Anna Merriman

As I recently mentioned, we finally managed to get around to collecting all of Anna’s photos into one place, so I can now start posting them here for family and friends to see. Apologies for the three week delay in getting these up, but TBH I’ve not had a lot of spare time recently, for some reason

This shot was taken when the first batch of ‘Congratulations’-type cards arrived. I think this is one of the pictures that will make it into Anna’s book that John and Irina are producing.

Next we have a close up shot that was taken on the 28th of February

OK, that’s all for now as the food shopping needs to be put away downstairs.

After YouTube banned my original account, (long story, the short version is I lost it due to short clips involving BBC material), I have finally got around to uploading some videos to my new account.

This post includes Anna’s first appearance in a movie (28th Febraury, on the sofa in Clydach, with Anna at just one week old), at least from Irina’s camera. I still need to hookup our proper camcorder and rip it to DVDs/YouTube etc. Anyway, enough of the text, onto the star

Click the link below to see: A higher quality version of the same video, parts 2-6 from the sofa, and also Irina in hospital a couple of days before the birth. (The ‘HQ’ embedded version appears to just be the same video enlarged, rather than the HQ version available from the video’s page on YouTube.com)
OK, just press the HQ button to watch a better quality version.

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Today we went to Swansea’s County Hall/Civic Centre, to see the Registrar and officially registered the birth of Anna Christina Merriman. Her middle name is a suitable mixture of Christopher and Irina, which is close to what her patrynomic name would be in Russian. Hopefully the Kazakh red tape guardians will accept this as a suitable choice, and won’t complain.

These photos were all taken around the time Mum showed Ira and I the best approach to bathing little Anna, and we’ve since done this solo without any major mishaps. Irina was a little apprehensive about full on bathing (as opposed to topping and tailing) and safety, so I explained that if the bath shifts around, or looks likely to shoot off the surface its laid on, hold the baby, and forget about trying to stop the bath from falling – as long as Anna is safe and secure, no is going to give a damn about a little spilt water. A case of not throwing the baby out with the bath water

As you might guess from the range of dates in these photos, I now have the pictures from John’s cameras, though there is another folder of them somewhere on his hard drive – I’ll have proper search soon.

Here we have a shot in the hospital (in their post delivery ward), just before Anna’s first parent-based nappy change

This is (my) Mum holding Anna in the hospital.

This is a shot from a couple of days ago, showing Anna in her drop side cot, in her current favourite sleeping position with arms up and out.

Please excuse lack of accompanying text and that the photos aren’t cropped/WB sorted etc.
Everything fine here, we have still been reading all the messages from people who’ve texted, twitter, facebook msged, blog comments, sent real world cards & pressies etc., we’ve just not had the time to respond yet. Please do know your thoughts have been received and appreciated

Photos with Mum & John in them are on John’s camera’s card still, I’ll try and grab them later tonight/tomorrow. I’ll also try to title the pics at some point.

Sorry it took a while to get the photos to you all, and thanks again for all your messages.

After spending a couple of months guarding/accompanying Irina, Gwen suddenly found there was a new baby in the house. She seemed to adjust very quickly (this photo was taken 23rd February 2009), realising that whatever/whoever this new arrival was, we were all obviously giving a lot of attention to it, and that she was being very closely monitored whenever she approached this strange smelling bundle of joy. Pretty soon, Gwen was alerting us if she heard Anna crying, and dutifully following Irina around and around the back yard when Anna was getting some fresh air in her pram.

John Anna Gwen on the sofa in Clydach

No, really, I think these are the last unpublished photos from Anna’s birth day, after this there will be a little more variety. If you are used to reading about Kazakhstan, WordPress info, Amsterdam and Conspiracy Theories, sorry, you’ll just have to have a little more patience…

So, finally back to posting Anna photos again, I am planning to post some of the pictures that didn’t find their way onto our hard drive until a little later than the first set of pictures. Some will be taken on the same day as already published photos, whilst others are entirely new. Anyway, within a week or so, we should be back to almost live photos of Anna here in Kazakhstan, but until then enjoy this series of catch up posts.
Strangely enough, the first of these posts focuses on Anna’s first day on this planet, over at the hospital…

For now, this site will link to the photos at Dad’s site, and some other projects.