I mentioned a little while back that I had a few new projects up my sleeve. Well this is one of them: thanks to my very kind uncle, I have a rather gorgeous Yamaha flute on long-term loan.

Not that I can get a note out of it yet. I have got some flute tuition books on order with Amazon, but they’re not due to arrive until the end of May. In the meantime, my mission is to practise in front of the mirror to get a note out of it, and that definitely isn’t as easy as it looks.

The decision to teach myself the flute though has had a rather nice side effect: it’s given me piano cravings and I’ve started having a little go at that again (in my youth I got to Grade 7, but my piano has mainly stayed silent over recent years). Playing music again seems to fill a gap in a way it’s hard to explain – it’s nice to take the time out in the day to get lost in a familiar tune.

If he was still alive he probably wouldn’t of blogged them (after all, he wrote them using mirror writing to deter snoopers), but I’ve discovered that there’s a way of receiving the Da Vinci Notebooks via RSS.

In these notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci recorded his thoughts and plans from everything to a design for diving apparatus to observations of the world around him. Reading them only gives you a glimpse of how his mind works (there doesn’t seem to be any topic that didn’t interest him) but it’s fascinating.

Unfortunately, it’s text only, so you miss out on his fabulous diagrams, and it’ll take over 4 years to read the lot, but each page is fairly short and thought provoking.

Long-time readers of Pewari’s Prattle will remember that a couple of months ago, we had an opportunity to buy our dream house and after much deliberation put our own house on the market.

I’ve kept rather quiet about the ups and downs of the last few months, mainly because it was such a roller-coaster it was hard to say exactly what was happening, but also to avoid too much identifying information for the other party (which is hardly fair). However, I can now report that we’re now not moving and have notified the estate agents to take ours off the market.

The decision was mutual between both us and the owners of the dream house. The market seems very slow here at the moment and we weren’t getting much interest, plus the other owners had been very disappointed with the quality and cost of housing in the area they were looking to move to. The reasons they were moving have been resolved to a satisfactory Plan B and we’ve both agreed that the best plan at this point in time is to both stay exactly where we are.

All is not lost, in many ways it’s a relief – financially it’s not really a good time for either of us to be moving. We’ve got to know the owners really well over the last couple of months and have got quite friendly with them; our children all play nicely together and it would be a real shame to split those friendships up. It still may happen in the future as we have both tentatively suggested trying again in a couple of years time and near neighbours with similar style houses are now also aware we would be interested if they chose to move.

I am, of course, a little disappointed – we had great plans. But we are now making new ones and are going to do a blitz on this house – doing all those decorating things you only do if you’re trying to sell, but this time actually doing it for us rather than a prospective buyer. That’ll be a novel experience.

There are also plans afoot for a “Not Moving” street party…

Li’l Bhaji has had a pretty good vocabulary and sentence structure for a long while now – problem is that he’s mostly indecipherable (sometimes even to me) as his enunciation just isn’t that clear. It’s almost like he’s learned whole sentence patterns before he’s learned to sound out each word.

However, over the last few weeks he’s suddenly got a lot clearer and is starting to pronounce the beginnings and endings of words much more precisely, with one rather cute addition – he’s gained a lisp (or should that be a lithp?).

It’s a very precise lisp. He’s deliberately and purposefully putting his tongue between his teeth to make the sound. I realise a lisp is fairly common in this age group (almost 3), but ironically his brother (at a similar age) could never pronounce the “th” sound, always using “ff” instead. So this is a new experience for us. I’m trying very hard to resist saying “awww, cute” and giving him a hug every time or just resorting to gentle teasing – after all, don’t want to give the lad a complex.

I must confess though, that when he was insisting to my mother that “yes, it DOETH!” rather vehemently and she automatically replied “no, it doethn’t” that there were rather amount of unseemly giggles for quite a while afterwards.

So, there I was flipping through the stats for my ‘umble little blog.

I think in general I have fairly respectable numbers for a personal blog whose outlook on life tends to be fairly … random… in terms of topics – Mooncups, baby gurus and chicken & mushroom pies for some reason getting a large slice of the fame.

My daily unique visitors have been as high as 150 a day, but are mostly around the fairly respectable 80+ of which I guesstimate that half of them are coming in via searches from Google and the like, either finding what they need or being bitterly disappointed and buggering off again.

Up until recently, I’ve been fairly ignorant of my RSS readers. Then I got a plugin for my stats package (Mint, for the terminally curious) which kept a count of feed subscribers – fantastic.

About 11 a day – it sounded a little low (as I knew bloglines had 12 subscribers alone) but assumed it was the right order of magnitude and that aggregate feed readers probably only counted once or something.

Small but respectable. It warmed my heart that there were a few online friends who liked it around here enough to visit on a regular basis and see what I was up to.

However, about half an hour ago I realised that there were other tabs to the plugin, and the number 11 only referred to Atom subscribers. After a few seconds of feeling a bit stupid for not noticing before, I flipped over to RSS2 out of idle curiosity.

400+ daily subscribers.

FOUR HUNDRED!

There are four hundred of you out there reading my god awful witterings about my children, stuff in the news and whatever current mind-bogglingly stupid scheme I’ve got going at the time. Given that my average is 5 comments a post (and that includes me replying to people), a lot of you are being very very quiet.

My flabber is well and truly ghasted.

And each and every one of you are now commanded (oh… okay… humbly requested) to comment and say “hi” – we’ve got 156 comments on the Mooncup post to beat…

The lunchtime nap has gone for good.

Oh, it’s not that Li’l Bhaji refuses to have one, on the contrary he’ll happily sleep for two hours in the middle of the day and then not go to sleep until nearly ten at night – not an ideal situation. So, I’ve had to ban the middle of the day sleep.

Li’l Bhaji is, of course, coping fine with the new routine. It’s just me and Akra Jr who are hurting. Akra Jr is devastated that he no longer gets sole Mummy time while Li’l Bhaji sleeps, allowing such privileges as watching scary films like Walking With Dinosaurs, and I’ve been promising him Doctor Who episodes for months now. I’ve just no idea how to fit these treats in around our new routine without scaring Li’l Bhaji witless in the process.

Additionally, I’m devastated because suddenly my downtime with cup of tea and illicit chocolate bar has disappeared along with the time I’d jealously guarded for new projects. Still, better that than having our evening disintegrate because our youngest son is well rested, full of beans and wanting to play.

Of course, it won’t be long before I regain some time again (once we start getting the nursery vouchers in September he’ll be expanding his sessions to 5 mornings a week). For the time being, though, I shall just mourn the loss of the lunchtime nap and praise the inventor of the DVD player…

Today we finally got around to buying Li’l Bhaji some brand new, open-toed sandals for the summer as the poor kid has been sweltering in socks and shoes all holiday. He chose the style and colour he liked in the shop, refused to put his old shoes back on and is generally very very pleased with them.

So, what is he wearing now he’s playing out in the back garden?

His wellie boots…

It’s hard to believe that Akra Jr goes back to school on Monday. Two weeks seemed ages right at the start, but they have flown by.

We don’t really have a lot to show for the time off, either. There were plans to go out and do things, which mostly didn’t materialise. Instead we’ve had a fairly slow paced holiday, with lots of time outside playing with the neighbourhood kids.

It’s been great – I was never much of an outdoor child myself, preferring instead to sit inside with a book or on the computer only grudgingly shifting if I was forced to, but as an adult I’m really enjoying escaping from the house. I can’t wait until we can get the folding camper back out of the garage and start exploring the UK again this summer.

One thing we did manage to do during the bank holiday weekend, however, was go for a trip out to Bewdley and go for a walk down by the river. We’d pretty much got the map out and stuck a pin in it – there was an obvious picnic place on the banks so we aimed for that.

On arrival we discovered it was actually one of the start points for a beautiful circular walk around the surrounding countryside of Bewdley called the Ribbesford Circular Trail. It’s nigh on perfect for families with young children, as it’s only 2 miles long and is pretty flat throughout.

We had a fantastic time of it, and although Li’l Bhaji did struggle on the last little bit, it’s fairly obvious he’s grown out of the pushchair age now. I’m so looking forward to the summer now I know we don’t have to lug that bit of equipment around – so freeing. Anyway, if you’re interested, the photos from our walk can be found on my Flickr pages.

Today I am rather excited because, thanks to a post on the Money Saving Expert Forums, I’ve discovered that Open University have given free access to many of their course materials online on their new site: OpenLearn.

Of course, all the courses aren’t available yet, you don’t get a degree at the end of it and you don’t get access to the OU tutor system, but those of us who just love learning for the sake of it and don’t care whether they get a piece of paper at the end or not, this is all amazing stuff.

Now all I have to decide is which unit to study first… “Babylonian Mathematics” perhaps? Or maybe “Introducing Philosophy”… decisions decisions!

For those readers who are more camera-minded and might want to take a look, I’ve just contributed a mammoth post over at the new Fotonomy Blog entitled 8 Tips For Taking Great Aquarium Photos.

The idea behind the blog is to give useful camera and photography advice, discuss photography-related hardware and share tips. It’s primarily the companion blog to the Fotonomy photo sharing site, but will hopefully be useful to everyone interested in photography.