Ho, ho, throw (up)….

And then the festivities were upon us…

There were parties to be attended, friends to be fed, family to be hosted, sickness to be endured. Yes, the festivities this year saw the dreaded vomiting bug swathe through the family – attacking each victim in turn (all except Niomi who seemed to be magically protected by her low-level antibiotic). But whilst it inflicted its woe on the victims we did all rally at appropriate moments to do our best to enjoy ourselves. And, looking on the plus side, I am now fully acquainted with the intricacies of our washing machine 😃.

So, as we watched the arrival of the Southern Rookes circling above our garden, we prayed for a miracle cure before bringing them safely to the nest in time for carols and mulled wine at the neighbours. That afternoon was then quickly followed by preparations for the arrival of the Big Man, putting excited children to bed, vegetable prep and catch up. Christmas Day was my least stressful yet as all food was safely cooked and warming by 11.30am, ready for the commencement of Le Grand Repas at precisely 1pm (well, that was according to the plan). It was a tasty affair which also saw the Annual Christmas Star Awards, and the inaugural Duckatella Fluff Conducting competition (full disclosure available on request). All followed by a small libation to the Christmas gods.

And so we moved on through the festivities with food, Mary Poppins Returns, walks, games, laughter, debate and lots of great fun…all interspersed with an occasional ‘man-down’ succumbing to the bug, and the boys allegedly winning the annual Cranium competition due to the girls being unable to field a team. But eventually the Southern Rookes had to sadly depart, kindly taking our bugs back with them to share down south. Sorry, sorry, to everyone!!!!

By now we’d abandoned ambitious plans for New Year and just settled down to a few days of R&R, or at least Tanya did. Having fared the best, I now was in charge of the children. And like any good Dad when flying tout seul, I reached for my wallet and got us out the house with epic walks and ice cream bribery. Eventually though, we did all manage a New Year’s Eve meal together which saw the final crackers pulled and a dodgy rendition of Auld Lang Syne, but by 8.55pm I was left contemplating 2018 all alone. Still I saw in the New Year – and by the following day the troops were starting to rally. A few more days of newly discovered expeditions round and about were had, and then the Gurney’s arrived to top off the celebrations nicely along with our friends Yvonne and Wilf.

And there you have it….Welcome 2019. I hope you bring peace, joy and happiness to everyone (and less vomiting all round).

Wishing all our family and friends near and far a very Happy New Year. Lang may yer lum reek.

 Little Miss Christmas

Little Miss Reindeer

The great Rooke gathering 

Hat slippage

This year's Christmas Brie

That's me apparently 

 Inaugural Duckatella Fluff champion

Victory to the boys by default (harsh but fair)

The game of Christmas - its hard to be genuinely beaten by a 3 year old

 Christmas angel - Penguin champ

 Cherry trees blossoming

 Out and about I

 Out and about II

 Candy cane Christmas

 Little and Large

Cousins

Eventually all out together 

Merry Christmas everyone...

Christmastress and the Polar Express...

Emily to Daddy on the phone: "Mummy just said shit. Only it wasn't shit she said. It was worse than that."

Ah the joy of Christmas! A time of peace, joy, love and happiness...and Christmastress.

Christmastress - adjective - a feeling of intense stress associated with the joy of Christmas.

So whilst Christmas has plenty of fun and laughter, there's also always a sprinkling of Christmastress added into the mix. As the big day beckons kids get more and more tired and need to deal with more and more excitement. Plus inevitably there's always a plethora of bugs going round at this time of year. In the last weeks I've looked at the girls with ever increasing bags under their eyes - desperate to have fun but desperately running out of the energy to cope with it all. Eventually it cracks and someone (child or adult) loses it.

In addition to that the Rooke household has the Curse of the Christmas Tree to deal with. I've blogged about this before but in essence every year something goes wrong on the day we go to buy the Christmas Tree. And this year was no exception as I didn't even make the tree buying due to an emergency trip to Birmingham. It also meant stir-up Sunday was in December, not November - but hey - who's counting...

Still we've had plenty of Christmas fun times too, and we're starting to collect a few annual rituals along the way. There's been the Kirky lights switch on and drinks with friends, a Victorian Christmas, the annual Daddy-Daughter Christmas day out, and this year's highlight has to be the Santa Train at Bo'ness. Top-tastic Christmas fun. There's been plenty of crafting, cooking, baking, singing and dancing too. Plus we even squeezed a trip to North Berwick in for an early Christmas gathering with the Gedik and Gurney clans.

But another highlight this year has definitely been Niomi's singing. About two years ago Niomi said nothing, and then a year ago she sang her first words. And now? Well now, she's taken great delight in learning all the songs for her nativity and any number of other Christmas hits you care to name. She might not always be the clearest but her effort, commitment and courage is clearly not in doubt - a true Christmas star. You go girl!!

 Daddy-Daughter Christmas Day

 Talking Christmas Postboxes!!

 Whoa - big tree alert

The Santa Polar Express

 North Pole Station

 Definitely a hit!

 Getting braver about Mr C but still unsure

Mr C is now firmly in this girls stride

My Christmas angels

Videoclip: A Christmas star

The Bionic Woman...

The Bionic Woman

Meet my mum. Aka the Bionic Woman.

For a long while she's not been blessed with the best of health (she has Lupus), but she’s always carried on regardless. In her day she was a very accomplished sportswoman – with plenty of trophies to prove it, and I think that’s given her the competitive edge and determination to fight against the odds. And since the summer the odds have been against her – with a number of weeks spent in hospital. She’s battled various serious infections, the most recent being pneumonia a couple of weeks ago. At 85, and with her historical health complications, this is no mean feat but last week she had a heart attack and broke her arm to top it off. The break was bad (both radius and ulna), requiring pins and plates to be fitted to put it back together again. But given the state of her heart she couldn’t have a general anaesthetic so she underwent surgery for 4 hours – pins and plates fitted – with just a local. She truly is the bionic woman.

Mum and Dad - Badminton champions

Whatever happens in the next few weeks and months who knows. But what I’ve really appreciated over my recent visits is her gratitude. She’s grateful to everyone – all the staff for their help, to my Dad, my brother and myself for our support, to our families for allowing us to provide that support, and to anyone who helps in any small way. It’s really lovely and is a constant reminder to me that I also have very many things to be grateful for. An important thing to remember.

New best friend...

Daddy: What's your favourite animal?
Niomi: Cows.
Daddy: Why's that?
Niomi: Cos....(dramatic pause). They're my best friends.

Niomi has a new best friend. She’s called Cow. She met her at nursery and she came home with her in her bag one day. Poor Cow didn’t get much choice. She was forced to come home. But since that day, Niomi and Cow have become inseparable. Cow goes everywhere with her; Cow talks for her and Cow talks to her; and Cow helps her do things she doesn’t want to do. Generally though as Cow only says ‘moo’, it makes for some slightly interpretive conversation. And not only that, Cow particularly likes other cows to talk too. It now appears that any cows, real or otherwise, or indeed us humans as well, will still be expected to respond to Niomi’s fluent 'moo-ese'. 

Whilst all this is very cute, none of it exactly helps make mealtimes shorter (Cow now needs to feed and encourage her to eat); or language development progress at any great rate (you don’t get much phonetic growth from ‘moo’); or transitional activities any simpler (Elephant is still around, so it's now two toys to lug about, and two toys to be in danger of losing).

Ho hum…the price you pay for a new best friend.

Niomi and NBF

NBF's Big Sister

Finally. Niomi's fruit tree getting planted - she got pears

I like birthdays...

I like a good birthday, and am regularly trying to squeeze an extra few in for myself during the year. The girls have grown wise to my tactics however, and are becoming a little more date savvy and aware that technically you can only have one birthday a year. Still when Emily read me a story the other day I was more than delighted to know I had another birthday. Her reading is coming on apace – it’s incredible the speed at which young children learn. Their grey matter is just so malleable that the neural pathways connect in record time. If you tried to learn to read as an adult it would take you so much longer in comparison.

Birthday 6 year old

Not birthday 3.5 year old (but growing up fast)

One excited unicorn pre-sleepover

Unicorn cake

Videoclip: Reading

On the subject of birthdays Emily has just turned 6. This was ‘celebrated’ in some style with her first slumber party involving another 6 friends. It was all their first sleepovers and inevitably chaos ensued, but I think everyone had a good time. The next day felt somewhat like New Years Day after a mammoth party the night before - except without the party bit. The girls didn't sleep (which also meant we didn't) till approaching midnight - and were up again just after 7am. Which when you consider Emily normally has closer to 12 hours sleep - it didn't make for a pretty day after the night before. Still, nothing like a good old birthday party.

And we’ve also been celebrating the pumpkin. With a harvest this year of 5 pumpkins we’ve had somewhat an overkill on our gourd delights. I decided to avoid having to carve them all for Halloween and went to cook one of the larger ones. I discovered a quarter was enough to make lasagne for 12; and another quarter made soup for 8. The remaining half is now in the freezer, and with another 4 to go it is quite likely we’ll discover you can have too much of a ‘gourd’ thing (boom boom). Pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin lasagne, pumpkin tagine - the list of delights goes on. And talking of good things, we’ve just had a few days of clear, sunny skies and frosty mornings – a chance to escape out to Loch Ardinning and to the Colzium for some fresh air and fine scenery before winter finally bites.

Halloween moon

 Scary daughter

 Scary face

Scary cat

 The lovely ladies

 Following big sister

 An unusual shot of the 4 of us

She'll be comin' down the mountain

Still adventuring

 Autumn fun 1

 Autumn fun 2

Autumn fun 3

The importance of dove...

It’s been another month of adventures in the Rooke household but with autumn definitely in full flight, we’ve been getting some final animal action in before they all hibernate for winter.

Recently, we had a hawk descend one Sunday at the beginning of the month, tightly clutching a pigeon in its talons. We then all watched enthralled over breakfast as it proceeded to devour it piece by piece – leaving just a carcass for the flies a few hours later. Other birds have fared much better – and we’ve been known to have flocks of 10+ goldfinches at our bird feeder as they stock up for winter. Then there's been our annual influx of thousands of geese arriving for their annual winter vacation in the warmer climes of Scotland - they "summer" in the far North. They fill the skies night after night, making a wonderful cacophony whilst practising their flying.

We’ve also been to the safari park where we had an excellent day visiting all the animals. From lions to sea lions, elephants to lemurs, rhinos to meerkats – the safari park had nearly them all. But bless Niomi though – she kept asking to see a hippo – but no hippo could be found. The day was a real treat for the kids and they both definitely got loads out of it. To top it off the monkeys paid a visit to DDU’s roof which slightly panicked the kids but made for some great roof drumming.

The most important thing is dove

Videoclip: Geese

 Hello beautiful

 Playing hard to get

 Old orange eyes

 Nice stripes

 Cheeky monkey I

Cheeky monkey II

There’s also been a fair amount of double trouble as the kids have been great at spending time together. Mutually fun activity is now a regular occurrence and they seem to be forming a very strong bond. A recent conversation before visiting the neighbours who have a dog called Blue went something like…

Niomi – Emily, I’m scared of Blue
Emily – Don’t worry Niomi. I’ll protect you.
Niomi/Emily - (Give each other great big hugs)
Mummy/Daddy – (Watch on - tear in eye)

Not just that they’ve both been independently thriving at school and nursery. Two recent parents evenings generated two equally lovely reports. And it was particularly gratifying to see Niomi really settled in at nursery as she didn’t find it the easiest at first.

They've also been spoiled rotten in Banchory for a week whilst staying with Nana and Baba (some of us had to work).

And all this has been topped off by their hippy father, who now has Niomi repeating his family mantra that the “most important thing is love.” That said, coming from Niomi it sounds more like “dove”, which causes a little amusement – and quite possibly that’s what the hawk was also thinking whilst he munched his way through one.

Bathtime!

Storytime!

Playtime!