My ‘Word’ What A Busy Weekend…

As far as weekends go, this one was a busy one, coinciding miraculously with both Sarah and I being off work on the same days – a feat as rare as the little one going a whole day without eating more bananas than the average monkey.

The only downside to this packed weekend was a mere 11 hour round trip in the car to Newcastle from Reading, but once we got there it was awesome from start to finish. Although the invite didn’t specifically say ‘no children’, the prospect of the little one marauding about on a boat along the Tyne at our friend’s wedding reception didn’t inspire warm, fuzzy feelings inside, so we were lucky enough to have Sarah’s mum come down to look after him for a couple of days.

Joshua on a pleasure boat, at least in my mind, would have looked much like the final hours of the Titanic with people running for cover and diving off the side and furniture flying through the air. Effectively he would have ripped through the boat like a metaphorical iceberg, with the final cinematic scene being the DJ sitting alone on a chair playing 80s classics as the boat slowly sunk, with Sarah and I clinging on to a stray toilet door floating along the middle of the Tyne. Although, to be fair, as I unceremoniously flopped off the side of the door like Leo DiCaprio I would probably have landed on a shopping trolley and been fine, rather than sinking to the icy depths of Davey Jones’ locker. As an aside, could Kate really not just have scooted over a few inches to let Leo park half a bum-cheek on that floating thing?!

So as the little one played at home with nanny, we enjoyed the sounds of Capital Radio (Capital London, then Capital East Midlands, then Capital Yorkshire, then Capital North East – all playing the same songs in the same order but with progressively more northern accents) as we made the 300 mile trek to Newcastle.

I’d only been to Newcastle once before, for football, and have vague memories of it being bloody freezing, interspersed with memories of girls wearing belts instead of skirts – and Reading losing of course. This time around, the whole experience was excellent – the people, the food, the cupcakes, the dancing, the music and the boat trip were all perfect – possibly made even more memorable by the fact that we don’t do things like this very often any more, since the little one came along. To top it all off, our lovely friend, Kelly, who was the bride, looked stunning and had a terrific time as well. And unlike Geordie Shore, there were no fights, no vomiting and no one pissed themselves! Although lots of people got ‘mortal’ we all stayed classy…

Obviously we missed the little man, but there were certainly some positives to be taken from a top night out, followed by a lie in and a full English breakfast, as opposed to the normal falling asleep in front of the TV, waking up at 6am and having breakfast of Weetabix to the chorus of ‘more please, Daddy’, whilst Dora the Explorer stares at you with her dead, Satanic eyes and switches randomly between languages like a pirated copy of Rosetta Stone.

Joshua loved his time with his nanny and the house was no more trashed when we got home than it is on any other day, although he was soaking wet having been playing with the water butt that we randomly have in our garden!!

The other major activity this weekend was moving my Blogger blog over to a self-hosted WordPress blog, now that I’ve decided that this blogging lark is good fun (if a touch addictive!) and that I’m planning on sticking with it. In my ideal world, this switch over would have largely involved pressing a button with ‘export’ on in Blogger and then pressing a button with ‘import’ on in WordPress and paying a few quid to a company in America who own a warehouse full of servers.

Although technically this was what I did, it’s the little details around the edges that take the time and effort! Setting up plugins, and themes, and replacing the blog images that never imported correctly, and fixing the links, and setting up a Blogger redirect to the new blog and a WordPress redirect so that the Blogger redirect takes you to the correct post, and redoing all the social links, and making an ‘About Me’ page, and working out how to show excerpts on the main page rather than the whole blog entry, and figuring out what Yoast was, and reading self-help web articles about coding from experienced coders that think you really should know what you’re doing already, and pulling your hair out when the passwords never seem to work correctly due to having a free WordPress blog a few years ago with a username that can’t be changed!! And let’s reserve a special mention for the 20 minutes I’d planned on picking a Theme, that somehow morphed into 4 freaking hours!!

But, after what must have been more time than it took to drive to Newcastle and back, the new blog is now up and running and looking OK-ish so far! If you notice things that don’t work, please let me know, but if you notice more than 3 problems I will likely throw the laptop out of the window and run away screaming…

So today has been spent catching up on housework, grocery shopping and reading the 8,000 parent blogs that I now seem to be following, whilst Joshua was at nursery. And, of course, writing this entry – the first one on WordPress!! Booooooom. (Zahramay)