Added a wee video this time

This is a wee video of Alice over Christmas. First part is her with Nanny. She sat all afternoon cuddling up to Nanny. Then a few openings. In the Night Garden book. She enjoys pressing the theme tune and dancing to it. The Bilibo, she's sitting on it thinking it's a potty. Just after this she stood up and had a look inside it, thinking she'd done a wee. Then giving Amy the rag doll a cuddle and kiss.

Christmas 2008

We had a really great Christmas with Pauline's parents. Alice really enjoyed spending time with them. "Nanny/Pappa" was all we heard while they were here.

Before they arrived Stuart, Alice and I went to the beach, the tide was on the way in, but it was lots of fun. Alice really enjoyed watching the dogs running in and out of the sea.


Alice really enjoyed cuddling with her Nanny and spent a whole afternoon doing that. We had just gone to the beach again and she had just sat in the sea; got completely soaked. So we had to come home straight away and put her in the bath.
We all got lots of really fun things on Christmas Day. A few highlights were this "My Quiet Book", which has been hand made by a woman in Northern Ireland (www.fun-2-learn.com). It has a different activity on each page and will hopefully last her for years. She also got this Bilibo. Is it a seat, is it a hat? No, Alice thought it was a potty. She sat in it and said "wee, wee" and then stood up and looked in it. We kept telling her it wasn't a potty. It's whatever her imagination lets it be.

On Boxing Day we went to the beach again. It was freezing, can you tell? We all wished we'd put more layers on.


Another Christmas over. What a difference from last year. At least Alice wasn't really ill this year and really enjoyed opening all her presents herself.

We hope you all had a great Christmas and look forward to a new year and that 2009 will bring you lots of happiness.

That's Christmas

I heard about this on the Today programme (Stuart - not Pauline) today. We have a morning ritual where Alice and I sit down to have breakfast and listen to Radio 4. After the 8am interview, we discuss the issues of the day, e.g. the financial crisis or current political scandal. Alice doesn't input too much just yet, but she will.

Anyway, it's a great explanation of the true meaning of Christmas in just less than 10 minutes. It's been produced by a large Church of England church in London (St Helen's, Bishops Gate). Either view below or visit direct at http://www.st-helens.org.uk/xmas/


That's Christmas! from andy pearce on Vimeo.

Frankie the angel

Yep, we finally got round to putting the tree up at last. With all three of us being ill, we didn't get round to it. Stuart is now on his third cold in a row, from not having anything for years. We decided to get Alice to help us put the tree up, in the vain hope that it would help her not want to pull it back down again. We put the tree up while she was asleep and the plan was to put the lights on too. Then the inevitable happened. The lights wouldn't work. Because they're LED lights, they are attached straight to the wire and so you can't replace the bulbs. So we had to wait until she was awake and go and buy some new ones.


She seemed really happy to help. I also managed to find us an angel for the top of the tree. I've been looking for one for years to replace Stuart's delapidated star. So when I took it out of the bag it fell on the floor and the head fell off. Then we realised that it looked like this had already happened before, as there was glue in the same place. So I picked that off and Stuart superglued it back on. When I asked Stuart for a name for the angel, he said Frankenstein. I said we can't call her that. We'll call her Frankincense instead, so now that's been shortened to Frankie. Alice just calls her angel.

A close up of Frankie.


The finished tree. Thankfully Alice hasn't been too bad about the tree being up. She's been more concerned that we had to get rid of her playpen. She kept asking for it and pointing to where it normally lives (which is just opposite where the tree is). She has only tried to touch the tree a couple of times and when I said you don't touch, just look. She then got all her stuffed animals one by one and pointed them in the direction of the tree to look at the angel.


If we don't get to blog before next week, have a really happy Christmas.

Snow and Spoons

We've all been ill up here in the frozen north for the past couple of weeks. Stuart, who never gets ill, was in bed for two days and is still not over his cold nearly three weeks later. Alice has had this horrible cough which is going around for about two weeks now. Plus I spent about 4 days in bed feeling pretty rough. All on the mend now and just waiting for the next one to hit, oh, right around Christmas. Anyway, the first day I was really ill, I got up about 9am and it was raining, then it started snowing and about 11.30am the garden looked like this.


So Stuart got Alice all hopped up and ready to go into the garden to play in the snow. There was enough to build a snowman, but as I was indoors (got out of my sick bed to take some photos) and it was just before lunch, Stuart decided against it. I think Alice quite enjoyed walking around in the snow. No point putting gloves on her, as she doesn't keep them on.


We also decided it was about time she started using a spoon for her yoghurt. As we did the baby-led weaning (no purees and straight onto finger foods) she doesn't really eat anything to need a spoon, except yoghurt. We've only recently started giving her a yoghurt every day as she's decided to stop drinking milk. She has milk in her cereal and she gets lots of cheese too. We'd feed her the yoghurt and then give her the spoon and pot at the end. Yesterday I decided to leave a little bit in the bottom and she did really well at getting it out. So each day I'll leave a little bit more in the pot, so she can get used to eating out of it. As you can see though, she is doing really well and there's barely any round her face.

Advent

This is Alice's new Advent Calendar. We normally use a fairly traded chocolate Advent Calendar from TearFund. Stuart and I would normally take it in turns to open the window and have the piece of chocolate. If you forgot that day it went to the other person the next day. I went to a Christmas Fair in Newcastle a few weeks ago and bought this for Alice to do. We put it up yesterday and she kept going up on the sofa and reaching over for it. So today when it was brought down for her to do, she went straight for the end one (number 12) and started pulling at it. We pointed at number one and so she did that one and started her nativity scene. Each piece has velcro on the back to stick it to the picture. We told her she does one each day and she can do another one tomorrow. Looking forward to Christmas Eve to see what it looks like all filled. Yes, I will put up some pics of the finished nativity scene.

First snow and Grandparents visit

Last Sunday morning we woke up to a small dusting of snow in the garden. Thankfully we weren't going to church in the morning as we were going at 4pm to our Advent Carol service. Which you can catch on www.clayton.tv and click on New Programmes and it's in there. A wonderful choir this year. Stuart unfortunately was really ill with a horrible cold. No, that isn't man flu, he was genuinely ill, he never gets ill and I haven't seen him look that bad in 10 years.


Then on Monday we had Nana and Grandpa (Stuart's parents) visiting. Stuart was ill for the first few days and spent a lot of it in bed, but he perked up towards the end of the week and we had another trip out to Plessey Woods and Alice had to hold Nana and Grandpa's hand the whole way round. It was the first time Alice really knew who they were. It took her about 10 minutes to warm up and then was showing them all her toys. Every time we went anywhere Alice kept saying "Nana, and" Which meant she wanted Nana to hold her hand (and).


This is just a funny photo of Alice wearing her hat with Iggle Piggle (from In the Night Garden, the only TV programme she will watch) in her pyjamas.

I was going to post a video, but will do it later, as we're now using Picasa 3 which means you can do something new fangled with video, but I'm not sure where they're saved and how to upload them. Waiting to see if there's a quick and helpful wee tip Stuart can impart. If you don't use Picasa it really is worthwhile, it's brilliant. It's free from Google.

Alice Baking

This is Alice's first foray into baking. We were making banana muffins. She loves them. No salt and very low sugar, made with wholemeal flour and bananas and seeds in them, very healthy. This is Alice mushing the bananas.


Once the butter was melted, Alice stirred the sugar and eggs together.

Then stir in the flour, round and round; only a little help from Daddy.


She was also very good at putting the muffin cases into the muffin tin. I showed her how to do the first one, the next one she pushed down too hard and squashed it quite a bit. Then after that she just gently placed them into the available spaces.

Mummy put them in the oven and when they were ready Alice took Mummy's hand and sat on my knee whilst we watched Daddy take them out of the very hot oven. She really enjoyed baking the muffins and she enjoyed eating one after dinner too. Then I just put them into freezer bags and freeze them. When she's having one I get it out of the freezer and defrost in the microwave. They are a firm favourite in our house. I think Daddy quite enjoyed it too.

Kelso 08

Hi all, never fear, we have just been away for a week in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. The cottage was beautiful and we needed the holiday. We've been back nearly a week, now but it has been fairly hectic. There wasn't a great deal to do in November with a toddler, but the point was to get away and relax, which we certainly did. It was also our 8th wedding anniversary whilst we were away. A local caterer provides meals for people in their cottages. So we did that and had a cosy meal for two after Alice went to bed. This is the view from the back of the cottage.


We bought a new back pack for Alice, as she really enjoys walking around now when we're out, we rarely take the pram any more. However, in order to walk a bit further we bought this so that when she wants up she can be in this. However, she only really liked being in it for about 15 mins. It was really cold when this picture was taken and she cried the whole way because she wouldn't keep her gloves on and her hands were freezing.


The cottage was in a row of three. Ours was the furthest, but this was just a beautiful picture with the sun going down and glowing on the cottages.


Every time we got into the car Alice would say "ome", home. We would say "no, we're going ..." or, "we're going back to the cottage". She would always say home. Then when we were actually going home, we got to a round about fairly near our house and she said "ome" and then again when we got to the end of our street. So we think she was glad to be home. This is her trying to get into the cottage in her new wellie boots. There was a wee children's shoe shop in Kelso and so we were able to buy her these. They are green with leaves and snails on them. A walker commented on how gorgeous they were on one walk as she passed by.


Just a cute picture of Alice. Shortly after this she wanted out of the back pack and cried the whole way back!!!!

Alice counting

This is a wee video of Alice counting. She did it for the first time this week, whilst playing with her blocks. She just started counting out of no-where and got to six. Then at dinner that night counted to seven; twice. Then tonight (after trying all week to catch it on video) she counted to nine. On this piece of video she is counting to eight though.

Christmas Cake

Here is how to bake a Christmas cake the Nigella Lawson/Pauline Grant way.

1. Soak 875g sultanas, 138g currents, 275g mixed peel in 150ml Earl Grey tea over night. Cover with clingfilm.

2. This takes 9inch/24cm spring form tin. Oven at 130C for fan assisted ovens. Line with a double thickness of brown paper and single thickness of baking parchment. I use the peg to hold it in place, quite ingenious I think. The paper must stand 10cm above the rim of the tin.

3. Soften 281g butter.
4. Cream together 244g brown sugar.

5. Grate the rind of one orange and one lemon.


6. Add one egg at a time making sure you mix well after each one.



7. Then add 2 and a half tbspn marmalade.
8. Add1 1/4 tspn mixed spice.


1/4 tspn cinnamon1/4 tspn nutmeg

1 tspn almond extract.9. Add and thoroughly mix fruit and flour alternately. Towards the end it will take a lot of mixing to make sure it's all incorporated.

10. Put into prepared tin and bake for 3 hours on 130 C (for fan ovens). Obviously take the peg off before you put it in the oven!!!


11. It is ready when the skewer comes out clean.
12. When cake is cooked immediately brush with earl grey tea and wrap it in the tin with double thickness of tin foil. This is the trick to it being really moist.


13. When cake is completely cold (which it isn't yet and it was baked last night), remove from tin and wrap in foil and baking parchment for 3 weeks ready for the marzipan.

So tempting to want to eat it right away, the smells all over the house last night and today are amazing.