What warms your soul?

I guess that technically I'm stealing a post here, but I'm all full of the warm fuzzies after watching a video on Georgia from Gregarious Peach's mum Toni Powell's blog. Go and watch the video - it's gorgeous.

In no particular order, the things currently warming my soul are:

Hearing J-cub wake in the morning. He seems to go from fast asleep to wide awake in seconds - one minute there's silence, and the next he's counting (something) or just gabbling away to himself. When I go to him, he's turned his light on, and excitedly points out his light, his lightswitch, his big boy bed, and the polka dots on his pillow. Then asks for cuddles.

Those mornings when he doesn't wake, and I need to wake him to leave the house. I go in and gently tell him its time to wake up. Without opening his eyes, he shakes his head. I tell him again he needs to wake up, and he starts his slow, luxurious stretches, still without opening his eyes. I giggle, and his mouth starts to try not to smile. He puts his bunny over his eyes and whispers "No Mummy, Jacob sleep". I laugh and pretend to leave. He suddenly sits bolt upright and shouts "Peepo Mummy!" and our day is begun.

Cuddles. I'm a super-needy person, and can't imagine life without a hundred cuddles a day. J-cub is going through a big old cuddly phase, and every few minutes he shouts "Mummy! Tuddle tiss!" and flings himself onto me, wrapping his arms tight around my neck for a few precious seconds, before pulling back and planting a great big smacker on my lips.

Love. Along with "Sorry", J-cub has recently learnt to say "Thank you" and "Love you". They sound exactly the same - something like "Buppoo". I hand him something, he says "Buppoo Mummy!". I say "I love you Jacob", he says "Buppoo Mummy".

Being reunited. As I drive towards nursery to pick J-cub up after work, my heart fills with excitement at seeing him again. When I walk through the gate, I peep through the trellis into the garden to see if he's playing outside. For a few special moments, I can see him playing in an environment totally alien to me - I never see him being strong and independent and holding his own with other (bigger) children. Then he sees me, his face lights up, he shouts "Mmmmmummy!" with so much delight in his voice, and runs as fast as he can into the building so he can be at the door when I come in. I go in, and he comes at me with his arms held up, shouting my name over and over. I swoop him up for cuddles and he holds me so tight. I ask him if he's had a nice day, he gives an enthusiastic "Yes!" and goes off into a stream of Jacob-talk about what he's done.

That all seems a little baby-centric. But really, whilst I still take great pleasure from other things in life, it's all nothing compared to being a parent. Nothing warms my soul like thinking about him, or being with him. He drives me up the wall a lot of the time, but life just wouldn't be the same without him. Jamie and I turn to each other several times a day, and say, with as much incredulity each and every time ... "We have a son".

What warms your soul?

#2 and #3 done already!

Look at that - just 4 little days into my half-term break and somehow, I've done 2 out of the 5 things off my list. And when I say 'I', I mean 'we'. Jamie needed to print some stuff, so he hoiked the printer upstairs and installed it into his shiny new study.

And this evening, a half-fledged idea to make J-cub a play-kitchen area in the living room turned into 4 straight hours of sorting and organising toys, so that everything is easily accessible and easily tidyable. Very important. We've got a bit lax on the old tidying front round here, and it's doing my head in.

So Jacob's cafe is now open for business, with his cash register and wares available on the left, his oven ready to cook breakfasts and light lunches, fresh fruit and veg in their baskets, and his teapot and cup out on the table ready to pour me a thousand imaginary cups of coffee. And Batty and Judy are eagerly sitting at the table, awaiting service.

It's gonna be yet another rainy day tomorrow, and for once, we'll be prepared with plenty of fun things to do. Today J-cub went the whole day without his dummy and bunny (apart from naptime), and it's good to have lots of play options if he's going to do the same tomorrow.

A little amusing moment from our day earlier - J-cub has (finally) learnt to say sorry and due to the bucketfuls of reinforcement we've been pouring over him when he says it spontaneously, he's now over-using it slightly. Case in point: I was in the kitchen earlier, bashed my elbow and shouted 'Ow!'. J-cub (in the lounge, out of sight), called "Sorry Mummy!".

Quite possibly the funniest, and cutest, thing he's ever done.

Half-term plans

After a 4-week half-term, the half-term holiday is suddenly upon us. I'm ignoring the fact that I've got a long 7 week stretch now until the summer holiday, and making the most of my time off.

I've already written a half-arsed list of things I would (quite) like to accomplish, which goes something like this:

1. Sort out sewing/crocheting/crafting stuff so neat and tidy and accessible.

2. Move printer upstairs.

3. Sort and organise toys.

4. Weed and plant garden.

5. Weed and clean patio.

Right now, we're trying to figure out what to do over the weekend. We suddenly realised that it's the Hay Festival over the next week, but due to a very late email notification, all the good stuff is sold out. The 2011 Eisteddfod is also happening just round the corner from us, but the tickets seem to be very expensive. I think we must be out of touch with how much things cost, as I constantly seem to be shocked at ticket prices.

On that score, we're trying to decide whether to go to Folly Farm this weekend. We've developed an obsession this week with watching the Giraffe cam, seeing what the giraffes are up to at all hours of the day, and fending off tears of disappointment when the giraffes are outside and not visible. We love Folly Farm, and last time we went we thought it would be fiscally sensible if we bought annual passes next time, as it were. So now it's next time, and we've seen that as it's now high season, it's £9 a pop. Which is a whole lot more reasonable than the £13 ticket price for the Eisteddfod, or the entirely-unreasonable £18 they were charging for Devon County Show last weekend (we didn't go). But it would still make more sense to buy an annual pass, and then we could just go any time we liked, and it would seem free. But ... £60 (£30 each, J-cub thankfully is free) is an awful lot of money. A lot more scary than shelling out £18.

So we're umming and ahhing, and wondering if we should go to Tenby and walk on the seafront instead, or go back to the National Waterfront Museum, where we went today and where J-cub was strangely content to ignore the toys and activities set out for exploring pre-schoolers (the purpose of our visit) and instead pottered around the exhibits; comparing the sizes of boats, exclaiming at flags, and showing lots of interest in entirely random things which I would never have thought to have taken him to see.

But none of those options have giraffes, and really, how lucky are we to have five giraffes just a short nap-in-the-car away? I'll spend the evening searching through jeans' pockets and old bags and down-the-back-of-the-sofa and see how many pennies we can dig up.

Real Nappy Week 2011 - the aftermath

So I did pretty well out of Real Nappy Week - I scored five pairs of Bumgenius Babylegs for £1 each, two Bumgenius flip covers for £5.50 each, and I won an Ella's House Bumhugger from a lovely local retailer, Nappy Go Lucky.

All had arrived by the time we got home from our weekend away, and thankfully collapsed back into cloth. 3 mornings of waking up to find J-cub wet through (it was very cold in my sister's house, so he was wearing a disposable nappy with a fleece cover, sleepsuit, pajamas, and the only 2.5tog Grobag we'd taken...) meant we had to try and wash and dry everything every single day. No mean feat when we were setting off on adventures every day, the sky was threatening rain and my sister didn't have a tumble dryer.

We've yet to give the Bumhugger a proper trial as it's still going through its pre-washes, but I can report that it is beautifully soft, fits him perfectly, and J-cub attests that it is "Bery bery comfy". I'll do a proper review when we've tried it overnight.

We are now in full-time cloth, using a selection of cobbled together nappies at night as we only have two proper night nappies (both Wee Notions Night Notions) and we're never organised enough to wash every other day. I'm sick of leaky disposables, and having to wash bedding all the time, and he has never (touch wood) leaked through a cloth nappy at night. His skin is a bit prunish in the mornings, which I'm not overly happy about, but a bit of nappy free time soon sorts it out, and I'm sure it's more comfortable for him than waking up shivering with cold from being wet through.

And in local news, Swansea council are now offering a £50 incentive voucher for parents wanting to try using cloth. I really hope the scheme is successful - it would be great not to be in the minority.

Weekend away

Last weekend (*I changed the date on this post to reflect when it actually happened, so that should read this weekend. May 22nd. Thank you.) my parents invited us to join them in celebrating their ruby wedding. 40 years! We're shocked enough to discover that we'll be celebrating our 10th anniversary next year, with the less expensive gift options of tin and aluminium (biscuit tins? tin foil?). As I was the same age when I gave birth to J-cub as my Mum was when she gave birth to me, that means that J-cub will be my age when we get to that milestone, which makes it all the more difficult to imagine.

Anyway, we went down for a long weekend, stayed with my sister as my Mum's sister and husband were staying with them. We had all kinds of fun days out, and J-cub slept happily on his blow up ready bed (great invention), and us young 'uns catered the whole party.

On Friday, we went to a little train place, which had a whole gnome village in the woods...

...and staying with my sister meant that when J-cub wasn't really tired when it neared bedtime, we could pop out to a park near her house for some playing fun (my parents wouldn't really approve of such sleep-delaying shenanigans)...

When His Lordship was finally tucked up in bed (their thankfully-newly-installed double glazing meant that he went to sleep despite their neighbours doing some impromptu jazz-band rehearsing in their garden) we sat in their back yard for a barbecue, gazing upon the beautiful brickwork of the building behind...

...and my sister and I attempted to do some ANTM-worth smizing (but failed)...

On Saturday, my parents attempted to lead J-cub astray by plying him with chocolate cake...

And we escaped to Exmouth beach where the kites were stunning, and we hired a windbreak so the wind didn't spoil our fun...

...and we bought J-cub a bumble bee wind-spinny thing, which he loved...

...and my sister kindly took a picture of all three of us. J-cub was a bit cold, and demanded "Mummy! Tuddles!" over and over again. It was lovely.

We escaped the wind to play in a super-cool park, where my sister took J-cub down this huuuuuge slide...

...and a zoom in on their faces shows their complete horror as they picked up speed, but that didn't stop J-cub from jumping up and shouting "Again, again!" three times in a row.

After some serious bargaining with J-cub to let us join him on this retro slidy-horse thing, Jamie had to drag Catey and I off it, long after J-cub had had enough...

...and we finished the day chilling in a Little Red Boat.

I don't have any photos from the party itself, since I was wielding my Dad's new DSLR (and was very restrained in not squirreling it away into the car when we left). J-cub slept almost the whole way home, waking up about 10 minutes from home with a deafening shout of "Tuddle!" before lapsing back into a semi-doze, with his eyes shut but singing along to whatever CD we were listening to.

Home safe.

Real Nappy Week 2011

I had a nice series of posts all planned for this week to celebrate Real Nappy Week and my love of all things involving fluffy bums. But oh I'm so tired, long days at work spent with a duckling nestling in my cleavage (don't ask) and Jamie having his final OU piece of work due on Thursday, so he's appropriating the laptop while I'm watching the extended version of The Lord of the Rings and crocheting pigs (it really was too much to ask that Peppa Pig would never make an appearance in this house).

So, a quick rundown....

• Go Real - the real nappy information service. Loads of great info, advice, and a list of offers available for Real Nappy Week.
• Baba Me - one of my favourite online retailers, who do a-ma-zing offers if you sign up for their email notifications.
• Nappy Go Lucky - fab and local (to me) online retailers.
• Baby Kind - great for reductions, special offers, bits 'n bobs and have super-low postal costs.
• Little Green Earthlets - specialising in Motherease nappies, and where I got my initial stash from.

And some lovely cloth-bummed pictures to brighten your day....

Cloth nappies rock. They're so easy, and the Daily Fail can f'off with their cloth-isn't-any-better-for-the-environment rubbish. For an easy-to-digest rebuttal, see here.

There. Fastest blog post ever. Tea time!

Upcycling a boring chest-of-drawers for an inquisitive toddler

So in J-cub's new room was the very first chest-of-drawers that Jamie and I bought, in a sale, in B&Q, when we first moved in here. It's a bit battered but serviceable, and we donated it to J-cub when we were cobbling the nursery together. It was very plain and boring, and didn't match anything at all:

I set about it today, with a load of alphabet wall decals, and the result is awesome, even if I do say so myself:

Except for the 'O for orange' - which is a) red and b) blatantly an apple, and the 'X for Xmas' which is just plain wrong when you're trying to teach a toddler how to read the alphabet. Better still, the set of decals (which included a further complete alphabet, numbers 1-10 and some random pictures) were an unbelievable £1.99 from our new favourite store, Home Bargains. Bargainous indeed.