Mini holiday

One great thing about being pregnant is being FORCED to relax. We went away to Cameron House hotel on Loch Lomond last week, for a short two night break - and despite trying to go out and get some exercise, I found myself breathless and exhausted after a short walk. Therefore we were forced to go back to the hotel and enjoy the amazing facilities!

Cameron House (I'm informed) is regularly used by footballers and VIP's like that. Despite this, we were surprised at how nice the room and breakfast was for the price we paid!

The room was beautiful and really comfortable. In reality it did have a straight bed, I think that the stitching-together of the photo Colin took has gone a bit off!

The hotel kindly provided extra pillows at my request, as I'm having trouble getting comfortable at night at the moment. Colin however took this as a challenge to use all of the pillows at once...

On the Wednesday morning we attempted our walk around the section of Loch where our hotel was situated. I didn't realise how beautiful Loch Lomond is, as last time we were there, it poured with rain and we were being eaten alive by midges. With constantly running for cover, we were perhaps too distracted to notice the lovely Loch!

Jeni and bump by the water

A small shower caused a beautiful full rainbow over the water - amazing!

We would highly recommend Cameron house, but also recommend avoiding the alcohol while you're there - £9.15 for a white wine spritzer and £6 for a bottle of beer are definitely footballer prices!!

Baby's new wardrobe

Now I'm 30 weeks pregnant, we thought it might be time to start getting some supplies, just incase Baby Armstrong makes an early appearance into the world. Up until recently all we had were three knitted garments, very kindly created by Granny Armstrong! However, we felt this probably wasn't enough to sustain a newborn. Every shop we've looked through so far seem to only have gender specific items in either pink or blue, which will only be useful to us if we were the gambling sort.

So today we went to Asda on a friend's recommendation to have a browse through their baby range... and came back with these to start us off!

It's amazing how buying a couple of garments for baby has made it seem more real!!! The packet contains 3 sleep suits, 3 bodysuits, 2 scratch mitts, booties and a hat, all for the bargainous price of £7!!!

Even though the sleep suit is for newborn, it still seemed to be awfully big to me. So I held it up against the bump for comparison...

When comparing it to the bump, I guess it seems a little more likely that it's going to fit - although I've still got over 2 months to go and seem to be large before my time! People at work have been making comments like "Are you sure you don't have two in there?!" which is making me a bit nervous that I'm going to give birth to a giant. So hopefully if it stops growing so fast and is born a normal size, we'll be able to use the cute wee sleep suit for at least a few nights!!!

There's certainly one member of our little family who's making full use of the big comfy bump while it's still around...

(Not so) New House!

As promised to a several people - I have finally got round to taking some pictures of the new house. It's a bit messy, but refer to the previous post and you'll see why I refuse to do any proper tidying up today.

Hall...

Living room...

Kitchen...

Bathroom...

Bedroom....

Baby's room.... (although I'm sure this will look a bit different in a few months time!)

Utility room....

Garden and patio area.

Kitty enjoying the freedom!

Duvet day

I'm enjoying a well earned duvet day today, as by tomorrow evening I will have worked 62.5 hours in the past 6 days. Quite an impressive amount of time to ask a nearly 7 month pregnant woman to stand I think!! So my one day off this week is being spent on the sofa, watching films that Colin hates - taking advantage of time alone while he's at work.

I decided to watch Phantom of the Opera this afternoon.

After getting the dvd case off the shelf, I noticed some interesting critics comments on the front of the box....

Of course, the critic was none other than Andrew Robertson, who decided to voice his own opinion on the film before giving it to me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It makes me wonder why he'd give me a film that he obviously hated!

Weird film

We watched Burn After Reading the other night. The general consensus about it was that it was a little strange, and we couldn't quite understand where the plot was leading... and were a little surprised where it did eventually lead!

But I made an observation half way through which I found incredibly distracting. The lead woman who played Linda Litzke looked exactly like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Linda....

Johnny...

What do you think? Most distracting!

What a mess

Today I spent my afternoon arranging this....

Into this...

Quite a few of the wires in the first picture weren't even connected to anything! It obviously just needed a woman's touch to get everything in order.

Evil cat

After installing a cat flap in the back door so that our beautiful little kitties can go in and out to explore the Great Outdoors, we have unfortunately had to put up with an unwelcome visitor in the house. The visitor is a massive black cat, which would be fine if it just came in and said hello and had a polite conversation... but instead it eats our little cats' food and then attacks them. Three cats in a fight make a horrible din, it's not the most pleasant way to be woken from sleep.

I haven't been able to get a photo of the evil cat, but I found a picture which is a fairly accurate depiction...

Anyway, we've never been able to frighten the cat enough that it stays away, because every time we run after it, it just shoots out the cat flap. Most people tell us we should squirt it with water because that is a sure deterrent for all cats. We however felt that a water pistol just wasn't going to be accurate enough to ensure the cat was suitably scared.

So one night last week, we heard the familiar wailing of our poor little darlings being attacked by the black beast. Colin crept through to the back door and set the cat flat to "in only".

I won't say exactly what we did incase Peta turn up at the door tomorrow shouting animal rights laws at us... but I will say the cat ended up looking something like this:

You would think that treating a cat in this fashion would deter it from coming back... (and believe me, we took no pleasure in doing this, but our little cats are covered in scratches!) ... HOWEVER, who should rear it's ugly head in the house just two days later?! Evil cat!!!

If anyone has any suggestions for ways to stop it from coming in, please let us know. Special cat flaps are no good, as our cats lose their collars within hours of going outside and would therefore be locked out.

Or maybe we should teach our cats some ju jitsu, or assertiveness techniques. Surely two ginger girls could take on this evil black demon?!