James Titcumb

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…

Oops, I missed the last 2 weeks posts. Admittedly for Friday and Saturday I didn’t even have a blog whilst I set up my new server configuration for High Availability. So this will cover the last 2 weeks. What’s gone on? Well plenty of stuff. I went to Combat South on Sunday which was fun, and took Phil with us for his first session. He enjoyed, Jon enjoyed and it was a good day (although raining to begin with).

Weeks progress as normal really – go to work, come home, give Freyja dinner, get her ready for bed, put her to sleep, collapse on sofa in front of tellybox. Normally on Tuesdays, Hannah goes to work as well so I’m left to do everything on my own, but there is an upside in that I get to spend time with just me and Freyja which is nice. If she’s in a good mood… She’s been teething lots over the last 7 days or so; her canines are coming through so she’s been mega grumpy recently.

Last Saturday me and Freyja made an impromptu visit to Somerset to see my granny who had just bought a PC (from previously owning a Mac) and couldn’t figure out how to get it connected. So I drove for an hour and a half up and fixed it for her. Things I do! Never mind, it was nice seeing them anyway!

We went to see my skin and blister on Sunday as well which was nice but Freyja was very ill and sicked up all over our car seat! Oh dear, think it was a tummy bug, because I had the same thing on the Tuesday, how annoying. I spent all day in bed sleeping pretty much. A nice change, but I hate being ill as I feel really unproductive and useless… Anyway, a couple of days later and Hannah got it as well as she was sicking up all night, so we all got it in the end.

Friday came and Hannah got all excited as Rob Zombie tickets were released for his tour in February 2011. Needless to say she was on the phone before 9am trying to get tickets. I managed to get them in the end through TicketWeb, so we are going to the gig, hooray!

Tom came down on the Saturday as well, and we had all the good times. We went to Sakura Japanese restaurant which was exceedingly good – I love Japanese food and Sakura was great. Next time I must try their sushi as I had a rice dish (sushi + drinking = bad combination). Sunday obviously was spent being hungover mostly, although I wasn’t too bad – probably because Tom forced me to drink plenty of water before bed – thanks Tom!

And Monday was great too – had Phil over after work, ordered in some pizza and watched Harry Brown which was absolutely 100% fantastic. I’d highly recommend this film to anyone, and is one of the best films I’ve seen for a long time. Brilliant. You can read Hannah’s review on it, which pretty much sums up my thoughts as well. Last night I did some work on a client’s site, and I’d better get on with some more now as Hannah’s at work. C’est la vie!

Right, I’m getting moaned at by Hannah. Apparently I don’t blog about my “personal” stuff any more (i.e. Freyja). So I’m going to make a target of making at least one blog post a week relating to my personal life as well as my irregular posts about technical mumbo jumbo. If I had my own way, technically because this post is in the “Personal” category, that makes this one my first week’s post, but I don’t think that’ll wash with Hannah…

Many people across the world have made this pledge:

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Here is mine, and although I didn’t have to think very hard about who to post about, I still admire her more than anyone in the world.

Hannah is 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant today, and she’s still working hard at Netbasic. She’s not exactly a pro programmer, but she’s learning so quickly. From knowing nothing at all about HTML or CSS or Photoshop, she’s come forwards in leaps and bounds with the help of everyone here. It’s certainly not easy for her, she gets aches and pains all day, Braxton Hicks contractions, extremely painful kicks, and all sorts. She’s under the weather, tired and very drained, yet somehow she is carrying on, she’s still working hard and creating pages that are helping keep the company going!

I suppose this is just my way of saying how proud I am of her, and how awesome she is.

929 tweets later, and I finally got around to customising my Twitter page. I used the basic colours from my blog, with a huge mug shot on the side. How attractive! It was much simpler than I thought it was going to be…

I think it’s rather fetching personally… Hannah disagrees, but I don’t see her with a fancy customised Twitter page…