Elise's Old Blog

So Ollie needed a haircut, as you will see in the “before” picture. You can also see how blonde he is which makes everyone who sees me with him assume his dad is blonde!
Before:

After:

Ollie has unfortunately reached that age where he refuses to eat unless he can do it himself. I let him play with pasta shapes yesterday. Some of them did get eaten, but I would estimate 80% became interior decoration:

And finally, when I asked Thomas what he wanted to build with meccano this morning, he said “Daddy!” So we built a robot-daddy for use when the real one is away, but here they are both together:

…or not.

Thomas was reading “Peer Gynt” by Ibsen this morning (God knows why – I had only just woken up) anyway, he pointed at it and said “This word here says puh…. (the letter “p”) puh… puh… puh… dog!

Needs work.

So, it’s raining. A LOT!

But I’m determined that the boys don’t grow up thinking rain is an excuse not to do anything. So out we went for a walk in. I got wet:

Ollie was snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug in the backpack avec rain hood:

…and Thomas didn’t care:

Sorry that last picture is so dark – it was dark. It doesn’t really seem to get light at the moment, with all the clouds, but it was getting late as well. And of course Thomas had to collect every single twig in the park, and either try to stick it back on a tree, or carry it with us.

He has surprised me with a couple of words lately – he told me he was “organising” his teddies the other day. This lunch time he was babbling nonsense, so I asked him what language he was speaking. I asked if it was Urdu? No. Danish? No. Gujarati? No. “It’s Catalan!” he said.

Ollie is not well at the moment. He is running a fever, but with no other symptoms I’m assuming he is getting teeth. It’s about bloody time too. However, he is really suffering, so I may get him looked at if he is not better tomorrow.

So our big news is that Ollie has just about started “cruising”, which for all you non-technical-in-baby-talk types means that he can stagger around the room holding onto furniture. He’s still very new at this, and a bit precarious:

This means he might not bother crawling at all, because our living-room is small enough that he can basically spin 360 degrees to reach anything, and he even slithered over to the door the other day (to look in the mirror I think!) and with Thomas around, I think Ollie would like as much height advantage as possible!

I’ve tried him on the walker a couple of times, but instead of trying to walk with it, he seems to want to let go of it! He even took both hands off the other day and stood for a couple of unsupported seconds, but I think he scared himself, and he now shouts at the walker quite a lot.

I looked back in my blog of Thomas at Ollie’s age, to see what he was eating at the time, and of course I hadn’t recorded it, so i’m none-the-wiser. However I did notice that Thomas was already crawling a lot and pulling himself up to play the piano at this age! Ollie is still at the slithering stage, and he hasn’t managed to pull himself up yet.

However I remember trying like crazy to teach Thomas to clap, which he absolutely wouldn’t. Ollie learnt to clap on the 27th December. He even claps if you sing “Let everyone clap hands with me!”

It’s easy to see how these differences came about. Thomas had a big space to move around in, and spent quite a lot of time in the baby-bouncer up to this age, so his leg muscles were probably stronger and he had more incentive to move around. Also access to lots of things he could grab onto. Ollie on the other hand, has quite a small space to play in, hasn’t been in the bouncer much, and can’t reach anything to pull himself up with (Thomas would just climb on it). On the other hand, he gets a lot of input from Thomas, and of course learns very quickly from him – hence being able to clap.

I also wanted to tell you about my surreal night. Ollie kept waking up every hour, so I was getting exhausted. Finally at about 4.45am, he went back to sleep and I climbed back into my bed again. Then Thomas, with perfect timing, woke up 5 minutes later, saying “mummy! mummy!” I climbed into Thomas’ bed with him, and lay there trying to sleep. However Thomas’ protestations about “want to sleep in YOUR bed” woke Ollie up. I managed to shut Thomas up, telling him to go to sleep, but Ollie managed to press one of the buttons on his cot toy that plays the Can-Can.

So, having been up hourly since 1am, I am now trying to get to sleep with Thomas and his entourage of a million teddies, to the accompanying soundtrack of the Can-Can. Ollie thought it was great, and after about 15 repeated presses of the button. I got out of bed and took the toy out of his reach.

Later in the night, when I had given up and gone back to my own bed hoping to leave the boys to it. I heard Thomas singing from the other room, very mournfully, the last verse of American Pie – in tune, and with all the words.
“I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away…” etc etc

Anyway, the rest of the night is all a blur, but I woke up in my own bed with Ollie, and Thomas coming into our room at 8.30am so at least all the shinannigans got me an hour’s lie-in!

So, hear we are for another 366 days of life. My aim for this year is to not be pregnant for the whole year! I also need to get rid of some of the fat I put on, so I have more than 1 pair of trousers I can fit. Otherwise I will have to buy some more!

We had a lovely Christmas with IaIa and IaIo staying, and being looked after by Aunty Jo and Uncle Tiggs on the actual day. Jo made an amazing meal with fresh locally grown veg and ducks, which, as we are mostly a supermarket family, really showed up how tasty organically grown stuff can be. The boys were very well behaved, even on very little sleep. so a great time was had by all. (pictures to follow).

New Year was a quiet affair for us at my mum and dad’s, which just as well as the boys decided not to allow us any sleep for the new year. David and I were totally ruined by being kept up all night. Thankfully Bedstemor fed us a huge fry-up which restored us a bit, and was also a good send off to eating unhealthily for those of use who want to shape up a bit.

We tried to take Ollie off dummies cold-turkey style, but it didn’t work. So we’ve decided he’s allowed them in his cot at night-time, but not during the day. This way he can keep them as long as he wants to – until he brings girlfriends home for all I care. Happily though, even though we’ve only begun to get back to routine for 1 night, the boys already slept better, and this morning, at 7.23am, all 4 of us were in our own beds. This also means that Ollie didn’t have a breastfeed this morning, so I may finally have ended my personal pregnancy/breastfeeding marathon which started 3 years ago when I fell pregnant with Thomas (at the end of January 05).

The big news for this post is that I have a job! I haven’t actually arranged the starting day yet, but it should be this month. It’s only 3 hours per day (4.30pm til 7.30pm) weekdays, term-time only, but it’s a good way to ease back into the rat race. I will be an Audio-visual technician at the local University. This also means we have had to enter the tricky world of childcare arrangements. Ideally I would like a nanny to come in, so that I can just come home and put the kids to bed, but as I was offered the job on the 21st December, all the nanny agencies were closed until the new year! I was a bit stuck, but just happened across a childminder’s advert on Netmums which is quite a good site for parents. Anyway, she lives around the corner from me. so we met up and clicked instantly. This was all really good luck, and a good 2nd-best option to a nanny. Anyway, we can only see how it goes.

I leave you with some pictures of the boys on New Year’s Day: