Happy-tired

You know that feeling, when you've been squinting in the sun, lying on the beach, too hot to breathe, swimming until your lungs give out, salt drying on your eyelashes, climbing up the cliff, walking miles back to the car, and trying to stay awake while you drive home? That. Except we haven't even been to the beach today.

Following the mother of all tantrums yesterday afternoon (I swear, they only get higher in intensity as the days pass...), we bundled into the car (in the rain and mist and coldness) and went to Pizza Hut, where J-cub delightfully constructed his own happy face pizza (unprompted) using carrots and cherry tomatoes and croutons.

And as he didn't really eat anything other than carrots and breadsticks and croutons, we thought it best not to have ice cream factories, so we went to Morrison's and loaded up on Ben and Jerry's. And they had a Peppa Pig ride on thing in the entrance. So far, J-cub has existed not knowing what these strange things in supermarkets are. But he needed cheering up, and so did we, so out popped our pound, and in popped our boy. He's been talking about it ever since.

We managed to thoroughly exhaust him enough that he went to bed pretty much as soon as we came home, and we settled in for an awesome-sauce evening of watching Parks and Recreation (soon to supplant The [American] Office as my favourite ever TV show). And somehow, despite it being Sunday, we were up and dressed and out before 9am this morning, on our way to a Safari Swim at our leisure centre. It was sunny but pretty fresh and chilly - hence our bundled-upness:

I'm not entirely sure why it constituted a safari swim - it was supposed to be for little people who were too small to go on the slides, with calmer waters and jungle animals. None of which seemed to be in evidence. Still, they charged us a fairly shocking £6 each to get in, so we thought we'd better make the most of it, and stayed in til we all turned blue. Which turned to be two hours after we first went in!

We started swimming with J-cub when he was 12 weeks old, we did Water Babies which was, on the whole, great ... but also beset with problem after problem. Swimming pools were too cold/deep/busy. Staff left. Classes were too small so we got bumped up into a toddler group while J-cub couldn't crawl, let alone walk (leaving us bobbing around, totally unable to join in the activities as he just didn't have the skills or understanding). He went through a big wobbly phase, which they say always happens, but having a child clinging onto you so tightly that you're left with deep fingernail marks, and who screams bloody murder when you even suggest that they should hold onto the side or do one of the million exercises they've been doing weekly for a year, just felt horrible and wrong and I left each class in tears. So we quit. We've been swimming precisely once since then ... more clinging, and more screaming.

But swimming should be fun, and we don't want to just give in when we know that he'll eventually get over it and start enjoying himself. So we stayed, and splashed, and cuddled, and gradually he calmed down. At the start of our two hours, he was screaming and refusing to approach the water's edge. At the end, he was riding on my back, holding on to the straps of my costume while I bobbed around the lazy river. And he went down a slide, which involved going through a curtain of water, and splashing into a shallow pool at the bottom. Yay!

We'll try and keep going I think, although maybe not at that time of the weekend with those prices.

Afterwards, we emerged to find the sun had put his hat on, and it was freakishly hot. We went to check out the marina (see the building in front of Jamie's face? Imagine that hadn't been built, and instead you could see a rather grimy ex-launderette in the basement of a fancy marina-flat-complex ... that's where we first lived together. Awwww.) - how similar are my boys?

And just to emphasise how perfect* the day has been ...

*By perfect, I mean too stinking hot to breathe. It's quite nice indoors though. We've also managed to weed and clean half the patio. It took 2 hours. That'll teach me to have a baby and ignore the gardening for nearly 3 years.

Reasons to be Cheerful - April '11

A little bit of a catch-up, framed in a list of Reasons to be Cheerful, just cos I need a bit of reminding sometimes.

Most of our days are now spent in the garden. There is nothing J-cub loves more than carrying around buckets of water, and any attempts I make to pick up a watering can are met with "No! Jacob!" and he comes and takes the watering can off me to do it himself. Most of my plants are therefore drowning, but it's nice that he's being helpful. And he looks about 6 in this photo, I can't believe how fast he's growing up:

We're looking after the school guinea pigs for the Easter holidays. We have the option of looking after them longterm, as the nursery class are kind of sick of them. I had guinea pigs up until J-cub's first summer, when old age and intense heat got to them. I've missed them so much, but having the cats is hard enough work on their own, without any further complications. But ... J-cub loves them, they're extremely tame and lovely, and they're cutting the grass for me. So maybe they'll stay:

My lovely fellow-babywearing friend Hannah came round for a sling workshop and an afternoon of fun. We went out for a walk in the woods (I use the term loosely, it's a managed forest and the bit in this photo has been harvested recently), just the two of us, and managed to craftily take photos of each other in a faux-walking pose, then photoshop them together. Awesome:

And, even more awesome, J-cub fell asleep, for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, on my back. It was lovely:

We've moved J-cub's table out into the middle of the lounge, and he's started having his breakfast there, and having lots and lots (and lots) of tea parties throughout the day. I love our quiet breakfasts:

It's been hot enough for the paddling pool :D. J-cub hasn't quite got the hang of paddling in the pool, but he likes splashing round the edges and throwing things into it:

A day after last year's paddling pool was revived, a friend let me know that TK Maxx were selling Nemo paddling pools. I really need to do a separate post about J-cub's Nemo obsession. Suffice to say, he now has a Nemo paddling pool in the lounge, full of blankets and cushions, where he likes to chill out during his lulls. It'll replace the one in the garden in due course, but it's just too damn perfect at the moment to risk being all dirtied up:

Al-fresco meals. At least one a day, sometimes in the nude, always met with relish, and usually abandoned part-way through to go and chase an ant or investigate an interesting bird-call:

Languid days spent on the beach, investigating rock-pools and chasing crabs:

And most emphatically NOT PADDLING. Looking at worms near the water's edge yes, stepping into the (tiny, sun-warmed) waves no:

Playdates in friend's gardens, where the paddling pool, sandpit and slide are fought over, cries of "Mine!" grow ever-more deafening, and parents sit around and happily reminisce over that long-ago first summer, when we could sit in air-conditioned joy in Starbucks, drinking mocha frappuccinos while our babes drowsed in our arms (not that we'd change anything now, you understand, it's lovely to be out in the sun and their chattering and babbled conversations are amazing to listen to ... I just can't wait until they understand the concept of sharing):

And that pretty much brings us up to date. We're spending this weekend moving J-cub's bedroom from the box-room to the second bedroom. He needs the space, we don't. He's also (gasp) pretty much ready to go in to a bed. I am terrified. Wish us luck.

Day 34 - New boots

(Sunday August 22nd)

During our trip to Asda the other day we scored J-cub his first pair of Wellington boots for the bargainous price of £4. They're probably not terribly good for his feet at that price but his feet grow so fast that he'll be out of them soon, and I'm sick of having to stay inside when it's raining because he doesn't have appropriate footwear.

We tried them out in the rain-sodden garden and they were deemed a great success. He still can't make the trike go forwards though.

The rain had been disastrous in our garden: the stand which was supporting a growbag full of strawberries and 2 pots of tumbling cherry tomatoes collapsed, pulling down the French bean wigwam which had trained itself around the top bars.

While J-cub investigated here and there...

I righted the growbag (the strawberries survived), chucked out all the slug-eaten tomatoes, and harvested all the French beans. I cut the grass and got the garden back to a baby-friendly state, seconds before it started to pour with rain again.

We had a lovely stir-fry of French beans (amongst other foods) for dinner, I'm just gutted that that'll be the last of them now.

(This is my 200th post! Should really be something more momentous, really.)

Day 25 - In the garden

(Friday August 13th)

Hmmmm I hadn't realised it was Friday the 13th until I typed the date above. That might account for why I went into a bit of a shutdown and found it hard to function all day.

Still, we had some fun playing in the sunshine in the garden:

And J-cub once again 'helped' me in the garden. And ate some French beans straight off the wigwam. Yum.

Apologies for my absence (2)

Quite simply - I've had a bereavement this week which I won't elaborate on as it's far too personal and complicated. I'm going to try and jump straight back into the swing of things with a bit of a catch-up.

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The introduction of a magna-doodle (and by magna-doodle, I mean a Tesco's own version which was considerably cheaper) into our lives courtesy of Auntie Rachel has unleashed J-cub's inner artist (I couldn't remember my son's name while I was typing that sentence. What does that say about me?!). Once he worked out which way round to hold the pen, there was no stopping him. Last weekend, we popped down to our big YMCA superstore, and there was this lovely wooden easel just inside the door (the fact that it was In The Night Garden was just icing on the cake). We immediately grabbed it and asked how much it was. The poor boy who'd just spent ages assembling it informed us it was £4.99, and begged us to take it home whole. We happily complied (and were also given 4 cups for paint and a bag full of chalk and crayons) and squeezed it onto the back seat next to J-cub, where he cooed happily at it until we got home. He's now mastered crayon (on paper) and chalk (on everything). There's a dry-wipe board on the other side, but he's not getting pens until he's about twelve.

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I've been gardening during the bright spells we've had this week (the sun which apparently is beating down on the rest of the country has mostly been avoiding us), and J-cub has loved 'helping'. You can tell from his long-sleeved top and heavy dungarees that despite the sun, it was fricking cold. He was a fab helper though, he dug over all the patches I'd just weeded (without eating any soil!), he picked strawberries, tasted them, and spat them out again (I swear he's the only child in the world not to like strawberries), and mostly practised his walking-on-grass skills (which, he informs me, will be useful for future gardening times when speed is a necessity).

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We've been for walks. Walks which don't involve a sling and don't involve a buggy. This is a whole new world for me; a world where it takes an hour to walk round the block and every ant, stone, cat, leaf, earwig, bin and garden must be examined carefully and exclaimed over. It's wonderful.

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J-cub can reach and operate the door handle. Oh dear. He hasn't yet managed to do so whilst pulling the door towards him, but I fear it can't be long.

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J-cub's signing has come on in leaps and bounds. I don't think I've said much about baby signing, but we went to a few Tiny Talk classes when he was about 9 months old, but they were on a Saturday and cut into our family weekends, so I bought some books (My First Signs, My First Animal Signs and Sign About Meal Time) and we've taught him ourselves. The CBeebies programme Something Special, aimed at children aged 4-7 with learning difficulties, has quickly become J-cub's favourite and he's slowly picking up the more regularly used signs from the show (and can do a passable monkey impression after the vastly annoying "oo-oo-ah-ah-ooh" monkey song).

So to have a quick recap of his current signs, J-cub currently uses the following: hello, bye-bye, baby, clean/wash, tired, bed, biscuit, apple, food, drink, gentle, cuddles, more, yes, no .... that's all I can remember at the moment.

I love it when he strings signs into sentences. Over the past couple of weeks while he's been poorly, we've been letting him have digestive biscuits as a) he'll eat them and b) they cheer him up when he's feeling wretched. After a few days of us asking "Do you want a 'gestive biscuit?", he started signing "gentle, biscuit". Whether it's because gentle sounds like 'gestive', or because it's gentle on his tummy, or just coincidence, it's lovely, it works, and it's now his most commonly used sign. In the photo above he's half-way between gentle and biscuit.

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J-cub has barely eaten since his ear infection of a couple of weeks ago (and that's on top of all the barely-eating he's been doing since his birthday). Baby-led weaning is all about letting them set the pace, and not forcing them when they don't want to eat. But when your baby eats nothing but yoghurt and digestive biscuits and peanut butter sandwiches and ricecakes for weeks on end, it's hard not to be concerned.

This evening though, he ate. I made him Swedish meatballs with a tomatoey sauce and peas. After some initial reluctance and suspicion, he wolfed it down. Then he ate a ricecake (we weren't really prepared for him finished what was first offered), and then a massive bowl of yoghurt. And he ate the meatballs with a fork, and the yoghurt with a spoon (well, mostly). I was such a proud mummy. That'll probably fill him up for the next couple of months anyway.

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How beautiful is my boy? We've been having a bit of a stand-off about baths recently, he's screamed as soon as his feet hit the water, and cried throughout enforced hair washing which makes me feel terrible. We haven't been swimming at all since our last term of Water Babies finished, and I think he's just got a Thing about water. This evening though, having sweated heavily through last night's sleep and today's two naps, then eaten meatballs in tomato sauce and copious amounts of yoghurt for tea, we had no option.

With a little help from a small green cup, J-cub and water rekindled their previous affection. He found it hilarious when he accidentally spilt water from the cup onto his face (which made hair washing much easier), decided that bubbles were yummy (he picked them up individually and ate them!), and drank water from the cup and directly from the bath whilst lying on his front. We stayed in until his lips turned purple. It was lovely.

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So that's all for now. I might do a Saved post later, then again I might not. I had a good one for today y'see. I'm off now to drink my cares away with a very rare alcoholic drink (rare as in I don't often have alcohol, not rare as in a thousand-year-old bottle of whiskey or something) or six. Night night.

Don't know about the future, that's anybody's guess

Just a quick one today, as I've done nothing of note other than try and get better, take Jamie to the GP so he can try and get better, and made a stupid mistake with the washing. What was I thinking, putting a brand-new, bright-red fleece rug in with the rest of the laundry?

The insides of J-cub's nappy wraps are now a delightful pink, although thankfully the nappies themselves are still pristine-white. A few of his t-shirts and vests also came out with a hint-of-pink, but I'm sure it'll just add to his charm.

Check out the wrap on the front line, third from the left. Doh.

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Today's Look Up photo comes courtesy of a battle with my camera, which has not been taking photos of the quality which I have come to expect. I've been fiddling with the settings all day, and getting nowhere, so I've switched it back to auto, stopped pretending that I can pass as a photographer, and taken some bog-standard shots.

The cherry blossom in our garden has exploded out of nowhere, it wasn't there 10 days ago, and it's just stunning. I've cunningly planted garlic all round the bottom to prevent the blackfly we are usually plagued with, and touch wood, so far it's working. I love Spring.