Christmas Day 2007

William had a Christmas stocking to open, before he got started on his giant pile of presents...

I gave him a small hedgehog toy (apparently baby hedghogs are called hoglets - how cute!).

William's first Christmas

William is already enjoying his first Christmas on Earth (I quite liked one of the cards that William received after his birth, which said - Welcome to Earth!). Early in December we bought a Christmas tree from the Sea Scouts by the Thames River, which we decorated with little pine cones sprayed bronze and silver. William enjoys touching the tree and feeling the pine needles. Tescos was selling poinsetta plants for the bargin price of £1.90, so we bought one of them, which was very festive in the lounge room.

Yesterday we packed the car full of presents (a large proportion seem to be for one William Marshall) and drove to Wales. The traffic was fine, which was nice. We stopped off at a pub near Newport to catch up with some ex-Oxford friends who live in Cardiff now and have a son a very similar age to William. Now we are in Gilwern, in the lead up to celebrating Christmas at The Marshall's. As I type, there is drumming, tambourine shaking and singing being rehersed in the lounge room, with William sitting on Jenny's lap watching all the commotion. Will he enjoy The Unicorn concert tonight at Llangattock Church?? I shall certainly enjoy the singing, mince pies and mulled wine! It will bring back memories of last year, when mum, dad and Alice were here and we all went to the same concert the Sunday before Christmas.

A couple of pictures to add

Just to give you an idea of what William gets up to during the day....

He can help me with the cooking (yes, that is a cabbage leaf):


Watch the birds in the backyard:


And when nothing else will distract him, we just place ALL his toys in front of him at once..... it works for at least 10 minutes!

Banana flavouring

(Another Lanzarote picture, I would like to entitle: Big hat, Little baby, Big smile)

William had his third lots of vaccinations yesterday and was very brave, considering he had 3 jabs. He is growing very well, following the 75th centile, and now weighing 7.625kg or 16lbs 12ozs. The health care visitor was impressed that he is so big feeding only on breast milk. Yay. Fat and heavy. Well I think we know where that came from… apparently when Angela gave birth to Andrew, Andrew’s grandfather, Garfield, described him as a ‘whopper’. Of course I’m pleased William is growing well, but do look enviously at the mums carrying smaller (lighter) babies. Both Andrew and I have knackered backs from lifting William about.

Tonight he has driven me to my wits end with his crying. He isn’t hungry, hot or cold and has a clean nappy.… but is crying to drive me to tears myself. The health care worker said that it might be ‘gum activity’. Although there isn’t really any sign of teeth, she said they might be moving up through his gums. Gum activity, eh? So, given the last two nights have been bad for sleep, this evening we bought some Bongela and put some on his gums. He looked a little surprised initially, which I suspect may be in response to his first taste of banana flavouring! Since then (2.5 hrs ago), he has been crying for 2 hours. Soon it will be time to put more Bongela on. But I’m beginning wonder if it is helping. I thought perhaps I could see the edge of a little tooth in the middle of his lower gums, but I’m probably hallucinating to try and justify the upsetting and distracting noise. I dread to think what the rest of the night holds in store.

His hair is growing back, through the ever-present cradle cap.

I think his eyes are hazel, or perhaps dark hazel.

William is 4 months old

When he is happy, William is very, very happy. Tonight he was as excited as I’ve ever seen him, when I held a mobile above his head that he hadn’t seen for a while. As soon as he saw it, he opened his eyes open wide, stuck his arms straight out from his sides and flapped then up and down wildly while kicking his legs manically. A squawk erupted from his mouth then he grinned hugely as he looked from it to me. He reached out his arms and pulled all the dangly bits to his chest then tried to open his mouth wide enough to eat them all at once. This is William heaven.

Of course, 10 minutes later when I left his side to try unpacking a box on the other side of the room he was in tears. I think he might be just starting to understand (perhaps even subconsciously) that he can use crying to manipulate us. Until now he seemed to only cry when something was up (tired, hungry, cold, hot, uncomfortable etc). But now he has a more niggly version of crying, and he looks to see if you have noticed that he is crying. On the other hand maybe it isn’t manipulative, but just that his needs have developed – now he needs attention, more stimulation, and challenges.

Physically he is still growing well. At last weighing he was on the 75% centile of weight for his age. He gets his third lots of vaccinations this Thursday so I’ll get an updated weight then. He has gained a lot of new skills in the last month but I think that over the next couple of months the increments of change might be slower. For example, he can fully support his own head now, and sit up when you prop him against the couch, but I think it will be while before he is sitting up himself. Another example is that he can hold things in his fist, but usually only if you open the fingers and thumb and put the item in his grasp. You can see that at times he wants to reach out and grab something in particular, but his arms tend to flail about and he probably only manages to grab the item through chance. But this is something that I think he’ll slowly develop over the coming months.

Feeding – hmmmm. We keep trying to get him to take a bottle, but he still hasn’t decided that this will be in his repertoire of skills. It would be very handy if he decided that he’d like to learn to drink from a bottle, but so far, no go. Andrew tried again yesterday and although William was happy to gum the bottle nipple, he didn’t suck at all. I’ll have to start some reading about weaning soon, as while we were in Lanzarote William became very interested in what we were eating/drinking and often avidly followed every bight as we ate. So we’ve given him a few things to try putting in his mouth. He isn’t eating them, but just exploring what they feel/taste like in his mouth.

Sleeping – well, ok, I guess. Some nights he only wakes up twice, and other nights 10 times. Some nights, he decides at 4.30am that it is THE MORNING and time to play and ‘sing’. This can be trying, but at least it happens less than once a week. We want to try and get him to sleep for longer stretches, so now that we are in our new home and back from holiday we’ll try and get back to a routine of bath-feed-bed at around 6.30-8.30pm each night and see whether he can get used to that. Then perhaps we’ll try and not feed him if he wakes less than two hours after his last feed in the night, to stretch out the gap between feeds. I am kind of dreading this, as I can see that I’ll get very little sleep while we try and adapt to the change, but hopefully it will result in us all being more sane and rested in the long run.

Overall I think William is a pretty good baby. We had a lovely time on holiday as a family last week and just wish holidays would last forever! (Not that we want Andrew to lose his job, touch wood!).

Back from Lanzarote

Well, in the end the final completion and exchange on the house were delayed so much that we didn't end up going to Australia. It just wouldn't have been worth it for 7 days. So, we booked a last minute package holiday to Lanzarote and went there for a week. After Andrew booked the tickets I had to go and look on the map to see where it was - it is safe to say that I knew nothing about it before we got there. However, it was surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. Neither of us has ever been to a volcanic island before and there were lots of things to see and do. We hired a car for a few days and saw some of the sights. Also spent a couple of days relaxing on the beach where had his first swim in the sea. It was relaxing and fun.




We had spent the three days before we left moving and then cleaning the old flat, which was pretty tiring. But Andrew's dad came and helped us out and it all got done in time. So now we are back in Oxford (and freezing our socks off, man it has gotten cold in our absence) and tootling about our new house. We're unpacking boxes, shifting furniture about and doing some DIY. I have proudly installed three door stops using a new drill that we bought. We've put some boards up in the loft so that we can move all the junk up there (that has been very helpful for making it look like we are tidying the house).

Andrew starts work again this afternoon, so the 2 week holiday has almost come to the end and I'll try and return William to a routine (of sorts) and start going to all the mum and baby groups that we were attending before. Then I spose we'll blink and it will be Christmas. I wonder whether we'll have all our boxes unpacked by the end of the year....?

Moving house

We have a new house!

All the moving obviously exhausted young William, but fortunately he had the presence of mind to take time out to chill and watch the leaves changing colour in the backyard. Pretty tiring work though - enough to send anyone to sleep....