We’ve had the suggestion from many different people that we should enter Freyja into competitions and model her for companies and so on. Hannah and I have discussed this a few times when the suggestion comes up, and we just can’t justify it.
The lure of prizes and money is the, and when our budget is so tight and doesn’t give us any spending money for ourselves, it can be quite tempting.
However, being a model isn’t easy on the baby. Sure they try and make it as easy as possible, give them breaks, pamper them, let them play and so on, but there is so much travelling to locations or studios and it can be tiring for the little ones. I may have a total misconception of the whole thing, as – to be honest – I’ve not seen how much a baby model does.
However, The risk of stress and losing her sparkle that makes her such a happy little baby is too much for me and Hannah. Freyja means more to me than anything, and I want her to have the best upbringing I can. I want her to make great choices with what she wants to do with her life, and I want her to become proud of what she has achieved. She can’t do that if she’s already born into a life of modelling.
Sure I’d love to see my daughters face on billboards or baby products, and I’d love to have a bit of extra cash, but she is worth so much more than any of that. She’s my little girl, and you can call it being selfish (and it probably is), and I don’t want to share her with anyone but those who love her.
Mine… my precious…
As a promise to Hannah I’m making new regular “personal” blog posts that aren’t to do with geeky computery things. So here we go.
Sunday we went to see Tom/Soph/Joss/Luke/Laurie for a lovely schnitzel dinner and to have a bit of banter. It’s always nice seeing them as I don’t get to see “them lot” as much as I’d like to, but it’s so much more difficult organising to come up sometimes. Monday evening Hannah went out for drinks for Mark’s birthday so I was left at home, apparently I was asleep when she came back so whatever was on telly must’ve been interesting… Tuesday she was working so again I was almost left on my own, but thankfully Phil came over and we watched The Hangover which was surprisingly funny and worth a watch for some giggles. Wednesday we had an evening in by ourselves (a rare occurrence now that Hannah’s working many days!) so we spread out on the sofa and watched some telly. Thursday I went to a “focus advisory group” to help Leila formulate some ideas for her new business venture, the Esteem Engine, which looks very promising and I think she wants me to do her website, so that’ll be more work for me to do! Yesterday Hannah was working again so I invited Phil over and we watched a couple of “An Idiot Abroad” episodes over a few beers and curry.
This morning Freyja has been super cute and saying great words such as “teeth”, “cheese”, “daddy” and “mummy”. She can touch lots of parts of her body when asked to as well now – her nose, eyes, ears, teeth, tongue, head, toes and tummy. She’s getting so clever at things, and the other day she built a whole tower out of mega blocks whilst I was at work and being really social with Hannah’s friends’ babies. Unfortunately as it’s the weekend I have to change all the poopy nappies. Today we’re off to get my eyes looked at for suitability for laser eye surgery which will be fun, and tomorrow I’m going airsofting again, woohoo! Roll on tomorrow…
I haven’t done a “personal” update for some time now, so I thought I’d briefly brush over our recent lives. The photo you can see on the left is the current state of our new house that is being built in the new Dickens Quarter development in Portsmouth. As you can see it is coming along well, and the estimated completion date is currently the end of April. It’s exciting to see it come so far and we simply can’t wait to make it our own lovely home.
On the Freyja side of things, she’s drawing close to 10 months old now and is coming on leaps and bounds. She can make “red indian” noises (patting her mouth and making noise), walk around standing up and holding the furniture, put balls into the “learn and sort” helicopter toy I got her for Yule, crawl around on hands and knees with quite a pace, wave, throw tantrums and all sorts of other bits and pieces.
She’s truly a joy and makes me a very proud parent. She also eats us out of house and home, typically getting through a bowl of porridge and yoghurt for breakfast, a slice of bread with topping and a yoghurt and biscuit for lunch, a snack mid-afternoon, and a bowl of healthy home-made food followed usually by 2 or 3 yoghurts. As you can probably tell, she likes yoghurts, but there’s nothing wrong with that as they’re a good source of calcium as Hannah’s milk starts to deplete.
In other news, it’s Hannah’s birthday soon, so if you haven’t been invited (on Facebook of course…) and you think you should be, get in touch.
Yeah OK, I’ve not updated my blog in like 7 weeks aside from increasingly annoying Twitter digests, which I have now disabled. Life has been busy as ever, and I’ve been working hard at Netbasic, often (much to the annoyance of Hannah) working late. Freyja is already 7 months old, nearing 8 months now, and she’s just such a character. She’s happily sitting up and loves playing with Daddy (providing he gets home from work before she goes to sleep!). Her first tooth is very slowly but surely coming through which is great, but the last couple of days have been hard for her and she woke up at half 10 the other night, which was very unlike her.
We had friends over on Saturday – it was nice to actually see some of my friends for once! We’ve learnt that having a baby can make socialising very difficult, and many of the things we used to do are not so easy any more, so it was refreshing that Tom & Soph came over to see us and a good night was had by all!
Yuletide is approaching already, and this year we’re off to Andorra with the family for a skiing trip. Freyja will be a little too young to remember it but I’m sure she’ll love the snow. Unfortunately I’ve learnt that my mum may not be able to ski due to her leg being sore and she’s had an injection and stuff from the doctors, so she needs to take it easy. Although having said that, she’d love to spend every day with her three gorgeous grandchildren!
In other news, I’ve been working hard on a new project of mine which some of you will have heard of. I’m not far from releasing it as public beta version, but more news when that happens. I’d love to commit to saying “Yeah I’ll blog every few days again”, but since Freyja was born my life has pretty much entirely evolved around her (of course!) which leaves me very little time – and the spare time I do have I spend watching films with Hannah! I will see if I can blog more frequently, as some of you have complained to me for not blogging so much and letting it fill up with tweets…
Many of my friends have already been and gone to many festivals across Europe; Hellfest, Metalcamp and a multitude of others. However, having a little baby can be quite restrictive when it comes to things like that – camping in a field when Freyja is so young is just a no-go – so where we normally would’ve accompanied everyone, we sat at home cleaning up poo and sick… although I don’t think I know anyone going to Wacken Open Air this year due to it’s weakening line-up and shift towards poor music (Bring Me The Horizon, Bullet For My Valentine for example). However when it comes to Bloodstock Open Air, Hannah’s mum lives just round the corner! This blessing has enabled us to visit the festival grounds during the day, and travel home in the evening to see our gorgeous baby girl. Maybe next year we might be able to bring her with us – she’ll be about 16 months by then, but we need to find out if even ear defenders will be enough at that age… May not even be until 2011…
Anyway, this year I’m looking forward to seeing some great bands, including Carcass, Katatonia, Saxon, Apocalyptica, Blind Guardian, Enslaved, Amon Amarth, Anathema, Europe, Satyricon and Turisas. It also means I get to finally update The Metal Page!
We’ve had the suggestion from many different people that we should enter Freyja into competitions and model her for companies and so on. Hannah and I have discussed this a few times when the suggestion comes up, and we just can’t justify it.
