Christmas 2012

At Cowieswells, December 2012. Note the house is not quite as finished as it should be!

After reading this I was almost tempted not to write anything this year but then I decided not to be bullied by cynics but I promise  I will keep it short and sweet.

It has been another busy year for us, Sophie is growing-up fast, the house is getting built (although not finished as we had hoped) and time is flying by. Katharine has been working full time, designing large chunks of the house and bringing up a small hyper-active child who doesn’t sleep very much. She is also pregnant and growing another baby that, all things being well, will be born in April  2013. Not surprisingly she is sleeping a lot! Who would have believed that bed at 9pm would have become a norm?

Sophie is almost 2 and growing fast. She is now fully mobile, running, shouting, laughing and generally keeping us busy. She is a bossy little madam who knows her mind (can’t imagine where she gets that from!). She can string a few sentences together and will very earnestly tell us all about her day and what she wants to do next. Collecting stones from the beach is very popular at the moment (guess where that comes from?). We are steadily priming her for having a sibling  and have high hopes that she will make a great big sister. All in all, being a parent is hard work and fantastic!

I have been overseeing the house building and working in between. Lots of travelling to Utah, Spain and the Middle East. Even managed to full fill a life time ambition and do field work in Greenland this summer. An amazing place and playing with guns, helicopters and technowank, while dodging polar bears was a perfect way to spend two weeks in the summer. Apart from that I have spent about ¼ of my time in Norway where I moved into the Fosswinklegates ghetto. Living in town has been nice and gives me a chance to catch up with people when I am in town. Still can’t wait to be living out at Cowieswells and spend as much time as possible there, in between everything else.

Building our new house at Cowieswells  has been a long process and it is now about 3 months behind schedule. We had hoped to be in for Christmas but the weather and Nordan* conspired against us. Its good to look back at the pictures on the blog and see how far we have come in 6 months and when we get in it will be an amazing place to live. Latest guess is now Febuary 2013!

Lots of good stuff to look forward to next year. New child, new house, a bit less travelling (hopefully), fieldwork in great places, buying a tractor and maybe even getting those Alpacas!

In the meantime we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and hope to see you all in the New Year 

   

(*Nordan – Norwegian company who make great windows but have an interesting perspective on time keeping and deadlines)