We’ve had a busy few months and with three young daughters, moving house, working full time and just getting on with everyday life, and there’s been less and less time for twitter, facebook and blogging!
To try and bring things up to date, Eve has turned one, we have moved back into the house we own (after renting a bigger one for the last 12 months) and we’re busy planning out the way we want things to work out over the next couple of years – where we want to live, our career ambitions, what kind of family life we want for us all.
Eve celebrated her first birthday in February, a couple of weeks before we moved. She is now 14 months and getting good at walking already. She still reminds us so much of her biggest sister in temprament – a feisty little thing who knows what she wants and when she wants it! This is assisted by having possibly the most effective pair of lungs on a baby ever – hers is a scream not to be messed with!
Although we may be biased I can’t help but think she’s extremely bright – she seems to understand things which should be way out of her comprehension, and she only needs to be shown things once (if at all) before she ‘gets’ how to do things or play with toys. She makes us laugh so much with her highly expressive and ‘knowing’ facial expressions. She looks at her bigger sisters and she wants to be one of the gang – she copies the way they read books by turning the pages and babbling away. She longs to get properly involved in all the mischief they cause and one of the loveliest things ever is watching her giggling until she loses her balance and rolls over because her sisters do something she finds amusing – like throwing a balloon, doing a silly face or noise or playing peepoo over and over again to make her laugh. Oh, and she LOVES them blowing bubbles for her to pop.
We’re at the stage with her where she wants to walk and play outside, but because her walking isn’t quite perfect she often tries to crawl around the garden – not ideal on the concrete or the muddy lawn! And if you stop her, or bring her inside before she’s ready, she’ll scream the neighbourhood down! Inside isn’t much easier because she’s always pressing buttons on the dishwasher or washing machine (she’s even worked out how to open the door, which I don’t think either of her sisters have ever done!), opening the oven, trapping her fingers in drawers or under doors, crawling under tables and chairs and getting stuck, opening the meter cupboard, hitting the television, messing with the sky box, changing channels, recording strange programmes on the planner and… well, the list is never ending!! Anyone with a baby this age knows that “she’s into everything” phase!
We had a little concern about a lump on her forehead, and she’s been to see a specialist who said it could be a cyst (harmless, but we could choose to have it removed before it grows) or possibly just a collection of blood vessels (which would disappear on their own over time). She was booked in for an MRI scan, which would have needed general anaesthetic, because of her age. Thankfully as we wait for this appointment to come round, her lump seems to be reducing in size, so we’re planning to take her back to the specialist and request to postpone the scan for a while, to see what happens.
Isla is still the mischievious terrible two we know and love! She’s three in a couple of months, which seems quite unbelievable, especially the thought that the September after this one she’ll be starting school. She’s such a hilarious little person, so much fun to be around, with such an enormous capacity for irrational behaviour! At the moment she makes us all laugh by taking great offence whenever somebody uses any kind of description to describe her – so if Lilly says: “Isla, you’re the best!” Isla will yell: “I’m NOT the best! I’m ISLA!!” And where Lilly could always be persuaded to do things (and still can be!) with the promise of “getting a sticker”, Isla doesn’t really consider stickers to be a good enough reason to entertain the idea of doing what she’s told, if it isn’t really what she wants to do…
She’s still able to throw those hilarious two-year-old tantrums and she tells the funniest tall stories which regularly have Lilly in stiches. She loves making people laugh. Her admiration for her biggest sister mean that she spends a lot of her time pretending she’s doing “guided reading” like Lilly gets from school, and she refuses to play the ‘toddler’ apps on the phone that Lilly used to like at her age – she wants to play the ones Lilly plays now, which are about learning phonics, doing spellings and basic maths… even though she gets very frustrated when they are inevitably too difficult for her! And she has become very caring and protective of her baby sister, she always talks to “Evie weevie” in baby language and still dishes out the slightly over enthusiastic hugs and squeezes (not always appreciated!).
But, even though she turns three in only a couple of months, she’s not in the slightest bit interested in potty training! She will occasionally deign to sit on her potty, or even the toilet, for a protracted period of time, in the hope of getting a ‘treat’ for a successful visit. But then she’ll inevitably get bored, get off, and two minutes later she’ll either be filling her nappy or doing a wee on the floor…. not quite sure how we’re going to tackle this one, but we’re going to have to do it soon!
Lilly is doing really well at school, she loves it, and luckily is now very enthusiastic about reading and writing. She absolutely loves drawing, and she’s pretty good at it too – we’re constantly impressed with what she creates (to say that, at the age of five, she can already draw better than me is absolutely true!) At home she wants to draw all the time – literally from the minute she wakes until bedtime. And now writing is a regular part of this, it started with cards and now she is making little books and writing people letters. She loves anything creative - cutting and sticking, making things, baking, all that kind of stuff. And her imagination is ever-growing, she’s always playing adventure games with her cuddly toys, My Little Ponies and other toys, and usually Isla is more than happy to join in. Lilly is very into her dressing up at the moment and will usually emerge from her bedroom having adapted her outfit today with a tail fashioned out of some other clothes, and some kind of crazy combination of princess / fairy accessories! Then she’ll announce: “I’m a Princess Cat today”.
And as for Tony and I, we’re busy with work and home, and in our spare time dreaming up plans about possibly buying a caravan… something we’re both really excited about and that, if we go ahead with it, I’ll be hoping to blog about on here… There’s just the small matter of working out the finances – and working it around moving house too at some point in the next few years…
Good job we like ‘keeping busy’, eh!
