De Silva Family Blog

From all your boys. Love Ni, Leo & Ollie xxx

I spent this week in Shanghai, attending a Board meeting for one of my clients. It's my first time in China and I've been blown away by the scale of development going on over here. The picture shows the Pudong district of Shanghai (my hotel, the Shangri La is the little orange building to the right). This whole area, all 500km2 of it has been built during the last 20 years! Unfortunately the most I've seen of this place is the back of a cab as, during the two hours I had free, the driver and I failed to communicate in any way. Finally, when I realised that we were going round in circles, I got out and walked back along a very busy road. I felt cheated, despite having only paid half the fare on the meter, so you can imagine my horror when I realised that I'd left him my camera too! At 500 times the cost of the fare, I'm sure that driver is celebrating right now. As for me, I'm just looking forward to getting back home.

We celebrated Ollie's birthday a few weeks ago , together with Leo and Ros. So, for his actual birthday, we thought we'd celebrate with a day trip to London. We started by visiting my office, where the boys worked their charms on various colleagues and were well paid with chocolate, sweets and toys! We then headed off to the main attraction, Dinosaurs Unleashed , an amazing interactive exhibition. Leo was really excited about the whole thing, until we entered the building and he came face to face with a life-sized, roaring, T-Rex. He turned tail and ran! Fortunately, after some cajoling and some (very nice) hugs, he managed to overcome his fear and spent the next few hours becoming a palaeontologist: digging for fossils, piecing the bones together, classifying dinosaurs and learning all about them. He even appeared in a video with one! Meanwhile Ollie slept peacefully in his pushchair, blissfully unaware that he was sleeping under the most vicious carnivore ever to walk