Happy New Year!

From kate 12 09

We had a lovely Christmas in England with the girls and Mary and Trevor. There wasnt much time for pictures as we were busy eating and having a good time but a few are in the usual place.

When we came home, we weighed and measured Katherine and she gained a healthy 310 gramms in a week! She is now a mighty 5kg 310g and 56 cm!

At the moment we are preparing to celebrate the coming of the New Year russian style, which means eating russian salad and herring "in the fur coat" and watching silly music shows on russian TV which feature the same stars as when I was young, only heavily enhanced by plastic surgery :)

First doctor check up

So last Thursday we went to a nice doctor in a village called Richterswil, not far from our place. We weighed and measured Katherine, she was 4550 g and 56 cm, head circumference of 37 cm which is all above average on the growth char. He listened to her heart and looked at her hips with ultrasound and found everything excellent :)

From kate 12 09

Sometimes K sleeps almost 5 hours at night, and sometimes, like yesterday, almost nothing, which brings me to my tip No 1 for mums : if you dont want to wear pijamas all day sleep in your normal clothes! I do :) Besides 22-23 C feels so called for a sleepdeprived person that I sleep in a fleece anyway :)

Our little cutie smiles at her mobile quite a lot and we finally caught one of those smiles on camera!

From kate 12 09

She also discovered my hair - I washed it so it was down and there to be grabbed, she seemed fascinated and kept stretching her arm to touch it, so we made a plait for her to play with

From kate 12 09

More pictures to see in the album!

Katherine Elizabeth is here! since 5th of November :)

Our daughter was born on a sunny November morning and has already celebrated her 1st month birthday! She is gaining weight at record speed and is changing every day. We have noted 4th of Decmber as the date of her first concious smile and every day we see some new and amazing developments.
She likes her baths, but most of the time we spend eating, even more than sleeping it seems :)

From kate 12 09

Our current photo album

Bump Evolution!

Our baby is growing and should have now reached the 2 kg mark! On the outside it looks like this:

From Bump

My knitting has progressed from no skills to fancy things like i-cord and 3 dimensional leaves. Here are the knitted part of the babys wardrobe, I know still a lot to do!

From Bump

Scan today

So we have seen baby Drews (code name for the time being) face, spine and thigh this morning on the ultrasound scan. She is lying head down, face down, spine on my left side. This is all correct and good. Her weight is 1456 g which is slightly above average but within the normal range. She did not want her picture taken and kept turning away, so we have none to show this time.
Next appointment is 30th of September. Watch this space :)

Spain in August is very hot....

But we did have a nice cooling swim everyday and ate lots of fish some of which has been photograped even :)


Interesting is the spanish classification of coffees, more types that in Italy I think:


There photos featuring human faces are also there:

New things at home and belly progress

We got our new bookshelf! and finally all my books are out of the cellar :)



And then we hung some family photos and it looks very -very nice



Today my iPhone says the baby is 32 cm and 771.1 g, so its growing fast!
here is what you can see from outside:
18th of July:



Yesterday (31st July)



and here is what we already have for the baby:
http://s165.photobucket.com/albums/u77/mashuha/baby%20things/

Birthday

Had a very nice birthday, thanks to many phone calls and sms and cards :) Got even a call from US from my godfather :)
In the evening we went to a nice restaurant on the lake, called Chez Fritz. The view was amazing and different from the usual because of a huge pine tree, which makes the atmosphere a bit more southern and holiday-like:

I ate monkfish and was wondering again how to get it so soft - when I tried cooking it, it turned out like a rubber.
Mark looked like he belonged in that restaurant :) He coordinated with furniture, tree and the lake

I was very happy to sit in the breeze after a hot and busy day in the office:

At home I found more flowers (mum, red are from you!) :


And here is a piece of birthday cake I brought to work, recipe will follow on my food blog:

A drive to Heidiland

Half an hour from our village there is a region of Heidiland, called so after a famous book about a little girl in the Alps, which then became TV series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi
It is a picture-perfect Switzerland! The lake (Wallensee) is dark aquamarine with white sailing boats, surrounded by high mountains, tidy pastures and lovely wooden houses.



And of course we took our new car for a photoshoot and drive :)

Our may holiday in Bandol

We spend last week in hot, sunny and very summery Bandol in South of France.
Our accommodation was half a house with a giant garden and a swimming pool.
A gate to the house from the street:

First level of the garden had a bbq and was our outdoor dining room:

Second level had a swimming pool and an abundance of mulberries falling from a tree straight into your mouth!

A medieval village of Castelet was our only day trip, as it was too hot for travelling on most days:



Not far away from where we stayed in Bandol, there was a little shingle beach, where Jacques Cousteau invented SCUBA diving! So we have been busy exploring the sea ourselves:


All in all one of our best holidays in years! :)

Our garden and other lazy sunday things

We have discovered that our street is full of belaja acatsija, which is apparently called "false acacia". This is our first spring here, so it was a nice surprise!

And here is my berry/vegetable garden!

First one on the right is tomato, then raspberry, strawberries, red currant and gooseberry, little pots have herbs in them.
The rest of pics show what we ate today on a bbq :)

A mini holiday in Spain

We flew to Malaga on Friday morning and came back last night, but it felt like a proper holiday, we had different weather every day, warm and cloudy Friday, rainy Saturday and very hot Sunday.
First thing we do when we arrive is to have lunch in the port in our favourite fish eatery

We always have mixed fried fish, or Fritura Malagueña, which consists of baby squid, baby fish, marinated snapper and calamari rings, all deep fried. This a picture from last year:


In the afternoon I went to read on the beach, watching little dogs trying to go for a swim in freezing water :)


Saturday started out sunny and here is me having a traditional andalusian breakfast, toasted bread with olive oil and tomatoes:


The coffee is half coffee half milk, it is amazingly tasty and we have never been able to reproduce it at home. Must be some secret - this cafe is making all this since 1944, so they had time to optimize the recipes!

Next to it is a very beautiful pharmacy. Look at those tiles!

More antiques are found along the beach, where old boats are used as bbq-s for fresh sardines:

The adjacent restaurants are full in any weather

The rest of our pictures are here

Rowing in the Constable country

Not far from Colchester is a pretty city of Dedham, which lies in the heart of Constable country - so called because of an English painter John Constable, who made the countryside in this area famous through his paintings.

We rented a little boat here and the girls rowed it mostly into bushes and scared some ducks :)

Japan March 2009

One of many amazing things in Japan is abundance of salmon roe and its cheap! (1800 yen is 13 euro) A rare Russian can walk past an enormous box full of inviting orange jewels. Even when writing this a month later, I have to swallow hard.



But we are not only thinking about food :) From an early age I was fascinated about japanese art, brush paintings in particular. I always thought how beautifully the artists stylize trees, branches birds etc. It was completely unexpected to find trees that look exactly like painitngs and to realize that paintings are in fact very realistic and not stylized at all!

Here is a brush painting :



and here is a tree.. most of the work is done by nature :)