August

More photos to share with you! Firstly the smallest – Sophie is 4 months old and getting stronger. She can happily sit up in a supported bumbo seat.



Sophie has progressed to sleeping in the big cot now – it makes her look much smaller all of a sudden. She is really happy in it, and it saves our backs from bending down quite as far. Of course, it does also take up a much larger chunk of our bedroom.



She is also enjoying spending more time on her front these days, and reaching for things. She can fairly reliably grab things with two hands and get them in her mouth now.



Now the oldest, and best at telling us what Sophie wants and what Sophie is thinking about (such an interpreter). William surprised me the other day by knowing exactly how to hold a guitar and play it – here is some footage. I guess that he has seen Andrew do it and that was enough.



William and I made play doh together last weekend. We both had lots of fun making it and it turned out well. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t get a photo of the great dragon that Andrew and William made with it but here are some shots of William making it and playing with it (“Still hot from saucepan Mummy”).



Although it looks like William will probably be on the short side in height, he obviously won’t take no for an answer, as he tells us daily that “I’m growing up (to) clouds”.

My friend Clare taught William a cheeky face a few months ago (thumbs in ears, hands wiggling, tongue sticking out and wiggling) which he thinks is hilarious and uses on lots of people. A few weeks ago he showed us a new face (?learnt from another kid at nursery) which I cal the 'scary face' - not that it deters him from using it on me all the time!


Finally, a picture of William and I eating ice creams in Brecon. Think that this is the first time we’ve ever given him a whole cone of his own to hold and eat – it disappeared within 60 seconds.

Milestones

A number of milestones have been reached recently:

Sophie can now roll over by herself, from her front to her back.
Jo can bath two children all by herself (a milestone which Sophie felt should be recognized by doing a squirting poo up her back, all the way to her neck! Great!).
William has done some very good jumping, both off the sofa into a pile of cushions, and into the pool (he goes underwater, then bobs up again and can swim to Andrew).

Sophie is also happy to laugh and chuckle when something amuses her.... such as a flying tree frog called William.

Sunday evening

I’m just coming to the end of a whole weekend looking after two kids myself, with Andrew working 14hr shifts Fri, Sat and Sun. It has been tough, but I think I’m slowly getting better at it. This morning I said to Andrew that I could never ever do this as full time house wife, i.e. every day. But, tonight (Sun night) I am less exhausted than I was on Sat night (when I fell asleep before Andrew came home). I wonder if I’m getting some stamina? Of course, I still don’t know how housewives do it, as I seem to have achieved very little this weekend other than look after the kids. I’ll need the time with William in nursery this week just to get the shopping, cooking, washing cleaning done (and I have a cleaner!). Poor Andrew is working more long shifts on Mon, Wed and Thurs this week, so he’ll be pretty knackered by the end of the week. I lift off my hair (a hat just doesn’t seem enough) in salute to all families and how they cope with the normal hubbub of life. How they manage when both parents work I guess we’ll start to find out in November….. I guess regular nutritious, healthy, home-cooked and tasty meals might fall by the wayside. Standards of household cleanliness will slide. We’ll all wear our clothes until they fall apart. No-one will be wearing ironed clothes (no real change there though!). Exercise will be difficult to fit in.

Or maybe I should try and be a bit more optimistic. We might be able to work out a way to get some free time. The kids will get easier - well, William should from here on, Sophie probably still has some high maintenance times ahead before she gets easier. While we're all exhausted, William, Sophie and I have done lots of fun stuff this weekend, including a tractor ride, picking raspberries and making Summer pudding, making foot prints of the kids, going to three different parks and eating with friends.

I might go and pour myself a glass of rose.

Oh darn, Sophie has just woken up, there goes my wine.

Would this man make a good paediatrician?

He seems to be like the pied piper – able to mesmerise large groups of children. This is an invaluable skill, which allows all the other parents to sit back and have a beer while Andrew looks after the kids. You can see that we recently had a holiday in the North Yorkshire Moors with two other family friends and all their kids.


We did a morning walk from the cottage we were all staying in, around a field of wheat, during which I suffered terrible hay fever. There must have been lots of grass pollen, although not the right kind of grass to get the seed head to pop off properly to the rhyme: Miss Polly had a dolly and it's head popped off! As William says - it didn't work :)



We also spent some time in the Lake District. Here is William splashing in Keswick.


William at the Cowley Rd festival in early July. I reckon he looks older than he is in this shot, as he casually strolls down the street....

We’ve recently also had a lovely family holiday camping with friends in the New Forest. A bit of home-made bunting (made by Liz) gave the gazebo a very fancy look. It was Sophie’s first camping trip. It was busy. We enjoyed walks in the forest (finding beetles, frogs and a deer skull), kite flying at the campsite, a boat ride on the river at Buckler’s Hard (William wondered if perhaps we might fall off) and some very good pub meals. There were a number of baths in a bucket (including one at the end of a day in a car park, in the naïve hope that William would drop off to sleep on the drive home). At an animal sanctuary for British animals, we saw owls, a lynx, otters being fed, and patted a fox cub. William was very cute running around the campsite in his pants and t-shirt. William was very excited to be sleeping in a tent and as it is so light in a tent had a few nights staying up until 10pm! One meal was eaten to a chorus of screaming kids. Ah, the joys of camping! Now, we are back at home, doing a million loads of washing and recovering from it all.

June blog (just a little late)

William defies violate the laws of thermodynamics, proving to be a perpetual motion machine.

William seems to spend some days talking (and moving) continuously. If scientists (should I change fields???) could harness this, the world’s energy issues would be solved. His energy levels at 5am can be quite impressive, but it is amazing (and exhausting) when he is still going strong 6-9hrs later. He often leaves a trail of semi-comatose adults strewn in his wake on the weekends.

We love listening to his constant commentary, and listening to his use of language expand and evolve. For instance, last week he was talking about a hat which he saw shrink on a television show, but not knowing the word ‘shrink’, he said that the hat was melting. Some of the more recent phrases of his that we’ve liked are:
I don’t need that, actually
Lets play with x all day and all night long.
Around the corner without a doubt.
I would eat it in one big gulp.
That is loady (meaning, there is a lot in that).

I quite like the term ‘loady’ and want to incorporate it into our family language, but get in trouble from Andrew when I do so, for being ‘bad example’. :)
Here is William eating some apple peel - he loves using the apple 'peeler-slicer-corer'.


Sophie sometimes also appears to be a perpetual motion machine, with all four of her limbs waving around energetically like little windmills (entertaining to watch when it isn’t 3am). She is also beginning to try and control her arms, for example to grab a toy or to try and put something in her mouth.

Life at the 96th centile

At 12 weeks old S weighed 7.3kg.
At 16 weeks old she weighs 7.9kg (17lbs 6oz). This is the weight of an average 9 month old baby girl. He he he. My breast milk must be the Jersey Island full fat variety.

She has creases in her folds of fat in mid-forearm, above and below her knees, two on her thighs (which are reminiscent of those of an Eastern block weight lifter) and most of her neck never sees the light of day. She has dimples for knuckles, a crease on her elbow and her toes are like little sausages attached to the ends of her feet. What a lot of baby to cuddle! We think she is adorable. I didn't know what 'knee sausage' was until Sophie came along, and you see one sitting across her knee when you straighten her leg.

Here she is in the bath, getting water poured on her by a very helpful William.

Domesticity

It has been a lovely time for making things at home recently. One of the benefits of Andrew working shift work is having him at home some weekdays, like Wednesday this week, and Friday, before he starts night shift. Last weekend we’ve all helped pick elderflowers, which Andrew made into elderflower cordial. He then used the sliced lemon and lime from this recipe to make marmalade.

I made a pair of simple pj trousers for William out of an old purple shirt of Andrews (with some material from my stash for trim) and have been testing egg-free cake recipes (in preparation for William’s birthday next month.

I also made strawberry jam recently, with strawberries picked while mum was here.

And thanks to Alice for getting hold of the best Anzac cookie recipe in the Filby family, I also made a batch of Anzacs, which didn’t last long.

Our window box and wall basket out the front of the house are re-stocked with flowers, which we enjoy as we go to and fro from home. Ah, I am happy.
Next project is a little quilt cushion cover, as a practice run before I start on my first ever quilt, for Sophie. Here is a sneak preview....