Books, presents & weight

Early in the morning both my orders of Russian books arrived (yep, I’m using my baby as an excuse to feed my book addiction) and now we are out of bookshelf space again hence need to figure out where we can fit another one. Since it didn’t rain in the morning I sat in the garden with Cat and looked through the books. The best buys – Pavel Bazhov and Russian Folk Tales. Both made out of good paper, with good binding and have fantastic colourful illustrations. I love Bazhov’s tales – according to my mum as a child I would agree to do anything if my parents promised me to read from his book. Sadly his books are almost impossible to get in English. There are few other Russian books I would recommend, but sadly they are also hard to get. I wanted to use Roadside Picnic by Brothers Strugatsky as an example, but Gollancz re-publishing it next year (I'm very happy about finally being able to get a copy for Clive to expand his knowledge of russians as he has scary narrow stereotipical vision of us :-P ). The edition from 2000 is going for over £70 on Amazon! Now I have to figure out how many copies I want to pre-order -> makes good present for IT geeks.

We also received the cutest little outfit from Arnaud & Anne. My baby has her first French garment! She is definitely going to end up having better wardrobe than I do. Julia is already asking what type of clothes she should bring back from her January USA trip.

Went to the Baby Clinic in the afternoon. Catherine is now 4 kilos. Not bad for the girl, who had thrush (yeast infection) at the end of last week and wasn’t feeding well for few days. While she is gaining weight, I’m loosing it. I’m back to my pre-pregnancy weight of 60.8 kilos – it is certainly good time to start concentrating on have additional lunch each day before I totally disappear.