A visiting weekend.

Mummy and Alice had a busy weekend of visiting and visitors. It started on Friday afternoon when one of Alice's Godmothers popped in, as she was in the area (Laura the English can pop from time to time). Alice had fun showing Louise her books and toys and singing her favourite song, "row, row, row your boat". I didn't realise until I started going to toddler groups that there are about 20 verses to the song!!! Anyway, it was a very busy weekend for Stuart at work and thankfully Louise did call in, because she stayed for dinner and then kept me entertained while he spent most of the evening on the phone to work.

Saturday. Stuart was at work, we had a couple of offers to go visiting with friends. We did a lot of deliberating, but Druridge Bay didn't work out with Mr and Mrs D, doglet and the boys. So went round to the McKelveys in the afternoon. Alice seemed very taken with their new bunny rabbit and enjoyed drawing a lot.

Sunday. Stuart managed to get out of working. However, was on the phone quite a lot to work throughout the day. We did have some very special visitors on Sunday. Alice's great aunt Betty and great uncle Brian. They were on holiday in Scotland for the week and did a few days at the end in our area, so they could meet Alice and then travel back home to Essex. It was great to see them and Alice really enjoyed showing them her toys too. Brian said he really wanted to see Alice and sit her on his knee and that's what he did. Thank you for calling in and for Jess, she is Alice's new favourite toy.

Jumping, Gardening and Slippers

Alice and mummy go to a Bible study group once a fortnight on a Thursday. Last week was the first one back after the summer, so they had a social instead of a study. Alice stays in a creche whilst the mothers go up stairs to study the Bible. As it was finishing one of the children who is a bit older than Alice was jumping all over the place and Alice was trying to copy her. Then on Sunday after church she was trying to do some more jumping, the first bit of the video is Alice trying to jump. She can't get both feet off the ground at once, so ends up more like stamping. We think it's hilarious.

On Saturday we went to a garden centre and bought a pile of bulbs for the garden. So whilst Alice was asleep on Sunday afternoon we planted most of them, bar one section. When Alice woke up we got her changed and went into the garden to introduce her to gardening. She threw in all the bulbs (only trying to eat one of them) and then we covered it with soil. She then didn't want to come back in so stayed outside with daddy to "garden" some more. She seemed to really enjoy herself and so hopefully in years to come we can get her doing all the gardening, for a small fee, no doubt.




She also found a new game; jumping on daddy to be a lot of fun. She did this for ages. Then got bored with that and started walking in Daddy's slippers instead.

We just can't believe how much she is taking in on a daily basis. She can count to 2, well we say one and she says 2. She can recognise the letters A and B on her wee alphabet frame. In fact daddy stepped up the counting training when he saw that she could recognise the letters A and B. Daddy is determined she will be a mathematician and Mummy is determined she will be really literary, hence reads Shakespeare to her every day (that's a joke I don't really).

Also really glad that the baking demonstration inspired a few of you to bake again. Glad also that they have worked for you and you are enjoying your creations.

It's as easy as wee buns

This is really for Laura, go on try it, it's soooo easy.

A few of us have been having baking discussions on other blogs and a couple have had minor disasters with baking sponges.

So I thought I would demonstrate how to bake one.

Remember, you will need 2 X 8 inch lose bottom tins (the bottom comes out) and your oven will need to be at 180C, 350F, Gas 4 or 160 for fan assisted and bake for 25 mins.

Ingredients:
8oz butter
80z caster sugar
4 eggs
80z self raising flour (or plain and a couple of teaspoons of baking powder)
grated rind of 1 lemon

lemon curd
200ml whipping cream
teaspoon icing sugar

7oz icing sugar
juice of 1 lemon (and a little water if needed).

You can't really hear Sharlene from Home Group, but she's saying it's the best thing she's eaten that I've baked. I didn't even have to pay her.

Let me know how you get on.

The mouse, the bath and home

The first bit of the video is us trying to capture the way Alice says home, it is so funny. When we're out anywhere and going home, and we say "are we going home" etc, she purses her lips this. After dinner every night she has a bath as part of her bedtime routine. This is what we get most nights when she's finished dinner. This is her saying bath.

Then we had a wee visitor yesterday. I think it's building a nest below our back step. Not sure that's good news, but Stuart was very excited when he got home from work and wanted to see it. Alas, it didn't comply. So he had to make do with this video. Alice thought it was hilarious and every now and again she would squeal with delight as it scurried past. Come to think of it haven't seen the rabbit this week.

We also started a mothers and toddlers' group at our church yesterday. It was great fun, although Alice didn't enjoy it too much initially, as every time we go to church I leave her in a creche of some sort. I think she realised I was staying with her this time and settled and played on the slide (her favourite). The group is so well organised. We had general play things, a story time, juice and biscuits time (although we don't give Alice either), sticky time and then general play doughing and painting etc. We missed the singing at the end, as we had to go and catch the metro to be home for Alice's nap. It was really busy and everyone seemed to be really enjoying themselves.


You can't really see, but this is Jenny, Alice's lovey thingy. It's a giraffe and we called it Jenny. She calls it "deddy". When she's not walking around with Ellie the Elephant (the white one in the pretty face post) she's walking around with Jenny. Jenny also goes to bed with her and every now and again with lie on the floor with her and give her a snuggly cuddle.

See she's not tantruming all the time.

Wibbly Wobble Alice

This is Alice last November, just before turning 8 months old. She did this for about a couple of weeks and then stopped doing it. So caught it on video just in time, before she stopped doing it. Now she loves to watch herself doing this. She laughs and laughs. It is so funny to watch her watching herself.

What a pretty face

This is Alice playing with her toy elephant, Ellie. She cuddles all her stuffed toys and walks around with them having a snuggly cuddle and making very beautiful soft "ahhhh" noises.

Then, she turns into this!!!!! With no warning at all, she becomes Mr Hyde.


My technique is to try to distract her into something else, which does tend to work, but today I wanted to take some photos to share with the world. I know, no thanks is necessary!!!

I think when you're raising (or is that trying to ignore) toddlers, you really have to keep a sense of humour or I think you would just lose the plot!!! As you can see from previous posts she is a sweet heart most of the time, but we do have to deal with this side of her too.

When do the tantrums start to subside?

Animals and Climbing

Put this wee video together as an amalgamation of what she's been doing over the past few days. Dog is "fff" and Rabbit is her pushing her tongue against her teeth. We didn't get it on video but elephant is her thrusting her arm in the air like the trunk!!!

She started climbing up on to the chair a couple of weeks ago and is making it look so easy these days. She did, at one point, try to get down forwards and fell off, since then has been getting down backwards again. Very sensible!!!

Pig tails and a BBQ

Although it doesn't look like it from the front, Alice's hair is growing, as you can see from her wee pigtails. Not the neatest pigtails ever, but when she's trying to escape her mummy's clutches, you have to make do with what you can get. About two minutes after I took the pics, she pulled them out. Typical!!!

We had our Home Group Bible study lot round yesterday for a BBQ. Thankfully it didn't rain, although was very cloudy, but warm. So we were all able to sit outdoors. There haven't been too many opportunities to enjoy the garden this year, but yesterday was certainly one of them. It's been an odd summer and we haven't seen too much of everyone, so it was great to see everyone yesterday and catch up before the start of a new Bible study year. We're going to be studying 1 John and Stuart is quite excited about it. I'm sure we'll all learn why in due course. I think I over catered on the dessert a bit though and thought I had the whole street coming rather than just the Home Group. So quite a few people took quite a lot home and we've still been left with loads. I would rather have too much than too little though.


To entertain Alice and Oliver (and probably most of the adults too) we got out the bubble machine. Anne did a great job of waving it around so that the bubbles changed direction a lot. They had a great time trying to "atch", as Alice says for catch, the bubbles.


Alice does occasionally give us beautiful wee smiles like this. That is in between the ever increasing tantrums she seems to be developing. We're using the tactic of ignoring the bad and praising the good which was drummed into Pauline during her teacher training. It does seem to be working and the tantrums seem to last a few minutes. We'll see if this technique is successful in holding off the tantrums as she gets older. We can't quite believe she's nearly a year and a half already. We just don't know where the time is going at all.

Our holiday Aug 08

We just spent a week in Somerset/Wiltshire. We travelled down for Stuart's cousin's wedding and Stuart's parents 40th Wedding Anniversary. The wedding was on Saturday and the Anniversary on Sunday. We were staying in a cottage with Stuart's parents, Stuart's sister (Catherine) , her boyfriend (Simon) and his two children (Lily and Jasmine). Instead of doing the journey in one go we spent the night in a B&B near Gloucester. We went to the Ricoco Gardens the next morning and did this maze. The garden was amazing, really beautiful. In fact is was the sunniest day of the holiday. Well worth a visit if in this area. Just outside Painswick.



At the wedding Alice met a whole load of new relatives. This is her great, great uncle Bob. She really enjoyed putting her hat on his head, over and over again.

She behaved soooo well at the wedding. Ate the majority of her yummy dinner and was quiet when she needed to be. Silly mummy and daddy forgot to bring anything to entertain her though. Thankfully Daddy found some books in the conservatory of the hotel which kept her amused for quite a while.


The next day was the Anniversary celebration. Ian and Marion (Stuart's parents) hired a marquee and caterers at the cottage. This is Lily and Jasmine (Alice is sitting on Lily's knee). They all got on really well and seemed to enjoy playing with each other.


Ian and Marion. 40 years of marriage. Aaaaawwwwww!!!!!


Stuart, Pauline, Alice, Ian, Marion, Lily, Simon, Catherine and Jasmine.

The sun was shining in our faces, hence the squinted faces.


We drove an hour and half to the south coast to visit The Sutcliffes. Stuart was at Uni with Jon and Maggi. Polly, Joash, Barney and Nia really enjoyed playing with Alice and telling us all lots of stories of poo. It was really great to catch up with them, the visit felt too brief.


We also took a trip to Longleat. Yes the one from BBC's Animal Park. No we didn't see Kate Humble or Ben Fogle (more's the pity). It was sooooo packed with people. We didn't do the safari as we thought it would be a waste of money as Alice probably wouldn't be that bothered by it. We went into Pet's Corner instead. They were doing a bird demonstration. We weren't quite sure who was watching who at this point.


Just a funny wee pic of Alice to finish.



We had a good time away, but it is always good to be home too.

Welcome to the new look blog

I (that is Pauline) thought our blog looked a bit boring and lacking in personality. So I decided to give it a bit of a make-over. However, I soon realised that all the ones I wanted were already taken by my friends. Particularly "scribe" Laura!!! Anyway, this was the least offensive, or at least the one that didn't make me feel dizzy and sick when I clicked and scrolled through it. So here is the new look blog. For the time being anyway.




Today we went to Whitley Bay's annual Kite Festival. It is a lot of fun and Alice seemed to enjoy looking at all the kites. She was pointing and saying "ite" a lot. Just a 10 min walk from the house. The festival normally has a teddy bear parachute jump. You bring along your favourite teddy and it goes into the amateur parachute jump, it is hoisted up in the air and then it let go to float gracefully to the ground. Unlike the one we saw a couple of years ago when it plummeted to the ground and they brought on the paramedics to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation!! Honest. Today we missed that part of the proceedings.



Whitley Bay is going through a massive regeneration. They've already built a skate park on the front, which was well used today when we passed it. Whitley Bay swimming pool is also undergoing a massive re-build. The most famous landmark in WB is Spanish City (I think Chris Rea mentions it in one of his songs, can't remember which one and can't be bothered to look it up) and it is undergoing a clean up and refurb, not quite sure what will be happening in there yet, but hopefully it will look spendid when complete. They're also rebuilding the Whitley Bay Playhouse, in some senses I think it only needed a bit of refurb rather than a total make-over, it is losing some of it's original charm and character. I guess that's progress!!!

This is Stuart trying to stop Alice eating sand. She's very determined though and we had to end up putting her in the pram with sand all over her hands and all over her face. Oh well she was having fun!!

Fork and certficates

Alice started using a fork for the first time this week. She seemed to quite enjoy using it. She can't quite puncture the food with the fork yet, but if we put the food on the fork she puts it in her mouth. It also gets her eating a wee bit extra as it's a novelty at the moment. She could put the food on the fork a couple of times but it took so long for her to eat we would end up putting the food on as well. Very clever girl.

On that note, she got her first certificate this week too. Not sure if this scheme exists in Northern Ireland, but in England they're trying to encourage people to join libraries and read more. So they have a scheme called book start. You get free books and when you join the library you get a sticker for the first four visits and then get a free book and this certificate. Stuart wanted to put it up in her bedroom. We didn't!!!! First of many we hope.


In the past couple of weeks she has had an explosion of language. She tries to copy everything we say these days. She is learning a new word every day. The latest are: "aggie" for hankie, "adow" for shadow, "go go" for babygrow, "ammy" for mummy, "giga" for Iggle Piggle (a character from In the Night Garden), "wazzee" for washing, "addee" for Amen, "annie" for Nanny and "papa" for Grandpa. There are loads more, but wanted to pick the highlights. She's even starting to try and put words together too. Her sense of humour keeps us very entertained. She plays wee games with us to try and make us laugh and will just laugh raucously for what seems like no reason and keep doing it. Today she did it in Marksies and people kept laughing at her as they walked past.

We were also playing around with the camera today, before we both watched the Olympics Opening Ceremony. OK, Pauline watched it, Alice played with all her toys. So just a funny pic to finish.

Hiya Daddy

We bought this wee phone so that when we're on the phone Alice can have her own. That way she doesn't want to keep pressing the buttons on ours and has her own buttons to play with. That's the theory anyway. After about 5 mins she gets a bit bored and throws it away and wants up on our knee to press the buttons on our phone. She has just started putting the phone to her ear and saying Hiya though. She also puts it to our ears too and says Hiya. Before now Alice got off the sofa by going backwards, but now she is brave enough to get down forwards. Also just a funny piece of video of her laughing.

Alice has started trying to put our shoes on and walk around in them. As soon as Stuart gets home from work, she goes straight over to his shoes and undoes the laces, much to his annoyance. It's OK when you get home from work, not OK when you're rushing out in the morning to catch the metro.



Just a couple of wee funny pictures to finish.