Baking

Adrian bought Freyja a baking book a little while ago and today we made scones:


Unfortunately I realised too late that the self-raising flour I had used was 6 months past it's sell by date. I've had experience of this before - self-raising flour that is out of date doesn't rise. But rather than starting again I pressed on and now we have flat scones. They taste quite nice though.

Birthday Girl

And here she is in all her 2-year-old, chocolately glory:


She adored being birthday girl. We sang Happy Birthday 3 times (though after the first time she wouldn't get close enough to blow out the candle on account of singeing her hair first time round....)


She spent a good 15 minutes charging round the living room, high on chocolate cake and 'it's all about me' excitement. She got some really lovely gifts and was delighted with them all - thank you everyone.

Christmas Time

We had a very nice Christmas day. Here it is in pictures:

Christmas Stocking:


Best present! Toothbrush & dummy!



Santa's gift:

Opening presents:


Christmas Hat:



Boxing Day:

Birthday Presents

It's Freyja's 2nd birthday at the end of this month, on the 27th December. Far from my worries that no one would pay any attention to her birthday, she's not only got piles of presents under the tree but she's got another pile of presents in the cupboard for her birthday. It's lovely and I'm possibly more excited about her opening them all than she is!

We've decided that instead of getting her more toys, we're going to try to use birthdays to get something a bit more lasting. This will hopefully also give us a way of separating her birthday from Christmas (by something more than just Boxing Day - poor thing!). So, for Christmas we've got her a wooden table top kitchen set, but for her birthday we're getting her some art. Yah.

I came across these gorgeous Missemai prints on the Bodie & Fou website. They are by a Danish artist and are influenced by fairy tales. I love them and would probably have bought one for myself if I didn't have the excuse of a child to buy one for. We got Freyja this one:


It's called 'The Old Oak's Last Dream'. I love it.

I also like this one and am trying to work out if I can justify spending a further £130 (when I'm about to go on maternity leave and we want to get the floorboards in the house done...) on another one. Maybe for the new baby?


Anyway, I suppose our good intentions will only last until Freyja is old enough to demand a Bratz doll or whatever the latest toy will be - but at least we can try.

Cardboard boxes and wooden spoons

Freyja has a great pile of presents under the tree, another lot in the cupboard for her birthday and has already opened a few of her birthday presents which were given to her at her party last week. I'm pleased to say that every one so far has been a real hit.

But today, she proved the old cliché about playing with cardboard boxes and wooden spoons true. We had a delivery recently which came in an enormous cardboard box. Adrian has cut her windows and a door and she's never been happier.

Early Rising

Freyja has never been the best sleeper. She took a long time to sleep through the night and even now she wakes up at least once a night most of time. She never does this legendary 12 hour stretch I keep hearing about - although we do get the odd blissful 11 hours. What is good, is that she goes down at bedtime really easily now. It hasn't always been like that - earlier in the year we were having real trouble getting her to bed each night, but she suddenly decided that she loved bedtime and now seems positively thrilled every time we tuck her up at night.

But, while I'm not complaining because it really could be a lot worse, she has started doing this early rising thing. She rarely sleeps past 6.30am anyway, but I can cope with that. The last 3 nights it has been 5.15am, 4.30am and 5.15am. Waking at those times is not unusual. What is unusual is that she is not going back to sleep. I haven't actually let her get up but I'm in and out of her room and I can't get back to sleep because she just whines quietly to herself. I'm now totally exhausted, especially as last night was my work Christmas do and although I wasn't drinking for obvious reasons I still didn't get home until midnight and then took a while to drop off after the excitement of seeing my work colleagues dolled up to the nines and getting down on the dance floor. It's enough to keep anyone awake, ha ha!

I guess I should be pleased that I am actually getting a slightly longer stretch of undisturbed sleep because she hasn't been waking up earlier in the night, which is something she does often do. Yeah, what am I complaining about? And it's all good practice for the new one. Sleep is over rated anyway, surely....?

The party...

...went very well. I was really tired afterwards, didn't realise these things took so much organisation - what I would have given to have collapsed on the sofa with a massive glass of red wine. Pregnancy and the festive season don't mix all that well. I have realised that for the last 3 Christmas's now I will have been either pregnant or breastfeeding (and will most likely still be breastfeeding next Christmas - although at least you can have a few drinks then!)

Freyja had 7 friends here, which was quite enough and everyone was very generous and bought her the most lovely gifts, some of which she has opened and some of which we are saving for her actual birthday on the 27th December. I can see I am going to have to up the ante with my present buying...!!

I didn't get round to taking any pictures, except one at the very beginning when she wasn't even wearing her little hat:


Still cute though, and I am fairly sure the outfit will be making a reappearance over the Christmas holiday.

Party Preparation

We are having a Christmas/early 2nd birthday party for Freyja tomorrow and have spent the last 2 days getting things ready. We've had to sort a lot out to get the house in order, after the building work we had done recently - today was spent putting quite a few pictures up, lugging boxes around (which we still haven't unpacked since moving in), dumping stuff behind closed doors and generally getting the place ready to host 26 adults and 8 children. It didn't seem like that many when I wrote the list out and I was slightly alarmed when I counted the final numbers last night...

My sister is here helping out and she cooked a batch of Christmas cookies with Freyja this afternoon:


I admit that I have bought most (all?) of the party food, and Freyja's cake, from Sainsbury's but I did spend 20 minutes decorating my sister's cookies with the names of the children who are coming - so no-one can accuse me of not taking this kid's party business seriously:


Although it's a shame I've only just realised that the icing stays soft and it will all smudge off when they go in the party bags....

Christmas Tree

My husband is normally an old Scrooge about Christmas. Whereas I adore it, he thinks it's a whole load of commercialised nonsense etc etc. But, since having Freyja, he's had something of a change of heart about the whole thing and this year he's positively brimming with festive cheer, and has been dying to get the tree up. I was going to wait until next weekend, so we'd have it up for Freyja's party but not up too early. Adrian wanted it up last weekend. We compromised, and bought it today.

We spent yesterday in town Christmas shopping. Not the hell it may sound like, because Katie and Paul took Freyja for the day. Even battling through frantic Christmas shoppers isn't so bad when you are enjoying a rare moment together. We went to Heals, Habitat and Paperchase, had a nice lunch out and gasped at the price of Christmas decorations (well, I did anyway - Adrian may be a Scrooge about Christmas, but he's not a Scrooge about spending money. That falls to me). We went to Homebase today and got some more reasonably priced (and very nice) decorations and then picked up the tree from our local florist.

We put up the tree then met a few friends at the Horniman Museum Gardens for the carol singing. We enjoyed it but Freyja got really annoyed whenever Adrian and I sang and just kept saying 'No singing' over and over. So much for festive spirit - she must have taken over Adrian's usual role...

Luckily she cheered up when we got home and we spent a happy half hour scoffing mince pies and putting the decorations on the tree - which Freyja promptly took off again.

Tea

Hehe.

I am going to stop soon, I promise, but this morning Freyja sat under the kitchen table with a cup and said to herself 'Mmmm, cup of tea'.

Words, numbers, telly

I'm still trying to keep track of Freyja's acquisition of new words. Having secretly feared for a while that she was behind in her language development, she now seems to be making up for lost time and is coming out with all sorts of things - new additions that I can remember are 'read it, tortoise, penguin (maybe she did pay more attention at the zoo than I realised), don't, go away, house, tree, bricks, bath, shower, eating, Hello, push chair, toilet, kitchen and picture'.

She has also said her first colour - I was putting on one of her Tots reusable nappies and she looked at it and said 'blue'. Mind you, she now says 'blue' every time I ask her what colour something is, but at least it's an improvement on a few weeks ago when she used to start counting....

Her best trick is still counting as she can count from 1 to 10. For a while she used to forget no.5 but she seems to have got it now. It is just repetition/memory - she wouldn't know, for example, that there were 3 balls or 4 dogs, but ask her to count and she reels it off perfectly. I have no idea if this means she will be numerate but, compared with her knowledge of letters (which is zero - I have read her various alphabet books but no letters have stuck at all) she does seem to have picked up numbers quite quickly. Oh, how I will laugh at this post in years to come when it turns out her numeracy skills rival my own for utter crapness!!

And, although I obviously never, ever let her watch CBeebies, she has somehow managed to acquire a great knowledge of all the different characters. Tumble, Jelly, Dipsy, La La, Po (not Tinky Winky, for some reason), Balamory (always sung), Plum, Spencer, Hoolie, Edie, Jump (Josie Jump), Jackson (although that is for the Numberjacks. Not sure why she calls them Jackson) and In The Night Garden, which she can't say but instead sings the theme tune to beautifully! Who ever said the telly is bad for them?!

I love this stage (I know, I've said the same thing loads of times before). I just find listening to the things that she comes out with absolutely hilarious. I want to keep a record of it all but that's just not going to be possible, so the odd post here and there, which I know are probably a little tedious, will have to do.

We're going to the Zoo...

Adrian and I both had today off because our child minder is on a course and we thought we would make the most of it and spend the day together with Freyja. Unfortunately, on Friday she started coming down with a particularly nasty, chesty cough combined with a temperature, running nose and generally grumpiness. Still, we decided to stick to our original plan of going to London Zoo today. This wasn't an entirely selfish decision - she did seem to be much better out of the house than in.

I don't know if anyone has been to London Zoo on a week day in early December but it is absolutely empty - of both people, and, unfortunately, animals. They are there, but wisely choose to stay indoors. You can see most of them, but there isn't a huge amount going on. I have to say, that Freyja wasn't really that impressed with the zoo. We started with the gorillas, which we thought were sure to be a hit, but Freyja just said 'no, no' repeatedly until we left them. She allowed herself a flicker of interest when we saw two amazing gibbons chasing each other round their cage - swinging effortlessly throughout a tangle of ropes and bars. It really was quite something to see. There were a lot of wonderful bird enclosures, which she didn't seem to like at all, she wasn't that keen on the monkeys, wasn't bothered about the camels, refused to go into the butterfly house, quite liked the goats and sheep, and was indifferent towards the flamingos, tortoises, pelicans, hippos and penguins. The best bit was the African section, where we saw zebras, giraffes, hunting dogs and warthogs, but Freyja had fallen asleep by that point and missed them all.

She did enjoy the meerkats and also the rainforest enclosure, where various tiny monkey-like creatures live, many of them in an open central area so you can get really close, although what she really liked in there was the tank of fish. And it was a couple of pigeons, a squirrel and some ride-on toys that really got her interest. Here she is at her happiest of the whole day:



We might as well have taken her to Asda.

Spotted

Freyja's knowledge of facial features is improving every day. This morning she listed all those she could see on Adrian:

'Eyes, Nose, Mouth, Chin, Ears, Hair, Spots.....'

Or, 'Pots' as she pronounces it.

I would like to add that Adrian does not suffer from spots, he's just had a particularly nasty one that's been lingering for a while.