The first couple are of Anna playing with one of her teething rings and a ball.

The next is of Anna playing pass the ball with Babushka (her Babushka being Irina’s Mum. Babushka is grandma in Russian).

The last two are of Anna playing/rolling on the floor, on the same day.

What is really good is that every day played is another chance to catch up to Narcogen and that 8,215 score… Make it happen AntiSceptic!!

Smiling Anna With Her Cube And Ball

Ah, upon checking the folder this photo was taken from, I can see this is the first day with some videos in it. I’ll go and upload them to YouTube, and include in a separate post, as the import process to Anna’s site creates duplicate posts if I put both and photos and vids into one post (and correctly categorize it).

For some vehicles however it’s rather impractical to take them down to the local ‘Shinomontage’ (tyre/wheel repair and replacement place in Russian). Luckily excavation/earth moving vehicles that are used in mining do not require this procedure, though I’m guessing they must need replacing occasionally. See prologcentralasia.kz for an example of one of these monster machines and then here to see a bloke standing next to one the wheels, it must be at least twice his height – “Dave I think we’re gonna need a bigger jack mate…”

Posted for a friend that created their site (I helped to optimize a few images that were slowing down the load times), though no money was involved in this post, though a glass of coke might be demanded the next time we meet

Anna and Chris sat in Ali BaBa

Oh, and for making it easier to follow what is what when this picture is automatically imported into Anna Merriman’s site, the photo was taken on the 9th of September 2009. 09/09/09, though not at 09:09. That would have been a little too early for all of us, and a little excessive just for obtaining a pretty time and date. That said, as the camera is still set to UK time, it thought it was 09:10 – only a minute off!

And that is all I got… it’s not much, but it is interesting.

Anna In Mega

Ooops, just re-checked the picture, and the yellow lighting of the fast food outlet sort of drowns out the KFC symbol. I tried playing with it in Photoshop, but to no avail. Anyway, the store is there, but no Burger King or McDonalds stores in Astana just yet, to the best of my knowledge.

Anna Sat Up In Denim Shorts

The rest of the photos will be spread out over the next week or so, so make sure you come back again. If baby photos aren’t your thing, I’ll be trying to add a few ‘normal’ posts along the way as well, so don’t go away

I’m going to be teaching an English lesson around that time, but hopefully there’ll be some sort of archive so I can play it back, even if real time interaction is out the window…
So, head over there if you want to ask an American living in Almaty, Kazakhstan what life is like (though he probably answered a lot of your questions in his other YouTube videos, so go and watch a few first ).

Oh, the BlogTV URL is here.

Last week she managed to co-ordinate crawling forward. She has obviously been happy crawling backwards for months, but until now never seemed particularly bothered about moving head first. Rolling from tummy to back to tummy again, combined with backwards crawling had got her everywhere she wanted to go, but now (especially with a remote control on the floor as the motivation) she’ll often choose crawling normally instead.

Food and drink – most purée flavours have been tried, as well as creating our own from the fruit and vegetables stored from the in-laws’ garden. To be honest, Anna is only really interested in the purée if it is sweet – she’ll eat other types, but if there is a high fruit content, Anna will be found with her mouth open, asking for more straight away! We are trying to make sure the store-bought ones don’t have any added salt or sugar, which can take a while with having to read all the ingredients. (Anyone who knows my cooking/Russian reading skills we’ll realise the ‘we’ part is in fact Irina.)

Although still wearing nappies and pull-up-training pants, Anna is now happy using the potty, although being only 8 months old, we’re not at all worried when she does just let go in her nappy, as opposed to waiting for the potty. Without going into too much detail, you can definitely now tell she is eating solid food!

In the coming weeks, Anna is going to be trying out both yoga (for mothers and babies), and swimming (with an instructor) which should be interesting. I’ve got about 10 Anna photos to post, and then I need to finally crack out the firewire cable and put the (very limited amount of) video on the camcorder onto YouTube and this blog. I think it may just be a few minutes from around the time when Anna was born, back in Britain.

This is really good stuff… the more we play, the more chances we have to prevent Narcogen from leaving us in the dust. Call me crazy, but that 5,430 point deficit is totally doable…

Hang gliding in the mountains around Kazakhstan’s former capital city, Almaty. One of Lucky’s older videos, but well worth a watch if you have some how missed clicking on my previous links to his channel etc.

Kazakh (specifically Almaty) police get jumpy when stopping a foreigner. With his wicked backhand badminton swing, and his constant spam-ban-baiting hip hop talk, who can blame them. (See his twitter account if that makes no sense, and I don’t really mind that much if you don’t use backhand swings (or call them that) in badminton. It is a silly game that involves staring at (shuttle) cocks anyway.) Let’s see if that gets a reaction

Having done so, I’ve just noticed there are a few more buttons available in TinyMCE’s editor than before.

Hmm, no Russian option in the WP spell checker list, but then I use Firefox anyway so no issue with spell checking anyway. Combine that with the fact that my written Russian skills are obviously outstanding, and no problem, obviously

Oh, insert custom code looks like it save me from pressing the Windows Flag+R and then typing charmap a few times, and the embedded media button looks interesting. I’ll have to try having a play with it later. If the blog suddenly appears borked, you’ll know why…