Bean and bags

Perhaps days are really like Mary Poppins' handbag and expand to fit everything you throw into them until at some stage the bag just gets too small.

I haven't had time to update this blog for such a long time, mostly due to the fact that I am trying to hold down a job, play Mummy and keep some sense of sanity around the house. Well, Jon would probably have some rude comments to make about the latter statement, but at least the laundry gets done several times a week. I'm pretty shattered though, even though I have managed to downscale my job from commuting to Oxford every day to the slightly less logistically impossible, but nevertheless challenging: go in at least once a week and work from home the remainder of the time. For those not in the loop, I'm doing some work for Oxfam as a humanitarian emergencies press officer.

Other than that, and in the absence of a desire to become one of those people who writes about work and nothing else on their blog, here are the latest (or almost latest) pics of the wonderful Azara, including one of when I took her to the local activity farm and she tried to pull the baby rabbit's ears out...she's much safer with the fluffy toys than the real life fluffy things, although she absolutely adores animals. Anyway, she's being fab as ever, although a little clingy, which I don't really think is surprising, given all the changes that are afoot in her life, plus the addition of two nasty top teeth which must be causing her a great deal of stress.

Hope you're all well. Now that summer is here, perhaps we'll be able to enjoy our garden for the four weeks we have left before we get turfed out by the deeply unsympathetic letting agents and landlord. Oh, and fingers crossed for fab weather next weekend for the wonderful wedding of Ellen and Si.

Lots of love

Me

xxxx

Chasing my tail

If life was busy before, it's now about to become even more so. As of tomorrow, I start working at Oxfam as an Emergencies Press Officer, with my main focus on being increasing media coverage of the situation in Darfur and Chad and the role Oxfam is playing there. I am incredibly excited about it and think it's going to be a fantastic challenge, but I'm a little anxious about the commuting - as the job is based in Oxford it may be four hours a day on the road. I have been told that I can do one day a week from home, so hopefully that will ease some of the burden, but I obviously don't want to jeopardise my relationship with Azara, so I will have to be sensible. As I start tomorrow, I'll try and keep this short and sweet, but just to report that Azara is doing fantastically and has just spent a very happy week with Nanna and Pappa while Jon and I were in Iceland. We went camping and it was a really fascinating - if a little over-priced. It was the second time in a couple of weeks that we'd been away. Prior to that we were in Istanbul for my thirtieth, which luckily came and went without too much of a bang. The weekend in between was spent in Crosby and its highlight was a truly brilliant hen night for Ellen. It's amazing how great it is being back with the family and it's made me even more excited about the wedding in a few weeks' time. Sorry if Azara looks a little bit like a convict in this picture. I can't immediately find any other recent ones, so I thought I'd upload this for now. She really loves the tambourine -- a present from Turkey, along with some Turkish princess slippers.

Well, I'd better go. Love to you all,

Hannah

xxx