Eve at six months old

The time has flown like you would not believe and now we find that our littlest baby is suddenly sitting in a highchair and eating dinners!

Eve is 25 weeks now and we have been weaning since 21 weeks. She was an enthusiastic eater from the off and now has decided she likes solids so much that milk is just soooo last month!

Her favourite foods so far have been parsnip, carrot and sweet potato. But it has been a resounding NO to courgette, no matter where I try to hide it!

Because she has enjoyed weaning so much we found ourselves moving from one meal a day to three more quickly than we planned, because she is drinking less and less milk at the moment. Where I used to always make her up 6oz bottles I now only make up 5oz, and it is very rare she’ll finish one of those (the main exception being at 4am when she is in the habit of waking…)

Her early issues with wind, which made her seem quite a tense baby, have pretty much gone. Now she seems much more laid back, full of smiles and only cries and fusses when she’s tired or hungry. She is still more than capable of screaming the street down when she’s not happy though – her piercing scream can still vibrate your eardrums if she fancies it!

Looks wise, she remains strikingly similar to Lilly at the same age, although daddy says she has his big ears! We still can’t tell for sure if she has blonde hair, or whether there is a hint of strawberry lurking in there…

She hasn’t yet rolled over completely, but she isn’t far off. She can’t yet sit up on her own, but she will sit happily propped up by cushions.

She absolutely loves playing with all her teething toys and she has a rattly pink poodle toy that she is quite fond of. At night we still use her Ewan the Dream Sheep to help her off to sleep, she likes the music setting and isn’t keen on the white noise, but it seems to be losing its magic a little now. (Hearing it certainly makes me feel tired though!)

At the moment, we think she is teething. There is no sign of any little white buds peeping through just yet, but there is a lot of dribbling and sucking of gums.

Sleeping wise, she has got a lot better recently in terms of going down for naps. She still needs her dummy to get to sleep, but one night last week she actually went to sleep sucking her thumb – which I’d prefer as then I wouldn’t have to keep getting up in the night to put her dummy back in!

In the last few weeks, Eve has started at nursery. She and Isla are doing two days a week, and Tony’s mum looks after them the rest of the week as both he and I are working full time again now.

I wasn’t really worried about Eve starting nursery, apart from feeling bad about her being the littlest one in there (just as Lilly and Isla were when they started). But I knew that really she is too little to be too upset, and will just take everything in her stride. I didn’t bank on the fact that, on her second settling in session (when I left her for an hour) I would return to find her screaming the place down! Apparently, she had been fine, but then Isla came in to visit her because Isla was a bit upset in the toddler room next door, and it seemed to set Eve off. She was heartbroken! But still had a smile for anyone who smiled at her, in between huge sobs…

Eve already seems to have grown up so much, but we know exactly how much more growing she will do over the next few months and years, having seen it twice before. We just can’t wait!

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Isla at 10 months old

Isla is now 10 months old – it seems impossible that my littlest baby is coming up to her first birthday so fast!

She is now much more mobile, she’s crawling and practicing doing a “bridge” with her feet and hands on the floor and her bottom sticking up in the air! She isn’t fully able to pull herself up on the furniture, although she is starting to try, and I am trying to encourage her to put more weight on her feet at the moment in preparation for walking. We have just got out the trusty old VTech walker for her, which she loves pressing buttons on (when she gets a chance because it is also Lilly’s new favourite toy too!)

Her personality is lovely. She remains largely chilled out but, since becoming more mobile she has become a little bit more demanding, and can be grizzly if she is hungry, tired or frustrated! Her face when Lilly has a tantrum is a picture – at first there will be a flicker of concern, then usually just amusement, or bemusement! In the last couple of months she has become much more of a smiler and laugher – her first few months she was very serious, as though she was taking everything in before deciding how to react. Now she will smile and wave at strangers in shops and she giggles more. I also love the fact that now, when she hears music of any kind, she will start jigging away!

Isla’s favourite things are baths – she loves splashing her hands and especially when Lilly joins in – she doesn’t even seem to mind being splashed in the face in the process! She also loves the sensation of being dropped downwards – even walking down the stairs with her in your arms makes her smile. She really loves her big sister. When Lilly comes into our bedroom in the morning and Isla is awake already, Isla will get really excited and start bouncing about on the bed when she sees her, which usually gets Lilly excited too – so generally a lovely start to the day. And Isla has started giving out lots of sloppy, open mouth kisses to people – usually me, daddy, Lilly or Nanna. She is a much cuddlier baby than Lilly was at this age (Lilly was always fiercly independent and didn’t “do” cuddles until she was probably about 18 months! - although she makes up for it now) and will still sit happily on your lap for quite a while. She loves to be carried around the house with one speculative arm out ready to grab anything that it comes across!

Food wise we are making progress. (I must confess that my work in the kitchen making homemade baby meals went through a bit of a slow patch recently – finding the time while working and also trying to make all mine and Tony’s meals from scratch for our weightwatchers diet left me with little time to batch cook. But we’re back on track now with a freezer full of food…) Anyway, after a slow start with lumps Isla is now eating sandwiches and toast, and managing slightly lumpier food. She is  down to just two milks a day – one at bedtime, one on waking. Yesterday, she ate one of Lilly’s chicken and apple balls which was great. I always have a mind on the fact that we’ll be going away to France in 3 months and I want her to be able to eat as “normally” as possible by then. And so far, she hasn’t been fussy in terms of flavour, she’s enjoyed all the jars and homemade things we have made for her. She even reattempted a strawberry the other day!   

Touch wood the last few weeks have been relatively illness free (she finally shook of her bad chest and cough with the help of antibiotics) and teething seems to have slowed for now – she still just has the six teeth and the dribbling is nowhere near as bad as it was a few months ago. Isla seems to be finally settling in nursery – we had a few weeks during which she wasn’t sleeping in nursery at all and was coming home in a dreadful state – red faced, overtired, really grumpy. One day I stayed in nursery and tried to settle her down for her post-breakfast nap but couldn’t – in the end she became completely hysterical everytime I tried to leave – in the end I just had to leave with her crying, it was awful. And then she started crying when I dropped her off. But for the last couple of weeks we have been taking her sleeping bag into nursery with her and they have tried her sleeping on a beanbag instead of in their cot and we seem to have had a breakthrough – she will now have 30 mins after breakfast (compared to an hour at home) and an hour after lunch (compared to 1-2 hours at home), and she comes home a much happier baby. I try to leave while she’s eating her weetabix in the morning, so that she doesn’t cry seeing me go and when Tony picks her up in the afternoons he says she is generally happy and playing when he gets there, which is a weight off both our minds.

At the moment she is going through a bit of a clingy stage though. It’s just little things like her reaction when I come home from work. She is really excited to see me, but then if I walk into the kitchen to take off my coat and shoes and I go out of site, she’ll cry. I have to come in and give her a cuddle first! And the other day I came back from the supermarket and was making a few trips to the car bringing in the bags. Everytime I appeared at the door she would be exicted and laugh, but then everytime I went back to the car she would cry!!

Isla has also started to take notice of animals, and she loves them! First it was Nanna and Grandad’s cat, Alex. Whenever he walks into the room she’s clench her fists, stretch out her hands and say “Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!” as if she can’t contain her excitement! On our trips to the local pet shop and garden centre, rabbits and guinea pigs have got the same reception, and she remains totally fascinated and hypnotised by fish. Lilly was the same with Alex at that age but she never wanted to actually touch him, she was always a bit too wary about how he would feel, I think! But Isla is much braver, she just goes for it and tries to grab him! She was even brave enough to try and touch Grannie’s tortoise the other day, something Lilly still needs a lot of encouragement to do!

Isla’s favourite game is opening and shutting doors – now that she is mobile she loves to sit in the doorway playing with the door – obviously not a very good idea as she is always getting stuck behind it, and in constant danger of trapping her fingers so mean mummy is always taking her away from the door and saying “We need to buy a doorstop”, but hey. Isla also likes opening and shutting the oven door on Lilly’s play kitchen, and her favourite toys are probably plastic bottles or empty (or full) packs of baby wipes! She also enjoys eating books when she can. Her biggest ambition in life is to chew my iphone. She also has a new toy where you press buttons and things pop up and has just started to work out how the cause and effect element of that works, which is fascinating to watch.

Language wise she now says a lot of “mamamamamama”, especially in the mornings when she wakes up and wants attention! I would like to count it as a first word, but then again I wouldn’t let Tony count “dadadada” as her first word a few weeks ago because we couldn’t be sure it was in context and not just a sound, so I think I have to wait for more definite verification!

And her sleeping remains good, she is usually exhausted by just after 6pm and will go down without fuss and sleep until about 5.50am (yes, it usually is that precise!) Lilly and Isla are still in seperate rooms – ie Isla is still in with us – but hopefully we can think about moving them back in together in a little while as they are both – touch wood – sleeping well these days.

Oh, and Isla has had her first pair of shoes. However, all she wants to do is eat them, and if they stay on her feet more than five seconds I am lucky! I’ve pretty much given up on them now, to be honest… seem to spend most of the time carrying them around in the changing bag!

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Isla at six months

My darling baby Isla, you are now officially six months old. And in the last week you have become more animated than ever, you seem to have suddenly gone from a babe in arms to an inquisitive little person!

You are still a very placid & laid back baby, you only ever cry for food or when you’re tired. (Or when we’re trying to put a coat on you, you HATE that.) You definitely have a serious side to your personality, and you often fix people with a bemused stare, as if you are trying to work out who they are, and what on earth they are trying to say. But when you smile, you have such a cheeky look it’s almost as if you are trying to hide your amusement! You are quite ticklish and you love it when people sing and shake their heads from side to side. You also love the sensation of dropping down quickly, either being jiggled on somebody’s lap, or as a game when somebody is standing up holding you. Don’t worry, we are very gentle with you! In the last day you have started to find your big sister quite funny too, and have started laughing at her when she smiles at you, which she loves. 

You still have your long hair, which seems to have mellowed a little from jet black to brown. Some has fallen out, but most of it has stayed, and we always get comments about it (usually from old people) when we’re out and about! When you have just had a bath your hair goes all crazy and sticks up, because you’re always so tired after a bath that you usually fall asleep before your hair is completely dry. You don’t watch TV, as such, although you do see TV programmes when Lilly is watching CBeebies. You are transfixed by Waybullooo, probably because of the colourful characters with the huge piercing eyes.

You have become really great at rolling, and you can flip over really quickly from your front to your back. You can roll back now too, although you haven’t mastered that quite as well yet. You are sitting up unaided, although only for a few seconds at the moment before you start leaning to the left or right. You have discovered your toes and you love to grab them, and, if possible, chew on them!

We have started you on solid food, and, although we had a bit of a shaky start when you had a few bugs and went off the idea a bit, you are now  eating well and eating more each time. You really love porridge and sweet potato, you’ve also tried broccoli and cauliflower, apple, carrot and parsnip.

You seemed to enjoy yor first Christmas, although you didn’t really have a clue what was going on. You liked chewing the wrapping paper and your favourite presents were probably books, chunky keys, and other things you could chew.

We have just got you down Lilly’s old “Standy Uppy Thing” (we’re never sure what it’s called, according to Google it’s an activity station), which you took to straight away. We’ve just packed away your playmat because all you want to do on the floor is roll and the bars were causing an obstruction!

You go to bed between 6-7pm each night and usually sleep through until 5-6am. You are starting to share a room with your sister though, and you sometimes wake each other up. Also, you snore quite loudly!

You are always babbling away and the main sounds you make at the moment are “gagagagaga” and “dadadadadadada”, which of course, your daddy loves!

You are quite cuddly and will often fall asleep on people’s laps. You’ll sit happily for ages just relaxing with somebody holding you, and there are no shortage of volunteers wanting a cuddle with you.

Soon I will have to go back to work and you will start at nursery two days a week. I don’t know yet how you will take to it. It will be strange leaving you and I will miss you lots. But I am so excited about the coming months, seeing you blossom and develop, learning new skills and becoming even more of your own little person.

You have been a wonderful addition to this family and we all love you so very, very much.

Mummy xxx

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Weaning in Progress

Well, after a positive first taste of solid food, so far, weaning Isla hasn’t been the straightforward process it was with her sister.

She certainly has a healthy appetitie, just like Lilly did, she is on (maximum) three hourly milk feeds and has been since not long after she was born. I assumed that when we introduced solids she would be very enthuiastic!

But after a few days of eating a few spoonfulls of banana, carrot, parsnip or baby porridge once a day, there were a few setbacks. First of all, we all had a gastroentiritis type bug, which passed from Lilly to Isla to Me to Tony. But Isla had it twice – just less than a week apart. And, somewhat understandably, that seemed to really knock her enthusiasm for solid food, even once she was better. We got disgusted faces pulled at carrot, which she previously had eaten and tolerated. And the other thing was the loud gagging… I had made pureed parsnip, which was as smooth as I could humanly make it, although there was the occasional teeny tiny ‘lump’, not really lumps at all as they were so soft, but when faced with one, Isla would go totally red and make awful, loud retching noises that frightened the life out of me. It became that every puree I tried would either result in the horrible scary gagging, or just a look of disgust at the taste! Porridge was the only thing she would eat and seem to almost (but not quite) enjoy.

So, Tony and I were starting to think that weaning Isla might not be as straightforward as our previous experience. My twitter friends were helpful, and some suggested going straight to finger foods. I was / am a little bit nervous about this, because of the gagging we were already getting from purees – I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I handed her something semi solid to chew on?!? In the end, we didn’t offer her any solids for a couple of days and then reintroduced porridge.

Mmmmmm, this stuff is actually ok, mum

Absence seems to have made the heart grow fonder and since then she has been a little bit more adventurous. I made her some sweet potato mash a couple of days ago and that got a pretty good reception. But she does like to do things herself – she grabs the spoon off me and wants to put in in her mouth herself – which I let her do (under close supervision). I’ve also been brave and given her a few finger food type items – some broccoli, a rusk (just made her frustrated and then she dropped it on the floor!), some toast to suck on, and some Organix carrot stick crisps, which went down an absolute storm!

And, we were reminded of the early days of weaning with Lilly when Isla was frustrated and crying between spoonfulls of porridge the other day – something Lilly used to do all the time as she loved eating so much she just couldn’t cope with the interuption to the supply created by us having to reload the spoon each time!

Bolstered by the successes of recent days I have now officially opened Mummy’s Baby Food Factory and my food processor knows there are some busy months ahead. We have our Annabel Karmel food cubes in the freezer as we speak, with more ideas buzzing round my head for purees for the coming weeks.

Hopefully the concept of food has finally made sense to Isla, and our weaning adventures will be a little bit more fun from now on…

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Eating, sleeping and… being ill

Well, it’s been a little while since I last blogged. There just doesn’t seem to have been any spare time anywhere the past few weeks to just spend half an hour with the computer… whenever there might have been a chance I’ve been so tired i’ve just been napping instead!

So, just to bring things up to date… We have, of course, been getting ready for Christmas the last few weeks. We had our Christmas tree up in the last weekend of November as we’re all really excited about this year and couldn’t wait! Lilly really understands everything this year, as she is nearly 3, and knows all about Father Christmas coming and what to expect. She isn’t frightened of Father Christmas anymore, and even spoke to him when she bumped into him at the local garden centre with her Nanna the other week. She has watched Peppa Pig’s Christmas more times than you can imagine, and now has a fixation with the fact that she wants a yoyo for Christmas – which is what Peppa Pig asks for. When she met Father Christmas, she told him she wanted “a yoyo, some scissors, and a baby toy for Isla”, and all from the top of her own head!

Winter arriving has also seemed to bring with it slightly better sleeping from Lilly. For the last two weeks or more, she has been trying very hard to sleep through the night, even managing it on a couple of occasions (Hallelujah!) We’re not quite sure where it’s come from, but I suspect it is partly motivated by Father Christmas watching and partly by a morning cup of hot chocolate, which she only gets if she’s been good the night before. At bedtime, she quite often tells me: “I sleep all night mummy, and then I have chocolate milk to keep my tummy warm, and for a special treat!” I don’t care what’s done it, I just hope it is a permanent improvement! She has still had the occasional night where she’s had to have somebody sleep in with her – the other night it was the wind whistling at the windows which woke her up and scared her – but at other times, even when she wakes, she is determined to go back to sleep and “sleep all night”.

It’s funny because the start of her better sleeping coincided with her being poorly. A couple of Friday nights ago, she was sick in the night a couple of times. Later in the week she had a bad chest infection complete with vicious cough, which needed antibiotics.

Unfortunately, whatever made her sick didn’t want to stop there, and a few days later, Isla was also being sick. The first time was at the end of her morning nap – when we went up to see her, her face was covered in it… she was crying like she was terrified, poor thing… awful. It seemed to only last a day and she remained in really good spirits throughout, but then, 6 days later, it came back – this time it seemed more like full blown gastroenteritis… and although she was over the worst of it in a day, two days later – you guessed it – Tony and I also had it. Urgh. All I can say is, if the girls felt anywhere near as awful as we did when we had it, they were very much braver than we were!!

Illness has also had a knock on effect on weaning, which really seems to have stalled. Since being poorly, Isla hasn’t been too keen on food and even the ones she had previously tried and seemed to quite like – carrot & banana – she doesn’t seem keen on anymore. Carrot got a full blown “yeuck!” face and banana didn’t fare much better. Parsnip has fared slightly better, but if there is even so much as the teeniest tiny-est lump (by which I mean a very soft piece, less than quarter the size of a pea), so much retching ensues I’m terrified she’s choking to death. In the last few days I haven’t given her any solids at all, and yesterday it was back to just one serving of porridge at breakfast. But I wouldn’t say her eating is particularly enthusiastic. She likes sitting in the highchair and getting plenty of one-on-one attention, but I get the impression she likes chewing on the spoon more than she likes eating the stuff on the spoon. We will just have to take things slowly and see if her enthusiasm builds I suppose.

And of course, it is only a matter of weeks now until the world is jumbled up all over again when I go back to work – I have now formally applied to do reduced hours, which will mean I will get two afternoons a week at home with the girls. And it is not so much the actual going back to work which worries me – I have done it before and know it won’t be too bad – it’s the logistics of how on earth I actually leave this house early enough in the morning to get there on time!! Doing the reduced hours means that, at least on two of the days, I need to be at work by 8am. It is 45mins drive away, plus ice scraping time. I am already imagining in my head the amount of military precision and night-before planning that will have to be done if I am to achieve this goal!

I’m also nervous about how Isla will take to nursery – generally I am sure all will be fine, Lilly was the same age when she started and never batted an eyelid. Isla is very laid back and accepting, so should be ok, but she also seems quite sensitive. I took the girls to a soft play place last week and had them both in the baby area where Lilly was enjoying the slide while Isla was looking at the other babies and toys. All of a sudden it all seemed to get a bit much for her and she started crying. I took her out for a while but when we went back in later, the same thing happened again. So I hope she will be ok with the bright and busy surroundings of nursery. Fingers crossed.

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More firsts…

Well, today was an eventful day as it was time for Isla’s first taste of solid food.

Banana mashed with milk was the house special today, and I must say, it went down very well indeed.

I like this, mum!

As soon as the first spoonful registered, Isla gave a little squeal of happiness and lots of big smiles!

There was a fair amount of dribbling and some of it came back up, but all in all she did very well. I am planning to give banana again for the next few days, then we’ll start moving on to carrot and some of the other first tastes recomended in Annabel Karmel’s Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. Wow, I love that book. Made weaning Lilly so easy and fun and I hope the same will be true for Isla. Based on first impressions, it looks promising!

There was also a first for Lilly today. Her first trip to the dentist! (Yes, I know, I know, she should actually have gone before now – but she used to be scared (terrified) of even getting her feet measured for shoes… I just couldn’t imagine what kind of emotional breakdown the dentist would have caused!)

So, at nearly three years old, off we set. Incidentally, it was my first appointment in years too – I never even got around to using my maternity exemption last time.

It didn’t start too well for me as when we arrived at what I thought was the entrance (to be fair, it was a door, clearly marked with a ‘Dentist’ sign), I couldn’t open it. I tried forcing it a bit, looking around for a doorbell, but there wasn’t one. In the end, I resorted to rattling the letterbox to attract attention. Just as we did that, Lilly piped up with: “Why don’t we try this door, mummy?” and points to the next door along, part of a glass fronted exterior, that on closer inspection is quite clearly a well signed and illuminated official entrance to the dentist, complete with amused patients and staff in the waiting room who have clearly seen and heard a 2- year-old totally outsmart her rather flustered mother…

Anyway…

Once inside, it all went very well. Lilly watched as I went first. All was fine, the only trouble being answering Lilly’s constant: “Are you having fun mummy?” questions whilst also ’opening wide’… “Mmmmmmmmm, yes, loooooads of fun!” (Dentist said nobody had ever said that before in their chair…)

Then it was Lilly’s turn. Thanks to infinite readings of Peppa Goes to the Dentist she was really quite excited about the whole thing. She had a slight wobble at the thought of actually getting on the dentist chair, and said: “I might be a little bit scared mummy”, but once she was on she was fine, and she opened her mouth nicely to let the (lady) dentist use the little mirror to look at her teeth (just like Peppa).

I’m pleased to say we both got a clean bill of health and Lilly said: “We LOVE going to the dentist, don’t we mummy?” on our way out, which I think rather made their day!

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Eat your greens

Lilly was always a good eater, weaning was a pleasure. She’d try anything, and liked most things. The only thing she didn’t like was jars – which was fine by me because I loved cooking and pureeing and freezing and defrosting healthy meals from her, mostly made from my weaning bible – Annabel Karmel’s Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. I loved it because I’d usually get an appreciative “Mmmmmmmmmmmm…. Mmmmmmmmmmm” as she ate.

 

Now she’s 21 months and lately she has become slightly more fussy – she turns her nose up at things more often – sometimes she eats half of a meal quite happily saying “yum yum” and “’licious!” then suddenly changes her mind and says “Don’t like it!”.

 

She’s also refusing to feed herself. “Mummy do it! Daddy do it”! I think it’s just an attention thing really.

 

But we both found it really funny yesterday, when she was tucking in to some tagliatelle with steak and mushroom for dinner. She went to great lengths to extract the little bits of chopped parsley and held them up disapprovingly.

“Little grass! Little grass!” she said.

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Has it really been so long?

Goodness, me! Lilly is now coming up to eight months old and this is my first post since she was born… (bad, bad blogger!)

Having a baby is certainly a full time job, and somehow you just don’t seem to have the time on your hands you did when you were pregnant – funny that!

Lilly is now a very bouncing happy little girl of seven and a half months. She smiles, laughs, sits, stands (with help), eats dinners in her highchair, rolls front and back and loves playing peekabo! We aren’t quite at the crawling stage but i don’t think she is far off. We are preparing ourselves for baby proofing the house and spending a fair bit of time chasing round after her.

All the baby cliches are totally true… they aren’t newborns for long (only about a month!), and they do, literally, change week by week. They are exhausting, but they are the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do. Our lives are unrecognisable from what they were, but we wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world.

I am posting this thanks to our new laptop which enables me to spend some time on the internet while Lilly is asleep, so who knows, i may even post on here a little bit more regularly again. Not making too many promises though…

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