Bodmacity

This month, the month of my birthday no less. A month usually associated with long hot afternoons, lounging in the park and the smell of barbecues has been wet. Not your common or garden wet but full-on, fill-your-wellies type of wet. It has been like that pretty much the whole month. Except Sunday!! Yes Sunday was the exception to the rule and it proved a scorcher. As luck would have it this was the day chosen for our barbecue to which we had invited 25 guests. The bad news was that I was suffering with infected tonsils so felt pretty grim. I came close to giving up the ghost and retiring to my bed but I managed to overcome and see it to the end.

DK brought the music rig and Deon kindly manned the barbecue as I don’t think I would have survived if I had been on cooking duties as intended. We blew up the Thomas paddling pool and all the children had fun jumping up and down on poor Thomas’ head while throwing the ballpit balls at whoever was unlucky enough to be in the firing zone :-). Paul Welch came with his wife and new baby Anna-May who is the most chilled-out 8 month old I’ve ever met :-). It was nice to catch up with them before they head back to Vietnam in the next few months.

Mia had fun in her trike as did baby Beatrice. On the subject of Mia, still no walking but she has started to walk holding only one hand. That’s progress isn’t it??? She has started saying a few words. She can say “Hello”, “Ouch” or “Owsh” as she puts it. Yesterday I swore she said “water” while having her bath. More impressively she does an amazing impression of a monkey. Oo-oo-ee-ee etc. Yes, she is amazingly cute at the moment as she marches(not physcially) towards 18 months.

Jake’s reading is amazing. He is on level 6 books now and can read very well. He is getting used to how words are put together and the different sounds the letter pairs make. He has a go at most words. Next week Jake has his operation for adenoids and grommets. Although an operation is far from ideal his hearing is pretty bad at the moment and in the long run it will be good for him. We went to the hospital last week and they showed us around the ward. The lovely nurse went through the procedure with Jake so he at least knew what to expect.

Last week or it may have been a week before, Mia cut her eighth tooth! The run up to this event was full of the usual grumpiness and midnight wakings. Now that is all in the past and she has a nice shiny torthen peg nestling in her upper jaw.

Seeing as I am here I will expand on Mia’s developments. On the walking front, not a lot has been happening. She still has a distrust of standing and prefers to crawl be it normal crawling or her strange up on one knee type of crawling or “drag crawling” as Amy commented the other day.

Her latest fearless antic is to stand while on the sofa while resting her back so she keeps her balance. Then she will proceed to bounce up and down in an alarming way :-).

she is enjoying her books more now. Her favourites are “That’s not my car” and “That’s not my rabbit”. She takes great delight in flicking backwards and forwards through the pages and pointing to the mouse at which point she exclaims “Da!”

Mia has started her road to cuteness. As if she could get any more cute but she has! The other day she uttered her first proper unprompted word. We were celebrating the Wills and Kate wedding and we said cheers and offered our glasses up. Mia responded by picking up her pink sippy cup and said “chzzz!”.

You can now differenciate between Jake and Daddy now. She sometimes says an abbreviated version of Jake that sounds like “jk!” or even just “j!”. She says Daddy as a question while raising the note at the end as in “Daddddeeeeee?”. Again, extremely cute 🙂

The walking is still not quite there. She can walk holding one of our hands but much prefers two. She can fly up the stairs though and even climb up the slide in the garden which is a little scary.

Today was Mia’s first morning at the child-minders. Amy found a lovely lady to look after her just 10 minutes walk away on Ladywell Road. When I came to collect her after two hours working Sara(the child-minder) told me Mia was a little upset when I left, which was pretty much what I though would happen,but soon picked up. When I came to collect her up I detected a little crossness with her. She kept looking away from me while she was sitting in the pram. :-(.

This was evidently just tiredness because when I got home she dove into her cot to snuggle in with her taggie. After what seemed a very small sleep I made her lunch and then afterwards took her to Emmas for the afternoon while I carried on working. It’s all very hectic with Amy working on these Tuesdays!!

Yesterday I spent an hour and and half in Accident and Emergency with baby M. The reason was simple. I was in the kitchen next to the sink. Baby M had speedily crawled to the ‘forbidden kitchen cupboard door’. Said door did have a safety latch, but said latch had recently been broken and said latch had not been replaced.

I turned around to talk to Jake and/or Amy. Then within seconds Amy was shrieking. I looked down and saw that Mia was holding a laundry tablet. Ordinarily this wouldn’t have caused such alarm. What caused the alarm was the fact that the laundry tablet had been nibbled.

Amy hoiked Mia up and began to fish out the offending frothy tablet. Mia started crying 1. because of the taste of the tablet and 2. because of the undignified manner in which Amy was rooting through her mouth(or mah as Jake used to call it). Anyway after a glug of water she was right as rain. Amy phoned the doctor and we were told to get to the hospital a.s.a.p.

At the hospital we were triaged and then had to wait until a doctor was available. In my haste I had omitted to bring any food or milk. Mia clocked another baby’s milk and went into meltdown. Luckily we were seen very soon after and luckily after her examination the doctor was happy that Mia was okay.

Let this be a lesson learnt. 1. Fix the door 2. Do not leave an opened laundry tab packet in the laundry tab box 3. keep a closer eye on baby M.

It was been lovely weather recently. Yesterday, Ben and I arranged to see the start of the London Marathon. So we met at the top of the hill with Antonia, Jake, Baby M and Baby B. Unfortunately it took so long to walk there that by the time we arrived all the runners had left. Boo!!

We didn’t let this deter us though. After a crafty ice cream we headed for Greenwich Park. Mia was delightful. She sat in her pram looking around and taking in the scenery. In the park we had a rest and the two 5 years olds went off for an adventure. Ben fed Baby B while Baby M had a crawl around. Mia was pretty tired when we were ready to go so I put her in her pram and eventually after much grumbling she went to sleep.

Before heading off we had an Honest Sausage which was luvverly :-).

Last week Mia sprouted her seventh tooth. It’s in her upper jaw next to her leftmost big tooth! Recently Mia has been into everything. She likes to investigate the area under the TV and pull out all and sundry. Her walking is still to come. I think it won’t happen anytime soon. She does not like standing up. She can do it quite well but I think she get’s a little scared :-(.

She is great at walking along with her walker/stroller though. This is something that Jake was never interested in doing. I fished out Jake’s old car/walker from the shed and much to Amy’s chagrin brought it into the house. Mia loves it in car mode. She carefully hoiks her leg over and sits there pressing the buttons and smiling when the music comes on.

I did the school run today to drop Jake off. Mia was a little unsettled and not her usual self. Maybe another tooth is on the way.

Yesterday I took Jake on his first ever proper bike ride. Ben and I met at Ladywell Fields. It was a good choice, being so flat and with smooth paths. After a little bit a fettling on both bikes. An adjust here and a tighten there Jake and Antonia were ready to roll.

This was Antonia’s second time on the bike and for some reason she was a little unsettled. Anyway after 5 minutes or so all was sorted and both children were fine.

Jake took to the the cycling very well, actually much better than I expected to be honest. He steered well and practised his emergency stops. We cycled all round the park and then also did a loop of the athletics track. He only ran out of steam when trying to cycle up Vicars Hill on the way home when Daddy lent him a hand. Good effort though!

Both children did very well and hopefully we can make it a regular occurrence. I’ve bought him an upgraded alloy set of braked levers for the bike. The plastic levers that came with the bike are to flimsy and bendy for my liking. They should make braking a lot easier.

Jake is five today! Alas for him it is a normal school day. He had most of his presents last weekend when he had his Dr Who party.

This morning he came down were what awaited him? A shiny new Spiderman bike!! We had been saying that it was a little dear and that he would have to wait another year so you can imagine how happy he was when he was his present.

He received lots of other great presents. A sticker atlas, another children’s atlas, some tag reader books. The Doctor Who Visual Dictionary. A box set of Roald Dahl books. The first Harry Potter book. A geography game and a Doctor Who Nintendo DS game. What a very lucky boy!

I have not blogged for a month. Well not much has happened to be fair. Mia and Jake have been poorly(again). Jake was off school for two days last week with a bout of diarrhea. He was literally rushing to the toilet every half an hour bless him. He ended up missing Oliver’s dinosaur party which was gutting for him and us because Amy and I had spent ages making an excellent dinosaur head for Jake to wear.

The week before Mia had a high fever. She was very unsettled in the night and a couple of times vomited all over the place. Once was in her bedroom immediately after her milk. Luckily it was not in her cot just over the floor. It did splash though so while Amy cuddled with the poorly Mia I got the disinfectant and mob and bucket out and gave her floor a good wash down.

Today Mia actually took a step. Amy and I were in the kitchen and we were sitting on the floor either side of Mia. She can stand for a while now although gets a little spooked because although she is standing nicely she is afraid of falling when she tried to move. Not that she is afraid of anything else! She brazenly climbs the stairs with a cheeky grin on her face as she looks back to see which parent is following her :-). As predicted in my last blog, Mia now can get to the Wii controllers and everything else in the TV cabinet. Her favourite hobby is pulling everything out of course :-).

This Saturday is Jake’s party. We have already had three drop outs due to various reasons. Let’s hope that’s it now though. It should be a good party. We have booked Mycenae House in Greenwich which is a lovely old house set in wooded grounds. Jake is having a Dr Who party(his favourite thing at the moment) and is dressing as Matthew Smith complete with a bow tie. Amy has been busy today making a Tardis cake and Dr Who cupcakes. After work I will try and use Ben’s projector to project a Dalek image onto some card stuck on the wall. The idea is that I then trace round the image and voila, we have a Dalek puzzle game(well that’s the theory anyway).

Weather-wise it is still quite chilly but thankfully Spring is definitely round the corner. I have planted out my onions and garlic in the raised bed covered by some mesh. We had some frost last week so fingers crossed that the mesh was good enough to protect the sets.

Last week Mia went to bed with a flaming red cheek and woke up with a lovely new tooth. Her sixth to boot. Well done Mia!

This week she has learnt the scary antic of crawling all the way to the top of the stairs. Last Sunday I literally went in to the kitchen for less than a minute and in that time she had crawled right to the top of the stairs and was calling down to me from the landing! Scary stuff. I am in the process of fitting the stair gate that Trudi kindly gave us.

Mia has now been walking about using the walker that Paul bought her for her 1st birthday. Jake wasn’t interested in his car/walker but Mia loves hers. It’s funny how they are completely different in lots of ways. I shall maybe get Jake’s old one out of the shed. I’m sure Mia would love it.

Mia has been getting cross because she has not worked out how to open the glass door under the TV to get at the Wii controllers and the like. It’s only a matter of time though…