Listen

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Most of my friends have a lot say. I always feel like I listen an awful lot. The moment I realise I have been listening for a while is subconciously the moment when I get bored of the monologue. When I talk, and am asked to enlarge on whatever it is I am talking about I get excited to think I suddenly have an opportunity to tell my story with an audience. This feeling of happiness is what defines a friend from an aquaintance.

The first line is quoted from Hemingway.

Phil & Teds

We finally received the buggy in the post, and we are happy parents! Catalina sleeps like a dream in the lower section; she's lying flat in the lower horizontal part of the buggy below where Juanita is sitting - notice Juana's position is quite high. When Cat is over six months old we'll put her in the front, so Juanita's present seat will disengage and fit low down. Ok, I won't go on about it, but I think I'm the most excited one in the family. It's like getting a new car!












Yesterday Mum phoned early in the morning because she'd stayed at my brother's house in London. Vicky turned up at ours soon after, so the two grannys were together, fighting over Catalina.

2007

This new year is anything but uneventful. The family on both sides of the atlantic have all contributed to help us buy the double buggy we wanted so Ro could carry the two girls easily - especially with the stairs up to our front door. Traditional double buggies with the chair on either side would have been impossible, they barely fit through doors. But this new design is single file, a great concept. I don't envy Ro, after my month off from work I appreciate it's hard work looking after the children and the house - I'm glad to be back in the office where I can have an uninterupted break whenever I choose to have it!

There's a saying in Spanish that says a new baby never arrives without bread under their arm, which means that somehow you seem to make ends meet, and it appears so, for now. I'm on the brink of going freelance as a lighting cameraman, finally leaving the comfortable security of a regular salary. I shouldn't write about it before it happens but I might already have a few days work for BBC2 in a couple of weeks, and that will be good for me to meet new faces and get my name around, hopefully bringing in new work. I'm confident of my skill, it's just making the contacts.

After ten years I'm finally facing my worst fear; to face the insecurity of no guarantee. No regular salary, even though they say it's great when you finally get there. I left university aiming to be an illustrator and chickened out because I didn't want to suffer 'five' years of searching for work, so I left for Spain then Italy. Because of the language skills I picked up I met my wife, and we knew without really talking much about it how we wanted a family. How can I have done all I have done with ambition and excitement, yet fear this peculiar thing? Well, it's rewarding to know that my time has come to face this particular demon that I've avoided for so long. For what is life for if it's not to be challenged?

Leala gets too big for her boots

Who's that girl?

On xmas day at my sister's house whilst I was chatting to my brother I was distracted by a stranger in the hallway. I noticed a tall girl standing by the stairs chatting to my 20 yr old neice Chloe. I wondered who it was since it was just family that had come to visit, so why had one of Chloe's friends come to say hello today? Then I was impressed at how good-looking she was, and at that moment realised it was my wife standing on the last step.

How cool was that!? It felt very odd at the moment of realisation, and I considered myself priveleged to have experienced a very important part of my life objectively. When I was in my late teens I'd make a habit of looking at my life objectively to the point of being profoundly moved on a regular basis - I almost changed my religion. Now I feel well and truly buried in my life full of tiny trials and life-changing decisions, but rarely do I step outside myself to consider how wonderfully my life has turned out. And it's refreshing to step outside yourself. Almost like a brief respite from those heavy thoughts called responsibilty!

Of course, I could have interpreted my out of body experience a totally different way, like oh I'm so drunk I don't even recognize my own wife. Except I wasn't drunk. I was very tired. Take the above photo as proof. I'll name the image 'before and after'. My brother Jeremy on the left with his 7 month old girl Leala May, arm placed forward protecting his young, wearing a proud smile. And there I am on the right with my second child Catalina, pale, withdrawn and exhausted, nothing but a blank unkempt rag of a face almost accusing my dear baby of sleep theft.

Fatigue Sets In

Recently Rosario and I have gotten into the re-run of Friends on E4. That's about the full extent of our social lives right now; the sum part of our 'free' time. We've been watching the double bill religiously since it is shown every day, and have watched at least 6 series now, we're totally into it. On the weekend we even saw a Holywood gossip documentary about the story of the series. By the time it was an obvious success they had movie stars like Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, and they were nervous and impressed by how hard and fast the six actors worked infront of a live audience.


At the end we were told what each actor had acheived since the end of the monumentaly successful soap. The line that Rosario and I related to more than any other was in a red carpet interview with Courtney Cox next to her husband David Arquette. After giving birth she was concentrating on motherhood, and it was much harder than her million dollar earning filming schedule on Friends. Hell yeah. The hardest moments are when we've been exhausting our patience with poor Juanita who's overtired at 11pm but just won't go to sleep - when she eventually does Catalina cries out in hunger after her three hour nap for another hour's worth of feeding. And you wanna sleep.

No, I don't think you read that slowly enough. You REALLY want to sleep. That's more valuable to me right now than anything in the world. Even a DVD box set of Friends.

The Future

I often wonder what the girls will be like in the future, how their characters will develop. I can already imagine Juanita as a bit of a tomboy who enjoys extreme sports and driving her parents sick with worry if she'll break any bones. She's so agile, I want to find some sort of agility classes for her like martial arts, gymnastics or ballet when she's old enough... Catalina will be more efeminite. People say she already looks more feminine at two weeks than Juanita did. And she does look beautiful.

I feel so impatient to see their near future - to hear Juanita speak and communicate mixing the two languages, and when will Catalina be crawling? How will they interact? I hope they don't emulate their mother and aunty who fought with knives and threw crockery at each other. Rosario and I met an old lady who sat beside us when we went to Regent's Park with Juanis. She told us she had three children, but her youngest died young. We shouldn't worry so much about the future and the money and the house and the career, and value every day as it comes because they pass very quickly. Even Mum said we'll look back on these days and say they were the happiest of our lives. Maybe my ambition for my family and status clouds my enjoyment sometimes, I admit it.
I told someone today "I still can't believe I'm a married man with a mortgage and two children". The two children bit is the hardest to believe. The person I said it to replied, "well you better start believing it!" Yeah I guess I should.