Category: Journal

Elisha’s grandma (the artist formerly known as My Mum) sent her a nice new swing of her very own. I put it together today and this is her testing it out.

We though that it was too small in its “infant” guise, though, as she was swinging to and fro very sharply due to the shortness of the ropes. The swing could be converted from an infant size into something that’s supposed to last kids until they’re ten. However, the rope on the baby seat would need extending so that it would sit lower in the larger frame.

Venturing to the retail park we bought some new rope, then happened upon Graeme, Lisa and Francis on our travels, who joined us for a meal in Pizza Hut.

That done, we returned home and converted the swing to über-schwing configuration as the sky got dusky and the insects got pesky. Elisha was getting over-tired at this point and was crying on and off as various things frustrated her while we beavered away with the conversion process. When it was done she perked right up – clearly delighted with the extended swing-time.

The light was failing by now, which is why my PSP’s Go!Cam was struggling to capture the fun in a single shot, but I filmed some murky footage all the same to record Elisha’s first moments on her new favourite thing.

I’m sure you can imagine the unpleasant meltdown that followed when we took her off the swing to bring her in for bed, though!

Fingers crossed the weather will be good tomorrow so she can get some good use out of it. I’m going to try and hammer the pegs into the ground so that Fliss doesn’t have to stand there holding the swing the whole time, but we’ll need to figure out an ideal spot for it first. All in all a successful present. Thanks mum/grandma!

Today I managed to get the camera accessory for my PSP a day before release, thanks to the friendly assistant at Game. Burning to use it, I took Elisha to the park on the way home and recorded her on the swings. Elisha was oblivious of the fact she was being used as a guinea pig for my filming, although she seemed very impressed when we watched the videos back when we got home.

The videos are of a good quality – especially the 30fps PSP format ones – sadly the video has been reduced to pixelated mush by YouTube, so I’ll need to think of some other way of hosting them. I put the original video of Elisha on a Swing here for download (almost 13Mb) so you can see the quality of the original.

Unfortunately photo mode isn’t quite up to replacing our broken digital camera at 1.3 megapixels, but the pictures will be good enough for sticking on the web at any rate.Keep your eyes peeled for more movies in the coming weeks as my fledgling career as a director takes shape! 😉

This morning I got the phone call I’ve been expecting would come since Elisha started nursery in December. They said she was ill, and could somebody come and pick her up because they thought it was a bug and didn’t want to put the other kids at risk.

When I went to get her I figured she’d be tearful and running a temperature, but she seemed alright to me. I gathered her stuff and took her out to the car, then figured that this (just after eleven on a Thursday morning) would be as good a time as any to take her to the Early Learning Centre for a play. That turned out to be the case, as it was pretty much empty and Elisha had a free reign to play with the bikes and other odds and ends.

I wanted to get her some flash cards with animals and stuff on them so we could help her learn them, but the closest I found was a jigsaw type of thing with animals and objects in different shapes that you had to match to the appropriate hole. I got that for her and a box of chalks so she could draw on the patio, too.

Once we were home I took her out into the back garden with a purple stick of chalk that she’d chosen from the box, showed her what to do with it, and then left her to draw while I made us lunch. The chalk didn’t seem to be a big hit, to be honest. She just left it on the ground and went for a wander into the garden next door.

I brought her back in for lunch and after that I showed her the jigsaw. We had fun for a while as I picked out an animal in turn and asked “what’s that?”, pausing for dramatic effect before telling her the answer, then giving it to her to put back in the board. She seemed to think it was good fun for a while, but then wanted to see if she could make the fish fit where the cat was supposed to go. Not exactly the point of the thing, but at least she was having fun with it.

One out of two isn’t bad – I’m sure she’ll warm to the chalks some other time.

Now we have to figure out who’s staying home to play with the jigsaw and chalk tomorrow, as Elisha cant go back to nursery for 48 hours or until the “bug” clears.