But we did lots of exciting things before the 29th, such as hike up South Barrule for the first time for all of us (which is perhaps a little embarrassing for the 35 year old Manx person amongst us!)
... And, to give you almost the same view, but with the view of the sea (off to the right) which we had...
... Very lovely indeed!
We had gone there (or, at least, got Finn to go there) because of the good videos about the Iron Age fort which was on the hill, which got Finn very excited about going to visit (though he was rather surprised and very sorry not to see Charles Guard up there!):
It was, however, very cold indeed, so we didn't hang out much up there - just long enough for us to work out where the wall was, to get a sight on Peel in the distance, and to get back down to a rock for lunch, and then even colder back to the car!
Apropos of nothing, here's Cori's recording of discovering Finn merrily singing The Beatles' All You Need Is Love, as he has a poo.
Some fantastic handling of a melody, I think you'll agree!
Finn isn't great about being alone in the house and so we have a lot of trouble getting him to go to the toilet (which is upstairs from the living areas) on his own, hence the hanging out just outside the door. There is also no chance that he's going to be quietly downstairs on his own with everyone else upstairs away from him while we shower and get ready. Sometimes, if Cori and Orry are still sleeping when I shower Finn will gather up books to read in the bathroom.
Finn had a very bad period of fear a short while ago. He began to be very difficult to deal with - not wanting us to leave the room at all, especially at night etc. We tried to speak to him about it, but he wouldn't tell us. He explained that he didn't want the thing to hear him and he didn't want it to become true. We discovered that Finn thought that whatever-it-was could be watching or listening in at the windows and doors, and so we negotiated that he would be able to tell us what was frightening him if we all crammed in the windowless cupboard and closed the door behind us. Crammed in there as a family, we felt sure that we could deflate Finn's fears as unsubstantiated and not truly scary. However, instead the tale just got us a little scared too! - It was of a troll-like beings listening and watching in at the windows and doors to see what Finn was up to, and then hiding a bag with bones in in his room. When no one was watching, or in the dark, the bones would then come together and come alive in the form of a monster, which would then attack us all... We were very impressed at how scary Finn's fear was!
He's forgotten about that bag-of-bones-monster now though, we're glad to say!
It might not be a bag of bones, but here's Finn being odd... or, at least, looking pretty odd when sat on the bus next to what appears to be his future self!
Finn has no awareness of the British avoidance of close contact - if there are other seats available there's no way you sit next to a stranger. But if that stranger is in the front seat of the bus, it doesn't matter if the rest of the bus is completely empty - Finn is sitting right there beside them!
I drop Finn off at school in the car each day - it's being next door to my work makes sense of this! - but Cori collects him at 3:30 each day. Because Cori's without a driving licence, it means that she has to get the bus. This is something of a pain because, although only 7 minutes driving, the timing of the busses aren't ideal, and so there is always waiting around or rushing.
Finn enjoys it though, as does Orry, who gets no end of attention from the girls in the years above Finn at the school, travelling the same way into town. Cori, however, a rare parent in a bus full of un-chaperoned children, is less than thrilled by the situation!
Perhaps also on the transport theme, October brought about a half-term for Finn. It was our first week ever of a Finn school holiday. Without Finn to get in of a morning, it meant that I could cycle in. Along the old train line (taken out in the 1970s), it was muddy and bumpy, but very beautiful, especially in the cool as mist lingered and the red glow of a sunrise peeked over the hills ahead of me. Very lovely:
Walking down the same train line was one of the activities which Cori did with Finn and Orry during half term. They went off in search of the last of the blackberries before the autumn finished them off. They were still there, in the brambles running along the side of the path by the river. However, it was very tricky for Cori to actually get enough for a pie in the end, because Finn and Orry were just eating them. At least Finn was picking his own to eat though; Cori was having to hide her own batch as Orry had assumed her as his dedicated picker!
They went with their good friends from the bus (with the only other mother who doesn't drive) ensuring that Alfie became Finn's best-best-best friend in the whole entire world. They do get on very well indeed though, and so do their brothers (Orry and Sal). Here you can see Finn and Alfie off down the path, having run off together in search for blackberries (or, more likely, just for the happy that they were!):
As well as Sal, Orry took to liking Little Bear very much in October for a period. No idea why, but there was a period when he decided that he couldn't go anywhere in the house without him. Such as to breakfast:
Of course, Little Bear has to sleep with him. And this is even when Orry wakes up early and wanders in crying to our room. At 5am or the like, the best course of action is to drag him into bed also in the hope that he will sleep for a little longer (knowing that he won't at all do so in his own bed at that time). Here is a successful such snatch from the early morning, some hour or so later, still snugly fast asleep together in The Big Bed:
One of the other activities for half term was a trip to the Wildlife Park, which was enjoyed by boys. For Cori it was mostly just a very long bus trip and a cold walk around in the outside... but it was a good outing!
October was the month that, at last, one of the permanent features of the toy area has died after years of good service. A musical card which Cori received from Auntie Casey nearly 4 years ago... at last!
Since the start of the month (perhaps the final week of September), we've been going to Manx lessons of a Tuesday morning. It's a small informal group of about eight people, meeting in a cafe near the school just after drop-off. We're doing quite well so far, and quite enjoying it. We have the advantage of having each other to speak to at home, asking "You want coffee, yes?", "Yes, I want coffee, with milk, and without sugar" etc. It is nice, though, to see some sense emerging from the Gaelic language which is otherwise 100% incomprehensible (unlike Continental European languages, where some words make sense). Hopefully we can keep it up.
Orry is there in the class with us, entertained with toys, drawing, food or, now, with a DVD player. There are other children there, so he's not alone. He is, thankfully, not too disruptive. Most of his silliness is restricted to when he's at home:
Another nice picture of the two of the boys was when they were left for a moment as Cori went to get ready to leave the house. She returned to go down to them, and found them like this, quietly sat together on the stairs reading books. A very rare occurrence!
On the 29th, a Saturday, Orry had his second birthday. He's become such a big boy!
We approached the Big Day in a relaxed fashion, allowing Orry to open his presents and then effectively just gorge himself on them all day, before a meal at home with just us, and cake. No parties or the like, but Orry was more than happy, we think - he had his favourite people there (i.e. Cori and Finn), and cake!
Presents...
Excuse Finn's whining in the first video - he was really having a hard time understanding the boundary between helping Orry to open things and pushing him out of the way to get to the toys! Also worth noting here that Orry's word for 'dinosaurs' has become something sounding like 'donuts.' We don't know why this happened - especially as he used to say dinosaur fairly clearly! But donut it is and donut it seems to stay. Unless he's talking about a triceratops in which case he inexplicably says 'triceratops.' Go figure.
Orry's big gift was the combination of a ball boat and a heap of new balls. They enjoyed that, though we're not too sure that it really warranted Orry's jumping in!
Later on came the other great highlight of the day - the cake:
It isn't often that there is cake that Orry can eat, so being able to gorge himself on it is a real treat!
Part of the reason that we didn't do a something for Orry's birthday was because I was off working in the morning, out at a hop-tu-naa event across on the other side of the Island:
Hop-tu-naa ended up being a big thing in our household. Fresh (back) to the Isle of Man, we threw ourselves into it all, not at all jaded from many previous years of the songs and the turnips!
It started early on in October with an outing to Cregneash, which does a big turnip-carving thing. We got there a bit early, in the hope of finding a stone circle, but I got us lost and we only found WWII bunkers, which Finn was delighted by (and demanded that we phoned Charles Guard to tell him!). We called it quits and ate sandwiches in the wind, looking out over the Calf of Man:
We had never been to the Cregneash turnip carving before and we were amazed to find queues outside the door of the tent, where there was a series of men employed to do different stages of the scooping out, before you emerged at the end with a "moot" ready to muscle onto a trestle table with to carve. It was something of a pressured situation to get the thing carved in the few minutes in which Finn and Orry were still interested, but I think I did a pretty good job:
We met with the cousins down there and, as is tradition, we went on to the Sound Cafe for a cup of tea and a chat. It is hardly worth mention, but that I bumped into someone from the Manx class, presenting the opportunity for a "Fastyr mie, kyss t'ou?" outside of class. Admittedly, my "Afternoon, how are you?" met the traditional "Braew/Fine" response, but it still gave something of a thrill to "speak Manx" in public!
We were very excited to get home and show off our "moot" to Cori, especially with the light out:
As you will understand, the moot was named Finn Orry McMoot. Finn Orry McMoot looked fantastic when lit up in the dark:
Into the spirit of the thing, we then set about carving more turnips, and doing it in a way which could actually involve the children. This meant doing some designing and planning...
Regardless, some excellent things were created:
Also created were the fancy dress costumes, which Cori did excellently: the very scary Moddey Dhoo, and a spider:
They are here dressed up on the way to the school disco. This was sort-of fun. Or, to be more accurate, it would have been fun (for Finn), had he not actually been frightened of most of the dressed-up children there. Indeed, he wouldn't even look at his friend, Anouk, who had come made-up like a Mexican style skull/skeleton! We spent most of our time, therefore, hiding Finn from everyone in the corner.
The costumes were really made for the sake of the event actually on the night of hop-tu-naa, which included a fancy dress costume. It also included a turnip competition (check), a gingerbread competition (check)...
(don't judge the gingerbread - they looked excellent before they went in the oven!)
... and a guy competition (check)
As you might be able to judge from the picture, the boys loved the guy, especially since he'd had his face (excellently) created by Finn. Indeed, they loved Big Guy so much that he even came to dinner with us:
Big Guy also hid in people's beds, and even on the toilet one night, which gave Cori something of a shock... which was probably good as it might have killed scaredy Finn had he been the one to discover Big Guy!
Since the whole point of guys is to be burnt on Bonfire Night, Cori thought it best to also create a Little Guy at the same time, which they could keep. He immediately became Orry's best friend, who he carried around for days afterwards, inside or outside the house:
Orry also got very much into the spirit of hop-tu-naa, though mainly by demanding "hop naa" whenever we were in the car. This meant playing this song on repeat:
We were glad when he was deflected to listen to another hop-tu-naa song (these are, by the way, songs sung traditionally at people's doors as you go around with your carved turnip), but then we had to listen to this one on repeat for days!
So we were both very excited and somewhat relieved to finally get to hop-tu-naa night itself. We travelled out to Maughold, where these two boys from the other side of the Island cleaned up in the prizes (though not for the gingerbread, which even Orry spat out!):
We also were treated to learning the hop-tu-naa dance, courtesy of one of Finn's schoolmates' mum's, Chloe. This meant that Finn was very confident around her, even in a crowd, and so he did his best unwitting job to interrupt her lesson by trying to tell her all about what he knew of the song. It was a good job Chloe was such a pro, or else Finn would have been in charge!
A lovely time was had by all, and especially we two parents, who got to have a nice quiet chat on the way home as the two boys snoozed at last!
But, of course, the final word should go to that two-year-old birthday boy Orry!
