Christmas 2008

A few pics on Christmas Eve

Here is some Christmas spirit! This is a recent picture (taken last weekend by a friend of ours, Aaron). We had a lovely lunch with friends (Dawn, Aaron, and little Violet, Clare and Jen) a The Fishes Pub. They gave us all Santa Hats - William loved all the comments that he received when he put his on.

Auntie Alice arrived safely in Oxford this morning, after a long journey. She and William met for the first time, and had fun playing together. Auntie Alice helped William add windows with curtains to the 'house' he has, which is made from cardboard boxes.

Here are some pics, the first one must have been taken in the Summer, as it is of William and I in the Botanic Gardens at Oxford. All three of us when for a picnic there one day. William was in a pretty good mood, playing on a rug while we listened to some live music - and was even happy for a little cuddle, which Andrew captured here.


Then, for contrast, some of William taken a rainy Autumn day, when we were scrumping apples (mentioned in an earlier blog).



And, for contrast - this is another face that we are beginning to see more of - here come the terrible twos!

I'm just sitting at the computer planning the logstics of the first ever Christmas lunch that I shall cook tomorrow. I'm gaining appreciation for the 35 Christmas meals that I've eaten to date, without having this pressure of actually cooking it all! How long do I need to cook a 5kg (=11lbs) duck for???? Does anyone know?

A more recent movie

These clips were taken in November, and the second bit was last weekend.

Uh-oh

Busy, busy, busy. Life is always very busy.

I just want to quickly put up some movies from the last couple of months. They aren't very good (going in and out of focus alot) and haven't been edited either, but they show William doing some of the ordinary things that he does each day. Firstly, taken in August I think, is a short piece showing how well William can feed himself.



Next, is a little movie of William on the swing at the local park.



He continues to do lots of new things every week. In October he said his first word "Uh-oh" and in the last week of November, he said his second "car". I'm not sure why he decided to choose "car" as his second word, as we don't take him in the car much (he rides on the bike to nursery each day) and he only has one toy car. Andrew thinks that he may have said his third word just today, which was "cat", but I haven't heard that one yet - I guess that we'll be visitng every cat we know to see whether he uses it again! He is also getting better and better at his overarm throwing, so will probably be bowling for the Australian cricket team in the next Ashes series.

We've been doing some DIY and recently put up a new coat rack in the hallway:

I got my act into gear last month and made some Plum Puddings, using the same recipe that I use every single year (because it is the best!), from my Grannie Olive. I made a couple of big ones and lots of little ones, that I plan to give away as gifts:


In November Andrew, William and I took a long weekend off work and stayed in a Landmark Trust house near Cambridge, in a little village called Clare. I have been wanting to stay in a Landmark Trust house for the last 6 years, and it was great to finally do it - the excuse being our second wedding anniversary. The house had loads of character, including a huge fireplace and lots of sloaping floors. The drop in height across the bathroom, for example, was over a foot! I like the carved plasterwork on the front of the house (see pic below) - pretty impressive. We tootled about Clare and visited some local attractions, including a minature steam railway that William loved.

Will-Power

I recently spent a happy half hour putting together a new window box for the Winter. It has silver thyme and heather in it, which smell lovely and will survive the cold weather.

These days William won't tollerate being taken somewhere he doesn't to be. He lets us know very clearly if we ever, accidently, remove him from a location or task where he is happily occupied. Actually, it isn't just us, when I collected him from nursery this evening the ladies there told me they had great difficulty today getting him away from the sandpit for a nappy change.

This week is the culmination of a month long warm up of climbing into boxes. Andrew received a cardboard box with beer packed in foam for his birthday last month and since then William has learnt how to climb in and out by himself. Every single day he spends some time in one of the few boxes that now scatter the house. There is the upstairs box, which has the foam. When in this box it is fun to drop foam pieces out onto the floor accompianied by an "Uh-oh". The downstairs box in the kitchen is shared between William and various pieces of plasticware. His teddy has a box too, that he is taken in and out of. Anything that looks like a box is worth trying to climb into. Yesterday he tried to climb into the mini eski (mini, ie. just the size for a 6 pack of beer)(for the Northern hemisphere readers, eski = coolbox in Australia).

More William-related news in brief:
- he ate brie for the first time yesterday and seemed to like it
- he is improving with his block-stacking skills; the new record is a stack 8 blocks high, completely independent of any help from us
- he is confident to crawl under things, eg. under a chair to pick up a piece of bread-stick, and is getting much better at not bumping his head
- the new skills we are practising together are kicking and throwing balls. So far William seems to think it is funny to pick up a ball and then drop it backwards over his left shoulder. We'll work on convincing him that this is not 'throwing'.

More new things!!

It never stops - William keeps learning new things! This week he has mastered clipping the buckles on our bike helmets together, putting plugs in sockets, turning our bike lights on and off and the sign language for 'eat'. The last one he picked up as nursery, as we didn't even know what it was before he started doing it and we looked it up! I guess that we'll have to check that our bike lights are turned off at the end of each day now, or we'll be using a lot of batteries.

Last weekend I took William to an indoor play centre, which has trampolines, slides, tunnels, toy cars to drive and ball pits! William just loved exploring it all and climbing over and under everything. As Andrew is working nights this weekend, we're going to go there again on Sunday so that he can get some sleep during the day. If William chose to speak, I'm sure he'd say "Yay!!".



I want to publically remind my sister, Alice, that she agreed to send me more pictures of her, so that I don't feel so far away and that I'm missing out on her life. We'll Alice - show me the pictures!! You should not be allowed to look at The Baban Draig website any more until you send me some pics of you!!!!

Autumn is here

Oxford is in full Autumn swing. The trees are ablaze, the light is golden and going for walks along the river, with the colours reflecting in the water is just the thing. During the last couple of weekends we've made sure to take a walk outdoors and see what we can see. It is also nice to end the exploration with a local real ale in a pub over which we can discuss the findings. Last Sunday we investigated Sidlings Copse, which is on the Eastern side of Oxford and has quite a variety of different habitats (woodland, heather, marsh). It is an ancient woodland and with its broad-leafed trees was good for mushrooming. Andrew collected quite a few varieties, some of which he dried and others are currently getting spore prints for identification.


A few weekends ago we went to a local gathering to pick apples and make fresh apple juice. We live just off Morrell Avenue, and as we learnt, there are some remaining trees from Morrell's Cider and Perry Orchard nearby. They are on common land, so free for anyone to harvest - and there are some good varieties, including Russet's which make delicious eating. Someone brought an apple scratter and a press. Here are some pictures of us first chopping up the apples in the scratter, which hacks apart the apples as you turn a handle, dropping the pieces into a bucket below:

Then we pressed them. After all the juice has been squished out, the top and sides of the press are removed, leaving what looks like a giant cheese made of apple pieces:

...and from here we all took a few bottles of fresh apple juice home. As it was made from a mixture of cooking and eating apples, it had a great twang too it - absolutely delicious. Even though it was drizzly all day, we still had great fun. William was a great help, throwing apples into the scratter.

Talking of whom, the purpose of this entry is to update you on all the new things he's done recently. There is almost something new every day. Some of the things he has mastered in the last month include walking backwards, saying "Uh-oh" and learning to point to parts of the face (nose, eye, ears etc).

Lip smacking good!

What do dummies and sheep have in common?

WILLIAM!

Each weekday when we pick up William from nursery, the ladies there tell us how his day has been - how long he slept, whether he ate well and what he played with. Last week when Andrew collected William, they told him that one of his favourite things to do is to pick up dummies that other children have dropped and give them back, to the right child! I am impressed. I almost don't believe that he knows which dummy goes with which child, but that is what they said. One day, apparently, he saw the father of a child, who was there to pick up his daughter, and William strongly insisted on giving him his daughter's dummy, which was on the floor.

Amazing.




A couple of weeks ago, on a trip to Wales, William met his first sheep. She (the sheep) is a Herdwick. Herdwick sheep are the most hardy of all Britain’s breeds of hill sheep and live on the highest of The UK's mountains. Their wool is very thick and hard wearing, so is often made into carpet, but William was given an organically tanned Herdwick sheepskin when he was born and it is as soft as anything. He used to lie on it when he was very little, then sit on it and now he still often goes and sits down on it to play with something. So, we went and visited Maggie and Jamie Battson, who have a herd of Herdwicks and gave William his lovely sheepskin. He was a little unsure of the sheep at first, but then had a go at patting her and watching her eat. It probabaly says something about us being very city-fied, that William met his first live sheep (and chickens and ducks) at the age of 13 months.

Each morning William likes to taste our breakfast cereal.....little monkey. Here he is checking that daddy's shreddies are ok.

New Shoes

I am so very far behind in this blog now. Life seems to be overtaking us a bit. That said, with Andrew working his new job in psychiatry, we seem to have more relaxed mornings together, while we all have breakfast and get ready to head off to work/nursery.

I think I’ll just summarise the gap of the past few months by saying five things:
1. William has progressed with his piano playing from whole hand bashing of the keyboard to now using single fingers occasionally to tap individual keys (usually repetitively).
2. We visited Gloucester Cathedral with Angela and Stephen in August and I was mightily impressed. It is now one of my favourite cathedrals in the UK. I am looking forward to hearing some music in there one day. Others looked slightly less impressed.

3. On our way home from the Peak District, (where we went camping with Matt, Rachel, Anne and Evelyn) we stopped in and visited Jodrell Bank, where the third largest radio telescope in the world is to be found. That is a big radio telescope! We saw it slowly moving about on its very large base. I was impressed.

4. William officially started walking independently on 14th Aug 2008, at the age of 13 months. He is steadily improving, and last weekend walked 5 metres unaided. To stop endless wet and muddy socks we’ve bought him his first pair of shoes. I find baby shoes very cute indeed, so really enjoyed buying them. Even the little tiny shoe box is cute itself!

5. William has also had his first haircut in the last month. It was a bit of a home made job, after a bath while his hair was wet. It is okay, I think. At least the hair is now out of his eyes. I saved the first curls to be cut off......they might be useful for makeing a voodoo doll some time in the future. Perhaps once he starts having full on rigid-back, flat-on-the floor, screaming-blue-muder tantrums, I'll find a use for said voodoo doll????

Okay, onto the new and latest stuff! We are just back from long weekend camping at the Towersey Folk Festival. William loved it. He walked about watching all the entertainment, had a great appetite, and enjoyed playing with Beatrice, the other toddler his age, who came with us (along with her parents, who we met through antenatal classes). We took him to a ceilidh (he even joined in for a dance being held in our arms), watched medieval puppet shows and Morris dancing, and listened to lots of great music. He even slept through one of the evening gigs, tucked up in his pram, which was great and allowed us to get out and made us feel very free.

God parents

“earthparents”
“non-godparents”
“honorary parents”
“spirit-sponsors”
“the B-Team”

There are many different names out there for what most people know as “god-parents”. We’ve chosen some of our very good friends to take a vested interest in William’s upbringing and personal development. William enjoyed celebrating his first birthday with an outdoor meal with some of our friends and his new godparents. Here are some pictures. William is proud to have Simon, Clare and Jen as his godparents. Aaron made him a chocolate chip carrot cake, that was truely the best carrot cake I've ever had! In what we hope is a sign of future generosity, William had a couple of mouthfulls of cake himself and then fed the rest, small handful by small handful, to Andrew.

Paris

William pointing the way to his distracted parents. "Mummy, Daddy, look at that!"

We had fun week in Paris with William, on holiday with my mum and dad this month. We stayed in an apartment, in which you can see William demonstrating one of the many exciting things you can do with a see-through plastic chair....

We didn't see that many tourist attarctions, but managed to go to Sainte Chappelle, Sacre Coeur, Isle St Louis and the Medical History Museum - where William loved walking around the main room, and only afterwards did we realise how dirty the floor was!

This picture is of William and Andrew at Sacre Coeur (while I checked out the fabulous fabric shops nearby.... they are wonderful! I bought myself some treats, including a few pieces of Liberty fabric. The shops in Paris had a better range of Liberty fabric than the Liberty shop in London!

We went to the Jardin de Luxembourg and to other parks almost every day, and just relaxed in the warm, sunny weather. Our local park was right near a school and so full of young kids every afternoon. William enjoyed feeding stale baguette to the pigeons and watching the other kids have water fights. Hanging upside down in a park is obviously a lot of fun. Check out his top teeth; he now has seven in total. He also practised his walking and can now take 3-5 steps before falling forward. Perhaps by his first birthday he'll be walking....?

Caving baby

William decended into the top of the Eglys Faen cave near Gilwern on the weekend. He seemed to like it (or at least that is the way his father interpreted his babble!

Wood

This year the group of people who organise Truck musical festival started a new one called Wood. It is quite near Oxford and baby friendly (one of my other Oxford mum's knows the couple organising it and they have one year old). We went last weekend. As its whole ethos was very eco-friendly we took the bus there. It was a very releaxed, small acoustic music festival. We heard a local Oxford band play called Stornoway who I liked. They played one song called The Good Fish Guide, in which the lyrics are a list of all the fish that we shouldn't be eating because of overfishing and depleted stocks, followed by the second verse listing all the ones we should be eating. One tent was showing short films and was only powered by bicycle - Andrew was peddling to keep the power going so that William and I could watch the film! William enjoyed the African drumming workshop and we enjoyed some local cider.


A guy had a giant gong that he gave 'holistic gong showers' with, where you sat with your back to the gong while he played it for 5 minutes, sending the vibrations through your body. William wore his cool festival clothes and I wore my pixie ears.

I hope we'll be back next year, and stay for longer. With just this in mind we bought a family-sized tent this weekend. William loved helping us put it up in the backyard (for practice) so hopefully this is a good sign that he'll like camping. Bring on the Summer and more festivals! I guess that we'll need to buy some of these 'ear defenders' for William. They are *the* festival accessory for the under fives!

May 2008

I just tried making my first little movie (of William, of course) using iMovie.

Here it is so that you guys can have a little look. It has involved a lot of reading of forums on the internet to try and work out what (free) software I needed so that I could convert the movie files I have into a format that I could import into iMovie. But I think I finally might have it sorted so that I can import movies from my digital camera and play with them. Now I need to sort out how to do it from the digital video camera.... next time I have a spare few hours....

Here is a little 3 minute summary of what William has been up to in the warm weather over the last couple of weeks.

William enjoys Spring

Last weekend we went for a walk in Wytham Woods, just on the outskirts of Oxford, and enjoyed the carpets of bluebells. William must have been hungry, and thought that blue food was going to quench his appetite.


Pulling yourself to standing up and sitting up from lying down isn't that easy when you are on a lumpy bed, but William is getting better every day. Caution, some "top half" nudity of Andrew in this clip!


Here is William playing with a balloon on the bed. His eyes were bit puffy on this morning and we ended up going to the GP later that day, poor little thing.

A few little videos

Again, taken with my photo camera, not a proper video camera, but they capture a couple of little William moments. Firstly, with a super hairstyle, happily playing in the bath.


Secondly, showing off his new trick of waving, while Angela holds him in windy Southern France.


Finally, William holding on the edge of the table while we were having lunch at a cafe on the beach. I was lucky to capture another one of his new tricks - the raspberry!


More pics from our holiday will come when I have a moment to process them.

William's new trick

These movies were taken on my digital camera when William was 37 weeks old (ie. last week). Mobility is such a strong motivation to gain new skills. William can now pull him self up from sitting to standing, when we put him in his cot. The bars are easy for him to hold on to, but I'm sure that before long he'll be able to do the same thing using the edge of a table....


Ah, yes, I'll try to remember to hold the camera the right way around from now on also...


Here is a little snap shot of him sitting on the couch, annoyed at my hat on his head. :) Oh, and another new trick that he learnt last week was waving. It is quite cute as he isn't completely sure when to wave, so when he wakes up in the morning, he often waves at the window, or his toys.

Snow in Oxford

This is what we woke up to this morning! A few inches of snow. How exciting! Who would have thought we'd get the first proper snow of Winter in April?!?! We had just planted some seedlings out in the back garden the day before - oops. William was fairly nonplussed by it all. Perhaps if it snows next year he'll realise the potential for sledging.




We took him to South Parks to check out the action where we found some people who were rolling a snowball from the top of the park. We helped them when it got too large for them to push by themselves. Then it became too large for four adults to push, so we recruited more volunteers, and kept pushing it down the hill until 6 adults could no longer budge it. It was a sphere of 6 foot diameter - the biggest in the whole park! Check it out:

Lots of firsts

William was pretty pleased with his first trip around the supermarket sitting in the seat on the trolley last week. He kept looking around, at the items on the shelf, down to the wheels and the ground as he explored the shop from a whole new perspective.


On the way cycling home from nursery last week (by the way, this is his outfit for the cycle home below.....) we stopped at the playground at the top of South Parks and explored the roundabout and swings for the first time. As the evening get longer and lighter, I imagine we'll be stopping on a regular basis. He also loves wearing his new stripy trousers, sent over from Melbourne by Aunty Alice.