Monday with Erika

Posted on 2012/09/18 10:50:34 (September 2012).

[Monday 17th September 2012]
I'm definitely starting to lose track of what day it is a bit now, having spent most of last week mostly confined to the flat, it feels a bit like we've had one extremely long weekend. So anyway, this is now the second week of my fortnight's paternity leave.

We had a delivery from Amazon this morning - some new cartridges for our printer. I wanted to print some baby photos, but the printer hadn't worked properly for some time and I thought new ink cartridges might help. It didn't really. I was rather annoyed by this, so spent a while taking it partly to bits in an attempt to clean the heads, which are presumably clogged. Whilst other areas of technology have generally improved over the last decades, printers are the one thing which actually seem to be getting worse. It used to be the case that a printer was a fairly substantial investment, that would work reliably for a few years. Nowadays the industry seems to have gotten itself into a race to the bottom with a model nobody benefits from, where the printers are ludicrously cheap and the cartridges are expensive, which is supposedly where they make their money - only I suspect they don't, because people just buy third party cartridges instead. So consequently the devices themselves are very shoddily constructed and painfully unreliable. This isn't just irksome to the consumer it's pretty environmentally irresponsible too - the printers themselves have effectively become the consumables.

Chie and Erika Skype called to Yoko-san - Erika's obaachan in Japan just before lunch. We had called her part way through our particularly bad night last week, and I have the definite impression Erika finds her obaachan's voice soothing. Although she did seem to be confused as to exactly how the little black box (Chie's laptop) was talking to her.

For lunch I rustled up a salad incorporating the leftovers from last night's dinner. As we've not been eating out or anything this past week we've done a really good job of using things up, and have thrown away very little food so far - that's rather satisfying actually.

After lunch I went out for another of my shopping forays, again to Peter Jones in Sloane Square. I bought rather a lot this time, including a baby bath and a splash mat, a thermometer (which would tell us both air and water temperature), some baby grows with farm animals on, a new draining rack for the kitchen sink (the old one was rusty and my nesting instinct wanted to get rid of it) and a few other bits and pieces.

We then took Erika out for another quick spin in her buggy around the gardens. Again she looked a bit bemused by it all, but didn't cry, so I assume wasn't entirely against the notion.

For dinner - it being a Monday - we made Chinese food. Actually we managed to cobble together quite an interesting meal from various bits and pieces. We started with mock duck pancakes, then had a sort of sweetcorn soup, then finished with a mock shrimp and spinach stir-fry, in a sweet mirin and ginger sauce.

Actually watched some telly for the remainder of the evening, for pretty much the first time since we've come back from the hospital. I suppose that could be a sign that we're settling into something like a normal routine.

Baby bath sugoi ne!
tukatte mite ikaga?

Posted by yoko at 2012/09/20 02:22:29.

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