Greg + Andrea

Wales in June

Greg Holmes — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:36:12 GMT

From being completely lazy for most of the year, we have not really done much on the website. That does not mean we haven't been busy, and I will try to show some of the more interesting events of the past few months in a couple of posts.

First up, we managed a short trip to Wales to visit Ealey and Gerry for a weekend in Wales. Blessed with fantastic weather we ventured up the Geyer (a hill near Abergavenny) and visited the lovely Llanthony Abbey where we enjoyed a lovely beer near the old monastery.

We popped the pictures in the gallery but here are a couple:

Lena and Gerry

Andrea, Ealey and Gerry at Llanthony

Happy New Year 2008

Greg Holmes — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:02:22 GMT

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

2007 was a great year! We celebrated 2008 coming by watching London's fireworks from the apartment of a friend.

Andrea's Youtube videos
Greg's Flickr site

I have sometimes been a bit lax on updates from this site, so please use the above links to see what we've been doing. I will pop these links onto the sidebar so you can come back to them.

2007 was a great year: during it we had many great events.

Lena's 1st Birthday
We moved house
We became Aunt and Uncle to Eleanor
We had a fun family trip to Scotland

In 2008, we want to:

Improve our house
Visit Australia in April
Holiday in Iceland
Go Skiing (wishful thinking)
and much much more!

Lena's First Birthday

Greg Holmes — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:07:06 GMT

Happy Birthday Lena!!!

To celebrate Lena's Birthday, Greg made her some pizzas, and Andrea made a cake with a special recipe and we got to enjoy a lovely day together. Some of you might expect a phone call or two, as Lena now has her own delightful telephone, with some cool ringtones.

We also were happy to pick up our bronze turkey ready for Christmas. This 5.6 kg beast will feed the 5 of us twice over we believe, so no need to dash out to the supermarket for a while after Christmas - maybe even until New Year!

Housewarming - we've moved yet again

Greg Holmes — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:31:56 GMT

So we upped house and moved one more time, or is that one last time maybe.

At least this time, we didn't move far, it is about 200 yards from the old place, on a busier road, but bigger and fitting our needs. We were lucky enough to have Francois, Phiona, and my Dad helping us move our stuff in, and managed the bulk of the move in 1 big day without professional help.

Lena is enjoying the new house, finding her newly learned crawling skills really useful, and also finding the steep steps a challenge rather than a barrier. She is also getting social with some other young children...

The new place is a lovely end of terrace house, 3 beds, nice living areas and a good sized kitchen, which is something we really prize in our modern living. The next challenge is the decorating, changing some of the more dated styles to fit in with how we want to live.

To top off the move, we set ourselves the very short deadline of a week to prepare for a housewarming party. At the last moment we did some panic buying of beer, wine and food, which means we are still very well prepared for anyone who wants to pop round for a quick beer.

I also have put a bunch of photos onto flickr of the housewarming

Lena reading

Greg Holmes — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 09:53:39 GMT

I know readers of Attack of the C'lonials will have already seen this, but I'd like to put this video here as well, because it shows how Lena is growing up in front of our eyes.

Lena has also shown her sense of humour and is fun to play with when she has had her food and is in a good mood. She laughs out loud when you throw and catch a ball or toy, she finds it fun to hang around upside down, and this laughter is very infectious in our household!

Scotland Trip

Greg Holmes — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:51:53 GMT

Well well well, I didn't want to say beforehand, but to surprise everyone we took a week or so off, and enjoyed a big road trip up to Edinburgh, over to Oban on the west coast, via Stirling and Callander.
We enjoyed the distillery in the town, before catching a ferry for a couple of nights stay on the Isle of Mull. This island used to be highly populated (30,000 or so) until the turn of the 19th century, when they shipped off most of the inhabitants to colonies in Australia, Canada and elsewhere in the world.
In fact, the city of Calgary in Alberta takes its name from a small bay on the island. We also had a boat cruise over to Staffa, which is a fantastic little island inhabited only by birds and seals.

www.flickr.com

gregholmes' Scotland Summer trip 07 photoset

After Mull and Staffa, we went back to the mainland, drove past the Scottish Open being played at Loch Lomond. We drove past to see the Highland Games being played at Balloch at the bottom end of the loch. Fancy stuff, and being from Germany we saw many parallels between the traditions of Scotland and Bavaria, where the old traditions are still valued.
It was exciting for a while, but then the three of us powered on to Ayr to spend our last night in Scotland.

We drove back on a scenic route through Nottingham, where we spent a lovely night with friends Paul and Cathy.

All in all we had a lovely week off, away from the bustle of town and the work, house hunting and lousy summer weather of Berkshire.

We'd like to thank Steve, Lisa, Ben, Alison, Bill, Katrina, Paul, Cathy and young Gregory for making our holiday that extra bit special either by having a place to stay or breaking up the driving with a lovely meal or tea break.

Events in the last two months

Greg Holmes — Sat, 26 May 2007 20:46:52 GMT

Some of you have written saying that I have neglected you. It has actually been almost two months, and a lot of new things have happened and most of all, Lena is getting bigger and doing loads of interesting things.

First of all, she is sitting up, starting to roll over, sing and gargle and sometime lie down to sleep when she wants.

So what have we been doing with her?

We've been in to London, visiting Matt and Vanessa and their daughter Isabel.
Marie (Greg's mother) visited, and we took her to a country show in Thame, and enjoyed the sunny springtime weather (where has it gone?).
Greg turned up at Bicester shopping village and happened to meet up with a friend, Brian. They both ended up buying new suits, and then drove back so Brian could meet Lena!
Norman and Lash visited for just on two weeks, so they got to go to the races in Ascot, trip down to Devon, went to Windsor Castle and the Imperial War Museum.
Greg's sister Claire has just arrived in the meantime, and she also went on the Henley trip.

So you could say we've been busy.
But there are many photos to prove this, and I have just uploaded four new albums for your viewing pleasure:

Devon trip

Marie's visit

May in Cookham with Norm and Lash

London with the Parrys

Trip to Munich

Greg Holmes — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:14:44 GMT

Lena has enjoyed her first international trip!

We just received her passport, and realised that we could still have a quick sneaky trip back to Munich to watch our band play its annual concert and catch up with a lot of old friends. So we started out in the Beergarden on Friday, Ate Weisswurst on Saturday, Visited friends and saw the Band on Sunday, and caught up with Peter on Monday at the Ratskellar and then headed back home to blighty. We all caught a horrible cold too, but that is another tale of lost sleep to tell.

The highlights of the trip was Lena meeting Corbinian and Jacob, the sons of our friends Kiki and Laurie, who were great with Lena and included her in their games - I am not sure what she added but it must have been exciting.
Also, us meeting so many of our friends again was great as it had been a long while, as it is now about six months since we left.

Oh, and we have like a zillion cute pictures of Lena in the gallery