Snow at the start of February

The last few weeks have been pretty busy; Saturdays are dominated by Nathan's Waterbabies (probably setting the scene for Mum and Dad's taxi for the next decade and a half), and then Sunday seems to come around too fast. I'm working from home on Mondays at the moment with my Mum in hospital, so spend Sunday night and Monday night doing work so I only need to deal with phone calls on Monday day when I'm looking after Nathan.

Mum is doing well, especially considering she has had her third hip replacement on her left leg following the fall and break. In some ways, it was a blessing in disguise where she damaged her leg, as she has had to have a new replacement – quite a beefy, robust one – rather than wait months to have it heal naturally. We're hoping she'll be out this week, which will take some of the strain off Dad with the travel to see her along with everything else. Of course, that depends on the all clear being given.


Out in the Cold

Nathan enjoyed the recent snow, especially on the worst day when he had Mummy and Daddy home with him due to travel issues. However, he did seem to think that it was a bit too cold and wet!


Unwrapping presents

Nathan also had his second birthday and party in January, and seemed to enjoy it a lot, especially opening the presents that he was lucky enough to get. The wrapping paper proved a big attraction as usual, and some of the toys are big favourites now!

There are a fair few new pictures on my Flickr page which you can get to from this page or directly by clicking on the pictures above.

Background Image is (Creative Commons), references by clicking on it.

On Friday night I completed the first draft of my theme, Singularities, for Graham Spearing's excellent Wordplay RPG. It weighed in slightly longer than planned at 15,000 words rather than 10,000 but I'm really pleased with the outcome. Graham has sent it to the editor with the rest of the book, rather than asking for a cut in length, and I await the outcome somewhat nervously.

I've got some reasonably ambitious plans for this if it survives playtest and proves popular, as I'd like to publish it as a standalone game. This means some more playtesting and writing later in the year, after I've done the layout work for the core book for Graham. The picture above is a mock up idea for a standalone game cover.

"Lovable Spot"

So, there he is, the stuff of my current nightmares, "Spot the Dog". As with most children, Nathan tends to get a little obsessive about certain programmes that he has seen. The first big hit was probably "Thomas and Friends" (from which we are having a sabbatical after James and Gordon had a crash which Nathan didn't like) followed by "Trumpton" and "Camberwick Green". And then came "Spot the Dog". Now, Spot is great in small doses, and his educational DVD is really good, especially 'Spot's ABC', but when it's the only thing that your two year old wants to see it becomes... somewhat wearing.

Anyway, we're now on our fourth day of avoiding Spot, and it seems to be going well. Nathan has discovered the CBeebies bedtime hour, and loves "In the Night Garden", which he has heard in stories at Nursery, "Third & Bird" (which is fantastic, especially Muffin!) and "Charlie and Lola" (which has the best pseudo 70s soundtrack ever)!

We've also rediscovered lots of books and the train-set, which is great fun