There's more to babies than poo, milk and vomit

One of Andy's main concerns about having a baby is that it will be boring. That and the fact that he'll no longer be able to climb/ski/mountain bike whenever and wherever he wants to, and will feel tied to this dribbling, uncommunicative creature that has no control over its bowels (the baby that is, not me). I refer you back to his response to the question of what the future holds in our antenatal class: 'Poo. Milk. Vomit.'

Fortunately, we have nice friends who kindly obliged by coming to stay with us for a few days at the beginning of January, bringing their two children to show Andy that alongside the poo, milk and vomit (of which, yes, it turns out there is quite a bit), there is also occasional fun to be had. The Jeens family (Henry, Lisa, Olivia and Alex) came to stay with us on their way back from London to Singapore, where they've been living for the past few years. Like us, they have a fairly positive, go-for-it attitude to life - get on with it, bundle the kids along with you, and you can more or less do the same things as before, give or take the odd bit of extra childproof logistics. Olivia was flown halfway around the world to a wedding when she was just a couple of weeks old and both kids seem pretty unfazed by the whole travelling thing.

Having previously thought that boys were the preferred child option (you get to tick a box, right?), Andy was nicely persuaded by Olivia that girls aren't too bad either. It helps that's she's extremely cute (she gets it from her godmother.... that's me):

And the fact that she wanted Andy to teach her to play the drums - and that she has great rhythm - definitely helped her earn extra brownie points. Here she is having her very first drum lesson (Andy will love me for posting this fetching picture of him in his dressing gown):

But Alex isn't too shabby either, and his gruffalo costume helped to make up for the fact that he doesn't quite have the same level of chat as Olivia yet. That said, I'd like to stake a claim for him saying his first word, 'cat', while he stayed with us and trailed Bella around the house, never quite managing to catch up with her.

So what else did we learn from our child-orientation lessons? We learned that you can't always rely on them to be an alarm clock, that some children will sleep for 12 hours straight and, on occasion, will have to be woken up by their parents at 9.30am because everyone else is awake and they aren't. I understand that's the majority of children, right? And that it starts more or less from birth...? We learned that some nine month olds have a surprisingly large capacity for peas. And we learned that no matter what programme is playing on Cbeebies at the time, no matter how apparently dull and poorly-made, children will fall into some kind of mesmerised trance while watching it. That, and the fact that you can never watch too many episodes of Alphablocks (although we knew that part already).

We were fortunate to have some amazing weather while the Jeens were here, so we took the advice of our bank manager who, back in September, had told us that we simply must visit Yvoire and eat perch by the lake, and we took a day trip up Lac Leman. Yvoire is a tiny picture-perfect village that in summer must be heaving with tourists and locals, but in early January was more or less closed up, with the exception of one very nice hot chocolate spot and a strange shop selling models of fairies. We didn't manage to eat any perch, but the tiny harbour that looks out over Lake Geneva is one of the prettiest spots we've visited since coming here:

And even when deserted and closed up, the rustic old buildings and tiny streets rival Annecy in the charming stakes:

For Andy, there was an ulterior motive underlying our trip to Yvoire - it is very close to Thonon-les-Bains. Other than a quaint little funicular railway and a nice view over the lake, Thonon doesn't have much to recommend it (note how short the Wikipedia entry is) - except for the giant sprawling industrial estate which just happens to contain one of the biggest and best-equipped outdoors shops in the region. We spent three thrilling hours in said shop while Andy tried on ski touring boots and yesterday, which was Andy's birthday, he chose for his birthday treat to go back to the same shop and spend another three hours getting the boots fitted.

Skiing has been a little thin on the ground lately - quite literally - as it's been really quite warm for about a month now and even the mountains have had very little snow since early December. Fortunately, this didn't stop Olivia receiving her first ski lesson from a very proud Henry, nobly assisted by daddy-in-training, Andy:

All this go-for-it attitude has left Andy with the belief  that it's completely feasible for me to be skiing again by March. That we'll just station ourselves in a restaurant halfway up the mountain and alternate babycare duties every hour or so, while the other person skis. I'm less convinced. Right now, the prospect of 12 feeds a day, 10 nappy changes a day and occasional snatches of sleep somewhere in between times is weighing on my mind more heavily than pulling on my ski gear. Three weeks to go, folks.