Over Christmas our house has suffered another influx of attention seeking talking toys. It’s not bad enough that they constantly sing every-time someone walks past them, but if you don’t touch them they start screaming for attention.

my ‘favorite’ two phases spinning around my head today are

“are you read for the learning fun?”

“lets go on a learning journey”

don’t know what you play with if you don’t want to learn anything.

*i don’t want people to think we are ungrateful, for all those who bought us these presents, thank you, really if we didn’t have them our children would be climbing the walls, but still i’m allowed to go mad arn’t I?

It’s starting, Daisy got into our bed at around 5:30 this morning - we managed to hold her off until 6, at which point we had a very quick breakfast, and then rushed through all the presents.

big hit for Daisy we are proud to say are the presents we got her; a pop up tent farm thing, and a ‘crown’ and wand - the think she decided she was getting for Christmas on Sunday! (so i was rushing around town yesterday looking!) .

Henry loves the ‘evil nest’ learn and groove activity station which my mum got him. this does of course leave us with a bit of a problem, both of these toys are huge! we have no room in the front room at all. i can just about see the other side of the room, and we are taking turns sitting down!.

I try to steer clear of website nerdiness on this blog but sometimes sites are so cool that I can’t resist.

• Is it Christmas?

it’s been a while and comment has been raised so i can’t just go back to filling your screen with rubbish without some explanation.

It turns out it’s been 39 days since I last blogged which is the longest time since i started all this. I don’t have a real definitive reason why, i think it was a combination of a number of things.

1. In early December I had coursework for my leadership course to do, this took quite a bit of time, because like last time, and indeed this time (more due end of January) I left it to the last minute.
2. I went for (and then got) the development managers job in work: during the run up to the interview I found my self in the position of having things I couldn’t say on the internet; this meant the blog became I bit divorced from my reality and my motivation to blog sort of wined.
3. It was Christmas and that was hectic
4. I have website issues:
   • right near the end of the year you may have noticed i took the site down for a few days. this is because it was hacked. I suspect not directly, but via something else on the hosting provider which is very pap indeed!, the site is also incredibly flaky, and if we had any money we would be moving, maybe next month.
   • I don’t actually like the current design for the pages, i know i changed them from the perfectly nice design we had for years and to be honest if i get some time we will be going back to that. but for now I will just have to live with it.
5. I got the management job (oh I’ve said that), and to be honest I got all self conscious about the site. I thought “I’m all responsible and management like now, and well the blog’s doesn’t (well my bits any way) reflect this”. in summary I got all up myself for a little while there. I think I’m getting over that now.
6. the website is flaky (oh I’ve said that too), at least once in that 39 days i got this far and the site crashed, again if we had any money we would be moving….

Anyway that’s the block out of the way, maybe i can start telling you about my new job now…..