Bumps

Sisters at 15 weeks and 37 weeks

I went for a potentially-final visit with my sister yesterday, it's unlikely I'll see her again before she pops.  She looks amazing for 37 weeks, a very neat bump and very active, although she can't fit her feet into shoes any more.

I can't WAIT to be an Auntie :D

Here Comes Science

Over the last couple of weeks, Jacob has developed a burning passion for Science.  I'm struggling to recall exactly how it came about, but each and every day I have around twenty-billion requests of "Can we do some more Science please Mummy?".

So far, we've done lots of bubble blowing (experimenting with different-sized and shaped wands), colour mixing, gravity (with a slinky on the stairs - didn't really work as the slinky was a cheap plastic one.  The real ones are surprisingly pricey) and water (pouring and measuring and bubbles and more pouring and splashing and pouring).  We also have 'science baths', where we hypothesise what kind of objects will sink or float, and then try them out.  Again and again and again.

I've been researching science materials and activities online, and it seems pretty much anything with an element of discovery can fall into this category for preschoolers.  There's a great resource of activities here at Productive Parenting, where you can choose your child's age and the learning category and get a list of activities from their library.  Pre-kinders has a load of great ideas and some printable materials.  I've started pinning some bits and bobs to my Preschool Science pinboard but haven't found much yet.

Of course, the best resource of all is the They Might Be Giants CD and DVD 'Here Comes Science'.  I could happily watch this all day.

Mostly, we're just having fun, and it's great having a focus to fill our days.  We try and get out for a nature walk in the woods that surround our house most days, where we can look at the weather, the seasons, learn about plants, and chuck stuff in the river to see if it floats or sinks (this is a very popular activity).  On Thursday, we set off into a slightly damp day, one of us sensibly bringing an umbrella along.  By the time we'd walked for 45 minutes and got a good couple of miles away from the house, the heavens opened and it POURED down.  Jacob looked down at my jeans, which were soaked from the knees down, and said "Mummy, I think we need to go to a waterproof shop and get you some waterproof trousers when we get home".  In his wellies and full waterproofs, he was happy to skip along in the ditches beside the path, splish-splash-splosh-splishing to his heart's content.

When we got home, we stripped off, wrapped ourselves in towels, and had some hot chocolate.  I've just found out that my over-the-road neighbour is going to be homeschooling her daughter.  Right now, I'm pretty jealous of them.  I could get used to this.

A convoluted announcement

Around 4 years ago, I sat on this sofa (well, not this one, the old one), staring in disbelief at a stick I'd just peed all over.  Jamie wasn't going to be home from work for another 5 hours or so, I couldn't tell him by email or phone, and I couldn't, just couldn't, cope with this on my own for 5 hours.  So I rang my sister.  She knew how for the last 6.5 years, we'd been trying to have a baby, and how we'd pretty much given up and were looking into what our options for medical assistance were.  After a convoluted introduction, where I explained how I'd been feeling nauseous and sore, and how I'd been trying to calculate when I last had a period but couldn't (damn PCOS), I told her that I'd done the peeing, and there were 2 lines looking defiantly back at me, but I couldn't believe they were true.  She screamed, and cried, and came to her senses and talked me into going out to buying another (six) tests.  I returned home (after a hilarious encounter in the pharmacists, where the pregnancy tests were located on the shelf below the haemorrhoid creams, and two elderly women were very s l o w l y and LOUDLY deliberating the efficacy of each and every one; while I dithered behind them, muttering under my breath about needing to GET A DAMN PREGNANCY TEST NOW), peed on 6 more sticks, and ended up staring at 7 lots of glowing double lines.  Yep, no mistaking those.

Living 3 hours away from my beloved sister means that we don't get to spend as much time together as we'd like.  When I next saw her, I already had a little bump going on.  We took this photo of me with a real bump and her with a cushion stuffed up her dress, to commemorate the occasion.

Fastforward 3 years, and sometime last year I had a phonecall from my sister.  "I need to talk to you," said she.  It transpired that she was on her own, her husband at work, and she'd done a bit of peeing-on-a-stick of her own.  But, presuming it to be negative, she'd forgotten to actually look at the stick, had merrily tossed it in the bin and gone about her day ... until she next went to relieve herself.  She found herself looking into the bin, where the discarded stick showed two unmistakable lines.  I screamed, I cried, I congratulated her.  And persuaded her to go out and buy some more tests, just to check.  She did, she peed: they were positive.

She's now got just a month left to go, and when I saw her just before Easter, we decided to recreate the above photo, in reverse.

Just a couple of days after the above photo was taken, I was back home again, alone (well, as alone as you can be with a very noisy toddler running around), and making a necessary call to my sister.

"I need to have that conversation with you that we have with each other before we have with our husbands", I said.  After a beat of confused silence, she screamed "Are you fucking shitting me??!" (which, funnily enough, were the exact words my husband would say a few hours later).

It turns out that in the above photo, I didn't need a cushion at all.

EDD: 9th Nov '12

Real Nappy Week 2012

I'm cutting it fine again with my Real Nappy Week post this year; I've been following (and entering) all the competitions and gossip with avid interest but as usual, my plan for a nice week of cloth nappy related posts has been scuppered by my ever-present laziness.

We had a(nother) brief foray into potty training last week - Jacob is now 3 and I'm really feeling the peer pressure to get him out of nappies.  But I just don't think he's ready.  He hates not having a nappy on, and if I try to get him to run around naked for a bit, he just glues himself to the potty and stays there until I have to (literally) peel him off.  And doesn't produce anything while he's there.  So I'm trying to accept that he's just doing this late, and it's only a couple of months until I (gasp) finish my job and have endless summer days to turn him out bare-bottomed into the garden, and let him get on with it.

In the meantime, he's grown out of our trusty Motherease One-Size (MEOS), so I've spent this week digging through my various boxes of nappies and finding some size 3s which I had hidden away.  He still fits into our Bumgenius v3s and v4s and we got some cheap pockets from Tiny Nippers, which are fantastic quality, super-cool prints (Jacob's been carrying his new ones round and begging me to prewash them so he can wear them) and we've not had a single leak with them.  We do stuff them with an extra insert though, to be on the safe side.

Finally, I got some Tots Bots fluffles from a recent NCT sale, and they are gorgeous.  Jacob even gave one to Tilly to cuddle, which is about the highest form of recognition he can offer ;)

Check out this cute bum...

I've been promising my up-the-duff sister to write out some instructions on how to wash cloth nappies, so I'll try and squeeze a post on that lovely topic in before malaise overtakes me again.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Jacob

My 30th birthday - tummy bug
1st Christmas - tummy bug
Jacob's 3rd birthday - tummy bug

Poor Jacob.  Today's plans included a trip to the zoo with all the family, but a 24-hour bout of D&V on top of a cough/cold/sinusy thing going on, meant that we had to postpone, and now that postponement looks like becoming a cancellation as the rest of the family can't seem to make it.

He was a little better today, though still quite weak and floppy.  We made the most of the day, playing with a surprisingly-new inflatable pirate play centre (bought second hand but never used), an extremely popular marble run and investigating everything with a magnifying glass.

I can't believe my boy is 3.  I saw this blog post suggesting a list of 20 questions to ask your 3-year-old on your birthday, and every birthday thereafter, recording their answers for posterity.  I thought this was a great idea, and hopefully I'll get round to doing something nice with the answers.  Enjoy :D


1. What is your favourite colour?  Red
2. What is your favourite toy?  Gup B [Octonauts]
3. What is your favourite fruit?  Bananas
4. What is your favourite TV programme? Wiggles programme
5. What is your favourite thing to eat for lunch?  Grapes
6. What is your favourite outfit?  I don't know
7. What is your favourite game?  Hide and seek
8. What is your favourite snack?  Snack bars
9. What is your favourite animal?  Rhino
10. What is your favourite song?  Twinkle twinkle little star
11. What is your favourite book?  Maisy Mouse
12. Who is your best friend?  Mummy and Daddy
13. What is your favourite cereal? Yellow cereal
14. What is your favourite thing to do outside?  Play
15. What is your favourite drink?  Hot nana and chocolate [banana and chocolate flavoured milk]
16. What is your favourite special occasion?  I don’t know
17. What do you like to take to bed with you at night?  Boy buppy and nanny
18. What is your favourite thing to eat for breakfast?  Yellow cereal
19. What do you want for dinner on your birthday?  I don’t know
20. What do you want to be when you grow up? Santa

3 years ago, 8:34pm

It's FREEZING

I'm slowly getting the feeling back in my fingers after deicing the guinea pigs' water and making them as warm as possible for the night.  It's so cold that Jacob hasn't removed his socks, his trousers or his jumper today; a situation which I don't think has ever before occurred.  He keeps wrapping his arms around himself, shivering theatrically and exclaiming "It's FWEEZING COLD Mummy!".

I've just been trawling pictures of frozen waterfalls, fountains, rivers and even seas around the country, and if the snow holds off (or even if it doesn't) tomorrow, I'm going to get out with my camera to get some icy pictures.  This frozen elephant at a garden centre in Essex was my favourite today.

via The Torygraph (not my reading material of choice, you understand) 

Thanks goodness that for the first Friday in 3 weeks, our heating is working.  Touch wood.

Note: Just as I finished typing this, Jacob took his socks off.  I guess it must be time to turn the heating off again ;)

The things he says...

Jamie has just returned to work after 3 months of (serious, but now manageable) illness.  Jacob hasn't quite got used to him not being home:

"Daddy ...... oh no, you not Daddy.  Mummy..."
"Mummy, we love Daddy SO much, eh?"
"Mummy, where's Daddy gone?"  [hours after he's left the house]

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Talking to his cats:

"Maeby, Maeby, where are you?  Maybe you're under the table Maeby.  Maybe Maeby's under the table Mummy!"  [collapses into fits of giggles at the word play]
"Tilly, what you meowing about?"
"Tilly GET DOWN!  [counts to ten on his fingers, very seriously]  Tilly, get DOWN!  I asked lots of times now"
"Mummy, where's those cats gone now?  Maybe they having an adventure in the garden!"

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

In the car, he sits in the front seat next to me, because I work late and we more often than not come home in the dark. I like to be able to see if he's asleep or not, and it's far easier to have a conversation when he's right there.  In the back, I can barely hear him, and it's too distracting trying to look at him in the rear-view mirror (rather too much context-setting there, but I just want you to imagine it right):

"Mummy, the sun's biting my eyes!"
"Look, two big sheep!" [I gently point out that they're ponies] "Oh.  Jacob thought they were sheep, but they were big ponies.  Little horses.  Not sheep Jacob, silly Jacob."
"Mummy, I can't see the wheels!  Where the wheels gone?  We got no wheels!"

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Jumping on my bed, while I get dressed.  He keeps trying to open the curtains, I ask him not to because I'm about to take my pajamas off:

"I ... want ... to ... see ... some ... booooobies!"  [repeated over and over in sing-song fashion with each and every bounce]

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

And for the boy whose stomach is never full, he said the following extremely seriously, approximately 10 minutes after he'd finished his breakfast this morning:


"Mummy, let's have a chat about lunch."


;)