William's 2nd birthday present from Aunty Alice and Uncle Ian

Perhaps William is speaking French: 'deux' is two in French.....

William playing the piano this evening

Does he look like an uber nerd, or what??

Two, two, two!

William is two! We celebrated his birthday on Friday with Clare (they are birthday buddies with their birthdays on the same day!), on Saturday with Nana and Grandad (and a lovely walk with the butterflies in the meadow) and on Sunday with a few friends who live in our street - Daniel (22 months), Oscar (28 months), Zoe (about 3 years old) and Rodrigo (8 months). By the end of the weekend he was quite adept at blowing out candles and opening presents. I'll try and link some videos taken on my little camera.





Altogether it was a busy weekend. In addition to all the birthday celebrations, William went to a swimming lesson with Daddy. William loves swimming in the pool, and with the help of his new bathing suit that has floaties inserted into it, can swim/bob/paddle 8ft across the pool!
We also accidentally re-challenged William's possible egg allergy with this positive result as shown below - collagen lips! We had a few moments on edge as he got hives, swollen lips and itchy skin, but luckily it went down with some oral anti-histamine solution. I think we'll need to see the GP this week, and avoid all egg from now on.

This one is from this evening - hot off the press! William the underwater explorer......leaning out the window.

July 2009

A great host of new words are being learnt these days. Let me give you a little example of new words said by William for the first time one week recently:
Monday - bike, door, melon, bird
Tuesday - wall
Wednesday - lock
Thursday - pea, button, wing
Friday - knee
Saturday - apple, high, boat
Sunday, is of course, a day of rest and so William didn't say any new words this day

We spent a weekend in Gilwern recently, and while Daddy did a course on Advanced Peadiatric Life Support all weekend, we played with Nana and Grandad, walking along the canal, climbing on the couch etc.


Grandad found loads of toys in the loft that had been saved from previous generations and after a good dusting, William is loving playing with them. Check out these funky retro toy cars!

This is a nice picture that I took recently (at Keble College) and reminds me what a lovely Summer we're having this year. Although, I heard that people are already predicting that an extra cold Winter is coming up.

23 months old and talking

William is such fun to play with and do things with these days. We’ve really been enjoying doing things as a family, like going to aquariums, swimming in the pool, even a weekly visit to the park to play on the slide and swings. I loved the chances we had in Australia to go to the beach a few times.


When we left for Australia, William was mostly saying made up words of his own – “too-tar” and "up-ar-la". I guess that at this stage, I was a little concerned that William wasn’t saying many words. Andrew said that the normal range of the number of words that a two year old can say is 5-2000. Well, at least William will be in the normal range, I thought, with the approx 10 words he can say (uh-oh, oh dear, raaa (the noise a lion makes), up, no, more, mama, dada, choo-choo (for train)). Since then though, he is getting much more interested in having a go at repeating words we say to him, and also succeeding in learning many new words. In Melbourne he learnt to say 'dog'. While I was in San Francisco, he learnt light, bubble, bye-bye and hello. New words I’ve noticed since I’ve been back include wheel, please, baa (the noise a sheep makes), wire, teddy and ball. He has even been trying to say colours after us - black, yellow, blue. Very well done William!

Tassie

Tasmania is sometimes called the Apple Isle, and as we were there in apple season, we got to sample some of the produce. We also went to a Devil Park to see the Tasmanian Devils - whose wild population is being ravaged by a transmissible infectious cancer. The devils in captivity haven't caught it yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease



After a couple of busy weeks in and around Melbourne, we all really enjoyed 5 days in Tasmania, staying with friends Mel and Stu, who live halfway up the side of Mt Wellington, which overlooks Hobart (capital city of Tasmania). Even in Summer, there can be snow on the mountain peaks in Tassie, and so it was no surprise that there was some while we were there at the end of Autumn.

Mel in the lush green forest - it does rain a fair bit in Tassie.

This is the view off the sideof Mt Wellington, taken on one of the few different walks we did on the local trails from Mel and Stu's house.


More than half of Tasmania's land area is National Parks. We had a lovely walk one afternoon around Waterfall bay.

Looking down over the edge - something I wasn't brave enough to do.

And another lovely walk in Mt Field National park were we saw the multi level Russell Falls.....

The trees in Tassie can be quite large too! William at 22 months of age provides the scale.

Visiting friends

In addition to some relaxing, and lots of family events, we caught up with some friends in and around Melbourne. In fact, we drove to Somers, Geelong and Elphinstone. Here is William meeting Mell and Danny’s twin boys, Jake and Tyson, for the first time. William thought that their baby toys were quite fun to play with and wanted to keep passing them toys which were out of their reach (which was very sweet to watch).

A number of friends had trampolines Australian houses all have much more space for such things than most in the UK). Here he is on Justine and Mark’s at Elphinstone. Mostly he liked running around the trampoline in a circle, or lying flat and being bounced into the air by Andrew.