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.