Yorkshire

I have returned from the wilds of Yorkshire. And believe me, when I say wild I really mean it as regards the return trip. It took poor Mummy and I a whole nine hours to get back through wind, and rain, and more wind, and more rain.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind back to Friday morning when Mummy and I set off for Yorkshire.

Daddy got me up bright and early for first feed so Mummy could get moving as quickly as she could and avoid the rush hour in the places we'd have to go through to get to the moteyway. I think she actually managed to only come back in to the house to pick up something she'd forgotten once (instead of the usual three or four), that's how ferociously focussed she was.

The weather was gorgeous on the way, and as we wended our way north, and well clear of nasty poopy London (as Daddy calls it) I was so impressed with all the cool landscapes. There were so many different things to look at - new hills, trees, people. The great outdoors, baby! I love it.

Eventually though it was time for me to have my next feed, and we stopped just before a place called Oxfood which presumably has lots of farms in it. I didn't mind stopping to nosh some milkies, but then once I was finished Mummy had the barefaced cheek to try and get some food of her own from somewhere called Macadees.

I didn't like Macadees. It smelled funny, and being in there was stopping me from enjoying the thrill of the open road, or something. I put up with it as we waited in the queue to be served, I put up with the smelliness, I even put up with waiting to go back into the car. But Mummy actually let go of me with one of her hands when she picked her juice up off the counter, and this was just the last straw. So I decided to use my baby martial arts to deliver a swift kick to the offending article and show my displeasure.

Unfortunately it all went a tad wrong. I'm not too sure how I did it, but I kicked at an angle that sent the juice all over Mummy's face. And my face. And my hair.

Mummy? Not impressed, I can tell you.

So there I was, on the way to Yorkshire to meet my cooing public, and now I smelled of orange juice and baby wipes. So I didn't try any more of the old high kicks again. I'm only in my Pink Babygro after all. When I get my Black one I shall be able to aim them perfectly to only get Mummy with a flood of juice and avoid myself.

I fell asleep after a while, quite a long while in fact. By the time I woke up we were well along the Moteyway. This is a very long road with lots and lots of cars on it, and Mummy gets to drive much faster on it, which she is very pleased about. Also it flashed by so fast that I could barely take in all the sights, but there were lots of other cars that seemed to be barely moving at all next to ours. It was very strange, that. The background (trees, fields etc) seemed to whizz by, but the other cars only seemed to be moving a tiny bit. Weird.

And then, after a whole seven and a half hours (apparently) we reached Yorkshire. Yorkshire is where Granny B lives. It is a house with a nice garden next to lots and lots and lots of hills. Because I was still a bit sticky from all the Macadees orange juice I had a special Yorkshire bath, which means I went in the kitchen sink and made a big splashy mess! It wasn't like at home where I have a special green baby bath, and have lots of towels laid down to stop me soaking the carpet. I thought everyone had baby baths, but obviously they do things differently 'north of Watford', as Daddy calls it. Shortly before receiving a ding from Mummy, usually.

When I went to bed I did not like the feel of my travel cot. It was very different to my supersoft bed at home, plus I was still a bit of a snotbox from my cold. So Mummy gave up and laid me down in my beloved bouncer and I passed out almost straight away. It had been a long day's travelling, after all. Apparently Mummy kept waking up to check on me all night, but I didnt stir on account of all that hard looking about and yelling I'd done.

In the morning we went from Yorskhire to the village, which is called Honley. But inevitably Mummy forgot her car keys and so Granny B pushed me along in my cousin Molly's pram and I fell asleep, as I like to do in the Tank. But when I woke up we were somewhere very odd. A lady was pouring water and stuff on Mummy's head, and there were ladies and men with scissors chopping off other people's hair! It was very disconcerting, but I was OK for a while because there were lots of people cooing over me. Some wore funny uniforms and were the people doing the hairchopping, so I was a bit unsure about them. After all I don't want them going near me with those fierce looking scissors, I've barely got any hair to get cut off in the first place!

Anyway, all went well until someone tried to attack Mummy with a very stubby looking object that I recognised. It made a strange noise and it started to blow poor Mummy's hair all over the place. If I hadn't gone completely howl-at-the-moon mad at this I think it would have charged up and blasted Mummy like some sort of weird raygun. I've seen those dodgy sci-fi movies Daddy likes, I know what a raygun looks like and I'm not having anyone point one at my Mummy!

Once I had saved Mummy from death-by-raygun, we went to see Aunty Jayney and Bob next. I was still very upset from the trauma of nearly seeing Mummy blasted into atoms, so when Jayney wanted to snuggle me I really protested. But she is annoyingly persistent and eventually I gave up and allowed her to cuddle me off to sleep for a little while.

I was supposed to meet one of Bob's grandchildren today, but she had the dreaded Chikunpops. Apparently this is a nasty illness that makes you feel really yucky and then go all spotty. Daddy gets very annoyed about it, because he says some people are really silly and think that children can only get it once whereas they can really get it loads of times as not all kinds of Chikunpops are the same kind. So if they are like like the Poppin Chikun then there must be Barbecue Chikunpops and Spicy Chikunpops and that sort of thing, I suppose. Anyway, some people actually bring their babies to see other children who have the Chikunpops so they can get it when they are tiny, which is about the meanest thing I can think of doing ever!

(Daddy's Note: It really is an Urban Myth of the silliest kind that children can only get chicken pox once. Amber has had it three times, I know of one girl who has had it six times. So don't ever, ever hold a 'chicken pox party' unless you want me to come over and make you eat ten snotty hankies by way of a metaphor for what you are doing to your children.)

It was all go today. No sooner had I woken up from my sleep then off we went again, this time to a special sale at the mill that Grandad B works at. All his friends who also work there and other people there to buy woolly things (no sheep for sale though, I was a bit disappointed about that) endlessly cooed over me, so by this point I was cheering up quite considerably. Then we went back to Jayney's to switch cars and left to go to another special Cooing Party. It was organised by a very nice lady called Granny Walker (who isnt Mummy's Granny but seems to get called that anyway and there were loads of people there to coo over me. I was the centre of attention for ages, it was great! True, there was a grownup called Virginia there who seemed to be getting quite a bit of greetings too (something about her 21st, Granny Walker must have a lot of grandchildren then) but really she got much less attention than me.

After my next bottle and a giant poopoo, Mummy took me out into Granny Walker's back garden to see something I've never seen before up this close - a great big horsey! I've seen some go by pulling carriages when I've been sat in the Tank but I never realised just how big they are before. Mummy wouldnt let me touch the horsey's mouth like I do with her and Daddy though because horseys have great big teeth and big flappy lips and I might get swallowed. Urgh, what a yucky thought, I sort of lost the urge to play 'Lets rip your lips off' after that.

Once everyone had had at least one good coo over me we dropped Granny B home and then went to see Grandad B and Granny She and the doggies.

Their two doggies are called Rubble and Freddie. They are both very bouncy and friendly doggies (not like Syco at all) and I played with them for hours. Rubble ate my little feet and made them all slobbery, and Freddie licked at my hands. I giggled like a maniac, they were so funny! Mummy reckons Milton's shares must have climbed after all the sterile wipes she got through, whatever that means.

I even got to pull Freddie's ears, bonus! Then I sat with Granny She and watched Mummy fight Rubble for the doggies new 'unbreakable' chew toy, which seems to be able to make a grown woman sprawl about on the floor playing tug-of-war with a doggie. What a versatile toy it must be. I watched Mummy rolling about and laughed like a drain the entire time.

Next I got to open a present!. It was a snazzy new coat, and I liked it so much that I tried it on straight away and then wore it outside to step into Grandad B's back garden and watch the fireworks go off nearby. I love fireworks - they go bang and pop and fizz and make pretty colours in the sky. Luckily the noise doesn't bother me at all, because I know that the bangs mean there are more pretties on the way.

As the fireworks finished, Grandad B's friends Diane and Robert came and cooed over me, but I was so tired out from all the excitement of the day that I went to sleep when i really shouldn't have done. I was rudely woken by Mummy to go back to Granny B's house to have my last feed of the day. Unfortunately for Mummy because I'd has my Powernap I was still very awake after the last bottle and I didn't want to go to sleep yet, after all this was about as exciting as the busiest day ever! Even after she finally got me down I still woke up at 3am. And 4am. And 5am. And 6am.

I think there was a pattern emerging at this point. Mummy took the hint and got out of bed to give me my first feed shortly afterwards. But joy! My cousin Molly was waiting downstairs for me when I got there, having her breakfast with Granny B. She is a bit bigger than me, she isn't quite big enough to be walking yet but she does crawl a lot. I think Granny B was having trouble catching her so she could give me all the morning smiles I was due.

After I played with Molly for a while Mummy packed all our goodies in the car and we left Yorkshire to see my namesake, Auntie Lucy. She is one of my two Godmothers and she lives with her fiance John in a big building with lots of floors and a really funny glass lift thingy. She is also a gaming and fantasy geek like Daddy, yay! Or not depending on your point of view.

Aunty Lucy also has a nice slidey wooden floor that I got to go dry swimming on. Dry swimming is what happens when a baby knows how to do all the motions to start crawling but hasn't quite figured out how to do them at the same time yet. I'm getting really good at it.

I also got another present from John and Lucy - a Tigger suit! Lucy took some photys of it next to me, but I didn't like it when John loomed over me to take some of the two Lucy's. He is very tall and a bit scary, so I kind of mimped until he took the hint and backed off.

After lunch we said goodbye to Aunty Lucy and John and Mummy said we were leaving Yorkshire and going home, which didn't make much sense because we left Yorkshire and said goodbye to Granny B earlier on. However we were soon on the way as Aunty Lucy lives very near to the Moteyway and that's the speediest way to travel, baby!

At least it is when the wind doesn't roar and the rain doesn't fall down in sheets. You see after we stopped for my next feed, I did a huge weewee shortly afterwards so Mummy had to stop at the next services to change me. And then a few minutes after we got going again I detonated a Size Six in my nappy, just to shake the journey up a bit. Well I wanted the fresh air, didn't I. It's not my fault Mummy wouldn't take the hint.

After all the delays for bum changing we were running later than intended so we were still on the Moteyway when night fell and the rain really hit hard. I didn't like this at all, as now I couldn't see much of anything and Mummy had to slow down as well, so I screamed for 50 miles straight to make sure my displeasure was fully understood.

However we took a big break just before that Oxfood place again and a funny thing happened. Suddenly Mummy's friend Sam and two of her friends were there, and I got some serious cooing. Now that made me feel much better, I'd gone without a good coo for hours. As Sam lives near us, from then on Mummy followed her car down the roads so she had a good target to aim at. It all turned into a bit of a blur for me afterwards, I think I fell asleep at least once before finally, after nine hours of gruelling travel, we arrived home at Chez Lulu.

When we got there Daddy wasn't very well. It seems he felt very ill in the car coming back from Indiecon and had been laid down for a couple of hours before we got home. So there was poor exhausted Mummy coming indoors and wanting to hand me over to Daddy, and Daddy thinking he was going to throw up any minute when I got all excited and started kicking at his tummy while he gave me a welcome home cuddle.

I decided to make them feel better by not going to sleep for ages, as I figured they could use the company to cheer them up. Oddly enough they didn't seem to appreciate the gesture all that much, the ungrateful pair.

So that was my trip to Yorkshire. I enjoyed it very much up until the darkness and the rain fell on the way home, and I'm sure I'll have forgotten about that part soon. And so will Mummy once her ears have stopped bleeding from all the screaming.

Night night and sleep tight everyone.