Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas from the whole Hopton family.  This picture is actually from 24 December, because that's when the Czechs have their main Christmas celebration.

This is also the first ever picture of all four of us :)

The Hoptons
(December 2012)

Adopting

Every now and again I see or read something that reminds me how lucky we are to live in a modern western democracy like the UK.

Earlier this week, the UK government promised more support to speed up the adoption process for prospective parents.  It's a positive but hardly revolutionary announcement and I probably only gave the story a passing glance when I first read it.

Then today, in a completely unrelated story, Russia announced that it would no longer allow Americans to adopt Russian children.  What a bizarre concept!  Reading further it turns out that this is actually just one part of a tit-for-tat series of isolationist measures between Russia and the US.

Still, seeing this reminded me of the UK announcement and really drove home to me the importance of the incremental but progressive reforms that we excel at in this country.  We don't move forward by leaps and bounds, but we do always seem to be heading in the right direction.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Getting Ready for Christmas

It's three days until Christmas. I've genuinely not enjoyed this time of the year so much in a long long while.  Ellie is at the right age to start appreciating Christmas properly.  I've had a week off work already so I'm winding down and in the right mood for it all.  We're not traveling anywhere or hosting any visitors.

Ellie and Ben have both come down sick, however.  Ellie has got a vomiting bug of some kind.  She won't eat much, is always tired and whine-y, and is occasionally sick.  I'm writing this having just put her back to bed and cleared up another batch of vomit.

Ben has got an eye infection (a recurrence from a couple of weeks ago) and a stuffed nose which keeps waking him up.  We also think he's started teething.  Jana and I are sleep-deprived and shattered.

The thing with kids is how they bounce back.  Even during the day, most of the time you wouldn't know either of them is unwell.  Ellie helped decorate the tree.  She enjoys taking several baubles off at once, wandering around with them strung from her fingers, and then placing them back in a little cluster.  We bought Christmas crackers today so she's been placing them on the tree too.

Mum and Charlie visited recently.  In Edinburgh we heard Christmas pop music so my mum bought us a CD and Ellie keeps demanding it be played.  I recorded a video of her dancing and sent it back to my mum.

Jana is taking the opportunity of having me around helping with the kids by spending more time in the kitchen, cooking and baking to her heart's content.  We are eating our main meals at midday.  In the evening, we're eating Stilton and drinking port (well I am.)

By and large, give or take, this is what I imagined (and hoped) the run up to Christmas would feel like once I had my own family.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

An Update

Since my last post I've got a job, got married, moved to Scotland, bought a house and had two kids.