The Carr Family Year (1998)
Perhaps the main achievement for us this year has been finally passing
a long-awaited family milestone: no more nappies!
A whole decade of bottom-changing
is past and the weekly shopping seems less bulky. This year we holidayed
in the tent once again, spending a blissful week at a countryside park
in Devon with animals to feed, adventure playgrounds, bouncy castles, tractor
rides, ponies and swimming! Jan managed to pick us the two hottest week
of the summer, with our second week spent in good old Swanage with the
usual mix of beach bathing, steam train rides, coastal walks and Punch
and Judy shows.
At the beginning of the year Jan spent a fortnight visiting a
friend in India (Bombay and Goa) where she learned to haggle and to speak
while waggling her head. Shortly after she returned she won a cup in a
singing class in the Southampton Music Festival and then gained a Distinction
in a City & Guilds Interior Design exam. This may be another step on
the way to getting a job (see last year’s letter), but more immediately
it qualifies her to paint the front room pillar-box red. I’m afraid you’ll
have to wait for next year’s letter to see how it turns out! Jan’s just
finished helping to run an Alpha course at the church (you may have seen
the national advertising campaign) and she’s planning to run one for her
friends at home in the New Year.
Les has at last been offered a permanent lectureship, having
spent the last five years on temporary research contracts. Because the
department was so well-rated in the last National Research Assessment Exercise,
it has made it very difficult to apply for new lectureships without a proven
track record (i.e. without actually doing the job already). One of the
irritating standard questions in the interview was "What makes you think
that you should have a job in a 5* department", the answer to which is
"But I’ve had one here for the last 10 years!" Ho hum! Travel experiences
this year have been Madrid (hot, bit of a building site, Air France lost
my luggage), Pittsburgh (whole city closed at weekends, it takes an hour
to get a cab to a restaurant) and Geneva (loved the mountain ranges, not
too keen on the fondues). Next up is a conference in northern Germany in
February (venue cheap, but unexciting).
Daisy is 10
½ now and has recently started Guides which she enjoys much
more than Brownies. She’s also joined a gymnastic club and is performing
in a gala at Christmas as well as starting more and more after-school activities.
She is currently performing in the school panto this year as one of the
Pied Piper’s dancing rats! Hopefully she will finish her cycling proficiency
certificate before the spring, so that will encourage her to be mobile.
We have just chosen her secondary school and have amazingly (all three
of us) converged on the same decision after each of us all wanting different
choices. She’ll go to a single-sex state school at the other end of Shirley
to us, so that’s when her cycling will come in useful!
Joel (8 ½) has just come back from a week-long school
camp at a study centre in the New Forest. They did a lot of work on the
Celts and he was given the Celtic name "Ur". He’s also performing in the
school panto this year (as one of the Pied Piper’s singing rats) and was
chosen for the school’s gym group. He has started up swimming lessons along
with Daisy and Sam and is doing very well under water. He is also completely
fearless at going down flumes. His real passion though is dad’s new portable
PC and the exciting new games that can be played on it. I’m afraid the
old Macintosh is feeling rather left out: even if it does have 40 children’s
games on it nothing can beat FIFA 97 for the PC!
Sam
(6 ¾) is in the last year of his infants’ school. He is almost
a twin to Joel, size-wise, and we have practically given up differentiating
between their clothes. This year we got a climbing frame for the garden
and built a tree house (with the help of a friend) both of which Sam has
spent huge amounts of time on. He also whizzes up and down the pavement
outside our house on his bike/roller blades/skate board and is constantly
in and out of local friends’ houses. In fact we have just had a new front
door installed so that Sam can come in and out without having to ring the
doorbell!
Ruby (3 ½)
has just started Nursery class every morning, which she loves. She
usually chooses painting, drawing and playdough activities and has started
to bring home some abstract artwork and more recently some recognisable
people! Ruby absolutely adores dollies, probably because she has no younger
siblings to use. She also has a very active imagination, with a friend
called Bogger who lives on her hand and a whole race of little people she
sometimes sees and talks to around the house. Unfortunately they are shy
because Joel keeps stamping on them! Ruby also spends most of her day as
a ‘mation’ (as in the 101 Dalmations) barking and crawling around the house
on all fours ("I not Ruby, Daddy, I mation!") After the summer Ruby will
start school full-time, which opens up a whole wealth of possibilities
for the family. Perhaps Jan will find that Interior Design job, or maybe
she will take up glass-painting full time. Tune in next year to find out!
To contact us you can
email Les.Carr@cheerful.com
or surf to http://www.staff.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/family on the
Web. Choose any way to keep in touch: we need to have lots of nice, friendly
people around us or we'll crack up!
We wish you all a wonderful Christmas and an exciting New Year.