The Travels of Carrie and Adrian: May 2010

Yes yes, we've not been keeping the Record of the Family up to date in the manner which our audience has come to expect. There have been complaints, we acknowledge that, and you can be assured that those responsible has been given a good talking to, and if it happens again the consequences will be more severe. So, with the time that has passed, there are quite a few pictures to choose from and a number of events to report.

Martha was 4 on 6th April and as that day was during Spring Break she was at her grandparents house. Unfortunately I wasn't as I don't have such a thing as a spring break, but I join the rest of the family for the weekend. She got a bicycle for her birthday - which wasn't completely pink, but was mostly - and was very happy with that, until she tripped up getting on to it, and from then on was a bit scared of it. During this week the other set of grandparents arrived too, and after getting the train from Santa Barbara to Emeryville they stayed with us for a few weeks.

Martha on the bike

We also had the good fortune to be invited to the wedding of Cousin Sammy in Los Angeles. This meant not only the chance to dress up and go to a wedding, but also the chance to see all the other Johnston kids and the opportunity to stay in a hotel. With a pool. And a big breakfast. A good time was had by all.

Noah and Matthias

Tom standing next to a large open pot containing what looked like (and was) stagnant water, pond weed and other aqueous detritus. A more unsuitable combination of person and object is hard to imagine.

In the pool at the hotel

Dancing at the wedding

Tom is both very entertaining and very annoying - often at the same time. If he was only annoying I feel we would have exchanged him already, but the entertaining side of him takes the edge off (see video of hitting the ball below). He's pretty good at saying a number of words, such as "hold it", "Martha", "strawberry", but mostly he makes an attempt but gets it wrong such as "quar" (squirrel), "goose" (juice), "ocho" (computer), "ogoo" (yoghurt). Occasionally he says verbs, but usually he steers clear of those. He did say "ogoo fall down" a few weeks ago, which I believe is a sentence! He'll be two in July and I remember Martha not saying much when she was two and speaking non-stop when she was three.

Earlier this year I was commissioned to build a bookcase. Having been given free-rein on the design of it, I decided to construct a large one, and made it fit neatly along one wall of our room. Dad and I did most of the work on it when he was here. Here's a picture of it after being filled up:

I made it go over our cupboard door, but that exposed the very unstraightness of anything in our 89year-old wooden house (note wedge-shaped gap above door in the picture; the shelves are horizontal). I even used a router to put the ironwork into recesses. This gave me an excuse to go to the very brilliant Berkeley Tool Library which really does work like a library, from where Dad and I borrowed a table router and we made the grooves in about 15 minutes! I was so impressed I went out and got a small router for myself, with which I made the little holes in the shelves. The little differences...