Can you get me up please?

A month ago Alice hated being in this ring and would cry as soon as we put her into it. Now she really enjoys moving around in it and curling herself up in a ball. She can normally move herself back into a seated position, but not from here. The other photo is just a cute wee picture of her. Disturbingly, she is trying to crawl when we put her on her tummy. She lifts her knees right up under her bottom, pushes her bottom in the air and tries to move forward. Thankfully her arms aren't strong enough to hold her weight and so she can't move anywhere... yet!!! We don't think it's going to be too long before she's mobile. We'll have to re-think the whole layout of the house and move everything up. We thought we might get a good few months yet without having to do this. That's progress for you.

Please don't go, mummy!!

Alice has taken to holding on to mummy like her life depends on it. Sitting down, standing up; it's quite a strong grip too.

She seems to be settling down after her "not wanting to feed" phase. Thankfully she is feeding again, but not quite so ferociously as before. Apparently, when they are born life is all about the food, but after about week 16 life is much more interesting than that and who cares about food.

What Statisticians do for a living

This was ordered from the Cadbury website: a 5000g bar of Dairy Milk (see the link below). The bar contains 32 "chunks", each of which is equivalent to three normal small bars of Dairy Milk. It helpfully says on the back that this bar should be one person's allowance of Dairy Milk for six months. We worked that out as half a standard bar per day. Not quite sure where a chocolate allowance is mentioned in government health guidelines.....

The bar isn't out of it's foil wrapper yet. Promise.

Buy your own bar!!

A new toy

We bought Alice a new box for her toys at the weekend. The front room was starting to look like a toy shop.

Not too many pictures recently as we've been having a trying time with her. She's decided she doesn't want to eat and screams when we bring the bottle anywhere near her mouth. The Health Visitor thinks it's developmental and says that at around 16 weeks they tend to have a bad patch and come out of it around 20 weeks. Hurrah!! Quite a few people have suggested she may be teething. If she is, we do hope this tooth comes through soon, so we can get her back on track again. If only they could talk and tell us what's wrong.

Sunday best

Had to quickly share this one. It was a happy moment from today. Pauline is just upstairs putting A to bed; not too many happy moments there!

New toys for Alice

In the last week Alice has started getting in to some more grown up toys. These contraptions are meant for babies over three months. So, she just qualifies.

We tried her on the inflatable ring a few weeks ago. Being as it's really meant for sitting up in (something she's not quite there with yet!), she didn't like it as there was no where to put her head when she got tired. However, since we've let the ring deflate a bit, she's now got the perfect lounging position.

Pauline tried out the door swing for the first time this week. Alice was a bit unsure to start with; just standing still and flailing whenever she overbalanced. It didn't take too long to get the hang of though. Now she's bouncing around just fine and enjoying every minute! But doesn't she look tiny!

That pesky foot

It can be tricky getting all those pesky limbs inside that babygrow. Alice is rapidly learning the skill of wriggling. In my defence, the holes between the poppers are almost as big as her limbs!

Happy smile

Snapped this pretty, happy smile this evening; just before she took 40 minutes of squirming to put down to sleep! She seemed to be much more interested in looking at and smiling at Daddy than actually closing her eyes. How sweet!

I want your breakfast?

I was tapping away at the computer this very morning, when all of a sudden, my tapping was accompanied by additional, much louder, tapping. Couldn't quite work out what it was at first. Thought that Pauline was walking rather loudly upstairs.

I eventually went to investigate and found a wee friend trying to break his way through the double glazed panes in the kitchen, woodpecker style. I managed to scare it away with a washing-up brush. My weapon of choice; burglars, look out

(incidentally, there's a flat roof out there for the gull to stand on. It's not hovering and pecking at the same time!)

Alice and animals

We haven't posted for a while. Here are a few more pics of us. Mostly with animals. Alice is becoming a lot more interesting and interested in items around her. She has started to chat with her wee animals when she's in her chair waiting for food. She has also started to smile at them too. Remember you can enlarge the images by clicking on them.

Alice is starting quite a sizeable collection of elephants. She loves looking at this mobile we were sent by some friends.
She also enjoys playing with and chatting to Cow.
Just a funny picture of her when we got back from church. The hat is a bit too big for her and so she didn't actually wear it.
Chatting to Hoopy Loopy; her new best friend.
A picture taken by a friend for an article she's writing about Pauline for a Christian women's magazine.

Alice's hair

Poor wee Alice, she has hairy ears and the hair on the top of her head is starting to grow back in again after it all fell out. Only the hair on the top of her head though, the hair on the back of her head is still there and a different colour to the new growth. She's going to be such a hit with the boys in the future. In fact with the amount of babies being born at our church at the moment, she's already met a few potential husbands-to-be. She'll be wanting to spend her child trust fund money on electrolysis when she turns 18. Not sure it's a good use of the money or not. Anyway, have blethered on enough.

If you click on the picture itself you get a slightly larger version, worth it to see the hair on the back of her ears. Stuart is convinced I was inseminated by aliens!! He takes this whole Dr Who thing a step too far sometimes, not quite sure where TV ends and real life starts. He'll kill me when he reads this!!

Alice cooing

A particularly cute video here! Alice has been cooing for a couple of weeks now, but yesterday we managed to capture it on video. She's just been doing a few sounds here and there, but yesterday evening, she was obviously feeling particularly talkative.

www.sandpgrant.myby.co.uk/adhoc/video/Alice_cooing_21May2007_web.wmv (this one is broadband size - 2Mb)
www.sandpgrant.myby.co.uk/adhoc/video/Alice_cooing_21May2007_lowqual.wmv (this one is dial up size - just a few minutes download)

We'll keep this on the website for a few weeks, so if you get dead links then I'm afraid that we've deleted these vids for other things.

Enjoy the video, must go and get lunch before she wakes.