Anna Merriman

Anna eating her breakfast in a good mood. http://twitpic.com/zng0c

The 5th of January for some reason saw a quite late tea-time for Anna. She is still at the age when human babies (apparently) don’t discern as much between using their feet instead of their hands for manipulation objects (or humans ) around them, compared to older children and adults. This means that if she wants to grab our attention, or stop the spoon of food from approaching her mouth, she sometimes just nudges her feet into our feeding arm. Cute right now, as long as it doesn’t progress into full on kicking when she doesn’t get her way

Foot Controlled Feeding

Chilling Out Between Spoons

As promised, this post marks the first 2010 photos of Anna. The 3rd of January saw us still at Irina’s parents’ house, with Igor, Losha and Katya popping round to continue the New Years celebrations.

Oh, and “nayelsa” is a Russian informal word for “I’m full”. (Please no more food. Yes it is delicious, yes I love it, but seriously, my belt doesn’t have any more holes to make it bigger). Or something like that

I think is the last photo of Anna from 2009 – 28th December to be exact. The boxes you can see were originally bought from Ramstore as a storage system for all her toys. When we got them home, and screwed the shelves together, and constructed the fabric boxes, we discovered just how petite they actually were. The boxes are used for storing teeth soothers, shoes, small cuddly toys and occasionally work as hats, apparently. Anyway, Anna seems to like them. Her shoes, when not on her feet, are normally found in her mouth, being chewed upon. The next photos and videos of Anna are all from this year

One of my earliest New Years’ memories is being allowed to sit in the living room, watching cartoons on TV, and eating my breakfast cereal at the same time. It now sounds very silly, but back then, this seemed like the most extravagant of treats, and I can still remember watching Road Runner avoid Wile E. Coyote, whilst simultaneously trying not to spill and Shreddies or milk onto the living room carpet. Why this sudden recall of something that happened almost 25 years ago? I was just looking at the photo below, before uploading it, which features Anna having a special treat of watching her DVD and being allowed to eat at the same time

Anna Allowed To Eat And Watch TV (Christmas Treat)

Shot on the 26th of December, here we have another video of Anna not dancing as much once the camera was rolling We have already backed up the Wheels On The Bus DVD, and use the copy, as if it were to break (Anna likes standing on top of DVD cases, I’ve since moved them away from the TV area) I think we would miss the collection of children’s songs a lot. Some of the tracks really get her bouncing around, whilst others seem to just grab her attention with the bright colours on screen. We try to make sure she doesn’t normally stand so close to the screen, though she already has enough independence to ignore us when we make silly requests like “Don’t touch that!” or “Come and play over here please”

Or at least wear something that hides stains really well the next time you are around Anna when she is about to enjoy some pasta and sauce. Regular readers will remember the previous photos of Anna’s mildly inaccurate food placement photos before, but I really think this one catches the moment pretty well. Namely her happiness with having sauce, pasta and meat to eat by hand, without silly Mum or Dad slowing her down, the wide area which such food normally leaves its mark, and also further proof that, despite Anna’s occasional very vocal protests, she really does still need to wear a bib when eating some foods

Do NOT Get In Between This Cutie And Her Pasta!

Oh, the photo was shot on the 10th of January. Another four or five posts and we’ll have once more caught up to real time posting of Anna’s pictures. I’ll wait a few days though, as the last 1/2 week’s posts take up the entire front page, and I know some friends and family don’t always get around to clicking the Previous Entries link to check out the second page.

After saying goodbye to Walton we relaxed for a few hours at home with Anna, and then travelled over to JohnA’s for a delicious Christmas Day meal. This was the first year I wasn’t at home in Britain for Christmas with Mum et al, so I was really glad to be in a friendly and happy atmosphere with Anna and Irina. DanD and his family were there, as well as Innessa’s parents, which meant I wasn’t alone in toasting the day with vodka and beer, rather than wine The food was great, and we even had some entertainment laid on – you’ll need to wait for the video to catch a clip of that…

Anna, DanD and a Dombra T-Shirt Model

So, these photos of Anna were taken on the 25th of December… Something about that date rings a bell…
Oh well, sure it’ll come back to me. Walton had seen in the transition of 24th/25th with us, and wasn’t driving home straight away for once, meaning we could all have a few drinks together properly, for the first time in ages.
This was obviously Anna’s first Christmas, and although it isn’t really noticed/celebrated by locals over here, we had a great day, though it was sad Assel had to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day – we’re hoping we’ll manage to meet up with them once they return from their trip to America, before we head over to Britain.
Later on in the day we went to another friend who was hosting a proper Christmas Day dinner, but these photos are just from the morning, where we ate, drank a little and Anna opened her presents…

The day after Christmas (26th December) saw Irina’s parents come to our flat to spend some time with Anna, and enjoy a meal together. Whether that day was actually Boxing Day or not, I’ll leave you to decide. Wikipedia has a good article on the subject, but as we don’t live in a country where St Stephen’s Day or Boxing Day is recognised, all arguments are null and void

A Light Boxing Day Meal With Ira’s Parents

Anna Watching Her Wheels On The Bus DVD

As previously mentioned this was Anna’ first Christmas, and so we wanted to make sure she had a good day, even if she was totally oblivious to the date We had a couple of presents for her to open on the 25th, a few more on New Years Day (which is celebrated a lot more over here), and we’re hoping to have a mini-belated-Christmas again once we arrive in Britain.
Anyway, these videos concentrate on Anna opening one of her presents – a match the animal to their hole jigsaw type of thing. As expected the wrapping and gift card were initially of a lot more interest, and as Irina had wrapped it, it took Anna a while to break into the securely packaged gift

You may remember I received some sort of automated warning from YouTube as they noticed I had a Christmas tune on in the background when we recorded Anna dancing. Well assuming they don’t remove it before this post goes live (a gap of four days or so), you should be able to see it below…

I’ll need to check our camera at home (as I write this post, we are at Irina’s parents’ house, but it looks like these pictures taken on the 27th December as Oleg was visiting us before returning to Moscow, might be the latest of her. Sorry it took a while to return to almost live posting of her photos, I’ll try and stay more up to date, and mix in a little more of the usual subject matter for new posts.

The 15th of December saw Oleg arrive, after a gap of around two years since we had last crossed paths in the real world. This post contains images we shot on our camera from the evening. In the next post, you can see Oleg’s somewhat higher quality photos, that you may already have seen over at John’s blog.

Anna Checks Out Oleg’s Camera

Oleg Demonstrates Good Manners To Anna

Anna Considers Whether An SLR Would Be A Good Starter Camera For Her

Stunningly Handsome And Supremely Modest Computer User

The WordPress image upload gallery function is playing up once more, but this time waiting around doesn’t seem to have magically re-attached these images to a post, so back to individual posting again.

Anyway, the evening of the 15th of December saw Oleg arrive, and before he got to ours, Anna had her evening meal. She has now started occasionally feeding herself with a spoon (though obviously prefers fingers), and that meal time decided that one spoon was not sufficient to transport the food

Feeding Herself With One Spoon…

Then With Two