James Titcumb

Jasper made some breakfast this morning and it looked good. So me and Freyja went to the shop and got our own breakfast, which I have to say is much better. Purely because our sausages were made out of real meat. And ours has bacon. Real bacon. Mmmm bacon. Bacon is good. And toast. The only thing that’s not as good is the picture, but I’m no photographer, so I used my camera phone.

I also thought I’d throw in a picture of Kali and Freyja for luck. Freyja is shown here modelling her new buoyancy aid that her Granny (my Mum) bought for her to go swimming in France.

Kali couldn’t resist getting in the picture either, although I’m not sure she realises what it’s all about. She’s definitely a puppy, and more than a handful. Taking her on walks is a real struggle, but I’m sure we’ll get there. She’s only 15 weeks old bless her, but my she’s growing! In fact, this is her like 5 minutes ago:

If you’re wondering what the white powder is all over her head, it’s not dandruff, it’s sand from Freyja’s sand table we were playing with earlier and Kali decided to roll in some sand that had fallen off. Silly puppy!

My attempts to actually do proper blog posts (excluding Metal Mummy Movie Memes which appear to have dominated my blog since it launched) have been failing miserably of late. For this I do profusely apologise. I’m sure you all share the insane busyness that has been engulfing my life, and I know for a fact many of my friends do! In fact the only thing I’ve been doing recently is working and finding any moment I can to better myself at Starcraft 2, which isn’t going too well in all honesty. Never mind, this blog post is sponsored by my long awaited holiday which has suddenly freed up my time. Laptops are being left at home, and phones will be switched off – yes this will be an actual real life holiday!

We’re currently sat in Stoke on Trent (in Linda’s freezing cold house) sorting out the final bits and pieces of packing and shopping (hooray I have real flip flops now). Hannah is busy writing a couple of blog posts so that prompted me to do the same!

For those that don’t know, I’m taking a 7 day break from the stress of life, work and PHP and swanning off to Ölüdeniz in Turkey to enjoy some quality family time with Hannah, Freyja and the mother-in-law-to-be. I don’t have any specific plans for what to do, but I know that I’m going to do my best to chill to the max. I really am exhausted and really can’t wait to just unplug from everything. So… if my server goes down, or there’s an emergency at work, well you guys will just have to cope without me for a little while. It’s probably not such a bad thing if my server goes down for a while… less of my inane rubbish that spurts forth from my fingers into your eyes. And… with my low blogging frequency no-one will probably notice anyway!

So, here’s to me finally having a holiday, I can’t wait. So long and thanks for all the fish. Thanks for reading folks, that’s a wrap.

Yeah I completely fell out the habit of making a weekly “what I did” post didn’t… I didn’t think it was that interesting anyway – recounting whatever rubbish I did on whatever day. I’ll post less frequently probably, but here’s what’s been happening recently.

You must be living under a rock if you’re not caught up in the mayhem that is the lead up to Yule. It’s been manic for us and the worst is yet to come… somehow we have to manage to fit in seeing all the family. We’re going to see my grandparents and Kevin and Juli this weekend which is great – two birds, one Stone (or 4 to be precise…). It’s nice though because my “gy gy’s” love seeing Freyja. It must be quite a feeling being grandparents.. so I can’t blame them really.

Taking of Freyja, she’s been talking more and more and is slowly forming more real-sounding words. If you’ve met her you’ll know that she loves to babble inherently so its reassuring to know she’s starting to learn real words now such as Apple, star, butterfly, and a host of others. I read somewhere that between 18-20 months toddlers learn about 10 new words a day, and I’d say she’s not far off that! She’s still a stroppy madam though.. but she hits us less now though which is good. Putting her in her cot with no toys and the light on (to distinguish from bed time) seems to be doing the trick, and of course is used if there is no other option. Generally a telling off does the trick but sometimes doing that blows things up a bit and some time out is really needed. The joys of parenthood

Of course with Yule coming up we have been stocking up the spare bedroom with presents… you can move in there even less than normal! We’ve preordered a turkey crown from M&S and I’m looking forward to cooking a good dinner…

I don’t really have much else to say to be honest. So… until next time!

So Tuesday at work they attempted to build a Ferrero Rocher pyramid. We ended up building about 3 different pyramids, none of which were as impressive as the advert, as you can see. For the evening me and Hannah made a big old list of stuff to do:

• Do some my clients site
• Play Fallout: New Vegas
• Cook dinner
• Food shop
• Order Freyja’s main Christmas present
• Sell old mobile
• Do my accounts

Out of that list all I managed to do was do some of my clients site, cook dinner, and Hannah ordered Freyja’s present. It was a productive evening because of doing the website, but everything else was shelved so I left it to the next day…

… which was Wednesday. It was a busy day at work as normal, and we got lazy and ordered pizza for dinner. I did however get to play about 10 minutes of Fallout: New Vegas before we flaked out and went to bed.

Thursday was a day of many deliveries for Hannah. Our new tumble drier came, which has been fantastic in this November Rain (Hah! Music reference…). Freyja’s main Christmas present from me and Hannah arrived as well, a shiny new toy kitchen thing which cost a pretty penny, but hopefully she’ll enjoy. We also had Tesco come, which reminds me, I need to get on with doing the shopping for next week!

Friday wasn’t too eventful (well, it was at work, had a big old meeting to discuss Phones…) – Hannah was working in the evening, so I got some client work done. When getting Freyja ready for bed, the fireworks started of course though. They’re noisy and unavoidable and thankfully didn’t keep her up too much. The great thing is seeing her face when they went off and lit up the sky – I wrapped her up nice and warm and we stood out the front of the house watching quite an impressive home firework display by one of our neighbours. She loved it and pointed and squeaked every time one went off.

Saturday I went shopping for some Christmas bits – big mistake. It was horrendously busy and full of annoying people. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate crowds and the general public, so it was a bit of a nightmare for me. Standing in a shop waiting for them to look up the item because Hannah’s Christmas present happened to not have a price tag and me sweating buckets and Freyja writhing and crying in her pram is really not my idea of a good time. I tried going to town to look at some book shops, but it was crowded, annoying and Freyja started whining so I just had to leave. We had home made Tomato Soup for dinner (I thought it fitting, being fireworks “weekend”), which was scrummy and Freyja loved it too. She loves home cooked food, and I swear she has a “home-cooked-food” detector that makes her not want to eat anything else… she knows what’s good for her at least!

Sunday was awesome – me and 3 others from the Deco got suited, booted, locked and loaded for Russell’s private day at UCAP Virus. Everyone played fairly, I don’t think I even heard anyone utter the words “Take yer f**king hit!!” which was really good. People were being tactical, not being idiots, and I think everyone had a lot of fun. Monday again was uneventful – Hannah worked, and I was shattered so I flaked out and watched crap telly, just like Sunday.

Yesterday me and Freyja went for a trip to our boss Luke’s house for his birthday celebrations and had a canapé evening. Most of the couple of hours I was there was me chasing her around making sure she didn’t smash Luke’s glass cabinets filled with expensive-looking glasses with the pool balls she was throwing around violently… so it was a bit of a relief when she was settled down to bed. On the downside, it looks like I need my car looked at – the orange engine light has come on so I’m going to have to take it in to have the computer checked to see what’s wrong with it. Not that we can actually afford to get it fixed… Gah!

Anyway, I’d better get on with doing the shopping (I love shopping online!), and get Hannah some dinner! Ta ta for now folks, enjoy your week.

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…