MinkBabyDotCom

January 2012

2012-02-05T22:21:00.014Z

Hi Georgie,

I haven't taken many pictures of you guys this month - no particular reason, I guess I have felt like we all dash about so much there are very few opportunities to take a picture of a little girl who rarely sits still (even while watching tv!)

You are still developing and hoarding your skills base - your swimming has been coming on really well and you're back stroke in particular seems very strong - you steam across the pool on your back in a way that kind of takes me aback, although about two feet from the side of the pool you almost always stop and check that you aren't about to bash your head - I get it, but maybe you can learn to reach for the side with a hand?? :-D I wish I could take pictures of you at swimming but it's getting increasingly hard to take a picture at any swimming pool, and at your lessons it's explicitly forbidden (a world gone mad!)

Your reading is also impressing me - not just because you are actually reading words now but because you seem to want to read so much. I have to admit that I find this very pleasing because I remeber my own thirst to read (even when my teacher didn't want to teach me to read yet - things were a bit different then!) She held up this book to me and said 'What does that say?' I remember thinking, 'I'm asking you to teach me to read and you ask me what something says?! Do you not understand the question?!' I said, 'I don't know. But I want to know' and she said 'It says 'Red' - if you can't read the word red, you're not ready yet.' I remember thinking that was plain dumb, but I must have convinced her eventually because here I am, reading and writing. I often hear you sounding out the words on road signs, on tv, or as you try to write captions for your pictures.

Your art work has also recently become more representative of what you purport it to be - I know that sounds like I'm really unimaginative (I guess maybe I am!) but the upside of this new surge in realism is that now when you say 'Guess what it is!' I can more often oblige you with an accurate guess rather than either admit that I don't know, or say something evasive (yet hopefully encouraging) like ' Wow! I love all the wiggley lines, why don't you tell me about it!' and then hope for some clues!

We recently started using the Wii and its Just Dance game, which has caused a lot of hilarity in the house. You both love a good dance - it's just we probably need A LOT more space or someone's going to get hurt!

Your ipod stopped working a while ago, I can't rememer exactly when, but this was the result of several months of your messing with it, pouring water on or near it etc. and so we decided that you will have to get along without music at night. We may get you another one for your birthday, but we felt it was really important that you understand that if you break something expensive, something that was given to you as a privilege, that it not be immediately replaced if it is abused by you. I was braced for a lot of fuss but actually after a day or so you seemed to accept it and you haven't complained about its absence once.

We did notice however that you have been staying up really late and playing and reading (there's was a bed side table lamp on in her room because she was scared of the dark and the night light was apparently not light enough). We axed the lamp too, in an effort to get you to sleep earlier (you have been hell to get up in the mornings, have been crying all the way to and from school, seemingly purely out of fatigue), and that also went surprisingly well.

I go through periods of being totally unable to tolerate behaviour from you and your sister that is ordinarily admittedly annoying but not the end of the world - I have a few hours every day where all I feel is overwhelmingly tired, which when pushed turns into uncontainable irritation. I think it's pregnancy related - that is not an excuse. I do apologise and explain and I think you get it, but I am trying to maintain a grip on my emotions, despite the galloping hormones. Bear with me xxx

So that's January - back to school, it's cold, it's a bit dark but we're still here, and all is well! I'll try to take more pictures in February.

Love you Porgia,

from your Mama xxx

September, October, November and December 2011 (SORRY!)

2011-12-30T22:32:00.057Z

Dear Georgie,

Ok so clearly I have fallen behind with your blog again - I blame my uni course, the fact that I'm pregnant again (!) and the school run, which has brought its own special brand of crazy to week days.

School

So anyway, school.....let's talk about that!

You seemed a bit shakey about the whole thing for a while there - very sad still about missing your friends from Fleetville, a bit unsure about going into a new classroom. It didn't last long though (during October half term you couldn't wait to get back to school!)

You've been invited to several birthday parties, girly ones, a bowling party and a soft play party. You loved all of them but predictably particularly liked the girly ones, because it gave the an excuse to wear your purple party dress.

You love to tell me how well behaved (or not) you were during the school day - the chart above helps you all keep track. Everyone starts the day on 'blue sky'. If you do something especially good (showing initiative, being particularly polite etc.) your peg gets moved from 'blue sky' to 'sun shine'. Good behaviour can rise from there to the stars (I think you're not destined for the stars on this chart because the kids that make it there seem to do so by being very good at tidying up, which is not your forte... ;-D)

There's also some kind of thing about pebbles - each child can earn up to three little pebbles, depending on how good the whole class has been. The idea is that when a jar is filled to the top with pebbles, the whole class gets a treat, but apparently boisterous boys keep knocking the jar over and so you all have to start accumulating the pebbles from the beginning. So YOU say anyway xxx

You seem to be learning to read and write and a respectable rate, and you appear to enjoy it.

You like using Lexi's magnestic writer, white boards, my iphone apps and more recently your Innotab to practise, which wastes less paper and at least offers you the opportunity to do the same thing in a bunch of different way.

I try to not be a pushy parent - it's kind of hard to know where the line is between being helpful, supportive and encouraging re your school work and being unhealthily invested in your academic achievements. I'm still feeling my way on that one, so bear with me, and if I get it wrong (along with a whole raft of other things, I'm sure) then you can come and tell me all about it and I'll try to be cool about it (I'll try!)

I took these pictures of your classroom just before parents' evening, where we received a very reassuringly consistence character report from your teacher, Mrs Thomas. My favourite quote out your learning journal was:

"We're going to pop Jesus on the cross and when he dies we'll wait for him to come back to life."

Spot the child who goes to Sunday school! (It made me laugh, luckily it made your teacher laugh too!)

First School Photograph

Down Time

We do the usual park on the weekends, during school holidays and even after school, (or we did when it was still light, back in September)

You guys seem to like playing together and although there are the inevitable fights, she gives as good as she gets, albeit in a different way. You both boss each other, but you are pretty good at sighing, muttering 'bossy pants' in her direction, with varying levels of love and frustration in your voice, and giving way to her. But you do like to tease her, and of course, she's two, so she is very easy to coax into apoplexy. Sometimes though she over-reacts on purpose, in an effort to get you in trouble, with varying levels of success (I'm an elder sister with a younger sister - this too was done to me by mine, so Lexi doesn't get away with it as much as she otherwise might!)

You're still loving the princesses thing - you got a whole princess room for Christmas, having seen Lexi's Peppa Pig new room make-over this was a major request that was actually pretty easily done (thanks eBay).

Luckily you Belle dress still fits because you love it (unfortunately Lexi is cultivating a love for that dress and is growing into it as fast as you are growing out of it - there will be tears! But hopefully no actual blood...)

Of course Spencer Bear is still very important, even though he's mainly a stay-at-home-bear these days, now that you're so grown up.

You still sleep with him and still occasionaly try to smuggle him into school. And why not!?

For some reason teeth brushing is an area of enormous conflict between you and Lexi - even though there are two steps (and more recently, two chairs) to stand on, one tooth brush each and and more than adequate sink for the both of you, twice a day you howl at one another, wail about wanting more opportunities to rinse your toothbrushes under the tap and spend more time spitting than actually brushing your teeth. Sometimes it takes all my will power and love for your tiny teeth to make me take up your brushes, set the stage for toothbrush conflict and call you forth to do war upon each other.

Baby Charlie

12 week scan pic

After some long discussion, Steve and I have settled on Charlie for the new baby's name, whether it's a boy or a girl. You have made several impassioned pleas for the following:

Boy

Spike
Henry
Harry Potter

Girl

Evangeline
Stripe

But you seem to have accepted Charlie (so far). You keep kissing the bump and trying to get it to tell you whether it's a boy or a girl. You can't seem to decide (we won't have to wait long, hopefully we'll find out this coming week, on January 6th.)

First Nativity

You were a shepherd in your first ever nativity play and you even had a line, which we practiced at breakfast:

"We're sorry we didn't believe you!"

And let's not forget the songs that you sand (with actions), over and over and over and over and, well over again. Such hits as "One starry night! A beautiful angel came to a hill....", "Three Kings were riding (it was a bumpy road)" "Deep in the night, under a star in stable". Goodness. That was a LOT of singing. But you were very good, and on the day you didn't falter in your rendition of any of the songs even once. Well done! We were super proud. I took video footage but we have been asked not to publish it to the web. So I didn't.

Christmas Outing

We went to see your Auntie Izzie in Wimbledon park, and went to the Winter Wonderland Fair, which was a lot of fun, even if the weather was overcast and freezing and the burgers we bought were severey over-priced!

You had a brilliant time, Liz bought your ride tickets and went on most of the rides with you. You and I went on the ghost train together but I thoughtlessly (cruelly???) didn't tell you that there were no actual ghosts in there and, worse yet, I screamed theatrically throughout the whole ride, so you just buried your head in my arm and clung to me, shouting "I don't like it!" So sorry about that, I hope I haven't scarred you for life...

Christmas Eve

We went to The Vineyard carol service, which was very festive and alot of fun.

Then we set out mince pies (which Seska got to before Father Christmas,) a carrot for the reindeer and, unusually, a gin and tonic to slake Santa's thirst.

Christmas Day

Father Christmas obliged you with a lot of presents that, thank goodness, you seemed and still seem to be genuinely thrilled with, which is always very satisfying.

You each got a scooter, a hard hat, a hi-vis vest, a light for your scooter, a hand-held game console and some games, and then family and friends picked up the slack on the good old amazon wish list. And man do you love your safety gear! You wore it all through Chirstmas dinner, while scooting and would put them on all the time over pyjamas or day wear if I let you (sometimes I let you just to enjoy the giggles that overcome me.)

You also enjoy your Innotab (it's like an iPad but designed for kids - I have to get you off my iPhone somehow!!)

A Family Christmas

Auntie Izzie came for Christmas, always a welcome event!

On the wine (as usual!)

Georgie, Lexi, Gran and Grandad

Daddy and Gran were in charge of making Christmas dinner, and very very nice it was too!

Gran and Gramps also did a lot of chopping and peeling...

Nanny and Grandad also came to spend the day with us too.

Nanny and Grandad, taking a welcome and mainly deserved coffee break!

As Lexi gets bigger, and her ability to speak increases, I get to listen to (and giggle at) these amazing little conversations and games that are developing between you. Although you are sometimes still cross with her, and you tease her, in general you're pretty kind and almost entirely non-violent, which is a relief for now but could change at any time. Generally you're quite cute together. You currently have a regular arrangement that Lexi puts both your shoes away when we get in and you hang both your coats up (Lexi can't reach the coat hooks) - I hope that mutually beneficial arrangements like this continue to characterise your relationship...we'll have to see!

I feel like I spend a lot of time telling you off, which is a shame because you ARE great - you just seem to like to test the limits ALL THE TIME! I try to make sure that I take every opportunity to praise you when you deserve it (aiming for appropriate praise - I don't want to overdo it and turn you into one of those children...shudder...)

Being pregnant right now and not the most patient person in the world in general, I am aware that my tolerance levels are not as high as I would like, and so I am very sorry for being a bit snappy and cross from time to time. I try hard not to be that way, and I try to apologise at the time when I realise I have over-reacted. I'm hoping that at least this way you can see that 'even' adults can be naughty and cross, and, more importantly, when we are, we should, we can and we do apologise and make amends. I'm only human, it's the best I can do, but I'll keep trying to do better. You are a big part of my life - a relentless, exasperating, exhilarating, fantabulous part. I wanted to give you this poem for this post, I know it's a touch morbid, but we have spoken rather extensively about death - after all, what do I know about death more than you know. Your grandad says that dead people, on passing on, either know all of the answers, or none of the questions, and I guess he's right. This poem was read by my cousin Jenny, at our wedding. I love it, and I love you.

The Life That I Have by Leo Marks

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

You are a continuing delight; a neon, scooting wonder; a rabid, writing wriggler and my very favourite Georgie.

Happy New Year, my darling,

Love from your Mama xxx

Month 49 - August 2011

2011-09-02T22:13:00.021+01:00

Dear Georgie,

We've had an action-packed August of time spent with friends at home and abroad, doing all sorts of fun things. You've been missing nursery, I think, and although you have made the best of things and played nicely with your sister and some of your other younger friends, I know that you miss the company of other four year olds.

I don't know that it was the right thing to do but I didn't make too much effort to get you together with your Fleetville friends, because they're all going on to school together and you...well you're not. You seemed very upset by all their excited talk about moving onto Fleetville reception while you were still at nursery and so keeping those relationships at a basic maintence level seemed wise. Willow was on holiday most of the break anyway, so in part that decision was out of my hands...but if it was a bad call, I'm sorry xxx

Baby Henry

You love that baby Henry - and why wouldn't you, he's a lovely little boy - look at him:

Henry and the new Cbeebies programme, Baby Jake has kickstarted your baby brother phase. You really want a baby brother. Ideally Henry. It would be so great if it were that simple but I don't think Kerry, even on her worst day as a mother EVER would be all, here you go, take my son, don't even worry about it. So bad luck, Georgie, a brother seems like a pipe dream at this point. Do what I do, and use Henry to scratch that particular itch (in my case the broody, irrational, hormonal part that seemed to get switched back on once Lexi got to about fifteen months old...)

Henry's Christening

Kerry, Henry and Tim

Kerry, Tim, Henry, and his godparents, Steve and Leah

The children were made to sit for far too long in front of the beautiful christening cupcakes (about five minutes - they did quite well really...)

Time Out With Friends and Family

At the Heartswood Forest Festival with Cirla, Rob and Skye

Holly and Georgie enjoy some car dancing in Holland

Georgie and Holly in the paddling pool

Grandad and Georgie watch gliders take off and land from Dunstable Downs

Time for a post-ice cream walk

Encouraging Autonomy

Self-dressing leads to interesting fashion statements

I've been getting a little bored....resentful, actually if the truth be told, of your running commentary of how many of the things I do for you are not done perfectly or fast enough (simultaneously might be fast enough for you, on a good day!) and so I decided to let you do them for yourself. Consequently you now have access to your plates, bowls, cups and cutlery so that you can lay the table and serve up your own food (I still cook it though); you select and put on your own clothes; you make your own bed, open your curtains and put your pajamas away and have landed yourself with all manner of other tasks that would probably not have come your way had you buttoned your lip a bit. I'm hoping this will teach you a bit of responsibility and also to appreciate all the things that are still done for you. At the very least you can moan at yourself for the slow arrival of your breakfast. Actually you seem to enjoy being in charge of these things. Although at times you do complain about how boring your tasks are. I just agree with you and let you get on with it. And to your credit, you do get on with it. So well done. Now make me a gin and tonic!

(Well, not yet, but eventually...)

Sister Stuff

You guys can really get into it at times but in general you are pretty good. Nine times out of ten I look up and you're draped all over each other. Bless you.

See what I mean? Aah x

More sweet sisterly sitting - it's not staged, I swear!

Charlotte's 4th Birthday - Pirates and Princesses

Georgie chose to wear her Princess Jasmine costume this time

School is coming, it's about ten days off now. Oooh. It's a bit unnerving, isn't it?! All those new kids to get to know. You had a big cry about missing your old teachers and your nursery school yesterday. We talked about who you would miss and why you'd miss them, and you drew pictures of everyone so you could remember them. It may sound a bit strange to other people but I really got a sense that you were genuinely grieving for your nursery life, and so I thought I wouldn't try to gloss over that, and so I just let you feel sad. I didn't go on about how many new friends you'll make, how nice you're teachers are bound to be and how much you will love your new school because although all that will come (I hope), I didn't think you wanted platitudes. So we drew pictures instead.

See you in September, my big school girl!

Love from your Mama xxx

Photos of Georgie's 4th Birthday Party of Princesses and Pirates @ Fleetville Community Centre, July 2011

2011-07-09T20:53:00.022+01:00

Georgie, the Pirate Princess (4 years old)

Well Georgie, We have had a fabulous party, if I do say so myself, thanks in no small part to Gran, Gramps, Nanny, Grandad, Jackie, Graeme, Emma, Izzie & Emily, who made the food and decor part work; Sam, the face-painter and magic-maker, Emma, of musical magnificence, Becs the cake-topping queen, Daddy (who minded the children this morning, helped throughout and, not to put too finer point on it, paid for the party) and....me!

There was colouring, play doh, outdoor toys, a sandpit, a picnic in the sunshine, a sing-a-long from Rattlenroll Music, face painting, cake and ice cream.

It was a lot to pack into two hours but pack it in we did, and hopefully the pictures below prove it!

We are making you spread the present-opening out over the next few days, and you have been very lucky (thanks, you lovely guests, you!)

Emma from Rattle'n'Roll Music keeps the pirates and princesses entertained (thanks, Emma!)

Andrea and Eddy (and bump)

Princess Jasmine (Annabelle)

Becs and Dylan

Tim, Amy, Lucas, Mia and Jess get into the play doh

Lexi sports an unusal off the shoulder look

The birthday cake (clearly)

Willow in her new Belle dress

Mia and Eva

More play doh

Lexi, Victoria, Amy, Katy and Eve

Becs

Dylan and Willow

Kerry and Henry

Mia, Willow and Dylan

Mia, Georgie, Willow and Dylan

Gramps and Grandad

Georgie, Lucas, Dylan and Willow

Amy, Dylan, Alex and Willow

Mia, Katy, Yuki, Georgie and Simon

Eva and Amy

Emma and Gran

Zinnia

Gramps and Nanny

Charlotte

More running around

Anny, Poppy and Sam, who valiantly face-painted all afternoon (thanks, Sam x)

Amy

Margie

I think you did have a fantastic time, and so did I!

Happy Birthday, Georgie!

Love from your Mama xxx

Month 47 - June 2011

2011-06-27T22:44:00.016+01:00

Darling child,

You're nearly 4!! I can't quite believe it! I can remember very clearly sitting on a wall on Bricket Road, on the way back from town, after I'd taken you into the office to see my old work colleagues. I was breastfeeding you, and looking at you and thinking "I can't believe we've got at least four years before you even start school!" Don't get me wrong, I wasn't in that much of a hurry to get rid of you, (then! x) but I had always thought kids who were just school age were teeny, and suddenly the reality of a baby, and the time it would take for you to get even that big, hit me, and seemed to open up before me in an endless chasm of time!!! What would I do with you? What would you be like? I remember it like it was yesterday and yet here you are, on the brink of your 4th birthday - it's less than a week away!

So what have you been up to this month?

We are the party people!

We've been to a few birthday parties - Eve's, Victoria's and Skye's - I've been ill recently and so I wasn't really on the ball enough to take any pics of Skye's do, which is a shame because there were some excellent decorations (some of which I hope to borrow for your party next week lol x).

Eve's party was at her house, and was a lovely princessy, arts and crafty type affair:

Victoria's party was at Willows.

Helicopter hellos at Willows Farm

Skye's party was at a hired hall and all themed out beach-style - I'm going to lift some pics from Facebook.

The lovely birthday girl/mermaid, Skye

Blowing out the candles on her Sponge Bob Square Pants Cake!

The vultures gather to sample the cake

School Meetings etc

We've had our school meeting, and met your teachers, found out more about how things are going to work (supposedly!) - they're going to phase you into to doing whole days gradually. We only know a few of the kids who will be in your year - I know that you will make friends quickly but I know that I am not so good at that, so I am a little anxious. At the same time, as much as I like so many of the Fleetville mums and hope to continue seeing some of them, we don't live in Fleetville and it would be nice if we could meet a few more people who live around the corner (although I'm not holding my breath or anything :-D).

Church

Yes. YES! I know. I'm the last person on earth to go to church and yet....I really like the vibe at the Vineyard Church in St Albans, and you seem to enjoy the play groups, Sunday school etc. and so we are finding outselves there more and more lately. There are worse places to spend time, and at least here the people seem (so far) to be very openminded, lovely and non-pushy.

Boy Trouble

One of the main heartbreaks of this month has been watching you lose your boy friends. One on one, your boy friends are happy to play with you but once even one more boy shows up, they up and leave you - worse, they often turn on you and taunt you, which is particulary horrible if you are the only girl around, trying to play with boys who used to include you and now suddenly don't. It's so sad, I can see the hurt and confusion on your face. You try so hard to make everything ok again. I've tried to explain that boys are like that, for the most part, and will be for some considerable time to come. Daddy also sat you down and told you the same thing. But you don't believe it. You are still madly in love with Ben B, you make him stuff out of paper and decorate it, to 'make him like me again', and it's very hard to watch you put yourself up for rejection, over and over. At Skye's party you were so excited to be seeing Connor but he too was more into the other boys and wasn't much for any of the girls who wanted to play, even Skye.

Getting with your girls

Georgie, Emily and Lexi

Of course there's always your girls - Emily is still your idol, you have your girl friends at school like Willow, is (I think?) you best friend at school - you girls have gotten pretty angsty with eachother of late, I'm hoping its just your age..., you enjoy running around and dancing with your fellow ballet students, the girls at swimming and lets not forget your aunts, your cousin and of course your mama xxx

Georgie and Willow

Georgie gets her nails done at Fleetville School Fayre

Striking a ballet pose in the kitchen

Family cutting, sticking and colouring of a Sunday afternoon

Enjoying girly hair braiding sessions

Attempting some kind of random street dance in the playroom

Hanging out with Pam in the garden

You're so good with your sister - about as good as you can expect a nearly four year old to be, in my opinion, and although you're pretty stroppy with the people who love you, I have high hopes that your frustrations with life's limitations will gradually diminish and that you will learn selfcontrol. In that hope I try, sometimes in vain, to improve my own self control - there's always room for improvement there. I've been pretty ill recently and so when I'm ill, although it's not an excuse, I have to confess my fuse is much shorter. We're both trying hard, and we always reconcile.

I think I'm going to start a new tradition for us, and as is often the case, it's going to be based on stealing another idea from another, much better writer - Dooce.com gave me the idea to blog about my children at all, once a month, (ideally). Jeanette Winterson's website has given me the idea to try to post you a poem that I like, either because it reminds me of you and how I feel about you, or because I like it, and it might be nice for you to know what poetry I like. It may even help you to find out about the kind of poetry you like. So anyway, here's one for June:

i carry your heart with me
by e e cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I love you very very much Georgie,

Love from your Mama xxx

January, February March, April and May 2011

2011-05-29T23:37:00.018+01:00

[Georgie, February, 2011]

Beautiful child,

The monthly blog is a thing of the past, and I shall stop apologising for it - it is what it is, and it doesn't mean that I love you less, only that we have so much to fit it that I would rather spend that time with you than writing about you.

[Thumbsucker, February 2011]

These last five, nearly six months you have come a long way (baby). You started nursery, and made a whole bunch of new friends. Your best friend at school is Willow, and her mum, Becs, is becoming a firm friend of mine too, which has been great - as a mother you get chucked in with a load of other women with whom you often have nothing in common but a similarly aged child...I knew from the off that Becs was on my wavelength, so thanks for being on Willow's :-D

[Lunch at Morrisons Cafe with Willow, March 2011]

[Willow, Georgie, Dylan and Lexi, March 2011]

Benbellingham is another favourite of yours too. Not Ben Bellingham. Benbellingham. That's how you say it. Over and over again. It's love. For your part anyway!

You seem to have adapted well to nursery, and while I'm not too sure about your teacher, you seem to like her and so as far as I'm concerned, she'll do.

[Learning numbers, March 2011]

You're still loving the princesses, Tangled is your most recent love in that department, the Disneyed version of Rapunzel. Actually its pretty good.

[Plaited Angel, February, 2011]

We went on holiday in May, to Tenerife, and you totally loved it - you were up for most of the things that kids club had to offer and had to be dragged from the pool and the kids disco every day and every night.

[Waterbaby, Tenerife, May 2011]

As we took off in the plane you cracked us up with a very loud, but genuinely released "Woohoooooooo!" and it was fun to watch you soak up every new experience with such ebullience.

[Sleepy Sisters, March 2011]

You have your school allocation now and you seem to be looking forward to 'big school', although there is some wariness there, especially as unlike most of your friends, you wont be staying at Fleetville and will be starting somewhere you don't know many people. You're resillient though, I think you'll be fine.

[Georgie and Zinnia, at the fun fair in Bricket Wood, May 2011]

You've been learning numbers and letters, ballet and swimming and words like 'cool' and 'wicked', you're a pirate, you're a princess, you're a zombie, you're an invisible dog, you're here you're there and sometimes I'm breathless just sitting in your presence.

[Swinging Sisters, Tenerife, May 2011]

You are so vibrant, so alive, so happy (mostly) and even though you can still also be extremely infuriating, an intractable, stubborn mass of contraditictions, I love you fiercely and I'm very proud of you.

[Sun Hat Princess, Tenerife, 2011]

I recently decided that I need to concetrate less on what I say to you and concentrate more on how I act. It occurs to me that children focus much less on what is said to them than how the adults who surround them speak and act...I know I did. There's no point telling a child one thing and then doing another. I find that scary because I'm not as together as I would like.

I am stumbling on parenting lessons in unexpected places - the latest and (from my point of view,) most freaky place is the Bible. I have made quite a lot of good friends lately, and a few of them are Christians. Not really my bag, as it goes. And yet from talking to them about my problems with Christianity, which are legion, I am really absorbing the fact that love is not how you feel about someone - it is a feeling, but when the shit hits the fan, love is not an adjective, love is a verb. I know that sounds hokey. I didn't make the 'love is a verb' part up but I do think it's true. So there. Only love could allow a person change all those nappies, put up with the bodily fluids, the ingratitude and so on. When you are at your most mulish, I no longer count to ten, I keep harsh words off my tongue (mostly), and my hands to myself (always) by repeating to myself, under my breath, that bit in Corinthians: "Love is patient, love is kind.." if I knew the rest, I'd say the whole thing over and over, because that to me sums up the blood, sweat and tears love that a mother must dredge up in order to bear the inherent frustrations of motherhood:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

I've heard it a thousand times, weddings, funerals, christenings etc. It just popped into my head one day when you had lost it and I felt like I was about to lose it too. And it helped me to calm down. I feel like lately I'm just starting to get it - the love part more than the Christianity part. That passage has become part essential parenting resource for me and part spiritual nourishment, but not in a particularly religious way. It lends perspective, I guess, it takes me out of myself and says, "Hey, get a grip, be better, rise above, hang on!" And it really helps me to work at being a better role model, a better person, and a better mother. Don't worry, I'm not planning to become a religious nut. Again. I'm just utilising good resources wherever I find them. The next one could come from graffitti off a toilet stall door. I'll take good advice wherever I find it. If I thought you'd take advice from your mother, I'd advise you to do likewise! :-P

I love you, beautiful,

You Mama xxx

[Waiting at the dentist, May 2011]

[Hair styled by Auntie Izzie, March 2011]

Months Behind - 38, 39, 40 and 41 (Sep, Oct, Nov & Dec 2010)

2010-12-26T01:02:00.009Z

Dear Mink Face,

I'm so so sorry not to have written anything about you for the last four months. I've been really busy trying to fit in university classes and study time, the Road Victims Trust volunteer training programme, you and your sister and general life and it's been tough, as anticipated, and so your blog has languished a little...a lot, if I'm honest.

In the last four months a lot has happened, as you'd expect. You went back for your last term at preschool, I went to New York for a long(ish) weekend, we celebrated my birthday, Emma's birthday, Gramps's birthday, Halloween, Lexi's birthday, Lexi's naming day and more recently, Christmas, which was spent with us at Nanny and Grandad's house, with Gran, Gramps and your Auntie Izzie. You rose to each occasion with plenty of enthusiasm, and quite often fancy dress, and you can almost always be relied upon to sing a heartfelt and resounding Happy Birthday or We Wish You A Merry Christmas (even if it's nobody's birthday and December has passed).

You like dancing in the kitchen before and after (and occasionally during) meal times, particularly to the sea shanty Bully In The Alley, which is a favourite of yours and of Lexi's.
You hit the princess stage hard, and love Disney princesses most, especially Belle from Beauty and the Beast. We recently moved you into your new 'big girl' bed in your new room, along with a lot of your toys, so you have a much nicer place to sleep, and somwhere you and your friends can play without having your games ruined by the baby (or me!).

You have expressed a lot of interest in learning to read but little interest in actually putting in the work required to start learning your letters - plenty of time Georgie, no hurry xxx

Up until recently your behaviour has been pretty good - I remember remarking about a month ago to another mother that I hadn't had to 'naughty step' you for a good six to eight weeks, and that was true. Although far from perfect from about September to November I could rely on you to be pretty cooperative for a three year old.

Looking back now I can see that there were signs of another descent into some kind of toddler rebellion around the time you absorbed the fact that your days at preschool were numbered. In fact things started going a bit pear-shaped just before your first visit to your new nursery. You liked the nursery, in fact when we left you cried, you liked it so much. But I think it's the prospect of change that has you jittering.

Where you had been happy for me to leave you at preschool in the mornings - actually you virtually kicked me out so you could play with your friends, you started to cling, begging for another story, crying and telling me you didn't want me to leave, that you would miss me and that you wanted me to stay with you always. By the last week you had to be handed off to a member of staff for a cuddle every single day. I think part of it is realising that you are about to go to a different, more challenging school (nursery), and that things will change. I think you're afraid of growing up. I think that's natural. I'm afraid of growing up too, and I'm grown up. Growing up is inevitable, my Porge. You learn to deal with it, but in my opinion it's still often bloody scary.

Then you got ill, which everyone did recently, it's that time of year. But then you stopped eating almost everything except chocolate, which you don't get a lot of. Even if that's all you'll eat. Otherwise where would it end? Normally after one missed meal you'd be ready to eat almost anything and yet for a good ten days you ate almost nothing. On the bright side you didn't seem to be losing weight (secret food stash?) but it did worry me and I was glad when your appetite rallied a bit. You're still not eating properly but hey...

But it's not just clinging - lately you have become more belligerant, more obstructive, more rude and difficult than ever before - although to be completely fair to you, my experience of your behaviour is definitely coloured by the fact that I have even more things to fit in than ever before and by the fact that Lexi has recently become more mobile and more difficult....so it's not just about you being 'bad'. I know that it's not just that though, because your Daddy has noticed it too.

I am sorry to say that I have not dealt as well with your difficult behaviour as I would have liked. I'm a firm believer in demonstrating rather than advocating how I want my children to behave. Unfortunately I have started cracking under the pressure of late - shouting and generally venting my frustrations onto the two of you. I'm really sorry about that. I haven't been beating you or anything, or even smacking but I have lost my temper more than a few times lately and stooped to petulance and anger when I should have been the adult and stayed calm.

I know I'm only human, and I shouldn't expect to be perfect but the reason I get annoyed with myself is that I don't want you to model the way I have been dealing with stress lately - it's not a good way. I wish I had my shit together better, so that you could learn to gather yours with a bit of dignity. You may get there on your own, to be sure, but you'll have a damn sight better chance of doing so if I can provide a good example of level headedness. I'm not sure I have it in me, but I really am trying. Because as much as I resent you at times, with your repetitious rude and selfish demands, I also love and admire you and want to be a better person for you.

Love is a crazy thing, and it shows itself in bizarre, even twisted ways. I'm not proud of it but it is true to say that some days all my love is capable of is preventing me from lashing out at you, with tongue or hand, and on those days it feels like a huge victory for love, let me tell you. I don't believe in hitting children. I think hitting someone smaller than you is a cowardly, bullying thing to do. I thought that when I was a child and was hit by an adult (teachers could smack you when I was a child, and most parents did it as a matter of course), and I think it now. I can accept that there are people who can deliver some kind of moderate corporal punishment that is not dealt in anger, but I don't trust myself to do it. The smacking I experienced as a child and the smacking I have witnessed was the angry kind and I wish to eschew it.

I hit you once when I was pregnant with Lexi, at the end of my tether and completely exhausted and was brought up short you said something like "But Mummy, it's naughty to hit!" and it is, and I was sorry and sat myself on the naughty step. That was well over a year ago now.

There are times when the repetitious tasks of motherhood seem to assualt my sense of self to the point where I think I will completely lose it - I feel so pressurised, harried, unappreciated and undervalued by you, that it takes all the love in my heart to do what I must - to keep my hands and thoughts to myself. It's not your fault. I check myself because it's not your fault. But it's not my fault either that I feel the way I do. Yet it's my job to contain and hold my feelings back. Sometimes I experience break-through backlash.

You may think that I shouldn't say these things to you at all, but I think that I should and here's why....because sometimes - rarely in general but in the last month, quite a few times, my frustrations leak out in unkind words, and if like me you remember your early childhood very clearly, I would like you to know how sorry I am for my occasional and thankfully relatively brief lapses in control, and to tell you that it wasn't your fault. I do apologise at the time, but in case those apologies don't register, I want you to have them here - I'm sorry for every time I've let you down, even though I don't do it on purpose but I don't want to do it at all.

One day perhaps you will have your own children, and maybe you will feel like this and wonder, as I have wondered, if it's normal, or if you're a bad person...a bad mother. Perhaps reading this will make you feel better - like you'll be able to deal. I think that having kids under the age of five is pretty hard. I think a lot of people feel like I feel. I think that all I can do is dig down deep into the core of myself and hang on for dear life by my finger nails until things smoothe out a little. There'll always be trials and traumas with kids, whatever their age, but I'm hoping that the nature of the challenges will change and that if all else fails, the time you girls spend at school will give me time to regroup and decompress in a way that I rarely have time to do at the moment.

But don't worry, little Georgina, my love for you cannot disappear - sometimes I don't feel it or show it the way I want to - sometimes it comes out all wrong but it's always there. I can spend a whole day wishing I was anywhere but here, doing anything but 'mumming', wishing for my days of unfettered fecklessness and resenting every single cup of squash made, every bum-wipe, every tooth cleaned and every mess tidied, longing for your bed time and yet, once you are in bed and I'm on my way to mine, I often have to hold myself back from the threshold of your bedroom and stop myself from diving into bed with you, throwing my arms around you and waking you up to tell you how much I love you.

However much I sometimes hate my housewifely, motherly drudging from time to time, my love for you makes any other life a lie, and I wouldn't change it, not one bit. I realised this recently when a friend told me they were spending Christmas in some kind of tropical paradise and basically asked me if I was jealous. I waited for the bile to rise in my throat, a sure sign of the green eyed monster....and I came up blank. I had a feel around inside my head and realised that I wasn't jealous at all. Weird. I felt....that I wanted to be where I was, with my family, in snowy, icy, totally unglamourous St Albans. I was geuniely surprised. But I was also glad.

I will make redoubled efforts to keep this blog more regular, little Mink Face.

All my love to you this Christmas,

Love from you Mink Mama xxx

Something to aspire to be, Georgie, a Phenomenal Woman

2010-09-09T20:27:00.002+01:00

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Maya Angelou

Month 37

2010-08-30T00:22:00.009+01:00

Dearest Minka,

I love this picture because it sums you up at the moment: if you look past the crayons up your nose (a challenge if you're not her mother, I'm sure!), look at how beautiful and grown up you look! And you're actually smiling into the camera without making a horrible face (although you do still do that most of the time - in this case you actually asked me to take a picture of you, which was a new phenomenon...) But then you factor the crayons back in and it is confirmed that despite looking all beautiful and grown up, this is still Georgie and if you don't believe me, look at those crayons up her nose!

What can I say? You still have your icky moments, which is almost reassuring because you are at times to well behaved that I hardly recognise you! When you're feeling just right you're this polite, sharing, agreeable, cooperative little person who's actually very good company.

We were out recently at a friend's house with lots of other friends and their children. You were the oldest child there and spent the whole time mediating the disputes of the younger children, preventing fights, sharing out snacks and drinks and making sure that the little babies weren't trampled by the toddlesome ones. One of the other mothers said to me, "You must be so proud of her!" and I said, "I would be, if I knew who she was!" which may sound mean, but it was a genuine shock, to see how great you could be - usually toddlers spend their time arguing over toys, snacks and attention, and the more there are, the more altercations there are, and most of the time you are right in the middle of that, shouting the loudest and staking your claims, however shakey, to other peoples' toys. But lately you are showing me that perhaps all the reminders to say please and thank you, to pick up your things, to ask nicely etc., to include everyone in your games, to share nicely etc. were not necessarily in vain after all - that they may have in fact permeated what appeared to be your impenetrable skull and made an impression on your psyche. I wasn't going to stop trying but I think a part of me doubted that it was doing any good, up until now that is. Hence my surprise. But how fantastic!

Don't get me wrong, you aren't some scary obedient zombie kid, but in the right mood you are 1000 miles from the bitey, shouty, stampy Georgie of a few months ago. I'm almost afraid to admit this in case the wind changes and so do you!

The Dummy Fairy

We summoned the Dummy Fairy because you started taking the baby's dummies and we couldn't understand a word you were saying at any given time. Also you have been waking up unable to find your dummy at least once a night for almost you whole life, and we finally decided that enough was enough - strange that it took us so long actually. It all went off fine as it goes - the dummies were swapped for a Buzz Light year, some chocolate coins and some Milkway Stars.

Although there were some tears and general unrest for a couple of nights, you seem resigned to the demise of the dummy and you are sucking your thumb. I should probably try to stop this but given that I still suck my own thumb, that would be hypocritical, and since you take your thumb out to talk, I don't really mind, to be honest. The only thing I made sure to do was to show you how to suck your thumb in such a way as to not push your teeth forward. I developed this technique when I was about four years old, when my parents told me my teeth would be pushed forward if I continued to suck my thumb, and that I would need a brace. My teeth never stuck out but sadly I needed a brace anyway. But nothing my parents did could stop me from sucking my thumb, no punishment or icky substance applied to my thumb nail, no mockery was sufficient to the task. I stopped doing it at school due to peer pressure but I still suck my thumb in private now. At least you can't wake up at night having lost your thumb. At least you are generally sleeping all the way through at last!

Daddy's Girl

There was a time when you weren't as nice to your Daddy as I would have liked and you were very Mummy-centric. I know it sounds like a wonderful compliment paid to me by you but in reality what your obsession with me did was make my life very difficult and hurt Steve's feelings, although he was very pragmatic about it.

Now it's a whole other story - I think our new approach to parenting since having Lexi has something to do with this, because although Steve and I have always shared parental duties as much as his job allows, once Lexi was born we intiated a one-night-on-one-night-off system, which means that the one who is on sleeps with the baby and answers all child-related disturbances, while the other one sleeps downstairs, and gets to sleep in if the schedule allows. Part of this system also means that if I put the baby down, Steve puts you down, and since the baby goes down first at 7, and Steve doesn't get in usually til past 7, you are usually put to bed by your Daddy.

So now he doesn't have to cajole his kiss goodbye but rather you demand to be allowed to bestow it, and you always follow it up with a very big hug. You run to your Daddy when he gets home and you enjoy going to football with him too. It's lovely to see and high time too!

New Scooter

We did manage to get Father Christmas to give you a scooter last year, despite the lateness of your request (the day before Christmas Eve), but as it turns out, it wasn't the best scooter ever, and you found it hard to keep up with your friends, who had the more expensive version. We managed to get one of the better ones second-hand via ebay, and you have been suitably exicted about it. Hopefully this will lead to your scooting to preschool when you go back in a couple of weeks. One less child to push!

Big Sister Stuff

I could be wrong but I think it's helpful that I have been a big sister because rather than just tell you off for taking things from Lexi, or getting cross with her when she's disturbing your games, I can genuinely empathise with how you feel and give you some non-violent strategies for dealing with your little sister, who loves you so much and wants to do what ever you are doing. I make sure that I remove Lexi, remonstrate with her for spoiling your games (I think she's starting to understand the word No even if she doesn't respond consistently to it) half the time and get you to compromise the other half. It is my hope that this tactic will lead to less resentment between the two of you, but only time will tell if that's effective or not.

We still have tantrums, but balance is creeping in there, so that when you're good you're very very good and when you're bad, it's not right but it's ok.

And here's a picture with you making that terrible face, because lately, it wouldn't be a blog post of yours without a disturbing facial expression from you.

I love you so much, Georgie, don't go changing too much too fast!

Love from your Minkmama xxx

Month 36 - Back in Love

2010-08-06T21:20:00.020+01:00

Dear Georgie,

I am simutaneously gutted and overjoyed that simply spending more time doing things with you seems to have solved 95% of the trauma of the last couple of months. Gutted because I seem to have managed to create the problems in the first place and overjoyed because the problems didn't last too long or get as bad as they could have done, and, best of all we seem to have reached a place where we can communicate without conflict...for now anyway! I have managed to find a middle ground between housework and play, and am able to play with you while working, take short breaks to sit with you and watch TV, read you a story, paint a picture, do some colouring, build a tower - my attitude is much less all or nothing, and we are all benefitting from that.

This month you have been 'the good one', if such a role should ever exist, which I doubt. It's not that Lexi has been bad per se - she's still a bit too little to be very deliberately naughty. But if you read her blog for July 2010, and recall the week of hell when she became much more demanding, you'll perhaps remember that prior to that Lexi didn't always cry the minute she was alone, or teething without producing teeth, or having her nappy changed, or was put into her highchair, or any single event that didn't involve playing, cuddling or tickling! You continue to be lovely to her, on the whole. Long may it last and thank you for being such a great big sister! You often tell me how much you love Lexi and that you think she's cute. 10/10, I totally agree!

Sleeping In

You aren't going to preschool at the moment because its the summer holiday, and so you are lying in like a teenager - yesterday I had to wake you up at 10am! I won't let you sleep past 8.30 because it seemed to affect your sleep last night, and I spent the hours between 2 and 5 this morning trying to keep you quiet and in bed while you were wide awake, singing, playing, and wanting to come and see me. How the baby stayed asleep I will never know!

Patchy Drizzle with Some Heavier Showers

We are having a few instances of wet pants because essentially you can't be bothered to go to the loo. You leave it to the last possible minute and then make a dash for the potty and sometimes you make it and sometimes I find you sticking your bottom out of the trampoline and doing your business on the grass. Lovely. But if that's as bad as it gets, I'll take those wet pants and the few other recent piffling blips with a song in my heart. Really really.

Neighbours, Everybody needs good neighbours...

And luckily that is what we have. You seem to get on very well with the kids you have met in the street, and in particular the children who live either side of us. You spend the most time trailing after Emily, who must be 10 or 11.

Emily is your personal hero. We've had a few problems simply because every time you see her, you want to be with her, and that's not fair on Emily, who has a more grown up life to lead, and not possible, especially when you catch sight of her just before your bed time! Emily is very very good with you, and gives you a lot more time than I would have expected, considering the age gap. It probably helps that Emily also seems to really love babies, so Lexi is a bit of a lure for Emily :-D

Luke, Emily's brother is also pretty good with you. I think Luke's about 8? Anyway, he lets you jump with and on him on the trampolines (theirs and ours). You also like playing with Cara from next door but because our house adjoins theirs, there's less opportunity for simply jumping over the fence between side passages as happens quite often with Emily and Luke.

Although it's pretty noisy, I really like it when I look up and realise I have a garden or house-full of neighbourhood kids. Of course that novelty may wear off pretty fast. But it's nice to know that you're going to grow up in the kind of street where people know each other and the people are the kind of people you'd want to know. We had a street party here recently. You didn't stop all day and had a ball. If I hadn't been busy enjoying myself I would have taken a few pictures!

I'm sitting here trying to think of more things to write, about the funny things you've done and said; the following exchange is one of my favourites:

Me to Georige: "I'm not your slave, you know!"
Georgie to me: "I know. Tim's my slave!"

But actually the main things that stands out to me is how affectionate you have been towards me, how often you come over and stroke my face, climb into my lap, and tell me, unbidden, how much you love me. Well I love you too. Most mothers dread the summer holidays, and with good reason. These holidays turning out fine, especially now the really hot weather seems to be on the wane, for now anyway. You are a pleasure at the moment - not an angel, but about as helpful, reasonable, loving and fun as anyone could hope for a three year old girl. Maybe even a bit more.

I'm sure I'll have more to add, perhaps even some pictures, but I wanted to get something up here before the moment passes.

In fact I can't believe I have let this post pass without mentioning your 3rd birthday party - I think because I uploaded the pictures to Facebook, I thought I had uploaded them here too - oops! We had a lovely Superhero-themed birthday party at Fleetville Community Centre, where you and your friends dashed about, dressed up as various superheros, splashed in paddling pools, coloured, decorated biscuits with icing, did colouring in, had face-painting done and generally made merry, while the adults tried to keep you with you all.

So happy birthday my beautiful Georgie, and here are the pictures...

Lovely girl, you make me proud and happy,

Love from your MinkMama xxx

Month 35 - Full of Woe, Like Wednesday's Child, We've Far To Go...

2010-06-18T00:14:00.005+01:00

Dear Georgie,

Our relationship has never been so angry. The power struggle starts at breakfast time and seems to rage all day – one long battle of wills. I wish I could let you win occasionally, but you ricochet from one dangerous extreme to another, and so the opportunities to give you a little autonomy are rare, and nothing seems to satisfy you.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you. You are so defiant, so stubborn, so cantankerous, irritable, rude, violent – initially I put it down to terrible twos and I’m sure that a significant part of that is to do with normal boundary-pushing – we are struggling for control and a certain amount of that is normal between parents and children. But I can’t shake the feeling that something else is going on, that there’s something amiss, and it’s not all about your most recent ‘phase’.

And then something occurred to me which, if true, made me want to hide my face and cry – what if you are acting out in this extreme way because you want my attention?

It sounds silly at first, doesn’t it? I mean I’m a stay at home mother and you spend most of your time with me. But physical proximity is not the same as real interaction. And I think it’s leading to my taking you for granted. Certainly your Daddy, how ever long and hard his day has been, seems ever-ready for a game with you once he’s home. He brings an enthusiasm to your romps that I find it hard to match. Is it because he’s a better parent? Or is it because he hasn’t seen you all day, and he can look at you with a fresher, fairer perspective?

The more I think about it, the more I see how I may have been short-changing you without even realising it. At times I have been treating you like a job. Worse than that – at times I treat you like an obstacle to doing my job. And so you have been acting like an obstacle – an obstinate, shouty, stampy, bitey obstacle that refuses to play quietly while I clean and cook; that attempts to draw me away from sitting with the baby in the park and just watching while you play; an obstacle that objects to my chatting incessantly with other mothers during play dates – an obstacle that does not only want a mother who feeds her, waters her, disciplines and toilets her. An obstacle that wants more.

You are right to want more from me.
You deserve more from me.
How has it come to this?

I have never been a domestic goddess – in fact up until recently I found my sticky student lack-of-housekeeping quite a hard habit to shake. In an effort to improve, I found that if I treated the wife and mother role like any other job, I could get it done better – be more organised and it worked - the house began to run more smoothly. Slowly the place is becoming cleaner and tidier, meals are cooked properly, laundry is washed every day rather than in one long day of washing woe, and sometimes the clean, folded laundry is even put away in the right place rather than languishing in the hall in piles!

It’s nice – I am learning to take satisfaction in tasks that I used to consider menial, degrading, mind-numbingly repetitious and my state of mind is greatly improved by the introduction of order into my chaos. Good for me. Good for all of us.

Except….

The darker, flip side of this is that I somehow mistakenly filed you away as a chore, and I think on some level you know this. I have been selfish, stealing ‘me time’ out of the lion share of time that should be yours – I’m on my iphone, I’m listening to the radio, I’m holding a conversation with someone else….it started out as an attempt to multi-task, but I know that there are times when that’s not what I’m doing at all.

As a result I believe that you have realised that the only way you can get my attention is to act out. On some level you have decided that bad attention is better than no attention.

And I am to blame. And I am so sorry.

It’s time for a restructure, which will hopefully lead to positive change.

I’m going to try to focus less on keeping you entertained and more on how we can enjoy the time we spend together – not all of it, because there will always be things to do, because I’m your mother, not your mate, because having some 'Me' time makes me a better person, and by default, a better mother. But I hope that if I can work some regular blocks of one on one time for us into our daily routine, we can turn the dial back down to a dull roar, and stop using conflict as our primary means of relating to one another.

I don’t know if this is a foolish, self-indulgent impulse, if I am giving my conduct too much importance, or if by my hand-wringing I’m making your personal quirks all about me.

I take some consolation in the fact that you obviously know something about love, because you express it beautifully towards your little sister. You continue to be an exemplary big sister - you fuss and coo over Lexi like a second little mother. She feeds best from your wobbly spoon, she reserves her biggest smiles for you and when she cries, you're right there with a toy, trying to cheer her up. I don't know if it will last, but I really hope it does.

However it all pans out, I want you to know that while I try to keep a sense of perspective, I also spend time every day thinking about how I can be a better mother and give you what you need to feel loved.

I tell you how much I love you every day. And it’s always nice to be told how much you are loved. But there comes a point when talk is cheap. How much better it is to be certain of it before it is said, because actions have spoken louder.

This is what I want for you.

Month 34 and 35

2010-05-27T22:36:00.007+01:00

Dearest Mink Baby,

Let us now sum up the activities of April and May 2010, which have managed to be splendiforous and awful, as we increasingly find ourselves at loggerheads...

Tantrums

Every day I tell myself "Today Georgie and I will not fall out" and then usually within five minutes to (on a good day), about forty five minutes, we are fully embroiled in a strident verbal (and sometimes physical) altercation (you have become a bit violent - we had one incident of biting, there is also some stamping on feet, spitting and hitting - nice...)

I really hate the conflict that your drive for independence brings because as much as I want you to use your new skills - getting yourself dressed, strapping yourself into your car seat, playing unassisted, and so on, youre sense of danger is not well developed enough to protect you and your ability to assess when it might be better to let someone else take over - for example, when we're in a hurry, (usually when the baby needs something,) is likewise immature.

I am keen to let you experience the consequences of your autonomy (as long as it won't result in significant harm,) and so your love of doing things your own way & at your own pace has led to missed play dates, you have had to walk extremely long distances, crying and wailing (having insisted I leave the pushchair behind) and you have been cold and wet (when rejecting coats and wet weather gear.)

Although this process is beyond trying, it is bearing fruit - recently you seem more open to the idea that when we're in a hurry, it's better to let me do some things for you, so as to not miss out on all the fun we're trying to get to, you are more willing to let me bring things like pushchairs and coats 'just in case' and so it's not all in vain. You sometimes ven listen to explanations - I do try not to be some awful despot, barking orders and threats, but sometimes there's nothing else for it...

The learning process is painful - you clearly think I am just being horrible to you for no good reason, you frequently castigate me for being 'a naughty, rude Mummy' and you tell me 'You're not my best friend anymore!' Maddening just doesn't cover it, and it's so relentless, so full-on, all day long that it can feel like pushing jelly up a hill, pointless, thankless and a bit sticky.

I try very hard not to be angry with you, to stay calm, and not to lose control - I fight the urge to smack you because I am convinced it is not a fair or effective disciplinary tool but rather the act of a vengeful, weak bully. I try instead to punish bad behaviour in a fair and measured (non-violent) way and to reward all cooperation with enthusiastic praise. I'm not perfect, and I regret every harsh word between us because I love you so much and I know that you love me too. It's just something we're going to have to go through - letting you get away with murder would be far less kind, even if it meant we got along better now. If I don't teach you now, the world will teach you later, and the lessons will be that much harder, honestly.

So what have these new independent tendencies led to so far???

Breaking Out of Baby Gaol

You have learned to open the downstairs gates now, which I thought would be the end of the world but actually you're pretty good, and when you're not feeling cooperative, I lock you in our living room, in front of the big TV, which is perceived by you as such a treat that you don't seem to mind such imprisonment. Haven't had to do that for a while though, so gradually the house is opening up to you. You are much better at the stairs, partly because your physical coordination is improving but also because the new house has larger, wider, better-lit stairs, and so I am less inclined to limit your unassisted ascents and descents. People may think I have been mad to limit you this way, but then they've probably never seen your previous kamikaze attempts in either direction, so what do they know... :-)

School

You are enjoying school more now and the sobbing and clinging finally came to an end this term - it's just as well as after the summer holidays you will be going four mornings a week and then in January 2011 you will go to nursery five afternoons a week. You trail after the 'cool boys', who occasionally deign to acknowledge your existence and even more rarely, actually play with you.

I hate to see this, the beginning of the in-crowd, peer pressure etc, mainly because it's all so pointless, empty and painful, but there's no avoiding it, and so I resist the urge to make them play with you (your street cred wouldn't exactly be improved by interference from your mother...) and you don't seem to feel particularly marginalised, and always find people to play with and/or things to do.

In the Playground

You are more daring on play equipment than ever before - and after a few painful accidents you have learned to swing down a pole like a fireman, something you have been trying to do for about eight weeks, perfected about a month ago, and it still delights you every time you manage it, and sends parents of other children scurrying over as their kids attempt to copy you - I guess that's how these skills get passed along, and that's how parents get greyer and greyer.

On the Loo

You generally prefer to eschew the potty altogether and can get up on the toilet to do the necessary without any help at all. Unfortunately you would put an entire roll of paper down the toilet without actually managing to clean your bottom at all, if you got your wish and were left to your own devices. After several very loud conversation about this, you finally agreed to call me when you want to wipe your bottom, let me pass you appropriate amounts of paper, and then met inspect the bottom before pants are pulled up. Bless you. x

No Pictures Please

You'll notice a distinct lack of pictures. Is it because I no longer like to look at you and create visual records of your antics? No! You just won't stay bloody buggery still and dodge the camera - not because you don't like having pictures of yourself - in fact you love it, but you love thwarting my photographic efforts even more. Evil child...

Moments of Togetherness and Harmony

We do still get those, even now - you like to pretend that I am the Mummy Lion and you are the Baby Lion, you like to lie in my arms and watch TV at the end of a long day, and you stroke my hair and my face and tell me you love me, and then we are just Mummy and Georgie again, and its almost as if we never fought all day. Almost.

A big sister

You continue to be a pretty exemplary sister and I continue to be surprised and hopeful (but ready for that to change.)

As ever I am totally in love with you, and as I often tell you, I always love you.

I love you when I'm cross, I love you when you're cross, I love you when you're good, I love you when you're naughty, I love you when you're awake and I love you when you're asleep - what ever you do, I love you always, so if you're going to be cross with me, that's ok, as long as you know that I love you, cross patch, love from your Mink Mama

Months 32 & 33

2010-02-18T15:29:00.026Z

Dear Georgie,

Once again I am running two months into one post - you kids have sucked up my time and left me very little to record snippets of our adventures - that's my story and I'm sticking to it...

So, what has been happening?

New Preschool

You started at your new pre-school in January and you seem to like it, but the whole 'new sister' and then the 'moving issues' (I'll get to those) have led to a resurgence in that limpet behaviour and so I often have to get your key worker, Mandy, to pry your desperate little fingers from my clothes so that I can leave and school can begin. You always seem perky about your time there afterwards, so I feel reasonably good about leaving you there. Some of the mums seem a bit cliquely though...or perhaps its just me???

Anyhoo....

Bye Bye Old House (sob!)

We managed to pack up the old house and move into Nanny and Grandad'se house, and all on time too, thanks to the help of friends and family. We then spent about two weeks feeling like crap - not because Nanny and Grandad's house is a bad place to be but rather that your response to disruption can be (and was) pretty cataclysmic, and you had me on the verge of tearing out not only my own hair, but the hair of every onlooker. We had to stay with Nanny and Grandad because the man we bought the new house from wouldn't let us replace the central heating before we moved in (boo! hiss!) and it isn't a job that could easily be done with us there. So we weren't. Anyway, you were a nightmare, bless you. It's over now, so I can say 'bless you' with genuine affection. Let's just agree that we should never ever move again and move on, ok?

Hello New House!

I must confess that when we moved into the new house I spent about ten days thinking:

"We have made a horrible mistake, lets tell those lovely folks who bought our old house that there's been a mix up with the paper work and that it actually still belongs to us and get our arses back there pronto!"

Of course that wasn't possible and actually now, six weeks or so on, I think we are all feeling more at home. Your clingy behaviour is easing off now and although it resurfaces from time to time, it's not the plague of frogs that it was (no one likes a plague of frogs.)

Our neighbours seem nice, some brought us cake, lent us lasagne dishes and all those that I have encountered have been friendly and polite. Good start. Of course there are those of our neighbours whom we have known for some time, such as your godmother, Sam and her family of other Pontes. We like them. There are others too and its nice to live in their street.

You still call our old house, The Old House and our new house The New House, but you seemed to become better adjusted when I got you together with the little boy who now lives in our old house. He is about your age and is called Nathaniel, and his mum, Jess kindly agreed to let us come over and have you boss her son around for an hour and a half while we drank tea. The play date didn't get off to a very auspicious start. I had told Jess that you like everyone, which is generally true, but of course I shouldn't have said that because then you started shouting:

"I don't like him, I don't like him, make him go away!"

My toes still curl whenever I think about that moment.

For reasons that are well beyond me, Jess and Nathaniel agreed to come and visit us yesterday and you guys were really sweet together and in the main played nicey (for toddlers anyway).

Anyway, now when reference is made to our old house (and sometimes when it hasn't been mentioned but you feel like telling people anyway), you like to relate the story of how we can't go back and live in the old house now because it's Nathaniel's house now, and that we can sometimes visit and play with Nathaniel but that we now live at the new house. Phew!

Celebrations of February and March

It's been quite a busy few months for events actually:

Grandad's 70th Birthday (Celebrated by adults in a swanky restaurant) - look how aghast he looks when he reaslises how old he is ;-D x

Nanny's Birthday (I made an actual cake and it was quite nice actually!)

Daddy's Birthday (we didn't really do a lot for that, sorry hun - but you did get some good presents, no? x)

Gran and Gramps's 50th Wedding Anniversay (celebrated with a holiday at Center Parcs AND a party)

Work Being Done on the New House

Yes, there'll be a lot of this to come. Our friend Dave has been doing a lot of work for us, particularly the fence on both sides of our garden, as the existing one was very small, our neighbours have small furry pets and we have a great big marauding german shepherd. Our other friend Tony is getting ready to start resizing our downstairs cloakroom, utility room and the path down the side of the house and, once we have all the relevent permissions, to start work on the loft conversion (mmmmm, huge ensuite masterbedroom for Mummy and Daddy!)

You are currently sleeping in what will be Daddy's 'Man Room' (think geeky computer stuff and a beer fridge and you'll be more or less on point), all our crap that we currently have no room for is in what will be your room, Daddy and I are in with Lexi in what will be her room and its all a bit higgledy piggledy but, as we I say to myself at least a hundred times a day, it will all be ok - better than ok, it will be great. (It will!)

Sleep &Bed Time

When it comes to sleep, we've spent ages trying to get you to take afternoon naps at the right time, and now we want you to stop taking them, you seem to be anxious to fall asleep often and in public. Gah!

You have learned how to open your gate, which has made bedtime, to be very frank with you, young lady, a bloody buggery nightmare.

We will replace this gate at some point but it's a matter of finding the time. So you have been hard to get to sleep, but I think we are making headway there. I hope.

I think screaming til you were sick brought you up short - I get the feeling you aren't anxious to repeat that experience, and who can blame you.

When you are sick, the Spencers (1 - 3) often come off badly and have to be washed and dried...

Potty Training

Goodness me, I have had to put this off so often - Gina Ford said don't do it if you're about to have or have just had a baby, or a new school or a new house - we had all of those! Finally, last week, I decided to bite the bullet, particularly as you suddenly started asking to be changed and admitting to having done poos (rather than running away and kicking though every nappy change.l)

You were so pleased to get your new 'big girl' pants that you put all twenty pairs on over your nappy!

I know you'll probably regress etc. but actually you seem to have licked it (potty training) within a few days and the last couple of days you have had no accidents. So far. You seem really proud of yourself. We have to bribe you with sweets. But Gina sanctions this (yes we are on first name terms now). Apparently I can wean her off those as we go, and you don't always remember you are due a Smartie if I can distract you with potty praise (one for a wee, two for a poo - Smarties, not praise!)

Lexi

You are still being an adorable sister, although I can see the outline of future conflicts already beginning to weave themselves into our routine. Yesterday Lexi was testing out her vocal range, as babies of her age do (as you did) when you came into the kitchen, faced the baby and hands on hip said:

"Be quiet, Lex! I can't hear the television!" Lexi said: "RAAAAAAaaaagh!" And Georgie shouted! "Oh she's impossible!" tossed her head and flounced off, slamming the door as she went.

I know teen trauma, even in its seed-form. I see trouble a-brewin'.....

You still crack me up, and continue to come up with some classic one-liners, such as the one that goes with the picture below...

Mummy: Why are you tying the cupboard shut, Georgie?
Georgie: No Mum! I'm the Easter Spider!

She also professed undying love for the Easter Bunny because 'he brought me a gun"'
(It was a water pistol, how she even knows it's a gun is beyond me, I blame the boys as preschool!)

You also enjoy your goggles - in and out of the water...

You are getting more and more grown up, which is unsurprising but also unsettling. I was looking at you yesterday, and it was the first time you had been dressed for about ten days (potty training is best done in short tshirts and pants in my opinion!) and you looked dramatically older. I pondered this impression for a moment and then realised that it was the absence of a bulky nappy under your leggings that had created what was for me a dramatic and memorable moment. I've been saying it for ages but leaving nappies behind is a big step and, along with walking and talking, it's another step away from your babyhood, which is sad in a way but also fantastic! So keep taking those steps, Mink Face, but don't go too far away. Not yet.

I love you, love from your Mink Mama xxx

Spencers in the hood

Feeding the ducks

Mink Months 30 and Month 31

2010-02-02T16:37:00.011Z

Playing with washing up water

Oh my Mink Baby (for you will always be my baby, no matter how often you remind me that you are in fact a little girl now)

The Snowman in our garden

The transition to being an elder sister is a painful one - I remember mine pretty well and I'm not sure if I want you to remember yours for that reason, and others.... You have been my very own personal limpet of late, which was about to send me over the edge roughly around the time you first glued yourself to me (when Lexi came home,) up until a couple of weeks ago when, out of the blue, the limpet went limp and a glimmer of sanity was seen. While your sticky behaviour was ongoing, you wouldn't let me go anywhere without you, especially not on baby-related errands (of which there are many), particularly those that took place behind the dog-gate in the kitchen, or most of all, upstairs. When I dared to embark on these essential errands, you wouldn't be quiet if I let you come with me and if I locked you downstairs behind the gate, you wrestled with it until you became trapped and/or injured yourself, which of course required me to come immediately and make sure that you were definitely dead or dying, because the noises you would make could mean nothing less - and this happened about, oh SEVENTY THREE TIMES A DAY!

Poxy Georgie

The chicken pox Christmas was trying for all of us - you came out in spots on Boxing Day, which meant your special Xmas gift to the Wellses was chicken pox for Amy.

All dressed up for Playgroup Xmas Party

Now you are back to watching CBeebies downstairs while I tend to your sister upstairs for a few minutes at a time, and we all get washed and dressed in the bathroom together - a nice compromise I think, which is working out well so far, as long as it gets done before Lexi's first nap at 08.30....

Making Cakes

Unlike me with your aunt when she was new, you are at least nice to Lexi (for now) and either have not made the connection between the fact of Lexi and the simultaneous drop-off in my undivided attention, or you have decided not to hold it against her.

Playmat Playmates

For my attention is continuously divided now, and will be for the next um, well, FOREVER. You are unfailingly good to your sister despite the fact that my most oft repeated reason for why I can't leap to your service RIGHT NOW is that your baby's needs are usually (but NOT always) my first priority at the moment. (Yes, there will be many CAPTIAL LETTERS in this post. I think it has something to do with the intersection between LOOKING AFTER A BABY WITH ACID REFLUX and PARENTING A TODDLER! So there...)

We had a lot of snow this winter

We introduced a star chart to you recently, (Georgie, this is your Star Chart, Star Chart, this is your Georgie,) more to gauge how recalcitrant you actually are than to improve your behaviour, but in fact as it turns out, you seem to love the stars and you want to keep them.

The reward chart, awaiting stars

You get two stars if you obey and instruction, you get one star if I have to count to three and remind you that if you don't comply you'll get a black mark. One black mark = the removal of one star. Many stars = treat. Many black marks = punishment. You caught on fast and so far it's definitely still worth doing. We did ask for and receive a lovely reward chart for Xmas but it's too complicated and old for you at the moment, a fact that became clear only once we tried to put it into action. So I made you one that tells me at a glance how compliant you have been today and how drawn to displays of good or bad behaviour. Nice and simple. It works for me.

Spencer and Georgie at Playgroup Xmas Party

As mentioned earlier, you are nothing but sweet to your sister (unlike me at your age).

Waiting for Breakfast

You caress her little baby head, you kiss her, you play with her feet, try to feed her, lend her your Spemcer, 'read' to her, talk to her, comfort her and generally enter in to the spirit of baby adoration with all the gusto that you reserve for just about EVERYTHING!

The Christmas Scooter - Look at Her Go!

Nevertheless, I have decided to leave the Lex with Nanny and Grandad one afternoon a week, because I really really HATE the fact that I spend so much time telling you

"Not now, I'm feeding the baby/changing the baby/putting the baby to sleep/waking the baby up/cooking the dinner/having a nervous breakdown..."

"Ahoy there Capn Georgie!"

I want to be able to say "Yes!" to you for a few consecutive hours once a week or so. Because believe it or not (and sometimes I confess you may be forgiven for not believing it,) I miss you at least as much as you so evidently miss me. When you're not bored or disconsolate due to being bound by the routine of a small, sick baby, you are excellent company and I long for an afternoon with just the two of us, like it used to be.

Sharing Hot Chocolate at the Park

Like you, I love Lexi and I wouldn't be without her. But on Wednesday afternoons, at least for now, I want it to be just you and me feeding the ducks, catching the rain, jumping in puddles, sharing hot chocolate, reading stories and hunting for and running from lions. And so we will Georgie. As from next week.

Toilet Training for Dolls

I don't know if it will be enough to smooth the rough edges of the transition from only child to big sister, but I'll do all I can to help you, and all I can to be as available to you and involved with you as the the new and equally important needs of your little sister (and the generally daily grind) will allow.

Dressed up for NCT/Postnatal Christmas Party

I love you Porge, and we'll be ok, so hang in there, my Mink Baby.

Love from your Mink Mama xxx

Mink Baby Month 29

2009-12-03T22:15:00.014Z

Dear Mink Baby,

You are a big sister - finally! Like you, your sister was born ten days late and like you she was born by caesarean section at Watford General Hospital. I will save that story for your sister's own blog (yes, I have decided to give you each a space - it seems fairer and simpler to me, although inevitably there will be some crossover, but then what are hyperlinks for? If you want to read about Lexi on her very own blog you need to go here.)

This blog is chiefly about you - and you have been, for the most part, so far, pretty fabulous about the whole thing.

Perhaps it is because we have been talking about you sister for so long that she already felt like someone you knew before she got here - the fact that we named her before she was born may have further contributed to the familiarity with which you treat this new baby - as though she had been here for months - of course in a way she has!

You stroke her head gently (so far no hitting), you give her soft little kisses on her hair and face and you stroke her little wavy fingers and smile happily. I'm sure jealousy is to come, and I won't be leaving you guys alone together for some time but nevertheless I am cautiously optimistic at this point.

You have been keen to help bathe and change the baby, and content to let her share your bath on occasion.

You don't want to have breakfast, you want to sit next to Lexi and give her one or both of your Spencers, which is particularly surprising as you are pretty possessive about those bears, particularly "Old Spencer" (the original bear - the more recent one is called "Other Spencer")

You used to come down in the morning, or through the door from preschool shouting "Mummy!" and now you shout "Mummy! Lexi!" with just as much enthusiasm as ever. Could this be too good to be true? I hope not...

You're doing a lot more imaginative play - you love to play funny little games with your dolls house, and like to get us to play those with you, which is always hilarious because it mostly involves getting all the dolls outside to have a picnic or a tea party, only to have it interrupted by lions, at which time all dolls must rush back inside the house and cower. This is mainly funny becuase you get so into the game that you are simultaneously entertained and quite scared :-D

There's some weird obsession you have with covering things and people with tea towels - not sure what that's about or why it sends you into fits of giggles, but the giggles make me laugh so much that I am happy to sit under twenty-two thousand tea towels just to hear them - nutter!

On the TV front I can report new obsessions - The Wizard of Oz and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

These both scare you to death and delight you. You like to follow the yellow brick road up and down the house, doing your own wonky, toddlerish version of the hopping and skipping Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. You pick up words to songs very quickly and I can see that you will be following your Auntie Izz and me into the world of childrens musical film/animation for the next ten years or so - I can't wait!

You have been a little more prone to tears and a bit more clingy than usual, but then you've also been ill with a horrible cold - you've been quite the little snot monster for the past few days - and had horrible green glue smeared all over your face and in your hair - I'm pretty sure that you've been using Spencer as a hanky, as he is looking crustier than usual. I will spirit him away sometime soon and pop him in the washing machine...

You have been happily unwrapping presents to you, from Lexi, from family and friends, as well as Lexi's presents (she doesn't mind - she's a baby, after all!)

You make some odd little remarks lately - which gives me trippy little insights into what and how you think:

Georgie: "Lexi doesn't like me, Mummy."

Me: "Why do you say that, Porge?"

Georgie: "She doesn't smile at me."

Me: "Babies can't smile when they're very little - but she will and I'm sure she does like you really."

Georgie: (Gravely, with trembley lip) "I hope so Mummy. I'm sad if she doesn't like me."

[Another conversation]

Georgie: "When I'm a big lady can I borrow your bras?"

Me: (giggling) "Perhaps when you're a big lady you can have your own bras?"

Georgie: (thoughtfully) "That would be nice Mummy, when I'm a big lady I like to have my own bras - but can I still borrow yours?"

Me: (still giggling) "If they'll fit you and if you still want to, why not?!"

Georgie: "Thanks Mum."

Christmas is coming and I can tell that preschool has been all about Christmas this week, as you have started telling us all about it. Christmas, according to you, is all about "jingling", "presents if you're good and maybe even cake!"and "sparkly pretties". So noted x I'm looking forward to hearing next weeks installment.

I'm feeling good about Christmas - we are going to spend it with your godmother Kerry's family, and I've done all my Xmas shopping and most of the wrapping AGES ago! (I was trying to bring on labour by marathon shopping sesssions you see).

You leave your current preschool for a closer one after Christmas - I hope you like the new one as much as the old one (especially because the old one is now full, so there's no going back!)

What more can I say but that I love you very very much, and continue to be amazed by the weird and wonderful sights and sounds you bring to my every day. Congratulations on becomeing a big sister - you're doing a better job of it than I ever did already, so keep it up kiddo, you always make me proud.

Love from your Minkmama xxx

Mink Baby Month 28 - Well Overdue

2009-11-12T15:49:00.006Z

Hey Mink Baby,

I have been a bad Minkmama and not posted a thing for about three months - not because I haven't had time exactly, but because I have been caught up with selling our house and finding us another one to buy (job done by the way!) and also because I caught a nasty flu-type virus about three months ago that I have yet to shake completely, and it interrupted my sleep, prevented me from getting back to sleep, made me cough until I throw up and made me feel so crappy that just getting through each day was a challenge in itself. It felt at the time as though you were being really really naughty, and we have had some fallings out, you and I. On reflection however, I realise now that my perception of your behviour often depends as much on how much sleep I have managed to get as how cooperative you are being at any particular moment. So I have and do apologise for my irrascible nature over the last few weeks especially - I'm sleeping much better now and even though your baby sister is likely to interrupt that pattern, I'm hoping that as much as she is likely to wake me up often, based on past experience, I'm likely to be so tired that I'll have no problem getting back to sleep again.

So what are we doing these days?

At the moment you are being very patient with me - since I went overdue with your sister (Monday 9th November) I haven't really been going out much - I can't seem to get more than a few hundred yards without my back really hurting and needing to sit down. So we spent the mornings watching TV (at the moment Doctor Who and The Wizard of Oz are your favourites). You make me pretend cups of tea and coffee, you play with your dolls house and you have plastic picnics in the improvised tents I make for you using the sofa, the pushchair and the sofa-throw.

A Vote of Thanks to Your Grandparents

Your grandparents have been helping out A LOT, taking you while I have been looking at houses, cleaning this one for viewings, going to medical appointments and lately, just feeling too tired to move. Shopping has been done for us, meals have been cooked and all sorts. Fabulous! I'm sure I would have muddled through without them, just as so many other women have to, but I'm REALLy grateful for all their help, not just for my sake but for yours as well :-D

Mink Activities

You have been doing football on Sundays, and apparently you are coming on in leaps and bounds, cooperating with the coaches, and actually doing what you're supposed to do most of the time!

You have been going swimming with Kerry (I have been watching Amy while you guys swim).

We have gone to music a bit but I'm not so taken with that and it seems, neither are you :-D

We have seen other mums and babies and will get back to doing more of that once I feel human again, I promise!

Baby Lexi

Is still not here! You reached over and put a sympathetic hand on my arm, leaned towards me and said with a very grown up, confidential air:

"I'd go to the doctor and get that baby out, Mummy"

So funny - and so true. I'm all booked in for a C Section in one week - I tried acupuncture and nearly fainted, I'm going to try reflexology tomorrow but barring that I am SO not going to try anything (else) unpleasant to bring her on. At least there's an end in sight.

So I will try to get back to proper montly postings now, and I look forward to being a more active playmate for you in a few weeks.

Love from your Minkmama xxx

Mink Baby Month 25

2009-08-06T21:52:00.005+01:00

Dear Mink Baby,

And now we are over 2 by one month, and the changes keep ringing - and in keeping with the cliche, the more you change the more you stay the same, which is good, because I always have enjoyed you exactly the way you are...

Why?

We had our first "Why?" this month - you wanted to eat your breakfast in front of the TV, which, as I explained, is not where we eat breakfast.

"Why?"

"Because we eat at the table."

"Why?"

"Because we eat at the table."

"Why?"

"Because we eat at the table."

"Ok!"

I think I was let off quite easy that time, I'm sure you'll demand a more creative response once we hit the main 'Why?' feature - but it was fun to get the trailer...

Baby Lexi

You have become quite obsessed with your 'getting ready for baby' books - particularly the one called "There's a House Inside my Mummy", which has to be read to you before you sleep, stay in your bed all night, come down for breakfast and go out in the car wherever we go! At least I know that you have definitely absorbed the fact that Lexi is on her way, and on some level at least, what that might mean further along the line. I'm really keen to try to handle the whole new baby thing well, not just for me but for you too - I was terribly jealous of my baby sister.

A New Big Girl, Peppa Pig Room With A Big Girl Bed

A temporary but beautiful wall has been put up in your room, to make some room for the Lex and you, Porge Face, as the elder child, get the room that is slightly bigger, with the window. Daddy has painted it for you and this week I'm going to Peppa Pig it for you. I managed to get you a free toddler bed and we splashed out (!) on a bed guard, which will hopefully keep you in the bed while you sleep. We are toddler-proofing your room and the baby gate that will keep you from fishing in the toilet, disturbing Lexi or climbing into bed with us has been ordered from Mothercare. I'm looking forward to these weekend changes with a mixture of excitement and dread - there's something reassuring about popping you in your cot, from which you cannot escape. But these things have to be done :-D

I tell you about your Peppa Pig room and you make this fantastic expression of dramatic awe - your mouth a giant, stretched O-gape, your eyes like saucers and you exclaimed loudly and slowly:

"WOOOOOOOOW!"

On a slightly older child it would look like you were hamming it up, but you are totally entranced by the idea of this big girl, peppa pig bedroom - I hope the reality doesn't fall short of your expectations, especially now we have built it up so much!

I was a bit worried that you wouldn't take to the idea of a new room but you don't seem to care where you sleep - you are happy to sleep in Lexi's room and the fact that it has no window often means that you sleep really late - I'm tempted to brick up your window but no, I won't, don't worry...

Shrek

Shrek is your new TV obsession. I tried it as you didn't seem to take to Disney stuff so far (Aladdin - too scary, Jungle Book - boring, although you LOVE the book, Cinderella - Scary.)

We would watch Shrek and Shrek 2 all day everyday if you had your way - thank god it's funny! I have ordered Shrek 3 because otherwise I'm going to go nuts, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy how much you enjoy them, and also the fact that the increased length of these features, compared to say Peppa Pig) is such that I can get on with other things safe in the knowledge that you are glued to the sofa and not busily undoing all my good work....yet!

You love the dragon in Shrek - first you seem to enjoy being scared of it while they're looking for it and then once it's attacking everyone in fine dragon style, you declare:

"I love dragon! I want to cuddle him!"

I have tried to explain it's a girl dragon but you're having none of it!

You also particularly love Donkey and the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2.

I know that some people say that kids shouldnt be allowed to watch any/too much TV but you talk so animatedly about the characters, what they feel, what they're doing, why etc. that I genuinely can't help but feel it's not all bad. I woudln't let you watch it all day, but once or twice isn't going to hurt you, I don't think - so there!

As always I continue to love you more than ever, and although I enjoy spending time with you whenever I do, my favourite time of day is when you've just woken up, when you seem so pleased to see me and start a new day, and insist on my listing your breakfast options, even though you clearly know them by heart (if I leave one out, you make me say them again!)

We listen to breakfast radio and I chair dance to music while you happily shriek:

"No! Don't dance, Mummy!"

and then I stop and pretend to sulk and you start chair dancing, and shoot me a mischievious look until I exclaim:

"No! Don't dance, Georgie!"

It's kind of a tradition that happens around meals now, and I don't know which of us enjoys it more!

You rock, and you are my best Georgie!

Love from your Mink Mama

I'll put some pics up soon (as always I'm behind, but to be fair, the bedroom hasn't been done properly yet, so I can't take pics of that yet!)

Mink Baby Month 24 & Birthday Pics

2009-07-07T22:27:00.005+01:00

Dear Georgina,

You are now 2! Not such a Mink Baby any more!

We had a fantastic time over your birthday weekend, particularly on the 5th, when we had over fifty people come and celebrate the event with a summery BBQ.

You continue to amuse and amaze us with your articulate little observations and funny little mannerisms. You very often tell me that you can't do something I need you to do because:

'I'm busy, Mummy!'

which never fails to make me laugh.

In May and June, and now with increasing tendencies towards deliberate manipulation you tell us:

"I love you!"

which is lovely, even when it's intended to result in a second ice cream or delay bed time.

'Not yet' is what you say when we remark that it's either bed time or time to change your nappy.

I also love the fact that you like to sing 'Baa baa black sheep' to your baby sister, into my belly button, which is very sweet. What is also sweet, but less comfortable, is your desire to keep your baby sister well-fed, by means of breadsticks, inserted into my belly button. Crumbs in new places. Not a good feeling...

The fact that you still think chins are called beards cracks me up, especially when you hurt your chin and demand that I kiss your beard better!

Suffice it to say that we love you more than is should be possible to love anyone and look forward to all that your third year has to bring (including nursery - LOL)

Love from your Minkmama

Georgie's 2nd Birthday BBQ Photos

Georgie's party outfit stayed on for about 3 seconds. 3 seconds after that she was in the pool

Nanny

Lucy, Richard, Grandad, Kerry, Amy, Ellie, Leah, Oliver, Lisa & Paul

Graeme, Danny, Amber, Louise & Liz

Steve & Pam

Beth, Ruby & Lisa

Steve, the Godfather

Hollie & Georgie

Georgie, Jackie, Ollie, Tom & Richard

Auntie Izzie

Lily and Louise

Sam & Georgie

Leah & Ellie

Kerry & Amy

Amy and Milk Moustache

Linda & Dante

Oliver & Gill

Dante, Danny, Ollie, Tom, Tom, Millie and possible Hollie..?

Month 23 - New Forest Holiday With the Wells Family, June 2009

2009-06-18T20:41:00.010+01:00

Feeding the ducks at the farm

Feeding the baby goats

Trampoline Trouble Maker!

Jumpin' Georgie!

Tractor Time

Daddy

Gossiping with goats

Scaling great heights

Swinging with Spencer Bear

Merry Go Round

Georgie and Iggle Piggle

The smallest Mr Whippy they did....apparently?!

and it's gone!

Apple Juice and Pooh Bear

Kerry and Amy

Turtle

Big Fish

Kerry and Amy

She loves those helicopters

And the cars

And the horses

And the Tweenies

Disreputable Hot Tubbers

Mink Baby Month 21

2009-04-12T23:59:00.006+01:00

Hi Mink Baby,

I'm still pretty rubbish with the photos - I have some on my phone which I will upload at some point, please forgive me for being so remiss and also for the lateness of this post once again - pregnancy seems to drain all of my get up and go - although I am thinking of you all the time, a part of me, an unconscious but necessary part, appears to be concentrating on knitting together your sibling. Don't worry, I'll regain my focus eventually!

So what have we been up to since last I posted? All sorts of things my dear :-D

You are getting chattier and chattier and where there were one or two words in a stream of babble, we are now coming to a stage where we often receive a whole sentence or two with the occasional indistinct word thrown in.

You like to dance with me in the kitchen; to eat your food with a fork (you take great delight in stabbing your food, while saying 'Stab it!'); to drink from a big girl cup (and spill it all over the place); to chase and be chased around the table (when you want to play this game you shout 'Get you!' and then take off at high speed, giggling like a nutter;) to do pull-ups on the fridge (I think you're actually trying to open it); jumping in muddy puddles (thanks to Peppa Pig for that one); to drag a chair over to the sink and wash your face in dirty washing up water and half a dozen other mad things of this kind.

We have left behind the dreaded Higgledy House, and I have been able to safely delete it from our Sky Box. Your love for Peppa Pig has not diminished, matched only by your love of (old stylie) episodes of Winnie the Pooh. Sadly we only have two of these - luckily the Sky Box should not run out (please don't let it break down!) & Thomas the Tank Engine is another of your favourites.

You keep hurting yourself - today (Easter Sunday) you tripped and smashed your face into Nanny and Grandad's metal gates and on Maundy Thursday you slipped running to get back onto Gran and Gramps's slide and came home with a great big lump on your forehead. You're pretty tough though - nothing seems to slow you down for long!

Your devotion to football (or 'Kick the Ball', to give it its proper name), shows no sign of waning nor does your habit of bumping down the stairs, which takes ages. It's almost never worth picking you up though, because you get very angry about that indeed. So we have to threaten you with being picked up in order to get you up and down the stairs. Bizzare! If someone were strong enough and fool hardy enough to cart me up and down stairs I would so be in that. Anyway...

You have been pretty tolerant of all the sofa dwelling of the last few weeks - I haven't thrown up with morning sickness but I have been feeling pretty icky on and off, and also sleeping a really lot. Sometimes you let me sleep for a bit and snuggle in with me, only waking me to change to the next set of Peppa Pigs. Other times you are having none of it and rip the blanket off me and shout "Get up Mummy! Wake up! OUT!"

I feel bad that we have had to stay in so much but it can't be helped - sometimes you have to do what you have to do. My guilt has been eased somewhat by the fact that four days a week you spend the afternoon with well people who dote on you and actually take you out!

Flump the Foetus is at about ten weeks gestation. We have a booking in appointment at St Albans City Hospital this week, for bloods etc and we have elected to have a sexing scan at 17 weeks instead of paying for a 12 week scan ( no 12 weeks scans are available to us, which is wrong in my opinion but there we are.)

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll get on that photo thing eventually Minkster.

Love you lots!

Your Mink Mama xxx

A selection of belated photos from March, April and May 2009

Izzie & Georgie

Daddy & Georgie

Crayons in the kitchen

Mummy & Georgie

Painting

Mummy & Georgie

Iced Smoothie anyone?

Gran and Georgie

Daddy, the hoover and Georgie

Taking it easy on the sandpit

Chilling out - Georgie, Spencer and Seska

Mink Baby Month 20

2009-03-07T22:52:00.003Z

My dear Mink Face,

I have virtually no photos for this blog, not because I don't want to take any but because you are so rarely still these days that it's nigh on impossible to catch more than a blur of top knot and a flash of cheeky white teeth!

Today youwalked from Morrisons to just near the station, which has to be a record. You pushed Spencer in your mini buggy for most of it, so happy to be allowed to walk like a proper little girl.

I was very impressed, and also left in gleeful anticipation of all the sleeping you would have to do later on in the day, to make up for all that physical activity.

I do treat you a bit like a large dog in that respect - I spend my mornings trying to wear you out - we walk as far as possible (it's also eco-friendly and economical), we go to parks, to the gym/creche, to soft play and all sorts to keep us busy and make sure that we don't just watch TV.

The only problem with this strategy is that I am wearing myself out too, so where I used to use the time when you were asleep to do housework, catch up on work for www.minkbaby.co.uk etc., now I just collapse on the sofa and often fall asleep too!

If you're wondering why this is, it's really quite simple - little Mink Baby, your mummy is pregnant! We haven't told many people yet because it's so early. I am only about four weeks gone so far, and so while it isn't a secret on the one hand, it seems early to be shouting from the rooftops - which I want to but also want to not tempt fate (as if that makes a difference).
If all goes well, you can expect a brother or sister around 10th November 2009. What do you think of that? Nothing right now I'd imagine, as we haven't even started to think of how and when we should broach this issue with you. I'm pretty sure that I don't have a massive readership, and so I think it's reasonable to not leave it out of the blog, but to anyone who finds out this way, don't be offended if we didn't tell you ourselves, it's a tricky thing, that's all :-D

Anyway, I'm doing ok so far (touch wood) - I'm not very sick at all - which kind of worries me! There's just no pleasing me really is there? With you, little Porgina, I was very sick from about 3 weeks until 16 weeks or so. I felt a bit sick last week but now I'm fine. I hope it's a good sign, maybe a sign that I'm carrying a brother for you. Not that I care what sex it is. But I know your daddy would love to have one of each, you see.

You are really cracking me up at the moment - we go searching for lions when we're out, and you seem half complicit with this play acting and half sucked into a world of ducking and hiding and being quiet in case of lions. You told me a story today about lions, eating chocolate pudding, chasing a busy bee, that landed on your nose, and then was hiding. Not the most cogent, linear tale I ever heard, but to me it was still the sweetest thing ever.

You are into cuddles at the moment and you seem to have worked out that cuddles are well received as you keep trying to gain possesssion of my wallet, keys and phone by asking to cuddle them. It's funny to watch until you realise that your credit cards have been strewn all over the house, your money is in the bin, your keys are nowhere in sight and your phone is not only gone but also off!

You have hooked on to concepts relating to possession. You label certain items (like my keys, phone and wallet) as 'Mine!' and you extort everyone to 'Share!'. This command is often shouted at someone who has something you want and is frequently followed by an attempt at snatching the object of your affections as quickly and as brutally as possible. The true meaning of share, then, elludes you for now.

You have started eating off big girl plates, using a spoon and a fork, feeding yourself with reasonable accuracy.

I love you Mink Face, please stop watcin Higgledey House!

Your Minkmama xxx

Mink Baby Month 19

2009-02-22T22:39:00.003Z

Dear Mink Baby,

Your post is late this month - we have become crazy busy - we got the gym at 9 in the morning every other day (well, you go the creche) and we go to a toddler group/mums meet up or Willows Farm etc on the other days. In the afternoons you go to your grandparents' and time is just flying by!

Mink Chatter

You are really starting to chat a lot and more and more of what you say is becoming intelligible :-D

In the mornings you wake up around 7 and we often try to get your to sleep a bit more by bringing you into our bed. Once there, you burrow down for and get comfy for approximately 3 seconds. Then the 'num-num' breakfast chant begins. We try to ignore you but it's hard to ignore a forceful dummy in the ear. You name our body parts, poke us and then finally you sigh, reach over, hand me my glasses, hold out your hand and say:

"Come on. Num num. This way. Daddy do it too."

and march me down to the kitchen.

You are very keen on getting everyone to join in. When you eat your dinner and we give you a bib, you say:

"Spencer bibby too. Mummy bibby too. Daddy bibby too."

and so there we sit, all wearing bibbies - I live in fear of going out the front door in a bibby and being none the wiser - it will happen, I'm sure.

Losing a Spencer and gaing a Spencer

Your favourite bear, Spencer, was lost for a whole afternoon which was a total nightmare. We did get him back eventually but I decided to buy a back up on ebay. When it arrived I was shocked at how much bigger and brighter it looked - just goes to show how loved Spencer One is - he's nearly worn away.

Eco Friendly Mink Baby

I think you are catching on to the fact that Mummy is learning about eco awareness etc. There are all sorts of eco gadgets that have been invented to help people save water. You have come up with your own way of making sure that our household saves water by limiting time spent in the shower. It's very effective. Basically Georgie will give you about two minutes to get wet, apply soap, scrub and then rinse before beginning to post Mr. Men books through the bottom of the shower door.

Chicken Pox

You seem to have chicken pox - it's been coming on all week and you started to get spotty on Saturday. I'll take you to the doctors' tomorrow and get that confirmed, but I'm dreading this week - you love to be out and about and it doesn't seem fair to keep you in on the one hand but nor does it seem fair to take you out and let you transmit chicken pox to all and sundry. I guess we'll be visiting our friends who have already had it, like Linda, Hollie and Dante and Jen, Fionn and Lottie. No creche this week. Darn it. Oh well, the sooner you get it over with the better. You seem ok in yourself. A bit weepy, and obviously a bit spotty. As long as you get your Calpol every four hours or so you seem fine.

Amy's Christening

Beccuase of the pox you missed Amy's christening today. There were many pictures taken so hopefully I'll be able to upload some soon. As usual I'm behing on photos but I will get there, I promise. It was a lovely morning, and I made my godmotherly vows without a problem. Church was a bit frosty but the choir and organist kept everyone amused with their attempts at harmony. Bless. Amy was very well behaved and didn't seem to object to the proceedings.

Well that's about it for now - I don't feel too well today so I hope you'll forgive this short post.

As ever I love you beyond words - truly, madly and deeply,

Your Minkmama xxx

Mink Baby Month 18

2009-01-02T17:01:00.014Z

Dearest Mink Face,

Happy New Year!

You have now reached the grand old age of 18 months - well done!

As predicted, Father Christmas brought us presents and, more importantly, Baby Wells, who turned out to be a little girl, called Jeanne Amy Georgina Wells - Amy for short.

Kerry and Amy

She was born on 15th December, 2009, after a really long labour that ended in c-section (where have we heard that before?) weighing 8lbs and 4 oz.

Kerry and Amy the day after

So I have a god daughter and you, little mink baby, have a god sister, if such a thing can be contrived - surely if Kerry is your god mother and I am Amy's then that's how it goes? Anyhoo...

Back to you, little Minka.

You still love babies and you quickly warmed to Amy (so far). You kissed her on the head, and said 'Baby Amy', but the glow came off that pretty fast when you then tried to show her [brain her with] the coal scuttle. I don't think it was meant as violence, but when it comes to babies, you shall be constantly monitored :-D

Tantrumtastic

You are still throwing tantrums, but I forgive you because you're only asserting yourself, and I must seem like a real meanie to you. You genuinely think that I'm spoiling your fun when I won't let you run into the road, absail down your high chair, stick your fingers down the dog's throat, stir my hot, black, steaming cup of coffee with your tiny little pinkies. You get very cross and high pitched. And I in turn lovingly ignore your thrashing limbs, your drumming on the floor and wait for you to realise that it's just not going to wash.

Growing Pains

You don't seem to be in any pain - I'm the one in pain - we've had to buy you a bunch of new shoes and boots as your stompers have gone from an toddler size 4G to a size 6G. One day your shoes fit, and then they didn't - simple as. I shouldn't be surprised and yet, I am. Go figure.

Independent Play

You continue to gain confidence in play areas and are now happy to wander off into soft ( and not so soft) play zones and explore, to heave yourself over obstacles, climb up and down padded (and not so padded) structures and slide down any slides that you happen to find along the way - whether large or small, offering descents that are very fast or painfully slow, right now the slide is the new swing!

Christmas

You have definitely gotten the hang of ripping of Christmas paper, which is as it should be. You loved Christmas decorations this year and shouted "Oh Wow!" every time you saw new displays - the lights in particular. Nanny and Grandad took you to a local popular Christmas Tree display, which you apparently loved (probably because it included one of your very favourite things - bubbles).

You got through Christmas day pretty well - Liz, Nanny and Grandad, Gran and Gramps came over in the morning. We left Nanny and Grandad at home and took Seska to the local woodland park, where you played football and on the swings and slide. We opened presents, waved Gran and Gramps off to the Shaws, had our lunch, sat around bloated and watched you trash the joint.

It was great!

One of the nicest things about this Christmas though, as I'm sure you'll agree, was having your daddy around for a week or so, with no work! What made this extra nice was your recent decision to lay in until 9 or 10 am every day. Mummy and Daddy approve.

There was a lot of dog walking and park visiting for the Harris family over the Christmas period, and musical watching - you love songs and music and discovered Mary Poppins, The Sword in the Stone, Fiddler on the Roof and many more.

You even survived a Harris family trip to Ikea! And from Ikea we got you your first duvet, pillow and duvet covers (with bubbles on). You seem to be getting the hang of sleeping under the covers but it'll take time I guess - don't get cold!

Chatterbox

You chatter a lot, mixing real and non real words into genuine sounding sentences.

You clearly understand most of what is said because you follow instructions (when you like the sound of them) flawlessly. This should help when we start the potty training again - which naughty mummy stopped some time ago because she's very lazy.

New Years Eve 2009

We had a BYOB (Bring Your Own Baby) Party on New Years Eve, pictures of which I will post when Tim The New Dad has time to make them available ;-D

You stayed up for a fair amount of time, and delighted in running around the knees of a bunch of adults who, for the most part, had much smaller babies and were totally amazed by your sheer size and activity. You giantess you!

You went to bed eventually though and let the mummys and daddies (and other more sensible adults) have some board game fun.

I just want you to know, little girl, that there is nothing I would rather be doing than being your mummy. It's not always easy, and I have a lot of help, which...erm...helps, but for every inconvenience, frustration and drudgery there genuinely exist many moments -whole days and weeks of enjoying you. When I catch myself longing for full time child care, so that I could work more on minkbaby.co.uk, I realise that I really wouldn't want that, and would only do it if it were absolutely necessary, and even then, with a heavy heart. So, as Al Green says, 'Let's Stay Together!" at least most of the time, until you go to nursery and then school.

(Ill pop some photos in later)

Love from your Mink Mama

xxx

Mink Baby Month 17, Illness, Squiggling &The NooNoo Design Company

2008-11-27T11:56:00.015Z

Dearest Mink Baby,

I am writing this now, just before you turn 17 months old, because I know I probably won't have time next week, and I don't want to run two months into each other again if I can help it.

Mink Baby Illness Again

Life continues to be very busy for us, although the last week has been slower and more difficult due to your catching a cold, which meant very little sleep for a while there and we broke a rule and let you into our bed. I was afraid that after a couple of night in our bed you would be resistant to your cot, but so far you have been very good at going back.

It's always sad to see you ill - especially now that you call for us in your misery as if wailing 'mummy' or 'daddy' will magically make all the pain and discomfort go away. I wish that it did. You have virtually stopped eating, which is making me nervous, but I do keep reminding myself that when you are hungry, you will eat.

I have had snatches of the beginnings of what you have (I think) but have successfully fought it off, having an older immune system than you do. I think you have a sore throat in addition to what the doctor called an 'upper respiratory infection', which doesn't need antibiotics but is probably responsible for your reluctance to consume anything other than milk, the occasional mouthful of my daily scrambled eggs, strawberry ambrosia custard (ick) and very soft weetabix. I know that your teeth also hurt because you told me so - how weird is that, actual verbal communication! To be fair you just hold your teeth and cry and say 'TEEEEEETH!", but this is progress - at least me know for sure that your teeth are causing you a problem. I think this guessing game is going to be over soon, but there will be further guessing games - especially during the teenage years, so I'm not going to get lulled into a false sense of security just yet...

MinkMama's Weight Loss Kick

As you know, Mink Baby, your Mink Mama is thinking about getting pregnant again but she also knows that at her present weight, that would be inadvisible and possibly difficult. So I joined WeightWatchers a couple of weeks ago and started going to the gym more regularly, which has actually been nice for us both - Georgie likes the creche and as long as I have my ipod, I quite enjoy the gym.

But at the moment I can't go the gym in the mornings, because the creche won't take you, and nor should they, in fact I am glad that they recently took a harder line on parents who attempt to put their obviously sick children into the creche - quite apart from the fact that this spreads infection to the baby room, (a baby with a cold is a horrible thing), it is mean to put a sick child into daycare of any kind, in my personal opinion, and should be avoided if it's only to have a work out.

We go to Weight Watchers meetings at the gym, which you come to and at which you run riot, constantly trying to escape. I don't blame you - so far the other people there seem a bit cliquey and hell bent on watching you (Georgie) run out the door they just opened rather than fetch you back or leave carefully.

Fun

Football continues to be a passion of yours and I am looking forward to being able to put you into a ball-sense class at Cannon's called 'GiggleBugs', which isn't free but which I am pretty sure you will love.

It's getting harder to go past a playground without the joyful cry of 'swings!' from you and, if we aren't going to the park, progressively more and more pitiful mewling noises, which are often followed by a complete melt down. Which is not given in to as a rule.

We do go places like Willows still, and of course the swings. You are more sure of yourself in these places, and gradually you are happy to explore more on your own, as long as when you look round you can see me, or whoever you are with.

You still love In the Night Garden but you are also interested in a programme that involves a character named Squiglet, called 'Get Squiggling'.

The business is going better now, we have a blog to which we are gradually adding content. If you do look at it now, please bear in mind that it is so far from finished that I almost shouldn't tell you to look there. I only do so because my readership is very tiny and so I should be safe for now.

I have ordered a lot of eco-friendly products for us to try and then to get other people to review as well.

Yes, we were all about baby shower before, but this emphasis has changed slightly for now. Now we are all about reviews. Check out the blog, particularly this post, which explains what we are about, and if it pleases you to do so, why not watch it grow. It's a slow process because Claire has a full time job and I have a full time Mink Baby, but we will get there.

Would you like some really nice free stuff? Some eco-friendly, ethical, energy-saving, oragnic and completely free stuff? Then read on...

People who provide good eco-reviews (i.e. they provide objective, detailed and interesting assessments of whatever we give them to try - they don't have to like the product, or even say they do,) will stand to get free eco-friendly products to keep - pregnancy pamper packs, eco-maternity clothes, baby related things like lovely organic baby toys, blankets, creams and other accessories as well as other eco-friendly products across the board - energy & water saving devices, cleaning products, beauty items and so on, so if anyone reading this should fancy getting some free stuff to try, they should get in touch now!

My first organic luxury baby gift order from TINK/The NooNoo Design Company should get in sometime tomorrow, first come first served! You don't have to have a baby to review this stuff - so if anyone reading this will have to buy a gift for a baby or toddler soon in the run up to Christmas, perhaps this could help them out and save them some pennies!

Don't worry, Mink Baby, if there are a couple of NooNoo products that you like, I'm sure I can put them by for you once they have been reviewed.

Baby Wells

You seem curious about Kerry's bump, my godson or daughter to be (I SO want to know right now which it is), and after we spent a good five minutes assuring you that there was a baby in Kerry's tummy, you were happy to confidently pat the bump and say 'baby'. The problem is now anyone with a less than flat stomach is liable to have you do the same thing to them. Either that or she now thinks that baby is also a word for stomach.

So that's it for now, small girl.

December will bring us Baby Wells, Father Christmas and all sorts of lovely things. We just have to wait for them now.

I love you, please get rid of that hacking cough.

Your Mink Mama xx

Mink Baby Month 15 and 16

2008-11-07T12:17:00.010Z

Yes, yes, I know - bad mummy. I missed a month. A lot of that was due to you keeping me even busier than usual - you have developed the terrible twos already. Although Linda reliably informs me that it's not called the terrible twos because it starts when you're two but rather because once it starts, it goes on for two years. Something to look forward to then! At least this way there's an end in sight.

Words

You have been learning and using more words - animal sounds are a favourite and we now have, in addition to woof, there's meow, baaa, neigh, grunt, moo and ooo-ooo-ooo (monkey). You are no longer afraid of the mooing cows at Willows Farm and simply fix them with a stare and moo back at them - that'll show em!

You say 'up' when you want to go up, whether upstairs, up onto something or into someone's arms, and likewise 'down' when you wish to get down out of your high chair, off something high or out of someone's arms.

When you make a mistake, drop something or something happens that you don't like, you shout:
'Oh no!' or 'Oh dear!' in a pleasingly melodramatic fashion.

You have added 'Mummy', 'Nanna' and 'Izz' to your family list of one ('Daddy') and you have made sounds that resemble Gra, when looking at Grandad, Gramps and Gran, so it won't be long until you have most of our names figured out.

There has been a work man overhauling the exterior of next door for some time now. I used to call him your 'Hiya' man, because you are always all smiles (flirt!) and greetings when you see him. Now whenever you hear him working outside with various power tools etc. you fix me with a knowing look and announces, 'Man!', as if man were indeed your own private discovery.

Man is not a title reserved only for the hiya man however, as you have noticed and pointed out many other men. You also still likes to point at children of a similar or younger age to yourself and proclaim, 'baby!'.

You name your favourite 'In the Night Garden' characters 'UppyDaisy' (Upsy Daisy)

and 'Piggle' (Igglepiggle) and you are still entranced by the programme itself.

Activities and General Naughtiness

You keep turning the TV on and off, and you keep starting the dishwasher and washing machine, which is very naughty.

You also say no! naughty! and hot! which does often describe your transgression fairly well.

Football

You appear to be in love with playing football and run around the kitchen with me, kicking a light football around, screeching with pleasure, doing a little bizzare goosestep-run as you try to combine your comical running with continuous kicking action. You very often fall over, as balance is not currently your forte, but you are getting much better at it, despite your continual hand-ball offences. Sometims you stop play to have a rest, at which time you carefull lower yourself onto the ball, sitting on it, out of breath, beady eye on me, in case I take it into my head to try to spirit the ball way. As if I would.

Cleaning (yes, cleaning!)

I don't know why but yes, this child enjoys mopping, floor scrubbing and general surface wiping. She's not picky - when she can't get into the cloth cupboard she improvises with bibs, socks, toys and all sorts - when a baby has to clean, she has to clean, it would appear. Either that or Kerry's gotten to her while baby sitting (yes, Kerry cleans when she baby sits, which is why if she wasn't pregnant, we would ask her to babysit every day! :-D)

Dancing and Singing

The dancing has been around for a while but you do love a bit of Dizzy Rascal, The Ting Tings and other stuff. Nursery rhymes have always been a favourite but you have recently started pulling things together. You know that sheep go 'baa' and you can say 'yes' which means that 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' is a hot favourite, which you enjoy singing along with. More cannot be far away...

Books

Your love affair with books continues, both in terms of looking, identifying pictures and chewing on the card board. You have a Paddington teaches colours book which you particularly love - I'm really surprised you haven't ripped it yet as it isn't a board book. Nice going Mink Face :-D

Temper Temper!

You have developed a serious temper tantrum, which non-plussed me intially when it was bed-time related, as you have usually been a pretty good sleeper. You screamed like you were being vivisected. So no, not a nice sound. Your tore at your hair, banged your head on the cot and generally became inconsolable, whenever you were put in your cot.

Having ascertained that you are not ill, I consulted the Baby Whisperer book and decided that your tantrums will not be tolerated. It took a couple of one and two hour sessions of just keep putting you back in the cot, but no more than that, for now anyway. I'm sure you'll have another go as life goes on, but much as I love you, you are not the boss of me and so there are a few things you will have to lump. Your cot when you're tired is one of those things. Tempting and lovely as it would be to snuggle up with you in our bed, it would be good for no one in the long run.

The internet informs me that this kind of behaviour is normal for your age (16 months) and that it results from a combination of increased awareness of yourself as being a separate entity from me and Steve, of your surroundings etc., which can be scary and can also result in toddler nightmares, which can't be nice for you. Teething is also blamed as a contrubuting factor - you are producing teeth very quickly now - all I need you to do is let me brush them properly - that is another battle that I am winning only by minute increments. Lucky for you that I persist, or you'll be back to no teeth in a flash!

Where are the pictures?

I have taken some pictures of you lately - for example you made a very cross, odd but extremely cute witch on the playgroup's Halloween party, which I'll post soon.

It's just hard to take your picture now that you run around so much. You don't seem to understand the need to stand still - you are too busy running forward to examine and destroy the camera - it will be easier when you're older and hopefully vain enough to pose, or at the least be less move-y.

Who we have seen

We have spent some time with Linda, Hollie and Dante, Cirla and Skye, we have met up with Jen, Fionn and Lottie and I have spent some time with Leah, Oliver and their tiny twins, Ellie and Gil, some of the NCT Antenatal group and last but not least, Kerry, who finally goes on maternity leave today, I think.

I lifted a couple of photos of Oliver and Leah's twins off their Facebook Profiles for anyone who is not able to access that to see these tiny lovelies, who are now out of hospital and doing really well. (These are hopsital pics though)

How beautiful are these babies!? (Answer: really really goddamn beautiful!)

October also saw a lot of family birthdays - Gramps, Emma (Shaw) and me (31). Your auntie Liz, (or 'Izz' as you call her), took you for the night so that we could stay over at St Michael's Manor, after having a lovely meal there and drinks at the Black Lion with friends. We spent my actual birthday mainly shopping for/with mum at the big M&S in Colney Fields in scary Trinny & Susannah stylie - it was lots of fun and mum spent a fortune! (Poor Dad!)

Even though you are becoming more of a challenge, I continue to love spending time with you - there's a lot to be said for you're maturing communication skills and I have found that you understand a lot more than I initially thought you would. I scoffed a bit at my book when it said that instead of just shouting or saying 'No', that it would be more effective to get some eye contact, get down on your level and say something mushy like "I can see that you're upset. It's not ok to hit, it hurts mummy" but when I tried it (after first making sure no one was watching) I found that while it doesn't have a 100% success rate, your immediate reoffending rate is cut from 100% to about 20%, which is progress.

You totally rock, I love you very much and I can't wait to see what being sixteen months has in store for us :-D

Love from your Mink Mama xxx

Pictures of Kerry's Baby Shower, Oct 5th 2008

2008-10-12T22:15:00.012+01:00

Kerry Wells' Baby Shower

The mother-to-be herself, looking round and fabulous!

Fiona, unperturbed by two long nights of paryting, prepares for more of the same

There were many balloons of this ilk

Much bunting, many flowers and all sorts of lovely things to eat!

We had an obligatory stork

And I mentioned the many good things to eat, didn't I?

All sorts of well-wishing friends

AND THEN THERE WERE GAMES.....

The Nappy Game

7 mystery food stuffs masquerading as baby poop.

The task?

To correctly identify all seven.

We had 4 winners, so Kerry picked one out of a hat.

I can't remember who won - I think it was Sarah?

Sarah bravely tastes the poop

My mum looks less enthused - flash backs to changing Georgie's nappy, I should imagine?

Lucy gets her nose into it

As does Natalie

Then there were presents!

And another game!

Feed the baby!

A bit like "Blind Man's Buff", the object of this game was to take a baby bottle sticker with you name on it, and try to stick it in the baby's mouth.

Not so hard, unless you've been blindfolded, spun around 3 times and left to find your mark.

I think Liz won this one?

Marguerite attempts to send me in the right direction!

Kerry cuts her cake

Many of the guests had gone by the time we played

"Guess the girth"

But play it we did, and left for the pub still wearing our guesses.

Kerry's girth was 42"

And I think Val won the prize!

Now all we have to do is wait for the baby...

Mink Baby's Month 14

2008-09-13T21:55:00.006+01:00

Hiya Mink Baby,

Sorry it's taken me so long to post - we have been busy, busy busy but I finally made the time!

Talking

You have been talking a lot more - you have added the word 'baby' to your vocubulary and point at them (even those babies who are technically older than you!).

You also like to greet people, 'Hiya!' whenever you see them (whether you know them or not) and you look so sad when someone doesn't answer you (who wouldn't say hi to a baby? Surprisingly, quite a lot of people! Bastards!) you look up at me with a really sad face. Luckily there are some people who are happy to stop and chat to you, or at least smile and wave.

You 'woof' at dogs, you 'grunt' at pigs, you call me 'Mama' and yes, your most oft-repeated word is 'Daddy'!

What really freaked me out recently, though, was when you started using the word 'Yes.'

I am so used to running what it essentially a monologue with you, that when I asked you, "Do you want a drink of water?" and you said, quite clearly and emphatically, "Yes!" I was so taken aback that I just stopped what I was doing, stared at you and felt the need to ask you again. And I got the same answer. So of course you got your drink. And oodles of praise! You don't always answer with a 'Yes' but you do it enough for me not to think that it's merely a coincidence.

Toilet Training

We have also been toilet training with good results. You can't tell me when you need to go, but by following the baby whisperer's book, which has NEVER let us down to date, we are getting reasonably good at knowing when to put you on the toilet, and the result is wees and poos on the loo! Now don't get me wrong, we aren't putting you in little baby underwear - you still wear those nappies, and if we miss the wee wee or poo poo window, it's no problem at all. You know where it goes, and we pop it into the loo (or in the case of wee, we pretend) and then we tell it 'bye bye!' and you flush the loo. You particularly enjoy that part!

We are certainly not expecting you to be in full control of your bladder and bowels any time soon but you seem very happy to go on the toilet and I hope that it will hasten the advent of underwear and cut down the time spent in nappies, which can only be a good thing for all of us.

Well done, Minka!

Pictures

I do have some pictures to upload to this post, but I can't do anything about that now - they will come!

The business

Business-wise, we are stuck waiting for quotes on some much-needed web development but otherwise we are in good shape, preparation-wise. I have taken a part time evening job to earn money to put towards future costs (legal, accountancy etc.) so that's all good.

Radical Dietry Step

Me-wise, I have taken a rather radical step - one which I hope to keep to but then knowing my track record in this area, I must confess I can't tell if it will stick - I have given up sugar, wheat and flour. I'm not going to make you do this - you're a baby and you don't get a lot of sugar as it is. Hopefully I can teach you to manage your diet more effectively than I ever managed my own, so you won't need to do it :-D

I have been thinking about doing this for a while. I know very well that I am addicted to sugar and it has always been a puzzle to me what to do about that, because sugar exists in one form or another in almost every food you eat. If you're a more traditional kind of junkie (drugs and alcohol, for example,) at least you don't need to ingest a little bit of herion/aclcohol in order to live. Food is necessary for life. What to do?

Luckily it's not all bad - naturally occuring sugar is allowed (fruit is fine, for example).

I had been warned by the internet and people I know who have done it, that I would experience fierce withdrawal symptoms and find it very very hard from the get go. I am wondering what I have done wrong as I am just finishing off day 3 and I feel fine. I'm keeping caffeine, for now at least, and I'm keeping dairy too.

What's odd, though, is the fact that so far I have found it pretty easy to eschew things that I would usually see as essential - a Weetabix devotee, I am perfectly happy to eat porrdige or an omlette. I still have coffee, which is very important to me. I eat a lot of fruit, I have eaten a few jacket potatos, lots of vegetables and some lovely chilliconcarne, courtesy of my lovely husband. Never before has something I figured would be a privation been so easy to stick to (so far) and been so pain-free (again, I say, "so far!") Fab! I wonder if it's because in the past, when I have given up sugar alone, all the hidden sugar in say, bread, has kept feeding the addiction? That might explain it, I really don't know. I sat through a very lovely picnic at Willows Farm today with our AnteNatal group, and while I admit that I did look longingly at cake and biscuits etc., I was nowhere near crumbling. Ok, actually that's not true, there was one moment when you tried to feed me a sausage roll, that I nearly broke down and ate it - it was so close I could smell it, but I didn't do it, and I'm glad! :-D

I anticipate that as people become aware of this dietry change of mine, I will take quite a lot of stick, but I don't think that I will care too much. I'm my reasons for doing it have merit and while I'm happy to discuss those merits (or not), I'm sure enough that it is worth a trial period at least, and so the opinions of others, while interesting and always welcome, don't really matter enough to get worked up about. If it does turn out to work for me, good! If not, well, nevermind. I imagine that I will eventually lose weight doing this but that isn't my main reason for doing it - I am just sick of letting so many substances (especially pernicious ones like sugar and it's friends) run my emotions, and depending on what are essentially 'fixes' to get me through the day. So let's see how it goes. I may fall of the wagon tomorrow, but I really hope not :-D

Exploding Table!

Yes, it really did! Our glass-topped table exploded all over the house (from kitchen to hall) and all over you! Luckily you got away with one tiny tiny cut, but you bawled a LOT - and who could blame you! Note to self, avoid glass furniture from now on - kind of obvious now, but there we are. The kitchen table is dead, long live the dining room table!

I'm really tired, we just spent ages assembling and pricing stuff to carboot at Redbourn tomorrow, so I'm not really able to write about all this as much as I would like to. I will though.

For now, it's nighty night Mink Faced Baby, I love you much :-D

Love from your Mink Mama
xxx

Those Wendy House Pictures I Promised To Upload (weeks ago!)

2008-09-01T21:01:00.004+01:00

MinkBaby Ltd - progress update

2008-08-20T19:37:00.006+01:00

Hi Minka,

You are singing over the baby monitor - it's way past your bedtime!

I thought I had better pop in to update the blog on what we've been up to recently.

Steve is still in France and has caught some big fish, apparently, and has taken the photos to prove it.

You and I, little baby, have been blown around the local parks, in warm but rainy whether and gusty conditions. It's very autumnal at the moment, which seems odd for August, but good - Autumn and Spring are my favourite times of year. I always find that they both have their own particular and evocative smells - Autumn is crisp, leafy, and back-to-school-ish. Spring is light, warm, fragrant and end-of-year-exams-are-a-coming-ey.

We have met up with Linda, Hollie and Dante, we have been to baby rhyming, we have been to Morrisons (ugh! how I hate Morrissons) and of course we have spent time with Nanny, Grandad, Gran and Gramps.

You had your haircut by Angela, which was good because you were starting to look a bit shaggy.

Work-wise I have been taking general business advice today, as well as legal and accounting advice.

I have been advised not to talk too much about what we are doing, for now, hence the lack of explanation. If it works, it will be excellent. If it doesn't, we won't have lost too much money, just some time.

I have started applying for temp and part time evening jobs, so that I can fund the expenses of legal, accouting and other general company expenses. That way I can still work on the business when Georgie is with her grandparents, and not miss out on spending time with her when she's with me. That's the plan, anyway :-D

Someone asked me why I quit my recruiting job if I was just going to go back and get another job anyway. The thing is, I was starting to really lose interest in recruitment. It is possible that taking up the offer of being a full recruitment consultant would have rejuvinated my interest - I had definitely had my fill of being a researcher and I think by that point, Clair, (different from Claire,) my consultant had had her fill of me being her reasercher (!) What I am looking for is a job less demanding that can just be a job, that I do well and then go home and don't think about. Recruitment isn't that. Hence my choice to temp :-D

Also I don't want to have to borrow money from banks or on credit cards - therein lies badness.
So I'll do it the old fashioned way - work!

But ultimately, things are going well - I think.

Night night mink face

xxx

Mink Baby's Busy Day

2008-08-16T21:50:00.003+01:00

Well Mink Face,

It has been a very busy day!

You ran around the house like the little nutter you are and then, pooped, you slept for a good two and a half hours! While you were asleep, our friend Ross brought over a wendy house for you and assembled it in the garden (thanks again, Ross!) You were enthralled! You went in and out, you opened the little door and you shut it again, over and over and when you discovered the shutters on the windows, you opened and shut them too, sticking your head right out and grinning madly.

Daddy sent us a text from his fishing holiday in France to say he has already caught a massive fish - the question is, has he peeked too soon? (Or piqued? Neither word seems quite right, but hey).

You ate all your lunch (fish fingers, grated cheese, peas and broccoli is, it would seem, going to be a firm favourite) and manged to get some of the yoghurt that you fed yourself with a spoon, into your mouth!

Then you, me and Seska headed over to Thomas's mum's house where the afternoon of garden games was had. You were a bit shy at first but soon shook that off. You seemed to enjoy the garden, managed to find a cuddly toy to play with and swung on their swing - an adult swing, with no bars, no less, and didn't fall off at all! I was very impressed, once I got over my initial anxiety. Of course Seska enjoyed herself a lot too - there was a great big garden to sniff, tennis balls to chase and obliging people to throw them (and a frisbee) all over the garden for her.

We got home towards the end of the afternoon, and although you were tired, you wouldn't sleep until it was almost time for dinner. I let you sleep for an hour, fed you dinner and then spent much of the evening listening to you cry and sing - you were really excited and couldn't go back to sleep. It's about ten pm now and you have been quiet for about twenty minutes, so I hope that's it for tonight. Please sleep in a bit tomorrow and please don't wake up at four am and sing until six like last night. Please! Because I'm on my own and I need to sleep :-D

Tomorrow we are going to Nanny and Grandad's for coffee in the morning and staying for lunch. We'll take Seska again, I think, which should wear her out a bit (I hope).

I'll post the pictures of the much-loved wendy house later.

Now I'm off to bed, to get some sleep while I can :-D

I miss your Daddy more than I thought I would, but I have you for company, so it's not all bad :-D

Nighty night mink baby,

Love from your Mink Mama

My 100th Mink Post - Motherhood - it gets better all the time!

2008-08-09T08:11:00.008+01:00

(image borrowed from here)

Hi little Mink Face,

Let's be honest, you probably don't care that this is my 100th post to your blog. Actually I know you don't care because you are sitting next to me, in your highchair, eating fruit (and putting it up your nose) and talking nonsense to "small dog" (one of your many stuffed toys).

Anyway, I was catching up with my (2nd) favourite blog, Dooce.com, where Heather was talking about her feelings about motherhood and how that have changed over the last four years.

In particular she was thinking about how it took her a little while to experience the much-talked about joys of being a mum.

I always suspected that such feelings are more common than many people would like to admit (yes I know I have mentioned it before.) A few days at least after Georgie was born, I definitely wasn't feeling all that overwhelming love that I had been encouraged to expect. Anxiety about her well-being, yes. Immediate bone? Nope. And although I knew it would probably come, it was a struggle not to feel inadequate while waiting for it to arrive. Particularly with all that crying and pooping that was going on in the foreground.

Heather (who writes Dooce,) had this to say:

"Maybe it's because I've been going through collections of old photos from the first years of her life, or perhaps it's because the anniversary of my stay in a mental hospital is this month, but this morning I felt like I needed to say something to someone out there who may need to hear this right now like I did so badly back then: it gets so much better.

In fact, better is not even a word that can do it justice. There are very simple times that I'm with her, when I'm brushing her hair or watching her read herself a book on her bed, when the feeling that comes over me is not unlike how it was when I was a kid walking through the gates at an amusement park knowing that I was going to have the most awesome, most memorable day. And it's not the feeling of riding the roller coaster or being allowed to eat an entire bag of cotton candy, it's the feeling before all that. It's the excitement, the anticipation, the general sense of being in one of my favorite places.

When Leta was born I thought I would automatically feel this way, and many women do. But I did not. And I did not know if I would ever get here. So many women reached out to me to let me know they had gone through the same crisis and came out the other side, and it was the hope they gave me that pulled me through. If you happen to be in that place right now, I want you to know that it gets so much better. And one day you're going to be having a complex conversation with that baby who is screaming her head off right now, and you're going to go, holy shit, I made it. You will make it."

For the rest of the post go here

People do seem to assume that all pregnant women and new mums are, or at least should be, breathless with excitement and bubbling over with maternal love. They say things like:

"You must be so excited!"

I must confess that I was excited when I was pregnant, but why must one be?

Such people tend to balk when they meet someone who is not really like that (although not many are brave enough to own up to such feelings - in fact I hope she won't mind my mentioning her, but Kerry is the only person I have met who makes no bones about her discomfort with the idea of being a mother, and I admire that.

So, in Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn't help but wonder: Are these more circumspect women nuts or do they merely acknowledge certain hard truths about the reality of being a mother that most of us would rather ignore?

Walking into motherhood with your eyes wide open may not be a comfortable or socially well-received practice, but it just might take the edge off when the baby pops out.

And on the up side of cynical pregnancy/motherhood, being prepared for the worst certainly leaves lots of room to be pleasantly surprised. That's definitely where some of my guarded cynicism helped me out. Beacuse pleasantly surprised is what I was! And I still am, all the time :-D

By the way, before I go, we have at least thirty entires for our logo competition - please people, take a look and leave (constructive) comments here (click on comment to leave a comment!)

Love from your Mink Mama

Posting problems

2008-08-06T20:52:00.002+01:00

Kerry's baby doesn't want me to post about it - every time I try something goes wrong with my blog. But the screaming avocado won't win. I will do it. In the scan, it looked like it was silently screaming and now I know what it was saying!

"Blog about me and I'll mess with your html, you *****!"

I'll get you, Baby Wells, just you wait!

If you want to see the picture of Kerry and Tim's baby at 22 weeks, go here and then scroll down a bit.

2008-08-06T20:49:00.002+01:00

Baby Wells, 22 weeks - the silently screaming avocado

To My Mink Baby - Month 13

2008-08-03T21:36:00.018+01:00

Climb every mountain (or in this case, slide)

Well little Mink Baby,

We have certainly been very busy this weekend!

I took a train to Brighton to visit Claire and Lois and had a lovely time with them. Claire and I managed to do a lot of brainstorming and got our website mapped out - on their coffee table, of all places (but it's a start!)

Can you tell what it is yet?

We rented a dvd on Friday night but only got about half way through it because we ended up having long, deep and meaningful discussions about life and love and then I started falling asleep.

Uma - the size of a cat, the shape of a dog with the soul of a person

The next day we manged to do some work and then, having established that there was little else we could achieve together (Claire is going to upload the layout onto the website so that we have the bare bones in place and I am going to make more lists and keep totting up the start up costs etc.)

It was gay pride in Brighton, but we managed to avoid all that, not that we wished to disparage those who were celebrating their pride but rather that the three of us have seen enough gay and lesbian partying to last us a life time and we didn't feel the need to participate. We are nevertheless very proud in our own respective, and comparatively quiet ways!

Then we went out to return some of Claire's female fish (too many babies), to test the quality of her water (her tank water) and to have a coffee.

After that we took a walk along the front, had a very windy coffee by the sea before I decided that actually, given the state of the trains and all the engineering works that happen on the line between St Albans and Brighton, I would be better off going home that evening instead of at the butt crack of dawn the next day. I had to be back in time for Steve, Georgie and I to go to Hollie's 2nd birthday party today, you see.

And today we attended the aforementioned and sadly rainy party which, despite the persistent precipitation, offered excellent bbq fare, a bouncy castle, and all sorts of other children for Georgie to meet and play with, so it all turned out well in the end. Happy Birthday Hollie!

A lady like pose on her first bouncy castle

The balloon/cupcake scuffle - don't be fooled, it was brutal...

Giles (14 months) and Georgie (13 months) share a love of yellow balloons

This wendy house may no walls but hey, the door opens and closes, so I'm definitely interested

Singing Happy Birthday to Hollie

Hollie blowing out her candles

Mink baby, you are changing even more rapidly than before. You are learning to say "please" as well as "ta"; you say "yes" and you are clearly frustrated with the inability of your little mouth to keep up with your head.

You trot around quite fast now - you can beat Nanny in a race and frequently do, so it's up to Grandad to stop you playing in the cat litter and throwing yourself down the steps of their back door (good luck, Grandad!)

You have started climbing up on the sofa where I'm lying and throwing yourself into my arms, patting me & stroking me and saying "aaaaah", which is the pinnacle of lovely, as far as I'm concerned. Of course the effect is mildly diminished by your tendency to kick me on the ribs as you dismount, but I'll let it go.

It's been a productive and fun weekend and I am enjoying seeing everything gradually come together. I am looking forward to doing more this week and on that note, I'm off to bed shortly.

Night night Minka,

Love from your Mink Mama

xxx

PS - your baby toilet seats arrived while I was away - soon the toilet training will begin! ;-D

The Power of Advertising and Toilet Training

2008-07-31T23:05:00.005+01:00

Well little Mink Face,

It's true that these are not concepts that one generally finds lumped together, but hey.

Today I have been thinking about adverts. We will need all kinds of marketing and advertising for this new babyshower business, and it doesn't come cheap - online, print ads in relevant publications, listings in directories, paper advertisements to distribute, business cards etc. - all ideally as environmentally friendly as possible. I have been gathering information and making inquiries all day.

I spoke to an enterprising mum who I found on the Internet, who may be able to supply us with plantable business cards (compostable paper imprinted with wild flower seeds), which sounds fab but may turn out to be prohibitively expensive, we'll have to see... She can also get us plantable wrapping paper, gift tags and a few other things, which would be great as long as they also represent good value. I also need to find out what the recycled paper people can offer, and much as I love plantable paper, I may have to go with recycled for now. I do aspire to the plantable version though because it's much prettier.

Today made me think about advertising in general and I realised that I hardly ever watch adverts anymore. I think this must be a growing trend with the advent of Sky Plus and other similar devices. How did I ever get along without it? If I'm watching live TV ( a rare occurence these days) and the ads come on, I just press pause, go do something else and then come back when ten minutes have elapsed, fast forward through the adverts and continue watching whatever I was watching before they intruded.

This has meant that I now miss out the few good adverts that are out there, but it must have lowered my blood pressure and freed up a lot of my time. I watch less TV, it doesn't take as long and I can't watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it. Perfect.

I wonder if it has changed the face of TV advertising at all?

I enjoy a good advert but sadly most of them really aren't that good. I've no doubt that many of them are effective, even the ones I hate but I do like to see something clever and funny. Don't we all. So it was with great interest that I went along to a focus group for Cadbury's new cake bites to give my input (along with seven other women) into two of their proposed TV and printed advertising campaigns.

A lot of companys are jumping on the band wagon of the enormously successful Marks and Spencer mini cakes, sold in tubs, often 3 for £5. We all agreed in our group that the ad campagins that were shown to us weren't terribly good. The first was basically a rip off of the WKD ads with a "you've been tango-ed" twist - a kind of YouTube vibe except it wasn't carried off very well.

The second was a bit better concept-wise but it kind of fizzled out with a lame by-line.

What interested me though was the fact the despite the fact that no one really liked the ad campaigns we were shown (and to be fair, they are all on the drawing board at this point and so may never see the light of day), everyone said that how ever good or bad the eventual ads were, chances are that they would buy and try the new mini cakes anyway, because they like Cadburys. It must be nice to have such a well-established brand. I'm not sure we'll get quite that much customer confidence (well, not over night anyway) but it does show what can be achieved when you do get it right - and they have gotten it right a lot in the past - the iconic flake ad, the cadbury's creme egg ads, the cadbury's caramel ads and , more recently, the drum kit gorrilla. So chances are they will put their focus groups' input to good use and come up with something better.

In the mean time, I am left to see what my options are for advertising. I'm writing a list and will shortly be checking in twice ( an no, I don't mind who's naught or nice.)

I also found a great eco-nappy cake line of products (made by another enterprising mum) and hope that the business in question will be happy to sell to me wholesale - really nice products. I haven't heard from her yet.

In addition I found some very cool baby gros (made by yet another enterprising mum), and we are trying to work out a good order size that covers their print run costs and doesn't break my bank. We'll get there in the end.

It's amazing how many of my potential suppliers are enterprising mums - there seem to be a lot of us out there (if it's not too immodest and ambitious of me to count myself among them.)

I'll tell you something though - I have only been doing this in earnest for about ten days and I have never a) been so happy at work and (b) worked so damn hard! I just hope I can make it work!

The size of my to-do list is getting much bigger but I think that by the end of next week I should be able to present my investors with a list of necessary start up costs and a final figure.

I have a web mapping weekend ahead of me in Brighton with Claire, SEO and social media strategist extrordinaire. She's been taking web design lessons so hopefully we can hammer something out. Apparently this mapping process will be gruelling and awful. So obviously I'm really looking forward to that!

Steve is holding down the baby-fort this weekend (along with our respective parents) and so I can attempt to enjoy some me-time (when I'm not mapping - so that'll be about five minutes by the sounds of it!) So she is all taken care of until I get back and continue taking care.

Ah, the baby. How I love that baby. Which brings me nicely to my second subject - Toilet Training. we have been talking about it (Steve and I) and according to the book we have been using as a reference guide to raising a baby/toddler, (the fabulous Baby Whisperer) it may be time to start introducing you, little girl, to the concept of the toilet.

It's true that current trends seem to go with child-led everything - weaning, toilet-training etc. but I tend to agree with the Baby Whisperer when she points out that it may be better to get this concept going before the age of assertive independence and tantrums sets in. So I have ordered some little toilet seats that fit onto our loos and will begin to make the necessary preparations to introduce the idea to you. (According to the Baby Whisperer, using a potty just gives you another stage to get into and then out of again, so we are going to see if we can get along without them - good luck us!)

Don't get me wrong, we aren't aiming for you to be totally continent right away (if you can be incontinent, you can be continent, right?), but there can be no harm in getting started while you're a little bit malleable. We'll see how it goes.

Whenever we do it, it's going to be messy and difficult and I'd rather do it now, when I'm not pregnant! In fact it would be great if you were totally toilet trained by the time I get around to being pregnant again (assuming that it happens eventually when I even let myself think about it!) Thirty years ago (and more) children were toilet trained a lot earlier - maybe because the nappyies didn't keep you quite so dry.

Well anyway, it's definitely past my bedtime.

Good night mink baby,

xxx

Mamapalooza.co.uk - there may be hope yet

2008-07-29T13:52:00.006+01:00

I can't say too much at the moment and I am not jumping to conclusions but there may yet be some hope for mamapalooza.co.uk! In fact I won't say too much more right now but potential suggestions have been made to me by the owner of the Mamapalooza trademark - whatever happens, do go look at the existing mamapalooza site.

Their ethos seems very much along the same lines as what we have planned for our own company, albeit with a wider focus. They are US-based but are open to expanding their brand and so if we did manage to come to an agreement (and we may not) then so much the better.

If you are interested why not have a look at their mission statement - hopefully you will agree that if it did work out, it could definitely be a mutually beneficial arrangement.

But I'm not getting carried away. If we have to find a new name, then a new name we shall find. Ultimately, what ever we are called, our own mission remains the same - celebrate pregancy and baby showers and create an online community that supports mothers in as many ways as possible.

The Mink Baby is asleep after a long and napless morning. We went to the central library, where Baby Rhyme Time happens every Tuesday morning - it's so popular that they have to have two sessions and even those are packed out! Georgie had a lovely time singing and jumping around and she was very curious about all the very little, new babies.

There we met up with Emma and Thomas (who has just learned to crawl) at the session and went for a coffee and a catch up. It has been difficult to keep up with my NCT antenatal group as I went back to work so early and now many of the other mums are working part time too, but we are sticking at it and we manage a few nights out or park sessions when we can.

We got home from town to find that I had managed to lock myself out of the house - pregnancy has clearly demolished some parts of my brain for good - Sunday I drove off with the Times on Sunday papers on my roof and someone had to run after me before they blew away; yesterday I left my changing bag in the car park and today I lock myself out of the house and had to get my Dad round to let me in! God only knows what harebrained thing I'll do tomorrow!

Nevermind. I'm going to get my daily Judging Amy fix while she's still asleep (the baby, not Amy) and then perhaps we'll go the gym and see what I can leave there today!

Sleep little Mink Baby, while you can...

Love from your Mink Mama

xxx

PS Here are some pictures of our subsequent trip to Georgie's favourite palce - the park!

A Busy, Hot Day for the Mink Baby!

2008-07-28T19:32:00.003+01:00

Well little Mink Baby, I can hear from your singing over the baby monitor that you aren't asleep yet but you should be, it's been a busy day!

You spent an hour in the creche at Cannon's while Sam and I went for a run on the treadmills, then we whizzed home (and then back again because I left the changing bag in the car park), then (after I took a shower) we went off to pick up Linda, Hollie and Dante to go to Willows Farm.

We used some of the money you were given for your birthday to buy an annual pass (so we'll be seeing a lot more of Willows Farm over the next year!).

Woolly Jumpers (the soft play area) was suprisingly empty - surprising that is until we had been in there two minutes - it was hotter than hell in there! No air conditioning that I could detect. So after we had lunch we headed out into the fresh air and bright sunshine to the outdoor attractions - you are pretty good at helping me apply sunscreen but your sun hat tolerance is way too low.

Linda kindly gave you the next size up from Hollie's old mocassin socks (or socassins, as I like to call them) so that you could run around outside. I have been bidding on crocs on ebay but so far I haven't won any (well, unless you count the pair that I paid for and never arrived - I'm sure PayPal and ebay will get back to my re my complaint ONE DAY)

You and Hollie played on the tractors and Linda and I stayed in the shade with baby Dante, who spent a good hour personifying the word 'adorable'.

Then we went for ice lollies (you had an orange Calippo which I, stupidly, let you hold. Two seconds later in was in the dirt. Predictable much?!

Calippo mark 2 was fed to you, piece-meal, by me and seemed to go down very well indeed!

By about 3:30 we were all hot and knackered so we drove the Headings home and you went for a little nap before dinner.

You devoured your dinner, had a play in the garden and now you're seranading me over the baby monitor.

Tomorrow it's Nanny and Grandad's turn to be amused by you and my turn to get some real work done, hurrah!

Paolo emailed to ask if he can stay here for a night when he arrives from Italy in September - naturally I said Yes, so soon you can meet the infamous Uncle Paolo.

I love you Mink Baby,

Your Mink Mama

xxx

Houston, we have a problem!

2008-07-27T23:30:00.005+01:00

Oh dear, Mink Baby!

It turns out that mamapalooza is a reigstered trademark of another company, in the US, who won't countenance us registering anything similar and have already fought off a number of people who have already tried.

They were really nice about it but pretty firm.

It's good to find it out now, before literature was printed and websites were launched but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't gutted.

I am glad that I suddenly thought to check registered trademarks though! I had thought that by checking the register at companies house and making sure I had the domain name that I wanted that I had covered all my bases.

When I found that this company had bothered to register it's trademark in the US, UK and Australia I had a sudden sense of forboding.

Let that be a lesson to me!

Nevermind.

It's time to think of a new name and to chalk poor old http://www.mamapalooza.co.uk/ up to experience.

Damn! I do LOVE that name!

Boo hoo!

Aside from that, everything is going really well though, so I'm not going to let it get me down.

A good name is out there. I just have to find it! Maybe I should just run with MinkBaby...

xxx

Melting, Melting!

2008-07-26T23:44:00.004+01:00

Chocolate ice cream in Clarence Park, mmmmmm.....

It's so hot and sticky - yuck. Only the mink baby can be cheerful in this weather, and that is what you are - relentlessly cheerful (unless I prevent you from grilling your hands, throwing yourself off the sofa lemming-stylie, whacking your head off your shoulders on the underside of the table etc. and then your head spins around 360 degrees and you scream the place down.)

So apart from having your frequent, toddler suicide bids thwarted, you are extremely pleased with yourself.

You are particulary enamoured of swings and slides. These are a recent addition to our daily routine but as soon as you see a park you start to chuckle and point. Sometimes you are so excited on the approach to the park that you keep falling down and must be carried in.

(Bit like Daddy and golf courses really...)

But I am about as happy as I have ever been right now. Yes, I am still enjoying being my own boss, even though I am still not yet making any money. It's all going very well so far. Hurrah for mamapalooza.co.uk - in a month we might even have a website!

Night night mink baby,

xxx

Happy Birthday Georgie Video

2008-07-25T18:43:00.003+01:00

In order to get this video the right way up I need to do a bunch of technical crap.

I will do it, but not now, so in the mean time, please enjoy the nutcase that is our daughter, enjoying her first official rendition of happy birthday!

Funny old Mink Baby!

2008-07-24T22:54:00.005+01:00

Before I go any further, I must apologise for not posting our holiday pictures earlier. I was having technical issues but now the post with the pictures is out of draft mode and in the blog here.

Oh little Minka, you have changed a lot over the last couple of weeks and you are becoming more entertaining (and more challenging) by the minute, or so it seems.

Where to begin!

You are running everywhere, with a jerky, flat-footed little gait that is quite charming (and which appears quite drunken). You fall over all the time, but mostly quite safely - you just plop down on your bum and then get up again, unpeturbed and carry on.

You climb up on the sofa (and almost anything else that presents itself as having the slightest bit of climbing potential) and although you do need watching (because sometimes you don't seem to realise that you will fall off and hurt yourself if you don't watch it.) Actually your mounting and dismounting of whatever is in sight is quite precise and well-executed, considering your age and general lack of dexterity.

You are babbling a lot more too - and I really hadn't thought that was possible. We have more actual words now too.

Ball, Bear, Babba (banana) are words that you use to refer to specific objects, and usually the correct ones.

You understand what we mean if we say: "Where's you ball?" - I know this because you then go and get it and present me with a ball.

Everything you want or offer up is almost always requested or given with the word "Ta" - we like good manners and you are getting quite consistent with them. For now anyway.

You enjoy being chased and make all sorts of delighted sounds. Your favourite sound of excitment is an "Aaaaaaa" in the back of your throat (it sounds like someone being merrily but thoroughly sick). Mirth and/or excitement is also often accompanied by a lot of heavy breathing.
You can recognise animals as being animals, whether they are photos, pictures, soft toys or there in the flesh. You stroke the animal in question (no matter the form) and say "Aaah!" in a very loving tone. You seem to think that all animals say "woof". You know that dogs say "woof". We are working on other animal sounds but in general, "woof" is your sound of choice.

Today you even had a couple of goes at saying "Georgie", which was actually kind of thrilling - for me anyway.

As gentle as you (generally) are with animals, when you get tired or frustrated, you can be quite violent. You pinch, scratch and hit and it's definitely on purpose. I try not to be angry (or at least not to show anger) but simply say "No" firmly and then put you down and ignore you for a minute or two. Then I pick you up and praise you if you don't do it again. We'll see how that goes.
You have a bit of a cold right now, which means we've had a few broken nights but I think you are also teething (if the drool count is anything to go by!) so it's all par for the course.

But basically you are, as always, utterly fabulous.

You are happy with Nanny and Grandad while I work (and they seem happy enough with you) so all in all, things are going very well both in terms of you, and your speedy evolution and Mamapalooza, which is also getting along nicely.

I finally started facing up to looking into being a sole trader today - tax returns, self assessment, NI, VAT and all that jazz. Not as bad as I thought, I am pleased to report. The information provided by the government is actually quite well put together (so far).

Your Uncle Paolo's coming over for 3 months starting in September and I just so excited about that I just can't tell you. I'm excited to see him because it's been ages (I last saw him the day before I went into labour); I really can't wait to talk to him about how I can help promote his album (album promotion hopefully will start in the UK and I love his music and so am definitely interested in helping).

I have been enjoying watching the video more and more and can't wait to see the new one, which is apparently going to be going into YouTube soon.

I need to keep updating his blog and helping him to gain a wider audience and translate a few of his Italian songs into English (which doesn't sound hard but believe me, it's harder than you might think for a bunch of reasons I won't go into here but will go into here, if you're interested.)

I just need more hours in the day. No change there then.

But I am very very happy (if a little tired).

And on that note, night night little Mink Baby,

xxx

MinkBaby, meet Mamapalooza.co.uk

2008-07-23T22:28:00.007+01:00

Hi there Mink Baby,

Today is the second day that I have done some work on my own business, which is swiftly taking shape.

It's going to be called Mamapalooza.co.uk

Why?

Because I like sound of the word and according to the definitions I have read it seems to fit in well with what's in store for every new mama.

If you are curious to find out more you can look at definitions of the world 'palooza' here and here.

But in a nut shell, the word 'palooza' is suffixed to another word to indicate a chaotic state, usually something exciting (but not necessarily comfortable) that may leave you a bit nuts.

(Sounds like pregnancy and motherhood to me!)

So there you go!

It's a essentially going to be a babyshower company offering the following products & services:

* Gifts for mums-to-be, new babies and new mums
(Pamper products, baby gros etc.)
* Baby Shower Parties
(Think Ann Summers parties but replace sex toys with baby shower gifts, invitations, decorations etc)
* Baby Shower Planning
(We help to plan babyshowers & take care of RSVPs, ordering decorations, gift list admin etc.)
* Baby Shower Hosting
(We take on the role of host so that who ever is throwing the shower can enjoy the party)

I had a hard time yesterday, trying to find somewhere to work that was practical, trying to write a business plan etc. But today I decided to just throw all that to the wind and go ahead and plan as though I was going to launch the business in one month. So I started to look at what products I would like to sell and just began contacting businesses and asking about their wholesale policies etc and before I knew it, things seemed to be moving.

So far people have been so nice and helpful, it's been a wonderful day. I really didn't expect that I would be so warmly received. I suppose it helps that many of the companies I will be dealing with started out as small, home-run businesses, often by mums (or parents) and so they understand the challenges I face as a one-mum-band, so to speak.

I rang Claire, who is to be my partner in crime for this venture, and she kindly concurred - so the decision to just do it has been seconded. Phew! She is my internet marketing guru and general web goddess, and were it not for her, none of this would be possible (I sound like I'm giving an awards speech, but you know what I mean!).

We agreed that from a business structure point of view, we need to aim for a limited liability partnership or a limited company for the future but for now, we are best served if I set myself up as a sole trader, as it's simpler by far.

This is very trusting of her, and I am grateful to her for making it so much simpler as I would totally have understood if she had decided she wasn't happy with that. I know she doesn't have much time to devote to what we are doing, but her contributions will be vital, as I said before, and there is no way I would let her do so much important work for mamapalooza.co.uk and then cut her out of it. I think she knows that. But now it's there for the record.

Thanks Claire!

We decided very early on that we are going to make our business, its services and products as eco-friendly as possible. This doesn't mean that I'm about to become a born again eco warrior overnight (or even at all) but it does mean that, like many people, I am re-evaluating my wasteful ways.

I know it's a corny and vom-worthy cliche but it is true that often, when you have a baby, you do start to feel anxious about the way things are going, environmentally-speaking. Of course you don't need to have a baby to start thinking that way, and some might say that at the age of 30, I've taken my sweet time about it, and they would be right. But better late than never, I always say.

So yes, it's true, I'm not the greenest person by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, that's kind of the point. This blog is going to eventually become part of mamapalooza.co.uk's website, and although it will still contain a lot of MinkBaby-related posts, pictures and videos, I am going to use it to blog about all sorts of things, including my exploration of all things eco-friendly, and hopefully this blog will come to document many positive changes in my life in that area.

I am also hoping that my friend Linda, who was originally going to run this company with me, will still consent to be involved in what we are doing, even if it's not in the way we orginally talked about. Either way, I really hope that my continuing with this project won't cause any more upset, which it did a few months back, to my dismay. She has a great business idea of her own that I am hoping she will pursue, because I want to buy her products and sell them to my customers! So here's hoping for positive outcomes across the board!

So yes, MinkBabyDotCom is in for a shift in focus, or at least many more foci (not, it's not focuses - poncy of me I know, but I looked it up here) but none of this would be happening without you, little Mink Baby, so don't feel left out! Mamapalooza may be the new kid on this block but you still come first.

xxx

First Summer Holiday for the Mink Baby

2008-07-19T11:14:00.007+01:00

Pregnant Flash-Back

2008-07-10T16:42:00.005+01:00

Hi there Minka,

Your beardy man, Tim, came around for dinner the other night (Kerry is in Australia, being spoiled by her Mum and we didn't want to leave him to abuse the fearsome tomato-based sauces) and he happened to bring some pictures of Kerry's birthday weekend last year, just before you were born. And there's a rare picture of you and me before we were separated by birth!

xxx

1st Birthday Party Photos

2008-07-08T17:00:00.006+01:00

"That was the finishing shower - it'll brighten up now"

Cue the rain

And then some more rain

Liz and Georgie

Sue and Georgie

Georgie and Mummy

Georgie and Emma

Georgie in her ball crawl with Liz

Georgie and her beardy man, Tim

Liz and Georgie

Louise and little Lily at about 8 weeks old

Charlotte in the ball crawl

Karen, Kerry and Cake

And some more cake

Georgie and Barney the Bear

Birthday cards and Spencer Bear

Georgie, Barney and The World's Scariest Pop Up Tent

Nanny and Georgie

Even more cake!

Belated June 08 Photos

2008-07-08T16:48:00.004+01:00

What do you mean drool?

Georgie and Godfather Steve #2

Georgie and Spencer the Bear

Month 12 - One Year Old Today! - "Oooooo!"

2008-07-03T13:25:00.004+01:00

Dear Little Mink Baby,

Here we are at month 12 - you are one year old today! Can you believe it? I certainly can’t but the evidence wakes me up daily at 7 am, dummy in mouth, rocking on the bars of your cot saying “Ooooo!”

So it must be true!

You are becoming more and more vocal, and although you don’t seem much closer to associating specific words with specific people, objects or concepts, your exclamations give a lot of insight into what you are thinking.

You very often see something that you find new and interesting and you say: "Ooo!"

“Ooooooooo” is usually a loud and quizzical sound, followed by pointing and determined effort to get to what you’re “ooo-ing” at – walking, wriggling, falling down, knocking things over - whatever it takes (you're very dedicated...)

We get these “ooo”s when we see dogs (even our dog), other children, mobiles, wind chimes, and grandparents. My belly button bar provokes much ooo-ing and despite the regularity of its appearance [in your presence at least], your excitement is surprisingly undiminished. You are also disturbingly bewitched by your daddy's nipples - bare-chested Daddy results in an "Ooo"-palooza and then some!

But it's not all pointing and smiling.

Sometimes the “ooo” comes out very thoughtfully, as though you are weighing something carefully before coming to a decision – no one is rushing you to judgement and you will “ooo” until you’ve looked at all the angles.

Sometimes you say it wisely, like a little “ooo”ing Buddha, as if you have been sitting under a lotus tree, just “being”.

Other times we get a sad little “ooo” – as if you hoped it wasn’t true, but now that you see things the way they are, your suspicions have been confirmed and you must face the truth with dignity.

The “ooo”s are myriad but I'm pleased to report that the “ooo”s are mainly happy.

It amazes me just how much you can convey with an “ooo”. Imagine what you’ll be able to express when you start to talk (no hurry, ok?!)

You’re getting better at feeding yourself but are definitely nowhere near accurate enough to eat unsupervised. Left to you, grapes would reach your alimentary canal by way of your ear, half your food would go to the dog and the rest would be dropped when you turned your spoon upside down. But progress is being made, so don’t be discouraged.

Your walking is pretty good now too – you almost never fall down and hurt yourself unless you have slipped on something. In general, you tend descend in slow motion rather than actually fall. Sometimes onto your hands and into a kind of "downward facing dog" and other times you go gently onto your padded bum. Very graceful. Well done.

I’m sorry that Daddy and I are working today and I‘m sorry I haven’t had time to make a cake but you do get two parties this weekend, I bought you presents AGES ago and very soon, I won’t be working as much, which means we’ll have much more time together! You love being at Nanny and Grandad's anyway, so really it's all good!

We love you Minka, Happy Birthday!

Mink Mama and Daddy

Preparing to leave my job!

2008-06-28T09:52:00.003+01:00

Yes Mink Baby,

I'm facing my last day as Clair's researcher (Monday) with mixed emotions. Glad to be leaving recruitment, at least for now; sorry in a way to be leaving MCG; looking forward to your birthday celebrations next weekend; sorry that I won't be with you all day on your birthday (hand-over training ensures on Wednesday so I'll be in the office I'm afraid - important as your first birthday is to me, I figure you're one but you don't know it's your birthday and we have a whole weekend of celebrations planned so...) excited and impatient to get through July and finally start working on my business and trying to help Paolo (apparently I can't help that much but hey, we do what we can;) and I am looking forward to writing you your 12th month post!

In order to celebrate your impending toddler-status have a look at this video - sums you up perfectly!

August will be exciting!

I'm getting ready to go to Ediburgh with Kerry for Fiona's 30th birthday bash.

Have fun with Daddy and be good for him while I'm gone.

Love from your Mink Mama
xxx

Paolo's First Video - Gravita

2008-06-15T19:51:00.004+01:00

If you like it, please go to YouTube, leave a lovely comment and give it a good rating.

Paolo has a new website coming, so watch this space...

The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture with Lyrics

2008-06-15T19:26:00.005+01:00

Dear Mink Baby,

I can tell that YouTube is going to take up a lot of my time (and posts) for a good long while, so you may as well settle in for the ride and resign yourself while I play.

Virtually everyone else I know has probably seen this video already, but just so you know, the following is a condensed version of what I will have to say to you over the next - oh - forever...

Love from your Mink Mama