Anna Merriman

Smiling in the park
Proper camera battery about to die.
Managed to grab few shots of preps for Astana day.
http://twitpic.com/8r4u7

29th June, another walk around Astana park, and the main promenade is now filling up with yurts. These look a little different, and actually have some families living in them. Some of the market stall traders, bird of prey owners and traditional cuisine vendors seemed to be based in this area.

Well, eight days I think, but anyway, as this was the 26th June again, you can see the camera batteries took a bit of a battering. We took Anna out for her (almost) daily walk, and decided to check out how the preparations for Astana Day (and the International Religious Tolerance Forum) were coming along. If you have ever seen pictures of Yurts, and wondered how they were made, and the process that creates them, you’ll hopefully get a slightly better idea soon. If you’re reading this on the front page, you’ll need to click the link under the first photo to see the rest – there are a lot, and so to keep the front page readable, I’ve hidden them away.

Anna At Entrance To Astana Park, With Yurts In The Background

Yes, I know the last image in the set below is a repeat of the one before the fold. I’ve just spent 20 minutes battling with WordPress’ image gallery, and given up I’m afraid. I also had to type out the descriptions for some of these pictures four times, before I remembered to click Save Changes before Insert Gallery :/ I’ll learn eventually.

The same day (26th June) Anna experimented with non-conformist sleeping, Dana, Asen and their son Alan popped over, as they were visiting Kazakhstan before returning to Israel. By the time I remembered to grab the camera, Alan was already having a nap, so you’ll “just” have to make do with Dana and Anna in this shot.

Dana And Anna – Only Three Keys Required!

OK, getting to the end of June’s photos with Anna in now. So, that leaves nine weeks of photos to try and catch up with in two weeks, if I use the entirely arbitrary date of the end of August as a deadline. The reason for the title of this blog? Anna sometimes decides that sleeping in a bed the way bed-makers, parents and everyone else dictates just isn’t for her. However, we have no random diagonal re-arrangement here, thank you very much. Just 90 degrees worth of ‘YES, I did mean to reposition myself like this. This was no random thrashing around… I didn’t like where you put me, so I fixed the situation

Anna’s Slant On The World

Oh, 26th June was the date this was taken. If you’ve missed the previous explanations, I’ll be altering the dates on these Anna’s Photos posts (and most likely her Anna’s Videos posts as well) once we’re back up to real time posting, so the automatic export/import process to AnnaMerriman.com won’t involve too much faffing around with timestamps later.

Anna On Chris’ Shoulder

Just a very quick post here; Anna is on my shoulder, in the front garden of Irina’s parent’s house. Hmmm, I need to double check my apostrophe use there, I’m never sure if that is the correct way to indicate ‘possession’ twice in a row. Anyway, this picture was taken on the 23rd June. You can’t see her teeth yet, but today she munched on her first bits of food! I may break with previous predictions, and try to post that photo soon

Shot of trees, with traditional painted white socks on them, again in Astana Park, across the road from our flat.
http://twitpic.com/83hpm

Walk in the park again, Anna only managed 20 mins sleep again. Getting to know some of the smaller paths. http://twitpic.com/83hay

A nine day gap from the last photo, here we have Anna showing off her improved neck muscles, and pretty yellow dress, at the in-laws house, on the 20th June.
Really sorry about the week long break in the series of Anna’s pictures, real life got in the way again. I’ll try and schedule another batch this evening/tomorrow.

Outside the ‘mega’ shopping complex with anna. lots of anna pics to come during next week or so. http://twitpic.com/7pgpq

Here we have a quick video of Anna in her bouncy chair, recorded 12th June.

Right, OK, the rest of the videos I’ve uploaded already to YouTube are more recent than Anna’s pictures on this blog, so I’ll go back to catching up with the photos first.

OK, not quite laying on the ground, but using the traditional Kazakh style table and rugs on the floor, rather than the more conventional western style table and chairs, we were at Ali Ba Ba once more with John and Innessa (OK, we were there with their daughter as well, but I forgot to ask if it was OK to publish her name, so I’ll skip that for now).
Anyway, we were all meeting up (11th June) to catch up with each other’s news, before Innessa returned to Britain, where they are having a baby. Anna was very well behaved, and lasted long enough for us to all enjoy the meal and see how the others were doing.

Innessa Anna and John at Ali Ba Ba

Anna’s Babushka and Dedushka hadn’t seen Anna in a while, so they popped over to see us on the 9th June. (Why am I putting the dates these pictures were taken on each of the posts in the Anna’s Photos category? Basically the published date will be altered in the future, to reflect the date they are taken, before I import the post to Anna’s site. To save me re-looking each one up on the hard drive, I’m including the date in the text. This also means that friends and family can have a good idea of Anna’s progress over the weeks, as right now we are still just over seven weeks behind realtime photos. I’m trying to explain this every now and then, in case you haven’t seen the older photos yet.)
So, anyway, when it was time for the in-laws to go home, we decided to combine it with our daily fresh air for Anna walk. We crossed the road at the nice pedestrian crossing (meaning we would be walking next to the park, see 1st photo), rather than risk the zebra crossing or weird traffic light crossing further down the road, and went via the salt water aquarium place (Duman). Stopping for a sit down, the 2nd picture was taken.

The day (7th June) after Igor and Natalya visited, we have a quick couple of shots of Anna on her playmat. In the end we bought two of them, one for at the in-laws, where we stay each weekend, and one for here, back at home. Although the toys, tunes and animal noises are great, at the time of writing this post, we already often have to use a bedspread instead, as Anna has become quite proficient at rolling, and given 10-20 seconds, can be 1/2 way across a room!
Anyway, back 7 weeks or so, when this picture was taken, rolling like that didn’t happen, and Anna’s neck muscles were nowhere near as strong.

Anna with some more tummy time and playing on her playmat, recorded on 7th June