Baby and mummy are feeling poorly. We both have a horrible cold with sore throats, hoarse voices, loads of snot, coughing, you name it. On top of that baby is teething with tooth number nine which seems to be a really bad one.

All day Yannick is wiping his snotty face somewhere on my body, preferably at my lower legs area, from behind. As he needs two naps at the moment he doesn't go down well at night time and is fiddly like hell. While I am nursing him to sleep he is pinching my neck, fiddling with my watch, pulling at my duvet, my t-shirt or my bra, tickling me at my elbow, hitting me; did I forget anything? In short he is driving me crazy for about 40 minutes! Normally he sleeps after ten.

I am only hoping that this will be over soon, it's been going on for too long already.

At night when Yannick wakes me up and I wait for him to finish his drink I dreamily think about things to do.

I think about what I would like to write in my blog; if only I would remember the next day and have the time to write! I think I'd be publishing at least every second day.

The other thing I do is humming songs in my head. For some reason the childrens' songs that we listen to on CD during the day somehow make it back into my head at those times. With some of the songs I don't remember at all what the words are and then I am sitting there trying to get some made-up lyrics to work somehow with the melody. At times I come up with funny things which I would love to sing to Frank the next day, but obviously I never remember.

I am also planning what I would like to do the following day, things like I should tidy up A, send B away with the post, work on C on my web site, etc. Of course I never do any of those things unless I write them down on a to-do list. Fat chance I do that at three in the morning!

I think I simply don't wake up enough to remember any of these things properly. The moment I move myself back onto my mattress I am asleep again. Zzzzzh…

I am all excited as I have an update to my calendar of upcoming visits:

tomorrow - an old friend of mine will be coming over from Germany
April - my mum will be coming over from Germany for Yannick's 1st birthday!
May - possibly another friend of mine who lives in France will come to visit
June - my sister is contemplating coming over again from Germany
July - possibly some very good friends from South Africa will be visiting us
September - a friend of mine from the US will be stopping here on her trip to the Netherlands

Anybody else wanting to come and see us? I love to have visitors about once or twice a month and Winchester is a great place to come to!

On Friday I received an email from an acquaintance of mine with an invitation to join Hi5 (another web community site like MySpace). Never having heard of this one I wanted to check it out and registered. The site asked me whether I wanted to invite more friends and to help me it offered to get all addresses from my Yahoo address book. Not liking this too much I still decided to go along and see who I would want to send a mail. Surprise, surprise, some people I know were already members - even my own partner. I made sure to deselect all addresses (all checked by default) and to only select a test address (one of my own) and then wanted to click on Continue. By accident I pressed one of the internet buttons on my mouse which took me one page back instead of where I wanted to be. Pressing the other internet button I went forward again and clicked on Continue. Oooops, only then did I see that all my contacts were checked again and not only the ones I had selected before. Holy crap! 171 email addresses got an invitation!!!

The rest of the evening I got plenty of mails from Hi5 telling me that a number of people joined, some others that some of the email addresses didn't work. I also got a few direct responses from friends wondering what the hell I was sending them and of course some of those inevitable 'out of the office' notifications… Not really the kind of entertainment I was after, especially as I don't have loads of time during the day for emails.

On Saturday, after some more friend acceptance mails, I checked my home page on Hi5 and found that the site also shows me activities of my friends. Finally this started to be a bit more interesting, they actually started to connect with each other too! And I got a few personal messages from people I hadn't heard of much for a while. That's actually a nice side effect.

Now that I have started this involuntary experiment I am actually quite curious how many more friends will sign up and start using the site in some way. I didn't really want to be a member of yet another web community but let's see where this takes us. On Monday when people are back at work I am expecting some more mails to come in but I am sincerely hoping that it will all die down after this. The good news is that some invitation mails will never be seen as I heard that with some people they end up in the spam folder automatically - yippee!

For the more fragile souls among my friends: If you didn't get a mail from me and believe I should have your email address, then be assured my Yahoo address book wasn't quite up-to-date. Just let me know, I will invite you, no problem. After sending out 171 invitations another few won't hurt at all and I surely don't want to discriminate anybody! If you don't want to be my friend on Hi5 I won't be offended either. Oh, yes, you can find my profile here: Sylke on Hi5.

An afterthought: Are you actually a Luser if you know what the term means???

Ever since Yannick was born we've had plenty of visitors! It's great and gives both Yannick and myself much needed entertainment on those days when Frank is on his twelve hour shifts. To remind myself here is a list of all visits we've had with at least one overnight stay and also planned ones:

2006
April - my sister came over from Germany to be there when Yannick was born
June - my mum came over from Germany
September - very, very good friends came over from Ireland to help us with our move
November - my mum came over from Germany
November - a friend came over from the Netherlands
December - my sister came over from Germany
December - a friend who now also lives in the UK visited with his wife

2007
February- some friends came over from Ireland (one from South Africa via Ireland)
February - my nephew came over from Germany
March - an ex-colleague will be visiting on his journey from Germany to Ireland
March - an old friend of mine will be coming over from Germany
April - my mum will be coming over from Germany for Yannick's 1st birthday!
May - possibly another friend of mine who lives in France will come to visit
July - possibly some very good friends from South Africa will be visiting us

You can see there is still some space in June for example. Anybody want to come over? We've got sofa beds both in our spare room and the living room!

Another thing that comes to mind reading over this post, is that I am in the UK already for over a year now. And I left Germany 15 years ago!!!

Time to post again. Today some random facts:

• OK, this is probably nothing new, but I can't repeat it often enough: Time just flies when you have children. I would like to spend more time posting but need to play occasionally with Yannick.
• Yannick's poo smells like porridge with apple purée. Yep, you read right. Somehow I was wondering for a long time what the smell of baby porridge with apple and pear puree reminded me of and one day it finally clicked, Yannick's poos. LOL.
• Snot goes everywhere and babies HATE it to get their nose wiped. My trousers seem to be especially attractive for voluntary nose wiping. Sigh. But I've also had loads on my t-shirts, at boob level. Very fetching.
• NOTHING is more interesting than the laptop. Ahem, why should my child think any differently?
• Babies think you want to poison them when you give them something new to eat. Hihi, you should see the faces Yannick pulls when he tries something new! Funny thing is that if he decides he likes something nevertheless, he will continue eating it immediately, no matter how much he seemed to dislike it at the first bite.