Juicing

MK got a juicer for Christmas from K&L and we have been experimenting with different recipes over the last couple of days. Apples seem to be good and the pineaple was good too, but the rather past it's best melon gave me stomach ache. It seems to be a great and painless way of getting rid of all the awful fruit that is sitting around the house so later I may try it with some vegetables and see how cabbage juice tastes. If it is awful, at least I will have got rid of one of the cabbages from the fridge.

We were supposed to be visiting MKs family in Holte tonight, but we have had to cancel. J was up  lot in the night being sick (after drinking bath water that DK had pooped in) and DK has been coughing non stop for 24 hours to go with the running ear infection, cold and fever thing that he has going on at the moment.

Other than that, we're all fine.

Happy Chrimble

We've had a great, relaxed Christmas and MK was back in action again.

Disaster ahead

MK has the flu. I fear that this is going to take some of the fun out of Christmas at the very least.

Shortest Day

Today is the shortest day of the year which also makes it the worst day of the year in some respects. For the next 6 months, things just get better.

It is also looking rather wintery outside with another 20cm or so of snow falling overnight, we now have about 40cm over everything and it is beginning to get difficult to find places to put the stuff when you are moving it.

Apparently it is also -6C at the moment as well (this was last night)

Can anyone remember where I hid MK's Christmas present? I can't find it...

Bad Santa

We've had a snowy weekend. We went to get the kids hair cut, post cards and collect parcels from the post office on Saturday morning (thanks Auntie P) and then put up the Christmas tree and made pizza in the afternoon.

DK has been wearing his Father Christmas costume all day every day for 4 days now and shows little sign of taking it off. Thankfully he is wearing it over his clothes and is prepared to remove it for meals so it is not too dirty yet. I am, however, concerned that it won't last too many cycles in the washing machine.

Grumpy Nisser

The snow was absent for only a very short period and is now back and about 20cm deep around us. The country doesn't grind to a halt, but travelling is hard work and the roads are not being cleared properly becuase there is no money left at this time of year. Hopefully they have some set aside for the new year.

Just in case this doesn't happen, I have just ordered some studded snow tyres for my bike because I really need to get outside on my bike. I rode in the basement yesterday but it just doesn't cut it really.

Rapha Festive 500

My favourite bike clothing brand is running a challenge over the Christmas period to try and encourage people to keep riding through the bad weather. The challenge is to ride 500km between 23rd and 30th December and the winner will be the one who shows how they did this in the most creative way.

I am not kidding myself that there is a good chance of me completing this, let alone winning it, but I'm going to give it a go and I have created a new blog to chronicle my progress.

You can have a look at it here: http://ridingtheraphafestive500.blogspot.com/

In the meantime, I will try to figure out if this is possible at all as I already know that it is not sensible.

Woolly hats

I appear to have less hair with each passing month at the moment and am considering taking drastic action to deal with it in the new year. I'm not considering hair plugs

or a wig

But the Bjarne Riis thinning solution.

One of the drawbacks of getting thinner on top (unfortunately not in the middle) is that ones head gets rather cold. The obvious solution of a hat is an excellent one, but my preference is for a woolly hat and therin lies my problem, wolly hats make my head itch. A lot.

The solution is merino wool (I suppose cashmere would work too) so I have challenged MK to knit me a merino wool hat and amazingly she has accepted. The yarn has been purchased along with kneedles and a pattern and I am confident that there will be something ready for me to wear before next winter. I can't wait.

Christmas is coming and I am getting fat

I have a grotty cold and a cough which stopped me riding my bike on the icy roads in the freezing cold this weekend. We went and bought a Christmas tree on Saturday morning and then MK and the boys went to a Christmas concert in the afternoon whilst I did the supermarket with most of the rest of the town.

On Sunday MK had arranged for some friends to come and make Christmas decorations at our house so we had a house full of kids and mums. I make some jam tarts and the first mince pies of the year which went down well. It turns out that I make really good pastry when I try, but thankfully I don't do it too often.

Stuff

I seem to have developed a rather unpleasant cold overnight, but I suppose that is just what happens at this time of year. It took me 2½ hours to get home from work last night because the motorway was covered in snow and the traffic was dreadful. To celebrate, I worked from home today and now we are preparing for a quiet-ish weekend in the frozen wastelands.

Here is the front page of Monday's local paper:

Crazy days

Yesterday was rather manic with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. The result was getting home rather late with the boys to put to bed after they had an afternoon with Mormor ad MK was out at a meeting.

On Saturday morning we were asked to come out into the street to have our picture taken for the local paper along with the other residents of our road because we have, as a street, started a neighbourhood watch thing. To our amazement, on Monday morning our photograph filled the top half of the local paper with the story filling the bottom half of the front page and half of page 2. It was quite funny and as you can imagine, the boys and MK in particular stole the show.

I'll try and scan the picture later

OECD PISA Report

I have just been reading the OECD PISA report about the standards of education measured across all member countries and it was certainly an interesting read. (You can find it here)

It seems that Denmark has not really improved in any areas and there has been a slight slip in some areas although it is still firmly placed in the middle of average. Of course, there are lot os interesting things to say about different socio-economic reasons for this that and the other and the influence of culture on this that and the other, but I was not surprised to see that Denmark scored below average in the performance related to disciplinary climate. My reading of that is that Danish school kids would perform better with more discipline in schools.

I am not really overly concerned about the education system in Denmark. I am pretty sure that our family will overcome the immigrant parent problems and take advantage of the engaged parent benefits to come out of it all with nice, above average kids. After all, isn't that what we all aspire to?

Speech therapist

This morning MK and I took DK to the speech therapist at the cleft lip and palate centre in Hellerup.

The visit didn't start too well as DK tripped and dived headlong into a deepish icy puddle. That was the spare set of clothes used up for the day so MK is hoping that we will avoid any further clothes incidents.

We have a check up there every 6 months or so and the therapist was happy that there is some progress, but there isn't much progress as most of DK's words are reduced to "is" meaning ice cream, eat , pee and maybe more or just some animal noises.

We have noticed that he has come on a lot in the last few weeks and we are hoping that this will continue, but if he hasn't made some substancial progress by the next appointment then he will probably have to have some help progressing.

MK, DK, J and Mormor are now in Copenhagen for the afternoon to look at the Christmas decorations and generally get into mischief

Late nights

We were invited to a Christmas party at some friends in CPH on Saturday night. MK got a new frock and we had a really nice time but with that came a very late night  - 02:30 before we were in bed. As a result, the long, very slippery and snowy journey back to CPH on Sunday for my company family Christmas party was rather an ordeal. The kids made a lot of noise and both MK and I were a little short tempered with them.

The second party was really nice as usual and the kids got some nice presents and enjoyed the entertainment. The bridge too far was when I deceded to built DK's new bed when we got home. It was a nightmare of poorly thought out flat pack furniture. The bed had several different parts as guard rails and thing but there were only instructions for the basic bed and when you came to put the rails on, you had to take a lot of it apart again. The final straw were the finely crafter cheese screws you had to screw in with no space whatsoever whilst getting splinters in your hand.

There was much swearing and sweating, but I did prevail in the end.

snow and more snow

It has continued to snow so we now have at least 30cm in the garden and it is getting a little tiresome.

We are off to friends and my works family Christmas party over the weekend along with collecting DK's new bed and being photographed with the rest of the street for the local paper.

No rest for the wicked

Hospital visit

We had a half yearly check up at Roskilde this morning for DK. He was wieghed and measured and we had a chat about his progress. Other than not speaking, he is doing fine and there is nothing much to do for another 6 months. He then had a hearing test which seemed to show that he can hear properly and there isn't much to worry about there either.

The Doctor who oversees DK is presenting him at a conference in January as a case study because he is an interesting little boy who doesn't really fit nicely into any know syndromes. Despite that, the Doctor is convinced that he has CHARGE syndrome based on his one sticking out ear.

Not being a doctor, it is difficult to argue with one about a diagnosis, but I do know that a syndrome is just a collection of symptoms and there is a requirement to have a certain number of these symptoms in order to be diagnosed with the syndrome. The problem is that DK doesn't really have the symptoms necessary for a diagnosis so I really cannot see why he is so determined to demonstrate that it is what he has. Next step is a DNA test to determine if the "right" genes are messed up for it to be CHARGE.

Frozen Sea

It has been really really cold here for the last day or so. Yesterday there was only a little ice in the sea accross the street from the office, when I arrrived this morning, it was completly frozen over and now it has a good covering of snow on top too. I am starting to think that this will be my longest coldest winter since arriving in Denmark which is quite a thought given how long and cold the last one was.

Brrrr.

Got it

Just as I was leaving the office last night the guy selling this guitar called me back to say that he was in CPH and had the guitar with him so I arranged to go and meet up. It sounds really good and I think it is nice that it has been gently used. There are no major dings or marks, the neck is straight and the top is flat.

The only real problem is that I can't really play much on it. I can get lots of chords, but I need to work a lot on changing between them accurately and then quickly.

The most amuzing thing was that the guy (a music student) was selling the guitar to get a new flat screen TV for his bedroom in a shared house. When I asked about the 37" one on the wall, he said that he needed a new one. That was too small and anyway it was 4 or 5 years old now. Apparently he is getting a 50" 3D TV despite apparently having no idea about what you can see on it. He seemed to think that all TV became 3D on a 3D TV. I think he is in for a dissapointment...

(I should point out that he will be a very long way from affording the new TV with what I paid for the guitar.)