On Sunday Theo really did start walking. Taking a leaf from Freyja's book - who chose Caroline's baby shower to start walking - he decided Adrian's cricket game in Victoria Park was just the place to get going.
Here he is in action:
He's starting to say a few things now too. He's got a good line in animal noises - he moos, quacks, buzzes and makes monkey noises. And says 'Daddy'. Of course.
Sometime around Christmas, I started mentioning the Dummy Fairy - in case you aren't aware, this is the fairy who comes and takes away dummies, leaving a present behind. At 3 and a half Freyja still has a dummy at night. This doesn't bother me - it is restricted to upstairs and she only uses it at night and when we're lounging around in bed on the weekends. I occasionally bring up the Dummy Fairy but haven't really pushed it. But today Freyja informed me that she wanted the Dummy Fairy to come tonight. In fact, she was absolutely insistent - so her 3 blue dummies have been left outside her bedroom door. I feel rather alarmed by the whole thing - I've realised that she is not the only one who has been reluctant to give up the dummy. Whether it's the fact that it is one more sign that she is less my baby, or I'm just nervous about if she is actually going to be able to sleep with out it, I'm not sure. A bit of both I suspect.
I kept saying that she didn't have to do it, and she could even get up and take them back if she changed her mind - the Dummy Fairy would understand. But she was pretty insistent, despite being obviously upset, and it was rather heartbreaking to listen to her saying 'I just wasn't to go to sleep' as she lay in her bed, dummy-less for the first time. I tucked her in and told her she was very brave - she obviously has a lot more willpower than her mother -I was ready to stuff that dummy back in her mouth at the first sign of her wavering.
It remains to be seen as to whether she will last the night. I'm fully expecting to go back up and find at least one dummy removed from the little pile.
I just love this photo of Jacob and Freyja who suddenly appeared as Batman and his sidekick, while we were visiting on Sunday.
I still get a thrill seeing my kids playing with my friends kids - those same friends who I used to go out with for mad all night (and all day) parties...
I'll be the first to admit that I let my children watch too much TV. However, as part of my Work in Progress toward being a Better Mother, I have a range of (the usual) activities that I spring on them throughout the day. So we go to the library or the park, we bake cakes and biscuits, we read and draw and paint and dance. Then I feel slightly less of a Bad Mother when I do turn on CBeebies.
A lot of things we can do together, but the problem I've found with having a baby who isn't young enough to be entertained by just watching yet isn't quite old enough to join in, is that you just can't quite keep both your children happy at the same time.
Freyja particularly likes doing the crafty things - anything involving glue and she's happy. But entertaining Theo while I do this stuff with Freyja is not easy. He's just not quite at the arts & crafts stage - he does like to fish the chalk out from Freyja's easel, but that's because he likes eating it, not drawing with it. I usually end up giving him a range of toys to play with and singing various nursery rhymes, while simutaneously helping Freyja and looking interested in what she is doing, while keeping half an eye on what Theo has found on the kitchen floor, while stopping Freyja pouring the entire contents of the bag of glitter on the table, while clapping when Theo shows me how he can now stand, while cutting more pictures out of the catalogue....
Of course, what happens is that I give neither of them my full attention. And then I turn the telly on so I can have break. Like I said, it is Work in Progress...
In the last week I have managed to order and pay for six - yes, that is six - car seats. This has amounted to a total spend of £780. I do hope they refund on the cancelled orders.
Theo needs a new car seat and while looking for one, I stumbled across the Which? report showing that Freyja's car seat was a 'Don't Buy'. This didn't surprise me - no matter how much we tighten the harness she just slips her arms out of it and I frequently turn round to find her sitting there with only a lap belt keeping her in. So I decided - given that the only reason you have a car seat is to hopefully protect your child should you have an accident - that we needed to replace both car seats. I researched and decided to go for the Kiddy Infinity Pro.
Me and every other person in England it seems.
I have trawled countless online baby shops and ordered, paid for and then been informed it is out of stock on three occasions. But I'm determined to have new car seats before we drive to York at the end of the month. Finally, I have managed to track two seats down from two different places.
They are due to arrive on Friday. I will not leave the house on Friday until they are safely in my possession.
We bought Theo his first pair of shoes yesterday, from the lovely Biff in Dulwich Village - Start-rite prewalkers in size 3.5, exactly the same shoe and size as Freyja's first ones, although she was around 3 months older. And hers were pink.
In between shitting and vomiting all over the place this bank holiday weekend, Theo did find time to enjoy the new sandpit which we bought him (at last) for his birthday.
We haven't actually managed to get any sand for it yet, but I can already tell that this is going to be one of the best things we have bought. Hours of entertainment for both Freyja and Theo.
He is still not too well though and today has been mostly slumped over either me or Adrian. Poor chap.
On Thursday afternoon Theo's bottom suddenly exploded. After this had happened three times in close succession I decided that he probably had a stomach bug. That night he went to bed exhausted, crashed out immediately and then woke, bellowing, at 8pm - Adrian went to investigate and found him covered head to toe in vomit. There is almost nothing worse than having a child vomiting in their bed at night. We stripped him off, put him in the bath, took the bed sheets off, covered the mattress with a towel, found new bedclothes and got him back to sleep. I was prepared for a long night ahead. But that was it - no more vomit, no more diarrhea. The next day was Friday and I decided it was probably best to keep him home - although he hadn't been sick again he was obviously not well and I decided to go with the 'keep them away for 24 hours after they were last sick' rule. He spent most of the day slumped on me and ate nothing.
Then on Saturday he seemed fully recovered -apart from the fact that he was constantly letting off the vilest farts ever to come out of such a tiny little bottom. I put this down to post-stomach bug effects and we went out to buy him a (belated) birthday present - a sandpit. He then spent a few hours happily splashing about in his sandpit (we had to fill it with water as ELC had run out of sand) and that afternoon we all went off to Esme's party.
At the party he did seem a bit subdued, but he can sometimes find groups of people overwhelming so it wasn't unusual behaviour. He was continuing to expel toxic gas, which I was was merrily explaining away to anyone who happened to be near me, when I suddenly realised that the hand I had supporting his bottom was rather warm and damp. He'd managed to poo right out of his nappy, all over his shorts and all over my shirt. I cleaned us up as best I could and went back out, starting to feel slightly alarmed that I seemed to have brought a sick baby to a childrens party. Luckily my friends are very good about things like poo, sick babies and poisonous farts.
In the car on the way home, approaching East Dulwich, I commented that Theo was looking rather pale, which he responded to by vomiting all down his front and over his car seat. At home, we put him straight to bed and went out to sit on our new garden bench and enjoy a glass of wine. Adrian popped in to get a jumper and came out, looking rather alarmed, to say that Theo's room absolutely stank. I went up to investigate and was hit by the smell as soon as I got to the top of the stairs - how such a small boy can make such a terrible, terrible stench I just don't know. I changed his nappy again and hoped for the best.
Luckily that has been it (so far, at least). He's not completely himself and he has no apetite at all but he hasn't been sick again and his bottom has calmed down. But I would like to apologise right now if he has passed this on to anyone from Esme's party on Saturday... I'm sorry! I really thought he was over it.
We took the kids to the new playground opposite the Horniman gardens today. It's fab - a massive sandpit, with loads of really fun adventure playground type things in it, plus a cafe. I got talking to someone there who informed me that the site used to be a plague pit - though, a quick search on Google suggests that is rumour rather than fact! Whatever it might once have been, it's now another great addition to a wide range of activities for kids in our area. I really do love South East London.
I can hardly believe it but today we have been celebrating Theo's first birthday:
To think that before he was born I agonised over whether there was enough of an age gap and how I was ever going to love him as much as I love Freyja. And now he's my little man and I can't bear the thought of life without him.
We celebrated Easter (and a special birthday for Adrian's mum...!) in Norfolk this year, staying only a 10 minute drive from the sea. The weather was okay - a bit grey and bleak on the beach, but you try putting off an eager 3 year old who wants to go paddling...
I returned to work today, after a year of maternity leave. I have around 5 unpublished posts about my feelings on this, which is what always happens when something is going on that I have a lot to say about. So I'm not actually going to say a lot about it.
Only that I thought it would be much easier going back after the second child (as in: been there, done that, survived it) but in actual fact I've found it much more of a wrench. I kept waiting to feel ready to return to work, which happened at around the 9 month mark on my last maternity leave, but it just never happened. But I know that, for various reasons (money included, of course) I do want to work, so today I got myself and two children up, fed, dressed, dropped off at the childminder (kids) and on the 8.13 to London Bridge (me). And it was fine. I admit to a slight tear in the eye when I got in the car and Raffi's 'I wonder if I'm growing' song came on (I only listen to Raffi these days. Well, Raffi and MGMT).
And do you know, it wasn't so bad? I felt strangely free to be on my own - no kids attached - for such a long stretch of time. I didn't really miss them, though I was keen to get home by the end of the day. So all in all I think it is going to be okay.
Although I can't quite believe that I have to go back again tomorrow.
I arrived home yesterday from 10 days in Dubai with my parents. I flew out immediately after celebrating Katie's 30th birthday - having left Freyja and Theo with their grandparents for two nights, the first time I've left Theo over night. I had been slightly dreading the flight, knowing I'd have two kids awake well past their bedtime and me having partied all weekend, but after the usual airport and getting settled bit the flight was great with both of them flat out for most of the journey. I came home on a day flight and there really is no comparison. The night flight was so much easier. Three hours into the return journey, with both kids awake from a brief nap and showing no signs of needing any more sleep, I was feeling a bit frantic about how to fill the 4 hours still stretching in front of me...
The holiday was great and exactly what I needed before I start back at work...on Monday. Where has the year gone?
Freyja has had a wart on her hand for some time now - a 'rather substantial' wart, as the doctor put it, when I finally got round to taking her to have it checked. We've been putting the wart lotion on it since January, and it has fallen off 3 times but each time some of the wart has remained behind - it really was quite big. This wart began to take on a life of it's own. It became one of the family and was affectionately referred to as 'Warty'. I found myself referring to it as a 'he'. And then yesterday, at last, the final bit of Warty fell off and Freyja's hand is now clear. She was really quite excited at first, showing us her lovely, clear hand throughout the day.
But then this evening, while having her bath, she started lamenting the disappearance of Warty and told Adrian that she wanted him back, but on her other hand.
A lot of my friends have mentioned that their kids often have a 'thing' they are prone to - coughs, rashes, runny noses, ear infections. With Theo, it seems to be his eyes. From the moment he was born he's had trouble with them. Nothing serious, just soreness and gunkiness. If he gets a cold, it always affects his eyes. His eyelids, particularly his right one, is often red and sore looking. He had eyedrops as a newborn to clear up a persistently sticky eye, and then again at the end of last year for the same reason. A few weeks ago he caught conjunctivitis and then last week his eyelids became very sore and inflammed, first the right one then the left one. I washed them every night and morning, as the doctor keeps telling me to do, and they looked like they might be okay, but then a week later it suddenly got worse, so I had to use antibiotics yet again - although it did clear up almost over night once I started using them.
He's got a cold again and once again his right eye is weepy. I'm generally quite reluctant to use antibiotics if I don't need to and as far as I can tell, with the stickiness, if it happens when he has a cold, it's just due to general congestion and maybe to the cold virus getting into the eyes and will usually clear up once the cold has gone. But the gammy eyelids needed some help!
I have recently had two reminders that not only does my daughter understand every single word I say but she listens too.
On Sunday Adrian and I had a minor argument in front of the kids (something we have never done before) - it ended with me telling him to shut up as he walked out the room, only for a little voice to go floating after him saying 'shut up, Daddy'. Great.
And then this morning. It has been suggested at her playgroup that Freyja and her friend Ruby need to mingle a little more. I have been discussing this with Adrian and a few friends over the last few days. Then this morning when I asked Freyja what she was going to do in playgroup today, she informed me that she wasn't allowed to play with Ruby and she had to make new friends. Arrrggghhh.
...or rather lack of it. I have an unpublished post that I wrote last week about how Theo's sleeping had improved so much - he even slept through one night from 7pm to 7am. I was still having to visit him once or twice a night but it was so much better than it had been. I even wrote a list of things that I thought had helped improve the situation (for the record, these were stopping all night feeds, putting a cot bumper on his cot and responding to distressed cries not to every single shout.)
I didn't get round to finishing the post and it's just as well because we have just had a horrible week of sleepless nights thanks to Theo having what must surely be The Worlds Worst Cough & Cold. I've been at my parents for the last four days and Theo has spent much of each night sleeping (sort of) on the sofa bed with me. I've had trouble getting him to sleep and getting him to stay asleep. Tuesday night was totally awful as was Wednesday night. Things have improved slightly since then but it's still not great. I just really, really hope that it is all down to his cold and once he's over it, he'll settle down again.
At least Freyja is back to sleeping again now that her cough has gone and though she does sometimes get out of bed when we first say goodnight to her, once she's asleep she is staying there - so far anyway. She is still totally into her 'special bed'. I changed her duvet cover today and it's a whole new love affair all over again.
My parents made one of their flying visits to see us today. We had a bottle of champagne to celebrate (we can always find some excuse). Freyja has grown quite partial to a sip or two of champagne, but she is also quite partial to Cbeebies on the computer, which is what she was doing when the bottle came out.
We poured her a tiny, watered down thimble full of champagne and said she had to put the laptop down if she wanted to drink it. This caused some upset - she wanted both. Laying down the law, we said 'it's Champagne or the computer - you decide.'
Her reply - 'I want Champuter....'
(yes, I do realise that this post makes us sound like terrible parents)
On Monday morning we woke up to a beautiful sight - a thick blanket of snow covering everything we could see. The trains were cancelled, the buses were cancelled, the schools were closed - we were effectively snowed in and it was great. It was a good 6 inches deep in the morning and it carried on snowing all day - for London, this was something pretty special.
Of course, being Brits, we all love a good moan and the radio was blaring out complaint after complaint about how crap we are for not being able to deal with a bit of snow. It seemed everyone fell into two camps - those who felt we were a total disgrace and should have been better equipped to deal with it and those who thought 'hurrah, snow, this doesn't happen very often, lets enjoy it'.
We fell into the latter group. Adrian took Freyja up to Blythe Hill which was packed with kids playing and laughing.
Afterwards, Freyja spent a good hour pottering in the garden. And then Adrian went out and made a snowman with her.
Yesterday, Freyja and I crunched through the snow to the post office and smiled at more people than ever before. Actually I always smile at people I walk past, they just don't usually smile back - but they do when it's snowing!
Today, Freyja and I made fairy cakes. This is something we do quite often - baking is one of the things that we both enjoy doing (rather than something I feel I ought to do to drag her away from the telly) so we frequently rustle up fairy cakes, biscuits, scones or some other such delight. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much of a cook - I have a few dishes I make and I stick to them because I can cook them and they taste nice. The baking is causing me a few more problems. I've now made countless numbers of fairy cakes and biscuits and more often than not they don't turn out quite as I hoped. The one thing we cracked from the outset was banana loaf and after today's performance* I think maybe we should stick with that.
Here are our fairy cakes:
One of them was really more of a biscuit:
Sadly, the biscuit one actually tasted better than those that had managed to rise more than a few millimetres above the centre of the bun cases. Delia Smith, I am not.
Still, even pale, flat fairy cakes can be decorated by an eager 3 year old. And eaten by one too.
* While I do let Freyja get properly involved in the baking, I can in no way pass any of the blame onto her. She'd probably do a better job if I just left her to it.
So, we've finally done it. Taken the sides off Freyja's cot that is.
I've been resisting - Freyja didn't seem very bothered by it and given our disturbed nights I didn't think it was worth rushing. But recently she's been asking about it and on Tuesday morning, as I heaved her out of her cot, she asked 'when are we taking the sides off'. Time for action.
So today Adrian rushed home from work and set to dismantling the cotbed to great excitment from both Freyja and Theo:
Freyja wanted to go to bed at 6pm, as soon as it was finished:
We kept her up until 6.45, read her story in bed, explained that she should now stay in bed until the morning, tucked her into the duvet (itself a new thing as she's been in a sleeping bag until now), kissed her goodnight and crept out.
Two seconds later, before I'd even got downstairs, Freyja appeared on the landing and declared 'There you are! I'm awake now!'
Theo slept through last night. He went to bed at 7pm, squeaked briefly at 5am, woke up and chatted to himself for a while at 6am then got me up at 7am.
Don't get too excited for me though. Freyja had me in and out of her room between 11pm and 2am, as she has done for the last 3 nights now.
Theo is waving, clapping, crawling fast, trying to pull himself up and no longer feeding at night - not even at 10pm. He is not, however, sleeping through.
Freyja has started at playgroup. I think it is going well but it's hard to be sure because when I ask her to tell me what she did that day, she says that she has lost her voice.
I feel we are slowly making progress with Theo's sleeping and stopping feeding him has certainly helped. Freyja has a reward chart to try and 'encourage good behaviour' and I feel that things there are also improving - and if nothing else the 3rd birthday party I went to on Sunday reassured me that her recent 'challenging behaviour' is completely, absolutely normal...
We are currently experiencing a major pink explosion. I like pink and I don't have any problem with Freyja having pink stuff and dressing in pink clothes. But I like other colours too and a balance is nice...
But since Christmas and birthday number 3, our house has been taken over by all things pink - pink enchanted castle, pink scooter, pink Trunki, pink dolls house, pink toy chest and pink ponies galore.
Even though her bedroom has a green wall, lilac curtains, purple storage and a green & peach chest of drawers, for some reason it just all looks pink!
Theo still has big, chubby, baby legs (I was actually quite alarmed when I first saw this photo).
Sadly, the biscuit one actually tasted better than those that had managed to rise more than a few millimetres above the centre of the bun cases. Delia Smith, I am not.
We will see how it goes.
