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).