Christmas

A warm November is the sign of a bad Winter – or so they say…

Wednesday 30th November 2011Thursday 9th August 2012Baggie

We are two weeks closer to Christmas and I still have no presents or indeed made any effort towards purchasing them. Nothing new there then (although I have looked on Play and Amazon and bought stuff for myself -it’s a start!). It is with this in mind that I now start a 10 day break from my place of employment. I hesitate to use the word work, as Christmas shopping, visiting friends and relatives, preparing the house for Christmas and looking after the children is also work, I just don’t get any money for that!

So, again since this write up comes on the back of a couple of busy couple of weeks at work so you must forgive the brevity of amusing ancedotes and photos. It has become more of a discipline for me to continue with the updates when I am busy and not let the impetuous slip for as you will notice I have seriously missed the target this year in terms of updates and am currently only averaging 12.85 days between writes ups as opposed to 11.41 days last year and 11.77 days the year before. OK enough of the geekiness and back to the task in hand.

So with the 25th December less than a month away it is all geared to getting ready for the big day and Éowyn is, probably for the first time fully comprehending the idea of Christmas, i.e that Santa brings you presents not the religious aspect of the year. We are trying to temper the fact that she will get what ever she wants and the incessant stream of advertising aimed at children is not helping and the phrase ‘I want one of those,’ is heard umpteen times a day. However, it is giving us the opportunity to use the notion of Santa to our advantage. ‘If you are not a good girl then Santa will not bring you any pressies‘, although in fairness to Éowyn we have not had to say that to her that much because she has been relatively well behaved. We haven’t resorted to the tactics of friends of ours who pretend to call Father Christmas whenever their child misbehaves and asks him to take away a present. We’ll save that for when we need to wheel out the big guns.

We are, however, trying to use the notion of Santa in an attempt to stop Éowyn from sucking her thrumb. She has always been a thumb sucker. The nurses in the ICU at St. Peters tried to encourage us to give Éowyn a dummy when she was born (it seems to be one of the factors in preventing cot death) but, much to our relief, Éowyn kept spitting it out and so never had a dummy. Thus her comfort became her thumb, which is handy in some ways (never gets lost!) but at the age of three we feel that it is high time that she stopped, at least during the day. So, the power of Santa is being invoked by trying to convince her that only babies suck their thumb so if she is sucking her thumb then Santa will think that she is a baby and therefore only bring her baby presents and not big girl presents. Will it work? Watch and wait.

Amélie, obviously, is oblivious to it all. As indeed she is oblivious to the fact that her parents need more than 3 hours continuous sleep. Amélie doesn’t seem to understand the notion of a good night’s sleep and the best we can ever expect is to be woken at 0500. It is starting to get a little tiresome after 14 months! We had initially hoped to be able to move Amélie into Éowyn’s room earlier this year but until she sleeps through the night we are of the opinion that it is unfair on Éowyn that unfortunately means she is still in with us. However, now that Lucinda is back at work it is becoming more important to train her, if not to sleep, then not to scream like she is being murdered when she wakes in the small wee hours of the morning.

In the daytime Amélie is completely different and a little cutie with a very different personality to Éowyn. She is much more of a mommy’s girl than Éowyn. Éowyn was, and indeed still is, a daddy’s girl which, considering the amount of work that Lucinda does for her, much be frustrating for mommy. Amélie has redressed that but it can be equally frustrating for Lucinda as Amélie will follow her around incessantly, hanging onto the back of her legs whenever she has her back towards her. As if to illustrate this Amélie’s favourite word (not that she has that many at the moment) is ‘mommy‘. She can also say ‘daddy‘ and what sounds like ‘big sister‘ (much to Éowyn’s delight) among others but it is ‘mommy‘ that she constantly mutters. However, in the last few days that has been replaced with a new favourite: sneezing! She sits there pretending to sneeze. She then looks at you and gives a cheeky grin. You can start her off by saying ‘Bless you‘ and off she goes.

Amélie still has not taken her first unfettered steps. She spends a lot of her time on her legs cruising along the furniture but has not yet attempted to let go of the sofa and walk across the room. If you hold her hands to encourage her to walk she just sits down refusing to entertain the idea. This is probably down to a number of reasons: there really is no need at the moment: she is the Usain Bolt of crawling and can cross the room in a blink of the eye; her sister will carry toys for her so she can concentrate on crawling and the wooden floor is more slippery than carpet so probably doesn’t install confidence when taking those first steps. We’ll see if we can encourage her to make that next stage before Christmas; another of the items on the list for the week off.

So with that in mind I will leave you with this one thought. This apparently has been one of the warmest Novembers on record and one of the mildest Autumns on record (for the UK) and apparently the old weather lore states that: ‘A warm November is the sign of a bad winter’ (hence the title of this write up) as does the similar pearl of wisdom ‘Flowers bloomin’ in late Autumn a sure sign of a bad winter comin’ (not sure if that second statement is supposed to rhyme but if it is, it is a bad one, if it doesn’t they why does it look like they have tried to make it rhyme?). I have no empirical data to back up either of these statements, or indeed if they relate to great swathes of the world or just to a small town just outside of Scunthorpe (Winterton, perchance?) but I thought that I would throw it into the public domain and test it this winter. Obviously it will prove nothing either way but perhaps 30 years of study and a supercomputer (or at least a piece of paper and a propelling pencil) will, so come back to me in 2041 and I will let you know.

Enjoy the photos

Peace and love

Baggie

Wrapped up warm for Winter

Coo-ey!

I see you!

Let me play you a song

It goes like this…

One more for the lady in the corner

Fun at the park

I like the swing

I like the swing too!

What lies on yonder horizon?

It’s cheeky!

Look at me!

Lesson one: the emotional phonecall part one

Lesson one: the emotional phonecall part two

Lesson one: the emotional phonecall part three

In the Night Garden

Tuesday 9th August 2011Tuesday 9th August 2011Baggie

It is August. Where has 2011 gone, not that 2011 is over but Selfridges and Harrods in London do have their Christmas displays on show, so whether you like it or not the countdown has begun. The football seasons (yes, seasons, it is not just the English Premier League for us these days!) are beginning and therefore work is ramping up for me the slight breather that is the summer break is over and Lucinda returns to work in a little less than two months. It never stops but at least life isn’t dull!

Éowyn is off school (along with millions of other children) which means that the onus is back on Lucinda to look after both of our daughters and trips to Legoland or other such Merlin Pass venues are not quite as attractive as they were. Éowyn however is still going to Jo’s (our childminder) 3 times a month so there is a little break for her there. I have altered my days off so that my week is effectively Wednesday to Sunday with my weekend on Mondays and Tuesdays, which if nothing else is regular! However the days have lengthened as the workload increases towards the inevitable deadlines that usher in the advent of the seasons! This has meant that most days I have not been able to make it back much before the kids bedtimes and on a couple of occasions after they have gone to sleep. This is upsetting for Éowyn (and hence Lucinda and me) especially when the only way that Lucinda could stop her crying was to phone me up and ask me to speak to her. It is extremely hard to speak to your 2 ½ year old daughter who is sobbing because you are not there to read her bed time stories. It is rare that it happens now but this is the time of the year when it is most likely.

Éowyn however has been in the bad books of late. I think it is a combination of Amélie receiving more attention, more pressure on Lucinda because I have been at work for longer hours and the fact that the turmoil the house was in from the kitchen refit has been replaced by more turmoil since we decided to carry the decorating on throughout the lower floor of the house. That sounds rather grandiose, but it is merely the lounge and dining room and it is merely giving it all a lick of paint and replacing the old decrepit carpet with some hardwearing wooden flooring. However the work invovlved to move all our furniture away from the walls to paint was severely underestimated, especially since the house isn’t big enough to simply move it all into another room. This is going to be a problem when they come to fit the flooring, hence we are erecting a tent and a gazebo as temporary rooms in the only area that can accommodate the furniture – the garden.

So, there is some understanding, if not justification, for Éowyn’s behaviour but just because there is a reason it does not make it excusable. So there is a lot of explaining to Éowyn how disappointed we are with her and taking toys off her rather than shouting or sitting on the thinking step. She also appears to be better behaved when she has had an afternoon nap. It is unfortunate though that she does not relish them and will do what she can to fight the sleep. However she has surprised us a couple of times by saying that she is tired and can she go to bed for a nap.

Of course, all of this is Éowyn attempting to have some control over an aspect of her life and although as an adult you know this, it is still hard especially when Amélie is teething and will only stop crying when you are rocking her (her form of adult control!). It does make the days long, especially for Lucinda who is dealing with them on her own. Éowyn latest form of control is not to eat her meals. Again you want your child to eat and you feel that you are a bad parent if they don’t. So you appease them. Obviously this is wrong because once you have appeased them once they know they have you. So as a parent it is again time to regain power so now if Éowyn does not eat her meals then we do not make a fuss we simply offer her one more chance, then take it away. We tell her that because she has not eaten her meal then she will not get anything to eat until the next meal and if that is the last meal of the day, then it will be breakfast before she eats again. It is really hard to do this because it feels like you are starving your child (one missed meal, even two, isn’t going to cause that much harm) and all your parental instincts go against it but it doesn’t take long for it to bear fruit. A couple of missed meals and she will eat anything you set in front of her. We are still getting a couple of times a week when she refuses to eat her meals but no where as often as before and it doesn’t last very long.

Despite Éowyn’s behaviour she is still being taken nice places. Lucinda had booked tickets for the ‘In the night garden‘ live show her in Richmond Old Deer park way back at the start of the year. At the time, Éowyn was very much into ‘In the night garden‘ however it seems that it is a phase that she is currently growing out of and the show no longer maintains the same level of appeal as it once did. Nevertheless the tickets were booked so Lucinda jumped on the train from Staines to Richmond with her friends Christina and her daughter Arabella and the four of them went on an adventure. As feared she was not that interested in the show but it was good day out and as I stayed behind to look after Amélie it was some quality time for Lucinda and Éowyn alone.

As mentioned Amélie is teething again. Currently there remains only to front two lower teeth but she seems to be in a lot of pain with them of late so hopefully the others will soon erupt. She still is not taking her dummy, which is fantastic news, they can be consigned to the rubbish heap. She has also started to crawl forwards a little. Not as good as she can crawl forwards but we definitely have forward motion. The biggest news for us, as parents, though is the fact that she has stopped walking at 0500 and the last couple of mornings not risen until 0630! Bliss! There is a big difference is those 90 minutes. 0530 is the middle of the night, 0630 is early morning. Hopefully this is not a temporary thing and moreover a sign of the new status quo (the Latin phrase not the band, the new Status Quo is very much like the old Status Quo, status quo if you like. – I’ll stop there!).

Éowyn has also discovered the word ‘why’? Trying to explain gravity to a 2 year old isn’t easy, especially since I lost Lucinda at Newton and I don’t think that Éowyn was listening much after Einstein’s general theory of relativity!

With Einstein and Status Quo both mentioned in the same write up I think I will take this opportunity to stop. Hopefully I can squeeze another update in soon but with time very precious in August, I may not promise that the next write up will be as detailed as they have been of late.

Peace and Love

Baggie

That’s what I think of you!

Be very quiet, I’m hunting big sisters!

Strength exercises

I’ve got all I need

Extreme Close up

All worn outAll worn out

Ooohh! The Pinky Ponk!

The Pinky Ponk

On the Pinky Ponk?

Having a laugh!

Still watching the show

Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy!

Back in the routine

Sunday 20th February 2011Friday 11th May 2012Baggie

When I first begun this website with the birth of Éowyn I promised myself that I would attempt to update this website once a fortnight. Sometimes those updates are easy, so much has happened and I find it difficult to fit everything in. And then there are updates such as this. That is not to say that we haven’t done anything, it is just that there has not been much of note. So I apologise in advance for any ennui induced by what follows.

The cold and the snows of December seem so far away considering the mild start to 2011 (in the South East of the UK anyway), but not only did it close Heathrow airport for 4 days but also put pay to our NCT group’s Christmas party. We had booked the soft play area of Egham Leisure centre but due to the snowfall decided it would be better not to risk it that day and fortunately Egham Leisure centre were accommodating enough to re-arrange the date for us. That date was last Sunday, so we had our final Christmas party on the 6th February! It was good to see the other dads (the mums get together once a week) but was difficult to strike up any conversation since we always had one eye on what they were doing, or were climbing around the soft play area with them. For those of you unfamiliar with soft play areas, they are basically 3-dimensional mazes with rope bridges, slides, and slopes all padded for extra safety. Excellent fun!

Éowyn has been settling into playbox a little better. Still a little clingy when she is dropped off but has been more chatty and joining in more while she is there. However overall her behaviour has changed since the start of the year. Now whether it is the terrible twos kicking in, influences from playbox, jealous over Amélie, the fact that I am back at work or a combination of all four it is impossible to say. Don’t get me wrong she is not an overly naughty child but she is definitely pushing boundaries. It is ‘I want’ with no manners, she seemingly has forgotten how to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank-You’. She even got told off at school for not saying ‘Please’! Therefore we are employing tough love at the moment and she is not getting anything without asking for it properly. This has resulting is a number of tantrums and even telling Lucinda: ‘Mommy, I don’t want you anymore, go and put yourself in the bin.’ We thought it was quite an amusing phrase but not that we let her know that!

Amélie has begun to take to eating solid food. We have begun weaning her early on the dietician’s advice and at first she was struggling to take her baby rice but not any more. She gobbles her baby rice down but it hasn’t diminished her appetite for her neocate and she is still on her 3 hour cycle. Baby rice may be a favourite but she isn’t taking to new flavours with the enthusiasm that Éowyn did, but then if you had chronic reflux then maybe you would be wary when trying new foods. Her weight (6.3kgs (13lb 14oz)) has seemingly settled onto the 25th centile, so our concern over weight loss has lessened but her reflux is still quite bad. Hopefully after the ultrasound at the beginning of March they will be able to determine what is causing it. We will keep you updated.

Before I leave you to look at the photos just a quick note about the other love of my life: West Bromwich Albion. Roberto Di Matteo has been put on gardening leave and Roy Hodgson has been bought in as Head Coach. For one game (a disappointing 3-3 draw with West Ham United – we were 3-0 up at half time!) in between appointments an ex-player Michael Appleton was in charge and at 34 became the youngest person to be in charge of a Premier League team, remember that for your pub quiz team. I had nothing against RDM (we haven’t been in the relegation zone all season) but if Roy can tighten our defence and keep us up he may have a chance to put his tenure at Liverpool behind him. Come on you Baggies!

Peace and Love

Baggie