Ski Butternut

We went to Butternut. It was very good. Here is George:

And here is Ollie


There are more pictures of our winter ski-ing on the Flickr site

Charlie's Birthday

Today was Charlie's birthday party. We had the party at Club Fit. Charlie had a great time.

Charlie especially enjoyed wearing his new David Beckham England shirt; he is quite the soccer fan.

Charlie has also got into LEGO's Mars Mission and was very excited about recieving the Recon Dropship, the Switch Fighter, the Astro Fighter and the Trike (to add to the Base Station and the Mother Ship and the Speeder he and his brothers already have), as the picture below suggests.

The Wii

The Wii, at last, in our house. The Wii was this years "must-have" Christmas present. Thing was, it was a birthday present for Ollie! Ollie wanted a party this year and also wanted it the same year as his birthday - usually we have had his party in the New Year following. Lydia, mum of Ollie's friend David, suggested that instead of Ollie getting a large number of cheaper presents, as many parents as she could muster club together and get him a Wii (pro-nouced 'we' by the way). Ollie was overjoyed. It is a pretty big deal. We were also very happy though our happiness was slightly mitigated by two factors: firstly, the shortage of supplies. Though Lydia phoned, scoured on-line and went to our local Target alot, there was none to be got. The only place in the country that seemed to be selling Wiis (except Ebay at exorbitant prices) was the Nintendo store in Manhattan and that meant queueing at 3am for a chance of getting one when the store opened at 9am. By 20 January I only faced the prospect of an hours wait. That was ok, so I got it. The second factor was that we needed four controllers and Nanchucks (!), and of course the console only comes with one. Hmm, costly accessories. By early February we were ready to play.

It is totally excellent. Even on our tiny telly. If you don't know, you use the remote (and Nanchuck where appropriate) as a raquet in tennis, bat/throw in baseball, roll in bowling, etc. It isn't like really really playing but it does bear some resemblance. The technology is quiet amazing. So we now have the Wii in the basement and we can all go down and play happily, though with five in the family and a maximum of four players we have to rotate pretty furiously!