I had a message from a relative in Ireland – Mrs Hughes, aka Nana that there perhaps wasn’t enough about our family on DragonDrop.org at the moment. Quite right -here’s a family special, blog post! The first thing you might want do is click this link to the Family catagory and bookmark it. Anything I put on DragonDrop to do with family will appear there and all the other stuff – photography, technology, music and the like, wont be.

A quick who’s who of our family for the uninitiated – there’s me and my wife, and our 3 soon to be 4 kids. Our eldest – Felix is 14, Jaygo our second boy is 11 and Sophie is 6. So – how are we all doing? I hear you ask. Apart from my recent vertigo, we are all doing really well. I was back on my feet enough to head out into the warm, beautiful sun today. An afternoon in it has been just the tonic. I took my fairly new (ish) camera – a Leica Af-C1 and a roll of Kodak Ektar 100 out with me then after our jaunt, popped into town to have it processed (the photos on this blog post are the results of which), whilst we had a coffee. The joys of being off work!

I’m actually on annual leave from work this week – I thought I’d book a week off as it’s half term – so I’m extra glad I’ve been up and about so as not to waste the whole thing unable to move in bed. Felix was round at his friends house today – probalby playing MineCraft, but the rest of us went to a local park where we basked, climbed trees and played in the beck (kids – trees, Eirene and I – basking, dog – beck). We were with some friends and had a fine selection of differntly aged kids. Nice to hang out with a dainty little toddler. Good practive!

Eirene is quite rounded now with only 3 weeks to go until due date – she could officially, safely arrive anytime now. Baby is well and trully kicking and poddling about. Quite a strong wee one. She gets hicups a lot at the moment. We have a few ideas now for names, which we’re keeping close to our chest until she arrives.

Not much else planned for the rest of the week. Close to home ‘just in case’ although we may take a couple of day trips out over the next few days. Just on the family thing – I’m still frequently snapping photos and a lot of these get uploaded to my main photo ‘album’ website : flick. I’ve just created a set on there called ‘Family‘. I’ve just placed every photo I could find of ‘family’ in there currently around 680, and ordered them, roughly speaking, newest at the top.  With nearly seven and a half thousand photos in my flickr stream now, I may have missed the odd one or two (although I’ve been fairly good at tagging over the years, so it was a fairly simple task) We’ve just sat through the entire slideshow of the whole lot – quite a wonderful trip down memory lane.

For the more here and now, day to day stuff – I’m also uploading stuff from my phone to a website called instagram. Instagram for me is ‘enhanced, quick snaps’. Pot luck, as to what I’ve been taking photos of though at any given time.

I’m drawing towards the end of this post now. I think I’ll be blogging a bit more about family for a while – what with the iminent arrival, but part of me has avoided writing too much about family recently, so as to try my hand at writing a blog with a global appeal, not just a famly journal.  The analogy that keeps rattling round my head is – it’s kind of like the advice an estate agent gives you when showing your house – don’t have too much sentimental stuff lying around. You may like it, but the rest of the world isn’t all that bothered. But then again, I blog about what I see, and think and I see and think family a lot. I guess the only people left reading this particular post will almost definatly be people I know (correct me if I’m wrong). If I do know you – or better still if you are family, I’d love it if you left a comment from time to time – fill out the boxes below and say hello!