. He has a high chair, but about half way through every meal, he always moves over to a normal chair. Anyway, he seemed to be struggling a lot, trying to get out of the chair, and he was saying, “Chair! Chair!” so very clearly. I got up to help him get down, but as soon as I moved around the table to his chair, he flashed me a grin and climbed back up on to his chair. I sat back down and he continued smearing his porridge for a few seconds, until he started again. He sounded so distressed as he said ‘chair’ that I again got up to help him. Same thing! This happened quite a few times… and I knew it was a joke, but each time he seemed so distressed that I got up to help him, thinking THIS TIME he actually wants to get out. Eventually he grew tired of the joke, and just got off the chair himself. So cute! So cheeky! Such a good sense of humour! I wonder where he gets that from?

Enter Jack Frost

Winter is definitely on its way. Last night we had our first sub-zero temperatures and this morning I awoke to find the fields covered in frost. So beautiful! These photos were taken from the (relative) warmth of my kitchen and bedroom, respectively.