Baby's first...

...night in a big bed.

Yes, it's really taken us this long to sort out a proper bed for him, and to make his room safe for him to roam about. No messing about with kiddy size beds here, we've put him straight into a standard single. I got the bed frame ages ago off Freecycle, and we bought a new mattress for it last week in the sales. We got him a standard single 4.5 tog duvet and a small childs pillow, and today I bought him his linen. The duvet cover and pillowcase set has a royal blue background with brightly coloured trucks all over, and he thinks it's great. I could only get white sheets, but they're not going to stay that way for long

Unfortunately it took a lot longer than we thought this evening, to get the room finally sorted, so he's gone to bed 1.5 hrs later than normal. I hoped this would mean that he settled quickly, but there's been a lot more sobbing than usual. On the other hand there's been a lot less sobbing, screaming, getting out of bed, and yelling than I'd feared, and I think he's about asleep now.

The real battle is going to be when the time comes for his nap tomorrow afternoon...


*Post continues after about a 40 min break*

Well as it turns out he wasn't so settled as I thought. I'd gone downstairs to help Wookiee rearrange the furniture in his 'swamp' (it had all had to be shifted to get the single bed out and moved to Ewok's room) when I heard the clarion cry of 'MUMMY!' from upstairs, and waaay too loud for him to be anywhere other than standing at the gate of his room *sigh*

I soon discovered the problem was that I shouldn't have left his big toybox in the room with him. He'd opened it up and pulled almost all the toys out and onto the bed, and I think what he was trying to say was 'Mummy I want to go to sleep now and I can't because my bed is full of toys.'

So I had to put all the toys back in the box and move it out of the room completely. I'll worry about what to do with it tomorrow. After that he settled down without so much as a whimper.

I think he's asleep now...

Baby's first...

SUGAR RUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was a surreal experience, happening as it did while I was trying to watch a program on narcolepsy. Having a toddler running in circles around the living room with barely a pause for 30 minutes (no I'm not exaggerating, 30 minutes) while watching people who fall asleep up to 90 times a day makes for an interesting contrast don't you think?

The 'Ewok whizzing his tits off' episode was courtesy of him snaffling the last of my glass of squash while I was out of the room. I drink fully leaded hi-juice squash (in other words not the sugar free stuff *blech*) and I mix it about 3 times the strength it recommends on the bottle. I guess I'm lucky it was only 30 minutes really.

This evenings entertainment was brought to you by the numbers E110, E104 and the letter wheeeeeeeeeee!

Baby's first...

...day at the beach.

Righty ho, we were away visiting friends this last weekend. It was our friends T&J's annual birthday BBQ bash about which I have blogged before.

We travelled down on the Saturday afternoon. In true disorganised fashion we had hoped to arrive around 4pm, instead we didn't leave until near on 3pm and arrived at our B&B just after 7pm. We threw all our stuff into the rooms and headed back out to T&J's house and after a quick hello and a cuppa we all set off for an eatery.

Normally I wouldn't bore you with details of the meal and restaurant however this one was worthy of note for all the wrong reasons. Upon being given the menus it turned out that this was one of those 'few options, big prices' kind of places, where there's nothing that you're really bothered about on the menu and you're going to have to pay a lot for whatever you choose. As an example I had a 14oz t-bone steak with 'chips' and a tomato, which cost £18.95, the steak was wonderful, the chips were actually half a dozen not-very-well-cooked wedges and half a tomato. The other meals were similarly frugal, and disappointing. Hell we paid more for Ewok's meal than we would normally pay for our own. We thought it was just a pricey place and we were down south so even more pricey than we would expect, however our friends had been there before and were similarly shocked/disgusted at the prices and portion sizes. All in for an appetiser (one between us) and meals for the three of us we paid just over £50! As a follow up we got a text from T on Tuesday morning saying that the restaurant had closed down *lol*

Sunday was the day of the BBQ and the weather was perfect. As a side note, it always is good weather that weekend. I've been going to this do for 7 years, Wookiee for longer and without fail the Sunday afternoon has good weather, so if you ever need good weather for something around that time of year then choose the last Sunday in July.

There was slightly less pyromania this year than previous years. I think the guys are slowing down in their old age, although there was a slight pause in the proceedings when sirens were heard in the distance and they decided to wait and see if they were coming to us, before carrying on with burning any and all cardboard they could find. The main goal this year was to see how high they could get the flames to spurt out of the top of the chimnea. I think 3 foot was about the record.

On Monday we were heading home, but before we did we took Ewok to the beach for his very first look at the sea. Our friends live in Faversham which is only a few miles from the coast (as opposed to where we live which is pretty close to being the middle of the UK) and they recommended Broadstairs as having the best beach for kiddies, as in it is sandy not pebbly. We got there at 12:30 and headed for the beach. On the way we loaded up with various things for the beach, an umbrella, beach mat, bucket and spade (of course) and some beach shoes for Ewok. It turned out that the beach shoes were a good investment as the sand was so hot it was burning my feet let alone Ewok's delicate tootsies. We found a space to set up in, put down the mat, put up the brolly and then put Ewok into his beachwear (swim nappy, shorts, t-shirt and a 2 inch thick layer of factor 50). Once he and I were ready to head out into the sun we set a course for the water's edge.

I thought he might be a bit wary of that much water at first, but not a bit of it he toddled straight in without a care in the world and started splashing and giggling. I hadn't got my swimsuit, I just had my skirt tucked into my knickers, so we were restricted on how far in we could go, but Broadstairs is a very shallow beach so we still managed to get in a resonable way. He loved it. He wanted to go deeper but I didn't fancy having to plunge into the water fully dressed to retrieve him if he fell over in the deeper water, so I encouraged him back to the shallows for some splashy fun in the waves.

We had about 10-15 minutes in the sea then made our way back to where Wookiee was sitting grumpily under the umbrella (he doesn't like sun, heat or sand) and Ewok then sat in the sand for another 20 mins or so playing with his bucket and spade. We got him to bury my legs (well they were burning) and dig a big hole, and we even found a little damp sand further down so he could use the bucket to make a castle. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself, so we may have to do it again sometime this summer, although I think Wookiee would prefer a beach with a pub he can sit in, while Ewok and I play.

Anyway, here's a couple of piccies:



The look of concentration.



How do these things work?



Ah, got it!

Baby's first...

...haircut, as administered by me!

Before:


and after:


I didn't do a lot. Mainly I wanted to tidy up his fringe, and round the back where his hair was all very different lengths due to the back-to-sleep bald patch from when he was little. That and the fact that wielding a pair of very sharp and pointy scissors (I was using my stitching stork scissors) round the face of an extremely wriggly toddler who is fascinated by shiny things, is not my idea of fun and meant that I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

I refuse to pay a hairdresser at this point, I don't see that it's worth it for him, not to mention the hassle of first finding somewhere experienced in dealing with wriggly toddlers, then getting him there and keeping him as unwriggly as possible during the whole fascinating process.

I kept three curls and have them squirreled away, each one tied up with a length of silk thread (no particular reason for it being silk, it was what was to hand at the time) tied in a double knot and then made into a bow. When I get around to scrapbooking for him I'll do a haircut page and put at least one of them in a little envelope on the page.

BTW, please excuse the redness around his mouth and nose and on his cheek, he's teething again and recovering from a very snotty cold. Oh, and under his right eye you can just see the last of the scuffing from his attempts at being a superhero.

Baby's first...

... Dungeons and Dragons session:



This is the role playing group I'm part of. From left to right you can see M, Wookiee, Ewok, and L hiding behind D. I do have another picture where you can actually see L's face, but she hates having her picture taken so I thought I'd stick with publishing this one.

Oh, and the beer is Wookiee's not Ewok's, just in case anyone from Social Security is reading this.

He also has his own D20, here's a picture of it:



The little d20 on top is actually a standard size die. His isn't exactly a 'proper' d20, it's actually a life counter die, so the numbers cycle around the die, but it is 'proper' in that opposite sides still add up to 21. The biggest actual d20 we could find wasn't safe for him to have, and the guy advised us that the stuffed ones were not safe for small children.

I've considered trying to make him a stuffed one, and frankly, given the way he's wanging the blasted thing around the living room at the moment, I may have to do more than just think about it.

Superman he's not

Yesterday was a bath day for Ewok and I. There's not enough hot water in the tank to 1/4 fill the bath for him (37 deg precisely) and then refill it to parboil temperatures for me, so we bathe together while he gets a-scrubbin' and then Wookiee takes him away to dry and dress while I fill the bath up with OMFG-that's HOT! water, lie back with my book, and cook myself for half an hour.

Once I'm also scrubbed and polished I swathe myself in towels big enough to make tents for an entire Bedouin tribe and wander upstairs to the living room (it's a strange house) to get dry and dressed myself.

It was at this point I should have been warned about things to come. Ewok decided that it would a splendid idea to try and wear my knickers (aka panties). Now by no stretch of the imagination am I small, you could probably make Ewok an entire outfit out of the fabric from one pair of my panties. Much amusement was had by Wookiee and I at the sight of Ewok wandering around the living room with my knickers pulled up over his trousers (of course he had both legs through one leg hole, but hey) and we joked that only superheroes wear their underwear on the outside.

A little later in the evening while I was cooking dinner, Ewok started kicking up a fuss because he was HUNGRY NOW DAMMIT and didn't want to wait the few more pico seconds it was going to take for me to cut his sausages up into bite size chunks. So Wookiee let him out of the living room and let him roam under supervision, his supervision.

The first thing Ewok did was make a beeline up the stairs in pursuit of gawd-alone-knows-what, so Wookiee was stood at the bottom of the stairs coaxing him back down and watching for slips. Now Ewok can do stairs, he's careful, holds onto the rails, scoots down on his bottom, that sort of thing. Yet in the seconds that Wookiee looked away to talk to me in the kitchen (why he had to look in my direction to talk to me, I don't know), Ewok decided that if he could wear underwear on the outside he could also fly, and launched himself down the remaining steps.

Bumpetty, bumpetty, bump, splat, waaahhhhhh!

At least now he knows he can't fly, and he's going to have a corking black eye tomorrow, just in time to show off to his friends at Little Poppets.