It was only a short trip - less than a week - but it was still great.
The first excitement was Orry's first ever flight, which went very well - sleeping all the way through!
It's probably worth noting here that there are going to be more poor photos like these ones from now on - it's much too hard to dig out the big/nice/swanky camera every time we need a picture. At least here Cori was able to get out her mobile phone, rather than have no picture at all - god forbid!
Finn was very excited about going to the Island, although his descriptions about getting to his destination suggested that he perhaps had his priorities wrong: "We'll take the bus, and then the train, and then the aeroplane, and then we'll see granny, and then we'll go in granny's car." The car, predictably, was a big hit...
The trip, of course, was the first meeting of Orry and his Manx granny. Both were very happy:
It was lovely to be back on the Isle of Man and to see Orry adored and Loved by others. At that stage he was crying a lot. It seemed that whenever he was awake he was crying. So we ended up wishing away his waking hours so that he would sleep and the crying would stop, which is not very nice to feel. So it was good for us to see others adore him, which allowed us to look beyond the crying and beyond our buckling-down to parenting; so that we could stop appreciate and adore him a little too.
Orry also got to meet all of his cousins for the first time, which was very exciting for all concerned... Well, actually, for a mob of boys, it was probably only marginally exciting, for a short while... which probably explains why we only seemingly got pictures of Orry and Jake:
I suspect that Finn's being around makes a baby less interesting, and less able to retain their attention. But Orry certainly enjoyed being around them, as there was always something interesting going on at granny's house...
(I'm a little tempted to Photoshop my bald-patch out of that picture, but I guess I should own up to it - I imagine that it won't get any better!)
Finn really enjoyed being with his cousins. This worked all the better for his now being a little bit older, as it meant, for instance, that he could be upstairs in the boys' rooms without supervision (to ensure that he didn't get hurt, or didn't fall down the stairs etc.). It meant that he was more independent and able to have more freedom/fun, and we were able to sit down and have a cup of tea at last!
The only problem was when it came time to leave the mob of boys at the end of the day. Finn would inevitably break into weeping, but at least we could normally promise him that they would be back soon - even for breakfast one day, when we went to drop them off at school, which was great for me to go back along my own old school route!
(Finn was very pleased when he realised that he had on the same colour jumper on as the boys in their school uniform!)
It was just a problem that the cousins were in school all day, leaving Finn without people to play with. This was not helped by my being off in the Manx Museum for three days of the trip - the point of our going over - which meant that Finn was left to Cori & granny. He had fun though:
The biggest joy, perhaps unsurprisingly, was washing the car - a genius idea of granny's! Finn had a great time, what with a combination of splashing water and touching a car. I don't think that granny managed to remain very dry though. Unfortunately, Cori was stuck under a sleeping Orry and so wasn't able to get a picture of it otherwise than with her phone from where she sat, but it looked something like this...
As mentioned, with Orry in a sleeping-or-crying stage, Cori was mostly under him, but she did manage to put him down once or twice, as this documentary photography shows:
This latter one is the drawer that granny prepared with blankets etc. for Orry to sleep in. We liked it a lot, and we would have liked it even more if Orry had slept in it...
(It did look rather creepily like a coffin though!)
So all of this explains why many pictures of Orry are in the sleeping position, which is nice: for him to be sleeping, and for the holding one of us to be able to deflect Finn's demand for attention onto someone else (which only works if there is indeed someone else around!).
The apparent idyll of such family scenes is, however, often broken by Finn's taking it upon himself to hug Orry...
The lovely Manx family time wasn't actually what primarily took us there in the first place (fresh back from Paternity Leave at my work and without too much spare money to spend on flights etc.). In fact we went as a family predominantly as I needed to go and scan some books in the Manx Museum for the project that I had been commissioned to do.
The short version of the story is that I'm very interested in the literature of the Isle of Man - poetry, novels, plays etc. No one really knows that there is such a thing as a Literature of the Isle of Man, and so I wanted to do something about it. What with the big Island of Culture year in 2014, I was able to get funding to make a website where 40 key works of Manx literature would be made available free online. The project was commissioned at the end of October, and finished at the very start of January, which means that you're able to see what I'm talking about: http://manxliterature.com/.
The project (as I under-predicted and yet as Cori saw coming a mile off!) was an enormous one, requiring a large amount of work. Books had to be scanned, a website had to be created, texts had to be edited etc. Because of the scarcity of the books, the only easy place to find them is in the Manx Museum, which is why we all went over - so that I could go and spend three happy days engrossed in Manx books. (And I mean that - it was a very happy time to be there amongst all those so-precious and so-wonderful books!).
The project ended up requiring 4 or so hours a day, 7 days a week for three months for me - which was an awful lot. It couldn't have been done if Orry hadn't slept relatively manageably overnight (not "through the night", but enough for us to function!), and also if Cori hadn't been so understanding. This meant a lot of late nights for me and working hard during even the two weeks Paternity Leave (even bringing in the laptop to the hospital during the days of waiting, at the stage when Orry would sleep for hours on end!).
This meant that I felt like (and Cori felt like) I was missing out on something of Orry's first months in the world, and Finn's first months with a brother, and that Cori was missing out on my being a part of much of those first week's and months of being with Orry.
It was sad to think back to our first weeks with Finn, and how much time we dedicated just to being with and around him, and the contrast to how much I have been able to spend with Orry. Part of this has been in taking on the task of entertaining or dealing with Finn as Cori focusses on Orry - but the Manx project was certainly a part of my not being able to dedicate myself to Orry as I would have liked to have done. It is sad now to look at how big and smiley he is, and to think of how much he has changed; thinking of how I'd like to hold him as a new born again etc. But the feeling is inevitable. Time goes fast, especially with young children, especially when there is another young child shouting at you to look away from admiring the baby.
Part of the main feelings for me with Orry - as Second Child - is a shadow of sadness at not being able to give as much to Orry as we did to Finn (regardless of Manx projects), and also our not being able to give as much to Finn as we did before. It is strange to had a shadow of sadness over someone so wonderful as babies and young children. Life is a mysterious thing...
Anyway, here is a picture of Finn very happy to have discovered Esther Nelson's gravestone (the one inside the railings beside - we were very pleased to peel back the mossy turf to discover that!):
I'm not sure that there's anything else to report, but there are still two more pictures.
One of Finn blissfully sleeping even after being lifted from the car in his car-seat (probably having a dream of being in a car)...
... And the other is a collage of Finn being silly. Here he is reacting to my trying to take a picture of him by closing his eyes... and then opening one eye to see if I'm still waiting to take a picture of him... and then smirking!
And, just to prove that Finn had fun right to the last on his Manx trip, here he is enjoying the play area at the airport before we left. Unfortunately not caught here is Finn putting his head fully into the basket thing and trying to do a handstand over it - very odd. Fortunately not caught here is Finn forcing me to also put my head in the (rather small) basket thing also, though I refused to do a handstand, despite Finn's protests! Apparently Cori had been sitting on the side where she couldn't quite see him while I was getting a coffee and he came running over saying "Mama! They've got a basket for heads!" She was obviously very confused until another person waiting in the area said that he was indeed putting his head in a basket. And so he was! Strange child.
