Sunny Bank Holiday Weekend

We had beautiful weather for the holiday weekend. But although we spent most of it out in the open, I started on Friday by taking G to the National Football Museum at the Urbis. She's a little bit bigger than the last time I took her there, back when the impressive building in the middle of Manchester was still a museum of popular culture. Now that she's playing football herself, I thought it might be fun to take her for a look around the new collections.

The picture shows her sitting on some seats from the old Wembley, although the exhibit which really took her interest was the cabinet full of huge silver trophies. The old Football League Championship trophy was in the middle, but it was the even bigger, shinier and gaudier examples dotted around, awarded for various long-forgotten minor tournaments, which she kept pointing to. When she comes back from football, or ballet, or whatever, with her first little medal, I'm sure it's going to be kept extremely shiny.

There was a food festival at Salford Quays on Saturday. We went along, and Mrs J raided the stall selling macarons. As confections go these have always confused me, mainly because I was brought up in Scotland where we have macaroons instead. Also confusingly, G wanted to eat the blue one. And so she had a blue tongue for the rest of the afternoon, as did I, after I helped finish it off when she didn't want any more:

Cake has been a regular theme of the time I've spent with G over the years. There was a lot around on Sunday afternoon at an event called G Festival 2013, held in Swinton as a charity fundraiser after a girl from the local area who died three years ago. After having lots of fun blowing bubbles and on the bouncy castle, we went to the cake stall and found an appropriate one for G. Although she doesn't much like icing, so I had to have the actual bit with the G on it:

Monday was the warmest day of the weekend, and just as well as we went to the East Lancashire Railway in Bury for another day out with Thomas the Tank Engine. The success of our last visit to one of these events in Llangollen in February was only slightly dampened by the fact it chucked it down all day, so it was particularly good to have a day of train-based fun without having to scurry around under cover all the time. G even had a dress on, and got to meet the big guy himself:

She was less keen on the Fat Controller ("but I'm very shy" she said, intently), and needed a good bit of prodding before finally agreeing to sit next to him. Less prodding was needed to get her to toot Thomas's whistle. She talked about this moment all the way home. This would have been extremely tedious, but we only live a quarter of an hour away. Which was just as well.

Changing Kit

Quick change... vine.co/v/bFzjtwxldEK

— Lorraine Jones (@raynejones) April 13, 2013

I've written before about how G now goes to ballet and then football on Saturday mornings. There's not much time between the two classes, so a quick switch of outfit is required. Mrs J captured it yesterday using Vine (it's the new app from Twitter that lets you record six-second videos which play on a loop).

This is basically the pre-school equivalent of Superman changing in a phone box. Only with the additional knocking down of a few gender stereotypes.

Little Footballer

To go along with her ballet classes on Saturday mornings, we've signed G up to go to football lessons too. She has to go from one more or less straight to the other, which means changing from a pink outfit into a blue one. Her football kit arrived on Thursday, and she was very excited to put it on and run around the house in it. The excitement only dimmed when I took her into the back garden for a kickabout, and she looked at me over a curled lip and muttered "it's too windy daddy" before trudging back inside.

I was sleeping off a night shift on Saturday morning so Mrs J took her along to both ballet and football. She reported back that G had a great time at the footy, but that "her ball control is a bit of an issue". Having suffered through Scotland losing at home to Wales on Friday evening, I can say that this technical flaw may not necessarily hinder my Scotland-qualified daughter's prospects of an international call-up.

Her football skills need some work, but she did return clutching an Easter egg, which she won for doing the best colouring in her group. Up to now, colouring hasn't usually been considered part of an athlete's training programme. But given that the Easter egg is clearly far too big for G to manage on her own, I'd be happy enough for her to bring one back every week.

Haircut

G had her first-ever haircut today. For a while her hair's been growing at an alarming rate. Where once there was just a bit of fuzz, now there's a big blonde mop, so much so that the easiest way to pick her out of a room full of little ones is to look for her hair, which is much longer and thicker than everyone else's.

So I took her into the Northern Quarter salon where Mrs J was having hers done this afternoon, and sat with her on my knee as the hairdresser gave G a trim. She sat quietly throughout, and looked more puzzled than anything else. G's reward is that she now has a fringe, which also means her hair isn't constantly in her eyes and I don't have to fidget around with hairclips, so it's good news all round.

Later we went along to Oldham's Twestival, a charity fundraising event with various child-friendly entertainment on offer. G was particularly pleased with the balloon which the clown modelled for her, even though to me the pink "flower" looked decidedly more phallic than anything else.

In fact, G liked it so much she refused to let it go, even when she met a new friend, Oldham Athletic mascot Chaddy The Owl:

The mascot seemed very taken with my little girl. But given Oldham's current form, meeting G may be the first thing Chaddy has had to smile about in quite a while.

Looking In The Other Direction

Here's a picture of me and G yesterday afternoon, in the centre of our village watching the local brass band doing a free outdoor concert. Something other than the music had clearly caught G's attention at the moment Mrs J took the photo, which makes the image a bit reminiscent of the cover art from The Verve's Urban Hymns album. Not sure which one of us is Richard Ashcroft and which is Nick McCabe, though.

G was still looking in the other direction later in the day, when England played Germany at the World Cup. She seemed singularly disinterested in the first half, and didn't protest when I put her down for a nap during half-time. Perhaps she just couldn't face watching any more of England's terrible defending.

Having lived in England for more than ten years, my old yearning for England to lose every game 10-0 has slowly ebbed away. Now that I've got an English-born daughter, I actually felt obliged yesterday to hope for an England victory. At least I wasn't too disappointed when that hope was crushingly snuffed out by the Germans. Even though she was too young to understand it all this time, I suspect G has plenty more such disappointments ahead of her. Especially if I force her to support Scotland as well as England.

In Praise Of Urbis

Mrs J has gone away to a hen party, which makes today my first full day home alone with G. So I decided to take her out to another of Manchester's museums. A friend is up from London and wanted to see the new exhibitions on UK hip hop and the history of TV in the north-west currently on at Urbis, so all three of us went along. Both of the exhibitions were particularly good, with lots of interesting archive stuff to see. I was particularly taken with all of the vintage Granada programmes being shown in the TV exhibition, although amidst all the eulogising about the wonder of Manchester's TV history there was sadly no mention of Granada Men and Motors and the short-lived show presented by Vanilla Ice and Jordan. Can't think why.

G wasn't quite so impressed, in fact she slept the whole time, which at least meant we could take in everything at our leisure. As you can see, the photo above shows G completely ignoring a collection of hip hop magazine covers. Don't let her verdict put you off though, both of the exhibitions are on until the spring and I'd recommend each of them if you get the chance to go. In fact there are plenty of good reasons to visit Urbis anytime, including the beautiful building itself, the family-friendly cafe, and the fact that it is free, which you don't have to be Scottish to approve of. After a controversial start to its existence back in 2002, Urbis has now become of the best things about Manchester.

However, it looks like things are going to change. The trustees of the National Football Museum in Preston want to move it to Urbis, and they will probably get their wish. Basically not enough people visit the museum at its current location, so it loses money. The people who run it reckon they could get four times as many folk through the doors if it were housed at Urbis. No doubt they're right, and if there's going to be a football museum anywhere it may as well be in Manchester. But if Urbis fills up with balls and caps and scarves, there won't be much space left for the sort of exhibitions I went to see today. More's the pity.

On Her Best Behaviour

We've been trying to give each other some regular time away from G so we don't end up going completely insane. Yesterday was my turn for a few hours off duty, so I went over to Halifax to see some friends and to watch their FA Cup fourth qualifying round match with Wrexham. Since you ask, they lost 1-0 to an injury time goal, and there wasn't much sign of the magic of the cup.

Although it was good to be away for a while, by the end of the game I was already looking forward to getting back. Mrs J had taken G round the shops in Manchester, and said she'd been restless all afternoon. We had some friends coming over for dinner so when I got home I tried to settle G down. She likes being held a bit too much and has developed an annoying habit of waking back up as soon as you put her down to sleep. But at the third time of asking she properly drifted off, just as tea was ready. Our friends were suitably impressed as G slept soundly for the rest of the evening.

Inevitably, it didn't last. Almost as soon as our friends had gone G was back to being grouchy, and I was up until almost 2 o'clock looking after her. Then Mrs J was up with her for another three hours after that. We've clearly been living in Manchester for a while now, because Mrs J later sleepily told me G had been "mithering" the whole time. Rather than an extra hour in bed, we ended up with about three hours fewer.

Today, our friends came over again, but true to form by this time G was back to her angelic best behaviour. Everyone that meets her must think we have such an easy life. As you can see from the picture, she's still asleep. But because Mrs J has gone for a nap and I'm now on my own with her, I know I'm probably about 38 seconds away from some more crying.

Due Date, But No Sign Of Baby

Baby was supposed to arrive today. These things aren't an exact science, and apparently only 5% of little ones are actually born on their due date, but even so this is a day that's been staring at us from the calendar for months, covered in red circles and exclamation marks. So it's a bit of a shame that it's been an anti-climax. I'd kind of hoped that baby would be born with an inherent sense of punctuality. However, as the photo demonstrates, she remains resolutely inside Mrs J's tummy, so it looks like she's inherited her dad's tardiness if nothing else.

There were plenty of moments this weekend when I could see my future life unspooling before me, though. In the old days, and providing I wasn't at work, by 3 o'clock on a Saturday I'd have spent several hours surviving on little more than paracetamol and bacon sandwiches, and would have reached the sofa in time to spend a couple of hours with Jeff Stelling firing largely meaningless football statistics at me. Yesterday at 3 o'clock I was in Mothercare. Then we went on to B&Q. Today I watched the first half of the Manchester derby, but we were on our way to Ikea during the second half, although I did manage to make the process of parking the car last an inordinately long time so I was able to listen to the barely believable end of the game on the radio.

I took a close interest in the United-City match partly because I like football, but mostly because I've always had a vague sense that it's important to know about what's going on in the city where you live, and that includes football. I was in Leeds during their run to the Champions League semi-final in 2001, and it definitely gave the place a lift. There was an exciting atmosphere around the city on match days, and you could feel it in Manchester today. It was certainly different to the derby that took place the day after I first moved to Manchester in 2006, a match which probably nobody remembers much about. City were pretty rubbish back then, and nobody had any idea that soon they'd be the richest club around thanks to mega-rich backers from Abu Dhabi. From now on, it's likely both United and City will be among the biggest and best teams in the world, which gives Manchester a prestige lacking in similar cities such as, well, Leeds come to think of it. If we end up living either in or around Manchester for years to come, our daughter's going to have an exciting place to grow up in. Whether she likes football or not.