Spring update

I've been a rather inactive blogger lately. Nothing really serious, only a tight deadline for a paper at university and a language attrition workshop in Groningen, Holland. I managed to combine the latter with a short but very nice trip to Veldhoven to see Marlien, my old friend and former collague from Scotland. We spent a great evening together eating pizza, looking at old Camphill pictures and trying to recall the names of long-forgotten residents and co-workers. In short, it was just like in the good old days in her flat in Main Street in Doune.

Oh yes, and latelt I've been spending quite a lot of my precious free time on tidying up in my hand-scribbled notes, piles of documents and various computer files which until recently constituted the rather chaotic outcome of five-years worth of genealogy research. This process resulted in a new, flashy website which can be visited here. I really feel I could go on about the pleasures of family history research but I'd better leave that for another time; there are more important things to report.

Tristan has been through another explosive phase of development since my last entry. He can now walk with a lot of confidence, crawl up practically any piece of furniture and is very close to saying things one can actually recognize as words. Unfortunately his regular carer got ill in the beginning of January and is unlikely to return to work, so we have now been waiting for three months for the local authority to allocate a new place for him. In the meantime Tristan has been attending a so-called 'guest house' for kids in a similar situation. This has been an unqualified success: the place has the capacity to accommodate up to 20 children, and it seems like the bigger the crowd the better for Tristan. He simply loves being there and can't wait to get out of his push-chair in the morning. Our only concern is the constant change of attendants which prevents him from forming longer-lasting attachments to other children. So we do hope the authorities will soon get their act together and come up with a new permanent place for him.

What else is new? Just a few days after Inge's departure we also had the pleasure of entertaining Søren, Ane's stepdad as a guest. Somehow Tristan feels particularly attached to him and it is rather touching to watch the two together lost in conversation.

And finally, in a few days' time we are off to Hungary to spend a few days in Budapest and then to celebrate my mum's 60th birthday together with the rest of the family. She hasn't seen Tristan since the middle of October, so his presence is likely to become the greatest present of them all. I'll write about how it went in my next entry.