Jon's Blog

Back to work and new car....

2006-12-21T12:08:00.000+01:00

Well it had to happen. Since the birth of Andrea I have been off work due to paternity leave, a load of public holidays (I love Spain!!) and what I had left of this years vacation. So back to work today and the mass of emails....

Last night Mayte, Andrea & I picked up our new car. Now I know the guys in the UK will have a laugh about this, but we purchased another Skoda, this time in the form of a Skoda Octavia. I have to say this is a bloody good car, and from the limited experience of driving it home handles like a dream. The reason for the purchase of a new bigger car is fairly obvious.... we just did not fit into the old fabia.

The image above is exactly what the beast / tank looks like. To check out a review check out the 4car review at http://www.channel4.com/4car/rt/skoda/octavia/353/1

OK, gotta get some work done....

Amazon are the tops!

2006-12-19T18:53:00.000+01:00

This is just a quick blog to mention how good amazon really are at customer service. They are the tops.

For the birth of Andrea (our first daughter, see previous blogs for more information), my grandmother Rose purchased a baby bouncer to be delivered to our address in Spain. The bouncer arrived in a couple of days, but was unfortunately faulty. So an email to amazon was sent and within 2 days a new bouncer arrived. Now considering that this is delivery from to the UK to Spain, and the speed / efficiency that this was completed is amazing. My hat goes off to them, great customer service and they will be getting more of my business in the future.

More photos of Andrea

2006-12-09T16:06:00.000+01:00

I have posted more photos of Andrea using the Snapfish portal. They are available at :

http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=8251165349045765/l=232709079/g=79198237/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Enjoy :-)

Baby Andrea is born

2006-12-09T15:28:00.000+01:00

On the 28th November at 10:05 in the morning we welcomed baby Andrea Prior Gonzalez into this world. Our beautiful baby girl weighed 3.41kg and measured 51cm in length. The following is a picture of Andrea taken the day after her birth.

Since the 28th time has certainly flown by and we are adapting to no longer be able to sleep, watch TV, or do anything apart from taking care of baby. It is well worth it, as the slightest smile just melts your heart.

Now being a new first time parent it is amazing at how your prespective on things changes. An example of this is the amazing interest that you seem to have over the changing colour of babys execrement, from the exteremely smelly black first poo's to the later greeny type colour to the final yellow type. Sad, but true.....

Apart from having to adapt to baby, we have also noticed that we need to buy a new car. Simply enough our little car is not big enough for us, baby & shopping, so an investment will have to be made.

Mayte (my wife) is doing pretty well, and as my mother predicted she is starting to ping back to her slimline figure. This is supposedly to do with the fact that as Mayte is breast feeding the baby then all excess fats are burned to create milk for the baby. The other bonuses of this are that breast milk is supposedly the best food for baby (as it is natural) and it is fully of Mayte's antibodies which protect Andrea. Saying that, for reason Andrea sometimes requires more milk, so we are having to make up bottles. As you can see, Andrea eats like her father.

One thing about living in Spain is the amount of paper work that needs to be completed. This has been one of my main jobs over the last couple of weeks, as simply enough, Mayte has been recovering from the birth / looking after Andrea. If you live in Madrid and have a baby the following will needs to be done :

Registration of the baby at the registro civil. Pretty easy to do, but you will need to take the yellow form given to you by the hospital, and I recommend filling it in before you get to the registro civil. You will need to take the "libro de familiar" (i.e. family book) and identification for both yourself and spouse. I would recommend not going on Mondays as the rather nice lady who helped me complete the forms mentioned that Mondays are horribly busy.
You next need to register the baby with the Social Security office (seguridad social). This is pretty easy, but you need to add the baby to either your own or your spouses social security number. Once this is done you will have a little white peice of card with an offical stamp. While you are here, if your wife is taking maternity leave from work pick up the documents for the "baja de maternidad", ekse you need to make another visit to the social security offices (like I did) at a later date.
Now you need to register that the baby is living at your home address. This is called "empradronar" in Spanish I think it is a bit ridiculous, but with out you can not register baby at your local health centre. Get to your local council (ayuntanmiento) office early as the queues are pretty horrific. When I was at my local office(Cuidad Lineal district) it was even worse as they were having computer problems, but I have to say that the staff were fantastic to me.
Now go to your local health centre with the social security papers, the empradronimiento papers and family book to register with the centre, request a social security health card and assign a pedriatrician.
Arrange a doctors appointment for your spouse to be signed off (dar de baja) for maternity leave. You can go yourself, just explain that your wife has given birth and that you need the certificate for the maternity leave.
With the maternity leave documents that you obtained from the social security office, complete the paper work, send one of the paper to your spouses company. This paper has to be filled in an sent back to you. Then you need to go back to the social security office with the paper work from your wife's company, her ID and the document given to you by the doctor.

Well that is the basics, as the maternity leave paper work has only just started and we are half way through number 6 at the moment.

I would also like to say a massive thank you to family, friends & all for their hospitality and gifts. We feel truly honoured.

Third Trimester Scan....

2006-10-16T20:45:00.000+02:00

Wow... what a day! We have just back from having the third trimester scan... and once again have some cracking photos.. the following are my favourites...

The baby now weighs 2.160 kg.... and we are only in week 33! Not long to go now!

Updates???

2006-09-28T09:45:00.000+02:00

Ok, yes I know... this blog has been neglected over the last couple of months, but I have been pretty busy.

In the time since the last blog was published there has been a pretty horrible shake up at work (a lot of people were made redundant, but somehow I survived) . It was a shame to see so many people get let go, but I guess life goes on.

One postive thing is that Mayte is getting plumper by the day and we only have 10 weeks to go. Managed to speak to Ant & Em (who now live in Dallas) the other day, Em also being heavily pregnant & due on the 1st October. Let me know how it goes.... Ant also mentioned that he wants to get over to the UK in the May timeframe next year.... we will have to try and co-ordinate something this time (big party could be called for).

On the matter of good news I have also heard from Emily & Phil who have recently got engaged. Well done guys, good luck for the future and let us know when the wedding is that we can get over to the UK.

We have also managed to decorate the babies bedroom. We have painted the room two different colours separated by a stick on middle border thingy (I have not got a clue what it is called). We only need to wait for the furniture to arrive now. Once it is complete I will take some photos.

Another thing that has entered my life over the last couple of days is lego Star Wars, the playstation 2 game. This is probably the most addictive, easy to play & fun game I have come across since owning my PS2... and has rekindled the fire for hours of hiding away chopping up the various baddies with a lightsaber (tops). I brought the oringinal game (version 2 is out in the shops now) as it is at a bargain price of €20 (about £12). Check out the following screen shot... class.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

2006-07-30T22:28:00.000+02:00

Just had to post this... about a month or so ago I purchased an Apple bluetooth keyboard... which is quite surprising considering I use an XP PC as my main machine. I have used an apple KB before, and I just liked the feel of it so I thought lets give it a go.

I found a new Spanish bluetooth KB on ebay for 10UKP + packaging which was a steal and after a bit of fiddling around got it work with my bluetooth dongle. It is tops (and looks bloody good... well for a keyboard anyway). Well worth a tenner...

The Village....

2006-07-30T21:59:00.000+02:00

Last weekend we made one of our many frequent visits to my father-in-law's (Juan) village, Mijares. It is only about 100km away from Madrid (which should take an 1 1/2 hours to get there but took pretty much 3 hours due to the volume of traffic) but is a truly beautiful place, as it is situated in the mountains to the west of Madrid, and is part of the province of Avila. Going to the village has a couple of advantages...

It is far cooler than Madrid at night which means that you can get some sleep (which is something that is almost impossible in Madrid. When you do sleep you wake up in a big ball of sweat).
You get to relax...

To give you an idea of the view from Juan's house, check out the following :

While there this time I helped (or best put attempted to help) to harvest potatoes from my Juan´s allotment. Juan was born in the village and has various land around the area in which he has olive tree's, chestnut tree's and various other fruit & veg. Over the past couple of years I have helped out where I can and every year there is the ritualistic (and back breaking I can add) collection of the chestnut's and olives.

Another advantage of going to the village this time was that Mayte's cousin has purchased a bloody great big plastic swimming pool. The beast of a pool measures 6m x 3m x 1.2 m... it was great.
The only problem was comming back to Madrid last Sunday. Saying that, things have cooled down a little at night for the past 2 or 3 days, so sleeping is possible again.

New Baby photo

2006-07-19T21:59:00.000+02:00

Well... it has certainly been a while since my last blog....

It has been a hectic couple of months, I will post some details soon, but the reason for this blog is that we had a 4D scan of the baby today, and well all I can say is that it is amazing.

Mum & dad, this is for you.

Shopping, eating & the cinema

2006-05-29T21:59:00.000+02:00

As mentioned in my previous Mayte (my wife) is currently 3 months pregnant. As her stomach is increasing in size by the day, we needed to buy some clothes. Thus on Saturday we jumped in the car and headed to the new shopping centre (centro de comercial) called Plenilunio.

All I can say is that we have probably found a new shopping centre of choice. It bloody big with a wide range of shops (including a new on me called Saturn which is full of everything electrical, cheap DVD's , CD's and computers so I was happy).

An interesting part of the whole experience was getting into the car park. Now, we left at about 5pm in the after which here in Madrid is considered early as most people eat their lunch between 2pm - 4pm, but the queue to get into the car park was unbelievable. This may have been due to the fact that some reason a perfectly good entrance / exit was closed, and men waving their arms directed everyone 3/4 of the way around the centre, to a roundabout, looping around to back where we started! Oh well.

Any way Mayte is starting to buy some pre-mama clothes, which basically means that it is made of lycra with a big elastic band for a waist band. I have to admit it looks like a good design and something useful for when the beer belly develops in the future.

When in the centre we caught a movie in the cinema. Apart from the screaming kids kicking the back of my chair ( I will have to get used to this as I will soon be an owner) the cinema was pretty good. The seats were big and comfortable and the sound was pretty good (not THX though). The film we were watching was one that I have been waiting to see for a long time, X-Men the final stand (aka X-men 3). It was OK, but lacked something... I think this may have been down to loosing Bryan Singer the director of the previous 2 (very good) films.

Anyway, after the film we got something to eat in the rather exotic restaurant of... VIPs! If you are in Madrid, you know that VIPs are all over place, and is a place that has a set menu of pretty much fast food. To be honest, there is a good selection, and it is always better than McDonald's / BurgerKing.

This pretty much ended the day, as we escaped at about 10pm... to the obvious queue to get out of the car park, DOH!

The big news...

2006-05-29T21:43:00.000+02:00

After 3 months of waiting to tell the world it is time to announce the big news in both my and Mayte's (my wife) life. We are expecting our first child!

To say that I am thrilled is an understatement and I just can not wait. At the moment we do not know the sex, but as long as it comes healthy it is all that I care about. And yes, Mayte and I have already argued about names. The current estimated time of birth is the 6th December, so we will be looking at a winter baby.

What was truly amazing was the 3 month ultra sound check that we had last Friday... and I have to admit I was truly moved. To hear the heart and see in detail the baby was amazing! For Mum & dad, as you can not be here to see this, I thought that you might want to see the first picture of your new grandson / daughter :-)

Film Review: The Da Vinci Code

2006-05-26T10:11:00.000+02:00

The wife's company paid for use to see the Da Vinci code on Wednesday, so here is my quick critique...

The film in itself is pretty similar to the book, but just seems to lack something. Tom Hanks, in my opinion is not a good choice for the lead as he seems to be... well... dull. On reading the book originally I was expecting some Harrison Ford type character from the Indiana Jones type era, but even I understand he is too old now. The wife mentioned that Russell Crowe may have been better and I tend to agree.

Any way, back to the film... all I can say is that the book seemed better. I think this is because you compose the story in your mind, which allows for greater suspense. I also thought that the direction was a bit messy in the action sequences (fast moving camera cutting in and out of scenes which stopped you from seeing what was going on).

The ending also seemed a little different from the book, and I believe it was a little drawn out... and also missing the important revelation that Sophie's brother was still alive.

In all the film was ok, but I did attempt to check my watch out a few times (not a great sign). I would probably give the film 5.5 / 10.

A new hope.....

2006-05-21T16:52:00.000+02:00

No, not a reference to Star Wars.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the eurovision song contest and a rather interesting (if not bloody scary) horror band from Finland called Lordi. Yes you guessed it, they won the whole contest!

I would like to say that my faith in the contest has been restored, but in honesty I think this is more of a protest vote type of thing against the normal cheesy crappy songs that normally win. Also, these guys put on a show and it was certainly more interesting that watching a Russian guy jumping off a piano.

Let hope this paves the way for decent acts to get in on the contest over the next couple of years.

World Cup wallchart

2006-05-19T15:00:00.000+02:00

For all the football freaks out there, the bbc has produced a fantastic world cup wallchart available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sol/shared/spl/hi/football/06/worldcup/pdf/wallchart.pdf

You can now plot England's way to the final (yer right!).

What have they been eating in Finland!

2006-05-19T12:11:00.000+02:00

While flicking through the channels on the tv last night I happened to stumble across the eurovision song contest semi finals. From previous experience I have learnt that all the eurovision songs are crap! Not only that, but generally the whole event is a cheese fest!

Last night was no exception, but one act caught my eye. It was Lordi from Finland. As you can see from above, they are good looking lads and I was wondering what they have been eating to have such fantastic skin.

In honesty, these guys put on a show. After 4 hours or so of makeup, having fireworks strapped to the guitars and drums while playing certainly caused a stir. The fact that these guys are through to the final on Saturday may mean that I will sit through the rest of the contest..... but then again, I am sure there is something better else to do.

Well done Barca!

2006-05-17T22:55:00.000+02:00

I am an Englishman. I also live in Madrid, thus many people would expect that I would have wanted to see Arsenal win the European Champions League. You are wrong, as I am a Spurs fan, which means that I am glad to see Barcelona win 2-1.

It is only a shame that the mighty Spurs are not in the champions next year, but I am pretty content with the UEFA cup.

1st Blog.... Introduction

2006-05-17T20:24:00.000+02:00

Well.... this is my first blog, and I think I should start with a quick introduction.

I am 30 years old, English and live in Spain with my wife. Just over 4 years ago I moved to Madrid from the UK as my company (a big IT company) decided to start up a new euro-centric department. In this time I have managed to find a wife, buy a house & car, see the old department disappear and fill various other roles in the company.

I am really into gadgets (in fact anything with flashy lights), football, films and music (even though I have lost my way a little since living in Spain). Hopefully I will be able to comment on all of these things and more.....