Nearly 6 weeks... sooo hard :(

Barely time to BREATHE, but had to write a quick entry. Otherwise I'll have no time and never get to update at all! Jemma, I did get your sweet pressie, thank you so much! Debs, I got your email and the lovely package, thank you! I wanted to email you both but I just honestly haven't had a moment. I have only been online this week to check on Julie - so excited about little Ava's arrival!!! Congratulations Julie! :) But I'm sorry that I haven't emailed you guys to say thank you. Debs, replying to your email is going to take a lot of thought and some time, and I can't can't can't do it right now, I'm sorry. I just can't do anything with my head at the moment. I can't do ANYTHING at the moment. But I do mean to, eventually.

Well it's been a while since I updated, though I updated my pregnancy diary more recently. Matthew is nearly 6 weeks old and I know there are going to be good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks, but I am REALLY struggling lately (again). I soooooooo desperately just need to spill everything here in huge detail, but I can't :( I haven't got time. It's already late in the evening and I still need to shower (seriously unhygienic of late) as Cameron's mum and his two little brothers are coming round to visit tomorrow afternoon. I need to get ready for bed and get ready everything I'll need for the night with Matthew. Before that I need to eat. I can't seem to eat at the moment. Four or five days ago I woke with a HORRIBLE stomach ache, like I had been kicked right up where my stomach is. I felt really nauseous too. I had no vomiting or diarrhoea, and I could still eat, but the nausea was really bad that day, and the stomach pain made it hard to bend over to change the boys and stuff. I hadn't been out anywhere and everyone is healthy so it's not a bug. I can't think of a food it could be either. It took 2 days for the nausea to wear off but the stomach ache is still lingering. It comes and goes now but it's less severe in general. My appetite is affected because foods just seem too rich for my tummy, like ANY foods other than bread and, well, bread. I am beginning to wonder if it's stress-related? I don't think I've ever felt quite this heavily stressed before, and so maybe that's why?

My diet is so crap. I eat toast for breakfast but no milk of course, and then lunch is hastily grabbed, sometimes not until 4pm if I simply haven't been given a second to myself till then. It's pretty much bread and cheese, as for some reason we are completely incapable of stocking the house with easy foods for me. It bugs me. But when we go shopping we can't think of anything to buy. Dinner is normal but we keep running late - our evenings have been STARTING at 9.30pm as Matthew has been crying a lot till then recently. Then my tummy has restricted what I can eat for evening meals, to really bland stuff. Tonight I attempted to eat lasagne and had to stop after the third mouthful, feeling sick and tummyachy. Now it's 10.45pm and I'm nibbling a bowl of granola cereal with raisins - no milk, of course. I have had zero fruit or veg today. I seem to be RAGINGLY thirsty all the time and still have a "furry" mouth after a glass of water, but I can't get enough time to drink enough anyway. I know how important it is to get a good diet with all the breastfeeding I'm doing (never mind for my own strength to recover properly from pregnancy and birth, and to fuel me for the challenging days and nights), but I just can't do it. I am too demanded of ALL the time and I can't even manage to force the time to eat. Sometimes those boys have to cry and cry while I drink water or shovel something down when I get desperate enough, and sometimes (rarely) I do get a nice little window for eating a quick meal, but mostly I just have to wait or do without.

I'm just finding things very difficult right now (again). Matthew is so hard to settle and cries a lot. I am SO exhausted it's just not funny. I am CRAZY to be on the computer right now instead of grabbing every spare second to sleep, but I just feel desperate to get all this "out there" and maybe get some advice or love or prayers or something. Most of the day, the room just SWINGS about, I am so so so tired and physically exhausted. Today when I had a millisecond to focus on just Arthur because Matthew was down to sleep at last, I felt too tired to make my face smile. It felt really odd and detached to sit with him while he played, respond to him when he talked to me, but just not have any expressions on my face or smiles for him or anything. The flesh on my face just felt too heavy and the muscles too tired to move.

Arthur is being odd, well, maybe just normal given his age and stuff? He is testing us more than ever before and finds it funny to kick us and scrunch us hard with his fingers when we're changing his nappy, etc. He continues doing things with obvious intent when we ask him not to, and any discipline we try doesn't appear to be having any effect. He screeches and shouts ALL the time and it scares Matthew (who appears to be emerging as an anxious little person more and more all the time) and drives me CRAZY like fingernails on a blackboard. If I ask him not to do it in any variety of ways that I can think of, he does it more and you can see he's enjoying the fact that he's defying me. To protect Matthew a bit, I end up taking him upstairs and lately Arthur is spending more and more time on his own downstairs without me while I do something or other with Matthew. I keep hurting Arthur when I'm angry with him and I can't seem to control myself. I am TRYING not to let myself get that way, but something just goes buzz in my head and I lose control and push him or scrunch his hand or something NASTY and unforgiveable and shameful :( If he is reaching to smack me again after I told him NO and that it hurts Mummy, and I'm breastfeeding Matthew so I can't leap up and do some active discipline that very instant, the buzz in my head happens as he reaches to smack me and I just catch his hand and crush it in mine. Today that happened again where Matthew looked likely to get caught by his hand (not purposely on Arthur's part though - he was aiming for me I think), and I caught myself in time to not crush his hand. I made my mind shout NO in my head and that stopped me squishing his hand, but while I was working on that in my head, I pushed him away from me HARD and he fell down. I didn't even seem to be the one doing it, even though obviously I was. He just pushes me right to the edge of my sanity and then beyond it, and I can't seem to get a hold of myself and behave like a nice adult person. I am so ashamed. But at the same time I keep thinking, why won't Arthur give me a break when I am this close to the edge? I know it's just the way little ones tend to be, and I should STILL be the one to take a deep breath and go easy on him, but it's so incredibly hard right now.

It just doesn't appear to be possible at ALL for one person to adequately meet the needs of two children under two. I'm serious. I have really been thinking about it carefully. Anyone I know who is coping okay with two small children seems to have at least a few hours in the week with only their youngest child, as the older one is in nursery, or even just a few hours a week in a playgroup or something. Is it even possible at ALL to manage to cope with meeting the needs of both children and yourself when both children are in the house with you, under your own care (with no other help), Monday to Friday, with no time out for the older child? Has ANYONE done this and survived?! I don't want Arthur to go to a nursery or playgroup without me just yet so that isn't an option for now. But is it possible at all for me to meet his needs as well as Matthew's and a few of my own without falling apart in the process?

If I somehow go all out and miraculously meet each of their needs vaguely adequately in a day, then I am just crying by the end of it (and halfway through it too) because of how completely depleted my OWN needs are. I find that I don't get to wee, drink much or eat at all if I manage to give the boys nearly-ish enough of me. I KNOW I can't meet 100% of their needs any more, and I have to accept that, but I still have to meet each of their needs ADEQUATELY each day, and it seems that I can't even do that for one of them without the other one actually being neglected in the process. Or me. It feels hopeless a lot of the time, although a day that goes smoothly will have me feeling happy and normal and like it's all going to be okay and I can do it. In the last week I have phoned Neil at work again in tears a couple of times. One of the times he could barely hear me for ME crying, and both boys screaming in the background, and I said I was afraid I would hurt one of them and he came home from work again. I feel ashamed to keep bothering him at work and I don't want him to have extra stress on his plate, or to have issues with work if he's coming home to rescue his children from his wife, but I just reach a point where I don't know what else to do or who else to turn to. I have nobody else than Neil.

I'm scared of the possibility of postnatal depression, because of my history of depression and because I just don't want that label (or the illness, more importantly!). I also don't want to go on any anti-depressants EVER again. I just don't. I know there's nothing wrong with doing so, and there's no stigma, etc, but I just don't want to. I have already been on anti-depressants and I don't want to do it again. I just want it to be a bad patch and it will all get better in a few weeks (am I being naiive?) and I'll remember it fondly in the future even! I phoned the church office and put all this on the prayer chain, so that was a weight off, and at least I know that some people at church will know what's going on for me at the moment and that I'm struggling, instead of probably thinking how rosy and sweet it must be for us to have our sweet 6-week-old baby and our lovely 20-month-old son and be settling into family life nicely.

At the weekend, any time Neil was holding Matthew and playing with Arthur, or taking them both out, or if Matthew was sleeping or something, I started to read "Secrets of The Baby Whisperer" which has been on my bookshelf since before I had Arthur. Neil and I decided we needed to have an idea of a good "structure to the day" to introduce for Matthew, so that he would have some obvious points to the day, a clear start and finish, and things like that. We are such highly disorganised people that we actually need to be told how to make a day look organised for our children, haha! We figured if we could show him a bit of routine to his day, it might make him feel more secure knowing what was to come, and it would be easier if he knew it from birth than if we tried to implement it months down the line in desperation or something (like with Arthur!).

I had briefly picked up that book when Arthur was tiny, but got all offended about the anti-co-sleepingness and put it away again quickly. This time I am reading it with a more open mind, and I have learned a lot already about personality types in babies and the kind of things that soothe and settle them. There is a lot about routine in there, but to my relief, nothing about "schedules" for babies. After reading some of the book, we decided to start Matthew on the E.A.S.Y. plan in the book (Eat, Activity, Sleep, and time for You while the baby sleeps, although for me this is more EAST than EASY - Eat, Activity, Sleep, and time for my Toddler rather than me!). It's a loose and flexible 2.5 to 3 hour-ish cycle that gets the little one to expect what comes next and thus to be more settled. Also there's a big emphasis on learning your baby's body language and cries. I NEVER knew Arthur's different cries. I remember the Health Visitor saying one time, "I expect you know what his different cries mean by now" and I felt utterly shocked and stumped by that, because I had no clue that he even HAD different cries! I couldn't tell what he meant at all, he just CRIED. I felt awful that I didn't know when I "should" have by then. I never did know either. I answered every cry with the breast, which I was happy to do, and I am this time too, except that the book tells me that sometimes he isn't going to be crying for milk. I want to learn what he's telling me, because if he's asking me to change him or telling me he's too hot, I don't want to be putting him on the breast as it doesn't answer his pleas at all! I want to be able to tell what he's saying so I can respond the right way every time. That will help him be more settled too. Especially the times he tells me he's tired - then I can put him to bed before he gets overtired or overstimulated and has a huge meltdown (which seems to happen constantly these days).

So yesterday we started Matthew on the E.A.S.Y. plan. After he got up, I fed him, and then his activity was cooing and smiling and getting his nappy changed and so on, but only for about 20 or 30 minutes. I am starting to observe him really carefully to try and learn his body language and what he means by it. He started to turn his head away from faces, and get fussy. I took him right up to his cot and lay him down on his tummy, and whomped on his bum for a little while. He INSTANTLY closed his eyes and went to sleep! He slept an hour, and then I fed him and he looked at bright toys for a while and went on the playmat while Arthur was in the highchair. When he seemed stressed by that, I tried something else and he just cried, so I wondered if he might be tired again already. I took him up to his cot, lay him on his tummy and patted his bottom, and once again - INSTANT sleep! He slept 3 and a half hours!!!! I know that's too long for a daytime sleep but oh well. He went out in the afternoon after his feed to the supermarket with Neil and Arthur, and when they got back, Neil handed Matthew to me from the car and said he was tired, and I walked up the stairs with him, lay him in his cot, patted his little bum and he was out like a light AGAIN!! It worked PERFECTLY yesterday. He didn't have any stressed-out crying sessions and was in his cot asleep at 6.30pm. He slept till nearly midnight and then I was in bed so I just changed him and fed him, put him down on his back in the cot awake but sleepy (in a dark room mind you) and he went back to sleep! Wonderful. He seems to really benefit from the routine and especially me responding to his cues for sleep the moment he gives them.

But today hasn't worked the same. He gave me the cues but then wouldn't settle to sleep, and cried and cried, and I ended up having to take ages upstairs with him while Arthur was alone downstairs. If he slept it was fitful and I kept having to leave Arthur again in the middle of breastfeeding him or playing Duplo after he'd been without my company already for ages, to go back upstairs and try to resettle Matthew. Sometimes I had to bring him downstairs as it was taking too long and I couldn't stay away from Arthur any longer, but that meant he was crying and overstimulated and so on. Arthur was ready for his nap and Matthew woke while I was nursing him in bed, and I had to leave him to try and resettle Matthew, who wouldn't settle, and Arthur was so tired that he just lay in his bed and cried for me :( I ended up running back and forth from one bedroom to the other, unable to anything for either of them, and just went and phoned Neil at work with the two of them SCREAMING upstairs in their beds :( In the end (Neil's suggestion) I lay in Arthur's bed with him, with Matthew on my chest, and they both eventually fell asleep that way. I put Matthew in his cot after 15 minutes and he slept four and a half hours! Again, way too long for a daytime sleep but I don't care. It's so hard when they're both up at once that I couldn't bring myself to wake him. I'd rather pay the consequences at night when there's only one to look after. He was unsettled this afternoon and Arthur was difficult, and I was utterly exhausted and it was just so hard. But they were both asleep by 8pm for the night. It's now 11.35pm (quick entry, yeah right!) and Matthew is still asleep but stirring now, so he'll be awake for a feed soon. It's weird not feeding him before he sleeps any more in the day, but it's lovely to feed him immediately that he wakes and then to have him go to sleep tired from an activity, as it will help him learn to fall asleep by himself. Yesterday it was SO weird to put my 5-week-old baby down and pat him for 30 seconds and watch him fall asleep almost by himself, and then walk across the hall and breastfeed my 20-month-old to sleep, hehe!

I think the rest of this week MIGHT be easier to deal with, despite the heat. We're having quite a heatwave this summer. It's in the high 80s or low 90s all the time, and that is ODD for a town where the average summer temperature is something like 73, let me tell you! It's very humid with it and it keeps storming every now and then. Last week there was a new national record for July in England, as the temperature reached 97F (36.5F)!! Anyway, it's hot. I hate hot because, well, I just hate it, and also because we are stuck in the house all day, all week, with the curtains closed half the day due to the heat. It's too hot to take the little ones out at all. The Health Visitor gave me a leaflet about looking after little ones during a heatwave and everything! I am SO thankful for our new air conditioner. If we didn't have it before, we would definitely have bought one when we saw the forecast for last week! It has been absolutely invaluable. It's still in the main bedroom but it cools so efficiently that the other bedroom is usually 24C in the day and 22C at night, and downstairs is 28C in the day (82F) so that's not bad, especially compared with how it was before we got the unit.

Anyway so we are managing to stay cool but the weather is getting VERY boring as I can't go out with the little ones and Arthur really needs the outings. But this week we have a few things planned, so we'll have to go out a bit. Tomorrow Cam's family are coming to visit, and then the next day I have my 6 week postnatal check (can you believe Matthew is 6 weeks old this week?!) if Neil is able to take part of the morning off to watch the boys while I go, and then in the afternoon Matthew has his newborn hearing screen at the hospital (apparently a new routine thing in this area now, which wasn't there when I had Arthur). So the week might get easier with things to break the days up a bit and stuff to distract Arthur.

Urgh, it's sooooo late and I'm so stupid to NOT be sleeping right now. I still need to shower, but what if Matthew wakes while I shower? Hmmm. Nearly finished my nibbly bowl of cereal. I MISS milk! Other types of milk don't remotely appeal to me, unfortunately. When Matthew is more settled I am definitely going to try the milk again, but not while he's still having random fussy moments, as I want to be sure it's milk and not something else.

Okay I feel a bit better for writing everything, which is a relief! I have a bazillion photos but I'll have to try to catch up with those another time. Matthew is 6 weeks old in 2 days and when we're both "signed off" by the doctor (hopefully me on Wednesday and Matthew next Wednesday at the baby clinic) then I'll put my pregnancy diary to rest again and do all my updating and photos in this diary. I'm sorry not to respond to emails and messages at the moment, or to sign guestbooks and keep up with diaries. I am reading bits here and there if I get the chance, but I just have no time for anything sanity-saving at the moment! Thank you all for the messages lately though! I can thank people here at least, and that's a start! I'll try to update again soon, and hopefully things will get easier soon too.

Matthew is here! MEGA photo entry and Arthur update :)

Oh my gosh, a whole MONTH since my last entry!!! Well, I have been keeping up with my pregnancy diary, but still, I can't bear to see this diary neglected a moment longer! I also have WAY too many photos of Arthur to wait any longer to post them!

Well, obviously, since my last entry I have had a baby!! :) Yay! Matthew Gerrard was born at home (yay for my homebirth!!) on Wednesday 14th June at 10.45pm. He was born so fast that the midwife wasn't here and Neil delivered him! My mum and dad were with us too, and I had no pain relief (but oh my GOSH did it hurt!!). Everything went fine, except for my 2nd degree tear (ow), but my stitches are fine and it's not so bad. Matthew weighed 7lbs 11oz and measured 49cm long - smaller than Arthur was, which was quite a surprise! He was born at exactly 41 weeks gestation, and that last week was the LONGEST week ever! Everything is written in a ton more detail in my pregnancy diary (link on the left there) and my birth story is in one of my entries too, but I'll get it sorted into its own link on the left at my pregnancy diary soon.

I posted this photo in my pregnancy diary, but I love it SO much and it seems fitting to post it here as part of the entry that introduces Matthew to the world of "Arthur's Mummy"! In fact I love it so much that I think maybe I'll change the photo at the top of my diary soon, and maybe use this one? Or take another one similar to it, when Matthew is a little older and more expressive :) Anyway, I am SO proud to post this beautiful photo of my boys (my BOYS, yay, I have BOYS!!) here at this diary for the first time:

I am SO thrilled to be a Mummy of TWO children now, and two such precious little boys at that. I love them both soooo much! I will be continuing to write here as normal pretty soon, about life with the two little ones. I plan to continue to update my pregnancy journal till 6 weeks postpartum, since that's when Matthew is officially no longer a newborn, and I am officially signed off by the doctor, out of my postnatal period. Already I miss pregnancy and the wonderful joy of growing a new life inside me, and the excitement of waiting to meet this new little person! I can't wait to do it all again one day. I will feel sad to close my pregnancy diary again, like I did when I closed it after Arthur, but it's only until next time :)

Okay, it's late and Matthew has been asleep for HOURS so I know he'll wake soon and then I won't be able to finish this. So I'll just post what I can.

Arthur is doing great! He loves his new baby brother soooo much! We have no jealousy issues at all so far, though I know it's still early days. I tandem nurse, sometimes they feed together, but more often I feed Matthew when he's hungry and Arthur when he wants milk or for bedtime/nap. Usually that means they don't feed at the same time, and I feel like I literally NEVER put my breasts away all day long, lol! But it's worth it :) I have a ton of milk. The leaking is getting annoying, and I am bigger than last time so my bras don't fit generously enough to allow room for breastpads. Plus we are having a hideous heatwave and thus NO bra is much comfier than anything else. So I am doing a lot of pouring milk all over the floor, sofas, children (!), etc. Every time Matthew cries or even when I lean over him to just LOOK at him while he's sleeping, milk just goes pitter pat on the floor. I should wear a bra ;) But it's too hot for clothes.

When Matthew was weighed at 13 days old (8lbs 8.5oz and 52cm long!), I asked the health visitor to weigh Arthur too! He hasn't been weighed in AGES, so I was eager to see how he's growing. He sat nice and still on the scales, and he weighed 26lbs 12oz, at 19 and a half months. That puts him at the 70th percentile so he is doing great! I stood him against the fridge and got him to stand straight and tall with his heels right back against the fridge (I can't believe my baby boy is big enough now that I can measure his height in such a "big boy" way!), and he is 32.5 inches tall, so 2ft 8.5 inches. He is growing wonderfully. My mum said at the age of 2, I was 2ft 8in, and at 2 and a half, my brother was 2ft 10.5in, so Arthur is quite tall for our family really. Neil is average height so I guess Arthur will be at least his height when he is fully grown. He seems to have had a growth spurt recently. At first we thought we were just having that syndrome of having just had a new teeny tiny baby, and thus our toddler suddenly looks as big as an ADULT, hehe! But nope, he really has grown. He was a size 4 in shoes a month or so ago when I had him fitted for summer sandals. Neil said that lately he can't get Arthur's shoes on that well, so yesterday they went shoe shopping, and Arthur is now wearing a size 5 and a half!!!! He is getting so big!

Here are some photos - I have so many to post that I'll just get started and hope to post them all before Matthew wakes for some Mummy milk!

First of all, there are lots from before Matthew was born, which I meant to update with before the birth, but oh well. Here they are now! Here's Arthur, reading his Mr. Men books :) He LOVES those books - Neil's brother bought him the full box set for his birthday, for when he was older, but he loves them now. He just likes opening the pages and pretending to read them :) And he likes to sort them into piles and put them back in the box in order, etc. Anyway, here he is doing one of his favourite activities (Mr. Funny does not appear to be very funny, haha!):

My mum came over when I reached 39 weeks, and turned up every single morning till Matthew was born, staying all day till Arthur went up for his bath and bedtime (6.30pm) to help me with Arthur. She was so wonderful! Arthur got on SO well with her, and was confident with her right from the start. He happily went out for hour-long walks with her without looking back to see me, which was wonderful. I was so tired during those last couple of weeks of pregnancy, I really don't know how I would have managed without Mummy's help. Arthur is so busy and energetic, and has to be doing some stimulating activity ALL the time when he's in the house. The second one activity ends or he gets bored of it, he is asking for the next activity. He is particularly eager to do drawing and playdough and water play these days. One follows the other instantly, but we always tidy the previous activity away first, and he's so keen on tidying that he always helps put everything away perfectly, which really helps! But anyway, Mummy was very eager to play with Arthur and just be with him and have fun teaching him new things and seeing his enthusiasm, so she was GREAT with activities for him and stuff.

Here are a few photos of them during those weeks. First, drawing - Arthur showing Mummy each pencil and crayon ONE BY ONE, hehe! He likes to show people his things in GREAT detail if they have never seen them before :)

Banging on my birth ball - he loved this! :)

Water play - don't know where Mummy was in these photos! She seemed to spend all her time constantly baling out the mat he was sitting on, hehe! Nearly the whole tubful of water ended up on the mat, but the weather was so hot that it was lovely that he was able to cool down with some water. And we never got any on the carpet either! Arthur loves filling containers with water from other containers, and ladling water into things, etc. His aim was pretty awful the first time he had water play that week, but after a few sessions, he was very accurate at pouring a cupful of water into a jug, say. He loves water play, and asks for it a lot, pointing at the kitchen sink and shouting, "Yah-yah, yah-yah!!" (his pronounciation of "water"!):

It was so hot that I made ice lollies out of a carton of freshly squeezed orange and mango juice and some cheap lolly moulds! Arthur loved those :)

He especially loves Grandy (my daddy), but he didn't get to see him much because Grandy was visiting my grandparents a lot while Mummy was helping me, and also he returned to France for a week during the middle of Mummy's stay. But when he did come round, Arthur just smiled and smiled at him all the time. He wanted to take his favourite books to him and have Grandy read them to him - a real sign of affection for Arthur! Here they are doing just that:

What else? Oh here are some photos of me, Mummy and Arthur making ginger snap cookies! It was one of those crazy things I HAD to do for my own sanity in the last few days of my pregnancy, lol! In fact I swear I NEEDED to make those cookies in order to actually GO into labour! It was such an overwhelming urge. Anyway, once I had made the dough, we cleaned the playmat and disinfected it (!!) and then Arthur helped cut out the cookie shapes with his (previously thoroughly washed!) playdough cutters! He got really stuck in and enjoyed it a lot. He loved eating them once they were done, and telling me what the shapes were with great excitement, like he does with the playdough shapes he cuts out :)

Man, I was SO hugely pregnant in those photos!!! I forget already how big I was. It's so hot at the moment, I am soooo glad not to be hugely pregnant any more during this heat! I am worried about Matthew though. He is in his cot-bed wearing only a nappy (no wrap, to let his skin breathe even better), and the fan is on in here too, but I bought a digital thermometer to be nice and sure of the temperature where he sleeps, and right now it says 28.9 degrees (84 degrees) - waaaay too hot for a safe room temperature for a newborn :( But I can't get the room any cooler. At the moment the temperature just seems to be climbing in here. Urgh. Arthur woke twice already this evening absolutely soaked with sweat, poor love. He is in just a nappy too, and the fan is on him, but it's just so muggy and horrible and oppressive, and it makes me want to say (for the MILLIONTH time in my diaries, hehe!) how much I HATE the summer with its horrible oppressive heat!!! Urgh! Roll on cooler weather, already. The next 3 days are forecast 90 degrees. Yuck. How I wish we had air conditioning!!! Fans do very little when it gets that hot with the mugginess thrown in, and I get worried about my tiny boy's safety :( Plus it's just horrid and uncomfy for all of us. Bleurgh. Hate hot weather!

Anyway! I have yet more photos! The last ever photos of me breastfeeding Arthur before Matthew was born:

And the first photos of me tandem nursing my lovely boys when Matthew was 3 days old :) I posted these in my pregnancy diary, but here they are again - I am so proud!! :)

Same dress in both sets of photos! But then, I officially have NO clothes that fit me, tsk! I seem to have gained more weight than I even expected to, and I am a clothes size BIGGER than the size I had prepared for (which was 2 sizes bigger than my pre-pregnancy size in the first place!). So, of course, I have ZERO clothes in that size. And thus nothing that fits over my vast bottom! I am eBaying as we speak ;) So that maternity dress is getting a lot of wear, as it doesn't have to negotiate with my bottom, hehe!

Here are a couple of photos of Arthur being a bit of a monkey! Climbing onto the pushchair that was temporarily stacked in the living room to make way for a new washing machine in the car! And then one that Neil took when he discovered Arthur eating a chocolate biscuit - no idea where he had managed to find it from!

His hair got so long and wild, hehe! He had a haircut just after Matthew was born though - Neil took him. That was his third haircut already!! Wow. His hair seems to grow so fast. It is also very thick when it gets long, and it was giving him itchy heat rash on his scalp in the hot weather, so we knew it was time to get it cut.

One of Arthur's favourite things at the moment is to sit in the driver's seat in the car and fiddle with all the dials and buttons! He likes to "drive" with the wheel and puts the radio on and bops while he drives, hehe! It's the sweetest thing! He likes turning the lights on and that makes a bing-bing-bing alarm with the door open, which he really likes to have "control" over by switching the lights on and off! He cries like the world is ending when it's time for him to come inside, even if Neil has patiently sat with him for TWENTY minutes while he plays there! Here he is enjoying being the "driver"! :)

Wow, I think I am nearly there on the photos at last!! Hehe! I told you there were lots of photos to post!

Urgh, 29 darn degrees in here.

Okay, Arthur just woke again and then Matthew did, so it's after midnight now. I think Arthur's asleep again - Neil is lying with him. Matthew has been fed and changed and is now lying in his cot-bed behind me wearing just a fuzzi bunz nappy. He is a very contented baby. He isn't asleep but I know he'll let me know if he gets fed up in a minute, and I'll give him some more Mummy-milk. Sometimes he takes himself right off to sleep after I put him down! I HOPE this is something he'll continue to do - I am still holding out for a baby who naturally sleeps wonderfully!

Anyway I am so near the end of this entry that I just wanted to finish it off and post it. I just wanted to say about Arthur and the new things he's saying and doing, to keep track before it all changes again!

He is so active when he's out in a big space or at the playground. He enjoys the swings and the climbing frames and slides, but mostly he loves to just run, run, RUN until he's out of breath in a large grassy area, and then pause for a moment to catch his breath, and then run and run again! It's so sweet to watch him do that funny bobbly toddler run! He is very stable running now, but it's still such a sweet little toddler's run :) He also kicks a ball really well. He runs and kicks at the same time, "dribbling" the ball with pretty good accuracy. He really enjoys that.

He is getting taller. He can reach new things that aren't really toddler-proofed enough! He can reach dishes on the kitchen surfaces, and he takes them down to put them in the dishwasher! He's the tidiest toddler I ever met! He tries to wipe Matthew's bottom with a clean cloth wipe during nappy changes, bless him! He points at pen marks on his hands or places they shouldn't be, and says, "Oh-dee..." (oh dear) which sometimes comes out like, "Oh-doh" for some reason! Anyway it's sweet because he says it in such a doleful tone, like there's a real serious problem here, hehe! He says oh-dee" a LOT these days. Anything out of place or untidy or marked or even slightly broken gets pointed at and he gets very concerned over it, saying "Oh dee" over and over till we notice and reassure him over it! He's so funny.

He says such a lot of words and things. He names EVERYTHING, though plenty of it still with his own special pronounciations! He has a book with lift out pictures, like a jigsaw, and he takes each piece out and makes a big pile of them, and then holds them out to me one by one and tells me what they are, before putting them back in their places in the book. The pictures are: drink, toast, egg, swings, dog, tree, apple, carrot, cake, duck, soap, boat, car, ball, bricks, teddy, bed and moon! He names them all and I can understand him when he names them, though his way of pronouncing some of them is very sweet and toddler-ish! I particularly like soap (boap)! He just names everything he sees, constantly. He attempts longer words like ambulance, but only Mummy and Daddy know that he is saying ambulance when he hears a siren outside and says, "Woo-woo-woo! Ahh-dan!" Ahh-dan is ambulance :)

He is SERIOUSLY into anything vehicular! He has a real obsession with seeing cars and buses and trains and vans and trucks and lorries, and you name it, if it's a vehicle, he'll love it! He also loves toy vehicles and is gaining quite a collection as I am too soppy and can't resist picking one up every time I am in the supermarket! He plays with them such a lot and gets so much obvious enjoyment out of it. He pushes them around the floor all the time. He has a set of emergency vehicles which he pushes around singing, "Ni-nny, ni-nny, ni-nny!" in a cheerful manner! Neil taught him that sirens go, "Nee-nar, nee-nar, nee-nar" - well, they USED to around here. Now they just go "woo-woo-woo!" like in the States. But I remember when they all used to go nee-nar. Anyway, I love Arthur's way of saying "nee-nar", it's so sweet to hear him cheerfully singing, "ni-nny, ni-nny!" as he pushes the ambulance or police car around the carpet, bless him!

I keep feeling amazed at the things Arthur can say and do. Toddlers just learn in leaps and bounds, don't they?! It just amazes me. They are like little sponges. Mummy told me once that you should never expect too little of a child, just because they are very young. I read somewhere that "you can start teaching your child their colours between age 2 and 3". Mummy said that's what she was told as well, but she saw my interest in things and thought why should she just expect me not to be able to learn that at a younger age? So she told me what colour things were, just as part of the normal chatting she would do while we played and things. And as a result, I knew all my colours by age two, including weird ones like mauve and beige. My first day at nursery school (a year later), they had an "orange corner" and were just learning their first colours!

So lately I have been telling Arthur what colour his crayons are as he is drawing with them, etc. I am absolutely amazed that Arthur now knows ELEVEN colours. He picks up his marker pens out of the box, holds them out to me, and names the colour before placing them in a neat pile on the mat by his paper. When he has told me all the colours and all the pens are out on the mat, then he starts drawing :)

Since teaching him colours, he has developed a HUGE fascination with colours. Everywhere he goes, he is naming colours! When we sort the laundry now, instead of naming whose item of clothing this is, or what item of clothing (trousers, etc) - which he has been enjoying doing for a while - he now wants to tell me the colour of each item. Neil says when they go out for walks, he tells Neil the colour of EVERYTHING he sees! He is really excited by colours at the moment, and for the most part, he pronounces them really well.

He knows blue (boo), purple (bur-poo), red (rrrreh), green (geem), yellow (lellow), orange (ah-gah), brown (baum), black (dat-dat-dat! He loves the sound of staccato words and for some reason as to repeat this one several times for effect, lol!), pink (pim), white (way) and aqua (ak-ah!). His favourite colour is purple, and it's the first one he became really consistent with. Then followed blue, then aqua and brown and black. At first, if I asked him what colour something was, EVERYTHING was booo (blue), and sometimes everything is lellow, but if I ask him if a green item is yellow, he shakes his head and says geem. He likes to tell me the colours of the Mr. Men on the front covers of his Mr. Men books, and he is starting to tell me more detailed stuff like the Mr. Man in question is lellow, and then he'll say, "Hat!" with his hands on his head to get his point across, and then say, "Geem" because that Mr. Man happens to be wearing a green hat. Or "sshhooo, baum" because he's wearing brown shoes. He just LOVES his colours! Today I told him my trousers were grey and my bra was beige. I figured, why not? My mum did it with me and there was nothing wrong with it. A child can learn anything you teach them, and it's not pushing him to teach him something he's interested in learning. He pointed to an olive green Mr. Man today and said, "lellow", and I realised he was ready for me to teach him more "complicated" colours like beige and stuff. He can see the difference between colours, so why not tell him what they are? He seems perfectly able to retain lots of different names for colours and use them appropriately, so I am happy to tell him more of them. Anyway, he was very eager to repeat that my trousers were "gay" and my bra was "babe", hehe! I think he will remember those colours and point them out on other items in no time. It's so much fun teaching an enthusiastic little one and watching him enjoy his new knowledge! :)

Okay I'm sure there was more I wanted to say about Arthur's latest things, but it's soooo late now and I must go to bed. Matthew got cranky just now so I nursed him to sleep in bed. I'll put him back in the cot-bed I think, when I go to bed. If he wakes he can stay in with me. It's so hot, I am hoping he'll be happy (and cool enough) in his cot-bed because I'm too hot for close snuggles tonight! I have the fan on him. I hope that's okay for a newborn, but it's so warm in here that I don't know what else to do to keep him cool enough. Okay I am going to drink a ton of water and go to bed. I will leave you with one last photo of Arthur, just being lovely and Arthur-ish :) I'll update again if I get time, hopefully soon. Arthur is changing so much, so fast. I don't want to miss recording it all as it happens, or else it just gets forgotten and I cherish it all so much that I want it recorded! So I'll try to update again soon.