The Admin System Creaked....

Another egg from 'Laundry-Pile' hen

John's weapon of choice, my Old Father Time scythe. 'Cigar'
whet-stone in his pocket, these nettles don't stand a chance

A shorter post this time as befits the fact that I should be spending more time with our guest, good friend from Kent, John W. He is with us till Thursday and shows every sign of loving the slow-paced rhythm of life here, the 'plod' of gardening and the chances to relax, walk the dogs, eat good food and quaff a few beers or sip on a nip of Kilbeggan.

We finally open up some lovely clean ground
and get a load of long overdue seedlings in.
Here kale, chard and calabrese.

Some of the time I have been working with him but some I am off in another part of the site doing something else and we just cross paths then on coffee breaks or at lunch. Then we'd be off on an errand or a mission, shopping or whatever and he was happy to come along and get a look at the local area.

John contemplates a meal of duck in Guinness sauce

On Monday this ended up being more than once, as we are currently trying to get a replacement driving licence sorted for Liz. The local licencing office may be good at many things but it is not firing on all cylinders when it comes to the unusual request by a returning Irish citizen who has lost an English licence while in Belfast and now needs an Irish licence. Add to that the fact that this lady has changed her name on marriage from her maiden name to mine but VIA, on some forms, using a double-barrelled combination of both.

The admin system creaked mightily as we tried to prove that UK-Liz and Roscommon-Liz are one and the same even though both looked identical in their pictures and had identical signatures. At one stage the clerk even asked if it would help if she took a copy of a cervical smear appointment letter (?). In the end, after 3 runs to Roscommon (an hour round trip each time) that day we sorted it with a Marriage Certificate but even that the girl had a long reluctant look at "from corner to corner", as Liz said. Now we just have a 12-week wait (!) for the document/card to appear in the post. Don't hold your breath.

If anyone is reading this blog and dreaming of making the move out here, like we did, then I would offer the following short list of advice 'bullet' points.

New tiles for the kitchen. The mark on the
middle one is just tile-dust we'd not yet
swept off. 

• Don't change your name on marriage (taking your husband's name) and certainly not via a hyphenated combination of both names.
• File in a special file examples of utility bills in your chosen surname for both your old address and your new - don't let your husband pay all the bills or do all the admin and leave you with no inbound letters bearing your name. 
• Keep your passport and book all flights, car hire etc in your 'old' name. Also sign onto doctors, dentists and anything else in that name. 
• If you have to attend any interview like this then take your passport, PPSN card, any other 'smart card' with photo ID, marriage cert etc but probably NOT your letter of appointment for a cervical smear test.
• Don't lose your driving licence in Belfast. 
• Drink plenty of tea or maybe some gin.
• Be prepared for a 12 week wait anyway.  

In the middle of all this, our heroic builder-man, K-Dub, rocked up, first to cement in the step from one kitchen to the other, covering in the dish-washer waste and then to tile the kitchen floor.  He also created the step down from new kitchen to garden out of doors. The latter new cement was immediately walked on by chickens and kittens and I was thinking about painting in these prints to show them up, but heavy rain came and obliterated the prints. We (mainly K-Dub) did a really good job on this and it now really only needs grouting, skirting, 2nd-fix electrics and paint to finish the room.

Duck in Guinness sauce. 

So what else is new? The only real notable event was today nipping across to Sue and Rob's place so that they could meet John  and so that I could help/show them how to butcher up the carcass of their 'failed' ram lamb, Silas.

Silas gets reduced to kit form.

Friends of the Blog will know that that lad, orphaned and bottle fed from birth never made the size and stature of a ram capable of getting anyone's ewes pregnant and scored a big fat zero in our flock as well as in Sue's, where he has lived as 'man and wives' for his whole life excluding Nov and Dec 2016 when we borrowed him.

The amateur butchers cut out a shoulder joint

Well, it's a rough, tough world in smallholdering, Silas, and having blotted your copy-book with a nil score you then turned aggressive towards Sue and started butting her hard when ever she went into the field. Well, long story short, he went on that short trailer ride to Webb's in town and came home today in kit form. Most of him is now in the freezer but they kept a shoulder joint out for tomorrow's roast. Happy to help, Sue and Rob, and thanks for the sausage rolls and fresh (poly-tunnel) strawberry gateaux.

Nice tall fox gloves in our woods.

Well, now we sit this evening looking a bit anxiously at the sky. The ewes here have now enjoyed 2 days without rain and if we stay dry we can shear them tomorrow. John will be able to help, which he is quite looking forward to. But it has gone quite 'close' and some grey clouds are cruising through, so this plan may founder. Wish us luck.

Sausage and apple pie.

Never Ending

Some local horses make the 365 album

With the coming and going of Hallowe'en (and All Souls' Day, I guess) we realised that we are now three quarters of the way through the 'Lisacul 365' photographic project. This year-in-the-life photographic record of all things within the 18 townlands, started on 1st Feb (that pic Liz took of our St Brigid's Cross seems a long way ago now) and runs through till 31st Jan 2017. It has (touch wood) not missed a day yet and has accumulated around 1000 pictures at this 9-month stage. There are roughly 85 more days to go.

A common sight locally. Abandoned farm buildings now
used (if at all) as barns. 

Regular readers will know that I function as 'back-stop' or 'safety net' committed to take at least 1 (normally 3) pic(s) each day so that on the days when none of the other 20 regular contributors take any, the show must go on. Hence as well as the 1000 pictures stored by Liz on the project website (awaiting final choice of THE ONE for each date), I have my own 1000-shot collection which overlaps to a degree.

Shaggy Ink Cap

By now I have pictured most of the area - I have shot scenery, farm buildings, ruins, flowers, trees, animals, birds and other 'bio-diversity', people where I could, highways and bye-ways, the weather, sunsets and sunrises. night time pictures, food and drink, events and seasonal stuff. It seems never ending. I am not trying to impress anyone here (go look at the pics and then decide), rather explaining why I am running out of steam a bit and will be relieved when it is all over. I can see myself putting the camera down on 31st Jan 2017, determined to give it a rest for a while.

These babies blundered into the 365 project when they escaped
their field and went for a stroll on the tarmac. Their Mum was
giving them hell from the field to my left but they hadn't a bother
on them. 

We will all be immensely proud, of course, of having stuck it out and 'landed' the thing but now that we are through the 'autumn colours' blaze of photo-genicity, I am looking down the barrel of 80+ days of grey skies, rain-swept muddy fields, no new plants, baby chicks or lambs. I am feeling a bit uninspired. Still, no-one said it was easy and, if it was, then we'd all be less proud of it.

Pond frozen for the first time this winter
on Monday 7th Nov

Also in the 'Going on for ages and now finally nearly done' Dept is THAT election in America. Liz has, you will know, always been a fan but I am only this time finding myself drawn into the drama and intrigue, listening to pod-casts and punditry on the Internet. Well, they all went to the polls today and I am reverting to my less-interested 'tell me in the morning' mode while Liz is about to pull one of her all-nighters, simultaneously watching news feeds, Twitter hash-tags, Facebook and her own private chat-forum groups. Tomorrow has, of course, already been taken off work as a holiday.

Snookered today by having to wait while the People exercise their democratic right, she was reduced to ironing, going to Knitting Club and Drama Group and, very nicely, feeding K-Dub and I tea and buns whenever we took a break from 'doing' the new kitchen wall. When she returns from drama-ing (about 11 pm) the polls will have closed in US-time and things might be starting to move for her night-owl surfing. By my next post, presumably, it will all have been decided, the winner 'crowned' President and the loser, just maybe, conceded with good grace.

Tell-tale blue turf smoke. 

Meanwhile, Monday saw us with a first frosty morning of this winter and the pond frozen over. I am not 100% sure, but I think that ram-lamb Silas, may have been having a little go with our Jacob-cross ewe, Polly. I think she has the faintest waft of smokey blue colour across her rump. What we need is a great wet slapped dollop of the stuff so that we would know for sure, but this might be an early teen-age fumbling. Polly's wool is quite dark anyway and can appear a blue-ish grey in some lights, so you'd not swear that it was raddle-grease on her but we remain hopeful.

Going Once....Going Twice...

Crack! The (nominal) gavel comes down on our long running local drama, "The Sale of the Land". Back in early September I posted that the 28 acres of land around us had gone up for sale and that we were considering buying one of the fields. ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/09/field-of-dreams.html ). Back when we bought this place we took a small (2.5 acres) chunk out of what had been a 30 acre farm, in our case the house and buildings and the fields immediately surrounding. In the process we became good friends with one of the three sisters selling the place, 'Vendor Anna' on this blog.

No relevance to this story - just a '365'
pic I snatched of a water-well drilling rig
which parked in the village.

The three sisters held on to the remaining 28 acres for 4 years but have now put the land up for auction. They very generously created an option for us to buy the 1.5 acre field opposite in which we had registered an interest. We had to have a good old poke around in the dusty corners of the cupboard labelled "Our Financial Life" but alas, no such lump of 'wedge' presented itself and we had to pass on the option. Well, this sale has now gone through without us and we have a new neighbour. You don't win them all. Never say 'Never', though. The field is likely to remain right there and just maybe, in a couple of years when the cupboard might be a bit more yielding.......

Dry cured hams awaiting their 8 months (or so) of air drying.

Meanwhile, back in the bit we did manage to buy, plenty of stories are still chugging along happily. The big, complete pig legs we saved at butchery time for our version of Parma/Serrano ham have now completed their 21 day stay in the dry cure mix (3 parts salt, 1 part sugar, various spices, refrigerator) and come ready to be scrubbed clean of the encrusted cure (using cider vinegar properly but I used white vinegar), bagged in their muslin sleeves and hung up in a well ventilated, cool, dry place for (the recipe says) 4-18 months. Our plan is to try the first one next summer (so about 10 months) and save one for Christmas 2017 (14 months). The air drying is to get the lovely sweet Serrano flavours. The salt cure is to give us a head start in the not-very-Spanish local climate. If you hang up uncured meat in the West of Ireland in October, I think you'd just generate a maggot-sanctuary in a bit of a hurry.

The hams hang in their muslin sleeves.
We will hide them up when guests are
using the room!

The first print-run on the village calendar has sold out and we know that many have already left the country en route to their delighted recipients. We have had delighted feedback from the UK  and I have also posted them to Germany and Canada. Liz is already taking orders for a 2nd print run. The village website is widely seen as a great success and gets plenty of 'traffic' both locally and from people who have connections back to the area but now live abroad, the 'Diaspora'. It is to the website that many people are going to register their interest and place their order(s).

Liz has given up trying to knit here and is reduced to playing
a game on the laptop as long as the 'kattens' do not try to
eclipse her view. The laptop is up on the cookbook 'lectern'
to stop tiny feet walking on the keyboard. 

Our other main  'project' if you can call it that, is to try to integrate the "kattens" (they are too big to be called kittens any more but not yet big enough to be called 'cats'). They are almost 6 months old now and not too vulnerable to doggie molestation. They can jump up onto safe high places and make themselves quite big by arching their backs, bog-brushing their tails and hissing and spitting. The dogs tend to stop and think about it now.

Lovely colour from the beech trees in the
(now empty) pig-run

Most evenings and sometimes during the day when we are around to supervise, we open the door through to their Sitting Room and let them come through to explore and enjoy the family, fire-warmed company of the Dining Table. They love it and we are starting to believe that we may actually get these cats through from kittenhood without either of them suffering death (or injury) by dog. We do not yet trust them all together unsupervised, however, so they can not yet have the "access all areas" freedom enjoyed by our adult cats, the fearless 'Soldier' and the big-enough-to-damage-the-dogs, alpha-male 'Blue'.

Borrowed ram-lamb Silas has still not, to our knowledge, succeeded in mounting any of the ewes (no give-away blue painted rumps at the breakfast bar) but he has settled down with the ladies and is now very much inside the flock. I frequently see him in close company with the big ewe 'Myfanwy' and the youngster, 'Rosie'. The experts tell me that this is all OK and that ewes, even when they are in season, only come receptive to the ram on a 13-18 day cycle (average 17). We don't know where they were before Silas arrived, so we have no idea how many days we need to wait. If they weren't on at all, then the presence of a ram should bring them round. Happily, Sue says we can keep Silas for as long as we like or need, even through Christmas, so the lad has plenty of time to grow into the big boots left behind by the mighty 'Rambo', our 2015 tup.

I owe him an apology, though. In my previous post, I suggested that he was named for the biblical Silas who spent time with St Paul; Sue had said something about the diagonal white cross he had on his face as a young one. Apparently not. He is named after 'My Uncle Silas' in the HE Bates books because he is a country boy and Sue hopes he will be a disreputable, fun-loving, philandering rogue. Especially the philandering, I would think. I had not heard of these books, but Sue and Rob loved a TV series from 2001 starring Albert Finney as Silas and gave him the name in memory of it. Go Silas.

Silas the Tiny (and Blue)

Travelling First Class - Silas arrives in Sue's car.

"Holy Apostle", Silas you may recall from your Sunday School days, was one of Paul's merry men from the adventures preaching to assorted Thessalonians, Corinthians, Antioch and the like. Or you can look him up in Google, the same way I had to! Well, to us, now, he is much more recent and way less holy - Silas is this year's 'tup' or ram-lamb, staying here for 5 weeks or so while he works his way round our 4 ewes getting them all into lamb. Possibly. I say 'possibly' because the lad is still rather small. The name comes from a white cross on his face when he was a young one.

Larruping the gooey blue 'raddle' grease onto Silas's chest

Born this year he has not grown anything like as fast as our lambs and was about a month later coming into the world. His size is probably something to do with the fact that he was an orphan or 'sock' lamb and had to be hand-reared with no real ewe's milk to go at. No matter, we are going to give him a try out and he will no doubt enjoy the practise this year and whether or not he 'scores' we are fairly relaxed about how many lambs we get in 2017. We will have him back next year (all being well) as an 18 month old, bigger and more experienced chap.

Sue leads Silas out to meet his new 'women'

Because we want to know if and when he does manage to mount the ewes (so that we can do the 5-month calculation on the calendar), we have 'raddled' him; in this case bright blue. For the uninitiated, raddle is a coloured oily mess you slap onto and massage into his chest and lower neck so that, when he mounts the ewe he cannot avoid 'painting' her rump with the stuff. You buy it as a tub of 450 g of blue (or other colours) "chalk" powder and mix it to a sloppy paste with ordinary vegetable oil. You can, if you prefer, and have more money than we do, buy it as a fancy wax 'crayon' which fits into a leather harness which holds it in position under the boy's chest. You can even buy it in 'hot weather' and 'cold weather' versions to adjust its 'painting ability' to the frost and sunshine. Yeah right.

Please don't leave me behind.....

We had Sue deliver him while he was still wearing his head collar and lead, so that she could keep a hold of him while I smeared him blue and then lead him in to meet the ladies. He was a bit nervous when faced with these 4 bigger sheep and none of us could shake off the impression that he was a small child being taken to 'big school' by his Mum on that first day. He clung to Sue a bit and didn't really want to be left behind.

It's only vegetable oil - it washes off (I was relieved to find!)

Our biggest and possibly 'alpha' ewe Myfanwy came over and gave him a good sniffing including that lift-the-upper-lip thing they do when chatting each other up. We took that as a good sign. Myf' also gave him a couple of play butts just to make sure he knew she was boss and our new this year ewe-lamb (Rosie) also showed an interest. So, there he was. He's in there now and looks OK. He certainly has a strong appetite for our good grass and fiercely defends his corner of the breakfast (crunch) trough. As of tonight he has not 'scored' yet (no blue rumps, so far) but that would be normal. The ewes would expect to come into heat in the presence of a male, and may take some days. They may not have been anywhere near ready, living in the ladies-only flock as they were up till yesterday. Patience is the thing.

An interesting use for left over Dabinette cider apples. Liz
made this apple, lemon and star-anise jelly. 

In an amusingly related story, I was over in Sligo yesterday morning helping K-Dub build another stone wall when an old boy pulled up outside in a lovely vintage red MF tractor which was, in turn, pulling an equally vintage stock trailer. We didn't know the fella - he was just "generic weather-beaten, leathery Sligo farmer bloke". He strolled over and asked did 'we' have a Billy Goat (presumably knowing full well that 'we' (actually Charlotte) did - you can see the goats from the road. He had his Nanny goat in the trailer, he said, and she was on heat, so might he put her to the Billy.

The new calendars start to leave the country

We called C out from the house and she, obviously amused, took man and goat out to meet the boy. Billy was well up for any action and came racing down the field but our (human) ladies could immediately tell that the goat was nothing like on heat (no swollen vulva, no tail wagging) so there was to be no mounting and Sligo-farmer had to lead his charge off un-impregnated. C found out that he wants the goat 'in-kid' so that she comes into milk and he can put orphan lambs to her. The Billy he normally uses is locked in a "cage" he said on a farm where you can never get hold of the farmer. It is in a cage because it is "so fierce!", he said. C has invited him to try again next week and has also put in a bid for the goat-kid(s) which he presumably disposes of if he's feeding the nanny-milk to his lambs. The tractor, he protested, is not some lovingly restored 'vintage' machine - just his own, long-loved work-a-day farm machine.

Then there was Hallowe'en. We are not sure very much Hallowe'en happened down this lane before we arrived, there not being many kiddies down here of the right age. We arrived fresh from the UK and also filled with enthusiasm gained by association with the Silverwoods crowd and the mad party of armies of Estate children, squillions of Euro spent on sweeties and more still on dry ice, special effects, electronic ghosties and ghoulies and sound effects. In our first year we decided to put a rather tentative pumpkin lantern on the gate pier down in the lane and a few more small lights up the drive, bought ourselves a modest stash of chocs and wondered whether our 'advert' (open for business, up for some Trick-or-Treat kids?) would attract anyone.

We got one family, as I recall - near neighbours. Mum in Hi-viz and driving people carrier. Kids all costumed up. We've done it ever since. In the 2nd year it was lashing rain and I think we got no-one, but since then the word seems to have been spreading that you can go to 'that place down the lane'. This year we had a visit from K-Dub and co (OK, I admit I had invited them) but then in quick succession 4 very nice families finishing up with a crowd of 8 or so which included the little ones from 4 years ago. They descended upon our sweeties like a plague of locusts, 16 little hands scrabbling for the chocs and lollipops. They cleaned us out. They had lovely costumes - there was even a Donald Trump!

It was late enough by then, though, that we decided we could safely shut up shop to save having to disappoint any other families, so I whizzed round retrieving the pumpkins and blowing out lanterns. I'm not sure what the going rate is for the 'Trick' part of Trick or Treat - what happens to you if you cannot give the kids any sweets (or you just don't). I hear some houses get 'egged' (fresh raw eggs thrown at the front door). Our local kids do not seem to be that cynical and are, anyway, being driven round by parents, so I'd hope do not run to those Hallowe'en horrors. We got away with it anyway. One of the Dads told me today that he had hidden himself in a field while the children came up to our door and then sneaked along the lane behind them in the field before jumping out of the hedge at them in the dark, scaring them half to death before giving them a bucket of sweets.  Good Night Kiddies. Don't have nightmares now! See you next year. I will have to buy more sweeties.

Sheep Meds and Rising Sap

Sheep meds - against worms, fluke and Clostridium infection

A text message in the week from Sue and Rob reminds us that this is the time of year to catch up on our annual round of sheep medication. Both farms subscribe to the "nearly organic" school of management (Yes, I know the purists deny the existence of this one; you cannot be "nearly" organic, you either are, or you're not) - we do not do any un-necessary drugging, like the day to day dosing with antibiotics performed by the commercial boys, and we try to only use the vet when we have a known, proven disease.

The smallest bottle of Covexin you can buy - 50 ml.

3 conditions in sheep, though, have us convinced enough to be 'likely', so we allow these (worms, fluke and Clostridium infection) preventative meds in and hang the organic 'ticket'. The worms and fluke are just because it is wet, boggy land, and worse just outside our boundary, so that the little snails which act as secondary host to the fluke could easily get at us. Having said that, every time we slaughter a lamb we get the butchers to slice through the liver enough to confirm that it is 100% free from fluke damage and we have not had a bad one yet. In our defence we also own that the local farm co-ops all stock the fluker and wormer; a sure sign that plenty of farmers locally do this too.

The Clostridium thing is a little more complicated. We were not doing this up till winter 2015/16 and you may recall that in that autumn/winter we borrowed the lovely Suffolk ram 'Rambo' from Sue and Rob for 5 weeks to 'see to' all our ewes. A good job he did too, giving us 3 pairs of twins. All seemed well and we shipped him off back home with everybody happy and healthy. Or so we thought. I don't think I said this in the blog but, unfortunately, 2 weeks later, he suddenly upped and died for no apparent reason. They found him stretched out in the field at morning rounds.

The lovely bright red bark of dogwood.
Dogwood grows round here like weeds

Now, we don't know for sure that it was Clostridium that did for him (nobody spends money on post mortem on run-of-the-mill sheep like ours) but from our research and digging (including talking to our vet, of course) that is pretty much the only thing that causes fast, unexplained death with no prior symptoms and it can lie dormant in the animal and then be triggered by the stress of moving the sheep around. Obviously we also have no idea whether Rambo had it all along, or picked it up at home or at our place but the advice was to get everybody vaccinated.

A local donkey makes it into the '365' album

When you go to buy meds for sheep here you immediately hit a problem well known among smallholders and frequently moaned about. The manufacturers of the meds do not cater for us and the smallest quantity of drug you can buy is designed to meet the needs of normal size flocks.

Coming back into lay after the oddly late moult.

Our advised drug for the Clostridium (Covexin 10) comes down to 50 ml bottles and the dose is 1 ml, so you have to buy 50 doses. It is €37 or so so we have to try to share the 'pain' between a few smallholders. In our case, we bought the Covexin, Sue got the wormer and fluker. In fairness the drug lasts 3 years in the fridge and any new animals get introduced to the treatment via a double dose, 5-6 weeks apart, so between us we will get through about a third of it and only throw away about €25's worth. Ah well.

The 'new' kittens are 5 months old now.

So, over I went to do the first of the paired jabs  on 2 of Sue's new ewes and the new ram, Silas, replacement for the late Rambo (May the Lord have mercy etc). It was my first chance to clap eyes on him properly and weigh up his prospects of doing a good job for our ewes and I must admit to being a bit taken a-back by how tiny he seems compared to my mountainous Mummas. Apparently he is "all there" and has been making muddy foot prints on the flanks of Sue's ladies but he's only 6 months old and might not be 'man' enough. He is, though, our only option currently and we are going to raddle him up and give him the benefit of the doubt. In fairness we are not that pushed about getting a gazillion lambs off our 4 ewes so if he 'misses' or manages only singletons we will not be upset. We will look forward to using him again in 2017 when he is a big, strong 18 month old shearling. Good luck Silas.

Domesticity goes on for ever.

A little amusing aside on the meat-stock. Over the few years I have been here I have had a few happy chats with a neighbour about producing our own pork, lamb, chicken, etc. He is a life long beef farmer but amazed me by never having eaten any of his own meat - his animals go off to the big factories locally and into the supermarket food chain.

I was never intending to get that deep into Twitter. I seem to have
racked up 3000 'tweets' mainly chatting to the smallholder crew.

He tells me wryly that he is sure it is gorgeous (young, healthy, tender, almost organic (that one again!)) but that if the family wants beef on the table then herself has to trot off to the supermarket and buy anonymous meat in cling film packaging like "everyone" else. I joke with him that he is mad and surely just a little bit curious to sample his own product. Well he told me this week that he has decided to try it so a heifer has been chosen, taken off to local man Webb's (who does our pigs) and is currently hanging in the cold store there before being butchered up, and "herself" was sent off to town with a wad of money to buy a BIG freezer. Thought that'd amuse you.

This pic is a bit of a fake. The apples are
from our cider tree, variety Dabinette but
the cider is by the guy down the lane who
gave our pigs the pomace after squeezing
his normal dessert apples.

Meanwhile here today, everybody seems to be through their feather moult and feeling the sap rising. I have seen the Araucana cock dusting up with a Marans or two. Through the kitchen window I saw our #2 Buff Orp rooster set about the biggest male turkey poult and promptly get beaten up by all three poults acting together. One we think is a female, but maybe turkeys do this as a pack. Later I saw the big male turkey poult get hold of the smaller female by the scruff looking for all the world like he was about to mount. Child snatcher! On my afternoon rounds I inadvertently walked by that #2 rooster and felt the flap and strike of a kick-out. He'd had a little pop at me, the silly lad. He doesn't want to start that malarkey. We don't entertain human-aggressive roosters here. Then at lock up I had lost the turkeys. They were in the kitchen garden with the male in full display mode, tail erect and fanned, strutting his stuff like a pro. I had to shepherd them to bed. In his defence, as soon as he saw me his tail went down and he allowed himself to be shepherded.

Finally a fun pic taken by one of our archers, Yulia, who (with hubby 'Colly', of course) has recently brought lovely little Feliz Sophia into the world and now brings the baby along to our sessions to watch us 'arch' from her buggy-cot. I had offered to cuddle her (the baby, not Yulia!) during our coffee break to give Mum a chance to drink her tea, and she caught this cute pic of me doing bottle feeding duties. Ahhhhhhh.