Sleep. Not an upbeat entry.

Thanks for the notes and guestbook messages :)

I am feeling half-hearted about writing an entry tonight, but I have things to talk about and so I guess I'll get into it. Or Arthur will wake and I won't finish it.

I should talk about Arthur's sleep. It has been weighing heavy on my mind lately, so yeah I should offload here, since this is the place for it! Thank you so much Heather for the links and support over our shared sleep issues! Heather just had HUGE success at last in helping her baby boy, Camden, to sleep through the night. Somewhere under the surface I feel envious, but actually I am so glad for them and proud of them too! It is a hard hard thing when you have a baby who wakes all night and will not naturally sleep well. Heather gave me some places to read up on ideas (and opinions) on sleep "training" and stuff, so I have had those kicking around in my head for a few days. But in the previous week I had already been thinking about some stuff related to Arthur's sleep.

I think I already mentioned this, but lately Arthur is getting full before he falls asleep when I nurse him "to sleep" for his naps in the day time. Not every time, but sometimes. I have started to see that he needs to know how to get to sleep by himself once he is full, because he doesn't really seem to know how else to fall asleep, without using the breast as a pacifier. Now, I am absolutely HAPPY to be a human pacifier! I just want to say that. I read so many posts on breastfeeding forums where there are mothers who just aren't happy to feel like a human pacifier all the time. I can really understand their feelings and their reasoning! But I just wanted to say that I don't ever get that. I LOVE the fact that Arthur "uses" me at any and every opportunity for comfort, sleep, closeness with me, food, etc. I get tired of all the interruptions to my sleep, but I NEVER get tired of nursing him, even at night. Nursing him at night and being woken at night are two seperate things to me. I hate being woken when I'm tired out! I LOVE nursing my sweetpea in the dark in our snuggly bed when he's all warm and sleepy. Love it love it love it.

At night he usually nurses back to sleep really fast, and if he's full, he just rolls over and nuzzles his head into the bed over and over with his little chin up, making little munchy movements with his mouth. It's the cutest thing to watch! Anyway that seems to be his way of settling when he's almost asleep, and he goes off without a problem. I think it helps him that he had already been asleep and hadn't really woken up fully to nurse in the first place. But in the day, he will be super sleepy while he's nursing, then when he's full he takes himself off the breast, and then - oh dear! - he's awake, and his sleep-aid has stopped! If he could then fall asleep by himself it would be good, because until now he has been rolling over, crawling around the bed, and pulling up to stand against me (lying down next to him) in the bed. So of course, tired or not, he wakes right up, and then he is tired and cranky after a while (despite being very cheerful and playful at that moment) or else I have to rock him to sleep or something, or let him play a while and then nurse him a bit more.

So last week, or actually I think it was at least a couple of weeks ago, when this happened one time at his afternoon nap, I decided to try putting the travel cot up and popping him in there to see if he would burn his energy off and then lie down and sleep. I wasn't managing too well with him crawling everywhere, and he got angry and upset if I kept on laying him down again every time he got up. So I tried the travel cot. He cruised round and round and round in there for a long time, babbling and squawking and being generally cheerful. Sometimes he sat down and then got right up again. I lay down by the side of it and stayed quiet and still.

Of course, it didn't work. He got tired of doing that after a while, and then got really upset that I wasn't taking him out and helping him to sleep. When I just lay there and waited some more, he got soooo hysterical. I did not like the fact that the cot seperated him from me anyway, so I gave it up. I had to nurse him just to calm him down, he was so upset even when I took him out and cuddled him, poor thing. He really has never ever known any sort of seperation from me, even with me in the same room. It doesn't seem fair to him to start that now.

Soooo I thought if only I could be lying right there next to him, physically in contact with him, and available to him - as "there" as I could possibly be - surely that would be a better setting to try to let him find sleep on his own, since I knew he would not be happy about it. So last week I noticed that when he is in the top corner of our mattress on the floor (the part against the corner of the room, so with walls on two sides of the mattress), and I lie next to him, I can bend my legs at 90 degrees to my torso and thus "fence" him in, so he can't crawl around or off the bed. He can pull up on me or the walls, but that's fine if he wants to do that for a while. I figured I could just wait and stay still and quiet, and let him just play with me RIGHT there, and see if he would settle down when he got tired enough, since he would not be crying for me to go to him.

Well he pulled up and bounced and stuff for a while, and then got upset and tired. He cried more and more, and both times that I tried it last week, he eventually threw himself backwards when sitting and hit his head on the wall. Poor baby! He sometimes does this throwing backwards or falling forwards thing when he is doing his "despair" crying - which, by the way, he only does if I am trying to make him sleep by himself or maybe some other horrible thing like cleaning him after he eats! ;) So I always scoop him up and cuddle and kiss him when he hurts himself, and I always nurse him for comfort. I will never stop doing that. I will always offer him the breast for comfort if he is hurt or upset, as long as breastfeeding continues. Both times, he fell asleep (exhausted from the whole ordeal) on the breast.

Then I read up on crying and sleep and "modified" versions of that, and decided I would try being strong and waiting until he actually fell asleep the next time he got full before falling asleep at a daytime nap. I still planned to nurse him if he hurt himself, but I was going to watch out to try and stop him falling against the wall. I figured I would watch the clock and try and wait it out, even if he cried a lot, to see if he really COULD actually go to sleep by himself in the end.

So yesterday morning he took an hour's sleep from falling asleep on the breast. After his lunch I cuddled him close and told him that if he got full when it was naptime, Mummy would try to help him fall asleep by himself. I told him it would not be easy and he would probably cry a lot, but that I knew he could do it all by himself. I told him I would never leave him and that I would be right there with him. I told him I would nurse him if he got terribly upset and I would not let him cry himself sick. I told him how sorry I was for how upset he was going to be about it. I just felt bad already.

He started acting sleepy around 1pm so I took him up to bed. I nursed him and he got full and started getting up and doing stuff around 1.15. I got my legs in place so he was "contained" (!!), and then waited. He spent ages just cruising the length of my body and back again, over and over. He did his cute new thing he does, which is jumping! He bounces and bounces with both feet at once until they both leave the bed! He had lots of fun doing that. I felt like a total heel with him so happy and carefree and totally not expecting me to then act all cold and steely and do nothing to help him get cosy and sleepy when he expected and needed me to.

So then he got tired, and started rubbing his eyes and getting grisly. I stayed put. He didn't lie down, just sat, fell forward to crawling, flopped to his tummy, pushed to sitting, over and over. Sometimes he pulled up and cruised a bit but seemed very unhappy and kept sitting down and crying. I just waited.

By 1.30pm - it doesn't sound long, but it was a LONG time with him crying and not being happy - he was totally distraught about the situation. He would either sit and cry while pushing his face about with his hands, or throw himself forwards and lie face down on the bed sobbing and crying. He never lay flat, always with his knees bent under him, ready to push himself up again. He sweated his hair wet to the tips. He soaked the sheet with tears and sweat. He sobbed and sobbed and coughed and gasped and choked and screeched and wailed. This is the state he had reached by 1.30. I put my hand on his back a lot and sometimes I would say to him, "It's okay Arthur, Mummy's here. You can do it." And stuff like that. But he seemed to get more upset sometimes when I touched him, so I didn't do it all the time. I just didn't know what to do with myself.

I continued to wait like I said I would, even with him that upset. I felt like everything I had been reading told me I needed to stay strong, especially on the first time. He stayed in this state of total hysteria for 20 minutes. TWENTY minutes. Think about 30 seconds, no, TEN seconds of a baby crying like that. If you have that scary and horrible picture in your mind, now multiply the length of time by 120. It was endless and unbearable. I can’t even begin to describe how I felt. I can’t even imagine how my poor love was feeling. He cried like I have never ever heard him cry before. Even when he had the plaster put on his legs 4 months ago, it didn’t reach this level. And that was just awful back then. He cried soooooo much. I cried with him. His cries pierced me right to the core. They made every fibre in my being want to curl up and die if I couldn’t rescue my child and make him stop crying like that. And yet I lay there like a lump of unfeeling flesh and watched my little boy suffer. I do believe he was suffering, because how could a child cry like that and NOT be suffering in some way? His cries were raspy and hoarse by now, and his breathing was a complete spasm of sobs. Once or twice he raised his face from the bed, eyes closed, wailing and sobbing, as though he was writhing with the awfulness of it all. You should have seen his face then. He looked like his heart was broken. Utterly broken. I have never even seen him look like that before, ever.

When he coughed and gagged like he would throw up, I picked him up and held him close on my lap till he was just sobbing and not crying, because I promised I would not let him cry till he was sick. Of course the moment I lay him back down he was right back where he was when I went to pick him up. But I picked him up another two times when he got gaggy. After that I pressed the lullaby tune on his cuddly toy that he has in the bed, because I was hoping that would distract him from the crying and sobbing and help him calm down without waking up too much. We usually play that to him while we get him ready for bed, so I hoped it would be soothing. He did stop crying immediately that he heard it, and he was lying down in his “despair” pose so I hoped he might just doze off. But once the song finished he was sobbing and gasping and raspy-crying again. I pressed that button a few times. Then I waited a couple more minutes. I was about to give in and nurse him, even knowing that it would make the whole traumatic half-hour or so completely pointless, when all of a sudden he went quiet. He had his eyes closed. I held my breath. He opened his mouth (but not his eyes) and started crying again. After a few seconds it stopped again. Then started. Then stopped. And he was out. Completely and utterly exhausted from the horrible thing I put him through. He still had his knees drawn up under him, and his face was fully into the mattress, but he was able to breathe somehow.

That was at 1.50pm. He just went totally unconscious. Even though he was so utterly asleep, he did not stop sobbing violently for a full TEN minutes after he fell asleep. I watched the clock. Ten minutes, even in his sleep. After that the sobbing stopped and I stayed watching him for another ten minutes before I gently pulled his knees from under him, and his arms too, which were balled up under his chest. He turned his face slightly to the side and I left him to sleep. He didn’t move for two hours. I didn’t even want to leave his side, but in the end I tore myself away. I went downstairs and ate half a tub of banoffee ice cream whilst watching some daytime rubbish on TV. Urgh. I went up to check on him like every five minutes. I know this is the stupidest thing ever, but something in me was scared that he would die or something. Like I made him so distraught and exhausted that he might die if I didn’t check that he was okay. He might never recover. Yes, I am stupid. But there you go. It’s just how I was feeling at the time.

But part of me thought, if I can cope with that for another two days then he will be almost there, and will have learnt the “valuable” lesson of falling asleep by himself! Yay! A very small part of me, that is. The other 90% of me (or so) was just so broken by the whole experience. How on earth can it be right to make my baby go through something like this so that he will sleep?! He CAN sleep without any trouble, if I nurse him or rock him. He is happy with that. I am mostly happy with that. I worry that he is just never going to sleep by himself, and I desperately need more sleep than I ever get, and sometimes I find it hard to always be on demand over his sleep. But those are smaller issues compared with Arthur being contented and happy. I know if I “sleep train” him then he will come out the other side, sleep like an angel and be back to his smiley happy self, AND probably benefit from better quality sleep or more sleep in general. So those are the pros. But the cons are just too harsh. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. I waver between feeling wretched that this means I am letting my son down because I am not able/willing to put in the hard yards to get him through this so he can sleep better, and feeling wretched that I am putting him through something that is so obviously upsetting to him, regardless of the outcome.

One thing I realised on reflection, while he slept, was that crying it out is Crying It Out. I made my precious love Cry It Out. And I feel so awful and ashamed and just…. like crap for it, because I am so so so so strongly against CIO. I said I never would and I did. I realised that CIO is very simply black and white. There is no grey area to CIO. I keep reading about stuff called “a modified version of CIO” or encountering mothers saying, “Oh I wouldn’t call it CIO as such…” But right now with all my raw feelings about the whole thing, such ideas/comments make me feel so angry, because it’s such a pile of crap. There is no such thing as “modified” CIO (allegedly what I did with Arthur). Those terms are just to make people feel better about making their babies CIO. I think people say those things because “real” CIO involves just leaving the baby behind a closed door and walking away and letting them cry till they lose consciousness. That’s just mean CIO. Slightly less mean CIO is being more available while the baby cries itself into loss of consciousness. But that’s all the difference there is. Mean or slightly less mean. It’s still CIO. Arthur cried until he fell asleep. It makes no difference whether I was there or not (except that it would have been doubly upsetting to him had I NOT been there) – he still cried till he fell asleep. He cried for the duration of the time. He Cried. It Out.

I wanted (and tried) to believe I had been courageously and lovingly “teaching” Arthur some marvellous important life-lesson that would benefit him immeasurably. That’s what I was led to believe I was doing. I’m so angry, because THAT’S total crap too. I know the slogan – “CIO WORKS!!” Sure it works. But that’s not the point, is it? I know what the results would be around the corner. Sleep, for all concerned. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was soooo selfish. Does Arthur care how he falls asleep? Does he lack for anything, or FEEL he does, sleep-wise? I know he could get better sleep, but he is always bright and bubbly and cheerful, and rarely seems sleep-deprived. Would he go, “Wow Mummy, I’m SO glad you made me see that I needed to fall asleep without your closeness or comfort!”? Would he NEVER learn to fall asleep by himself, in time for starting school, when it would be more of a relevant issue? Of course not. So, who benefits? Me, that’s who. It all boiled down to ME. And while I do need to address my own needs for sleep and sanity (!!), it just doesn’t seem fair to cause Arthur unhappiness and trauma for my own comfort and benefit.

Ugh.

I’m sorry. I know that there are probably plenty of people who read this diary who have had their little one(s) cry it out in some form or other, and I know all my raw feelings that I have spilled out here might aggravate those people, since they seem accusative of everybody who does let their babies CIO. I didn’t mean to do that. I am just so upset and angry, from a personal point of view. I don’t mean to shout about other people’s choices. I don’t understand when it is RIGHT to CIO, I just can’t understand it, but that’s just me. That’s all it is – I don’t understand, so I am in no position to say anybody is doing it wrong or right. All I know is, for me, I just did it way way waaaaaaay wrong. Or at least it felt that way. And I am angry because once AGAIN I let myself listen to mothering society at large and question my actions and think that maybe I should try it the way everybody else does it. I hate how I keep doing that. I never want to do that. Most of the ways “everybody else” does it just don’t seem right to me (that is, FOR me) anyways.

I’m not saying CIO mummies are wrong. I just…. Ugh. I’m so sorry. I know I just probably upset a lot of people. I’m just spouting feelings. I’m sorry.

I feel like crap. I feel like using worse words than crap. I was feeling good about myself as a mother for a long time now, and then I feel like I made the biggest mistake. And now I have a permanent blotch of crappiness on my mummying record. Arthur will not remember it, I know. He woke two hours later, very wobbly and tired, obviously physically affected by such an exhausting and upsetting ordeal, but you can not IMAGINE how close I held him and how many kisses I planted on his cheeks and forehead and hair and ears and fingers and arms and toes and just any part that I could reach while I held him close in my arms for the time it took him to wake up properly. I just wanted to keep telling him how sorry I was. He was his normal self after a while, but he cried that evening at bedtime when I went to put the breast away that he’d drained and get the other one out. It was as though he expected me to leave him to it again, and it upset him immediately.

I could not take any joy whatsoever in the fact that he slept for two hours. It was no consolation at all. It was just a reminder of what I had put him through. I read a comment on CIO that said something like, “So many mothers are against CIO. Not many of them are still against it once they’ve tried it!” Well I think I will be the exception. Thinking of that comment made me wonder if I would feel better if we came through it and the sleep around here was wonderful again. I think I would be glad that he was sleeping well, and very glad to be getting sleep again myself. But I also think I would always regret what I had to do to bring that about. Actually REGRET it. And surely that’s not good? Today Arthur nursed to sleep quickly for his morning nap, and he stayed asleep all by himself (despite stirring 3 times) for nearly an hour and a half. I dreaded – DREADED – the afternoon nap. I felt actually scared of it. What if he didn’t nurse to sleep? Even with all my awful feelings about yesterday, I had still planned to try and be consistent and do it again today if he didn’t nurse to sleep. I figured, it could just be today and tomorrow and then he/we could be over that hurdle. But I was scared silly about doing it again. Thankfully he did nurse to sleep quickly as he was tired out. He only slept 30 minutes, and I think he could have used some more sleep when he woke, but I didn’t have the heart to try to MAKE him get back to sleep when he woke and smiled at me.

Am I just the wussiest mother ever, or what? I don’t know if Arthur is “ready” for this or not. Should he be? Should he even HAVE to be ready for something this horrible? How would I know when he IS ready, if there is such a thing? I thought he was. Why don’t I know anything about anything? I figured I would not even go NEAR trying to do this at night yet, because I don’t yet want to withhold any night milk from him, and also I simply don’t want to stop nursing him to sleep at night when he wants to. I enjoy it. He enjoys it. I am knackered but I don’t care to put an end to something so special just yet. So I thought if I could get him to learn to sleep by himself for day naps, maybe he would nap better and ALSO be more able to resettle himself when he wakes at night – that would be great! But yuck. The whole thing has been terrible so far.

I am not going to be one of those wussy mothers who can’t even bear to discipline her child. I don’t mind discipline, or tears or tantrums at my persistence over whatever the issue is. But this is different. This seemed like needlessly upsetting my precious little love. I just can’t do it, I can’t. But where does that leave me. I feel very insecure suddenly, about my abilities. No, not abilities… what is the word I’m looking for? My choices? My instincts? Something like that. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong. I feel like my mothering instincts got switched off and I am all lost in a fog wondering what is the right thing to do for my son, and that just sucks so much because if anyone should know these things, it’s me. And I just don’t any more. Why don’t I? Why has this one little experience made everything feel up in the air?

Ugh. I had other things to talk about today but I just haven’t got anything left right now. I forgot to post this photo a week or so ago:

He’s just so precious to me. I could never bear to hurt him, ever. I feel like I have. I feel like a voodoo doll or something, like, stick pins in my child and *I* feel the pain. I hurt him, I hurt me. If I hurt him, I WANT to hurt me, somehow. Like I would feel better for it, like I deserve it. I was never prepared for love at this level. It’s so wonderful but it makes life so…. on-the-edge. Risky. Painful. Incredibly wonderful. Scary. I’m here doing it and I wouldn’t change it for ANYTHING, but I’m suddenly terrified to mess up and do something wrong by my little one. I know all parents make mistakes, but I feel like Arthur is too precious to risk a mistake, even one. I know that’s not a healthy mindset. I need to work on that.

I love him so much. He is waking. I'm going to nurse him. With absolute joy and thanksgiving, I am going to nurse my baby boy. And then I'm going to bed, about 3 inches from him.

General Arthur update and photos :)

Arthur is napping, so I have a moment to update. He napped 2 hours this morning!! I think maybe he is teething, because he's biting like CRAZY on everything, and still drooling loads. And he seems a bit out of sorts these last couple of days. It is horribly hot and muggy and humid though - it's been building up for big thunderstorms over the weekend. We had some great thunder last night, but not for very long. Anyway, it's fresher today which is nice! But I don't know how much the weather might have been affecting Arthur.

He has slept a lot more in the day. And sometimes he just looks tired and pale and puffy. He had one episode of diarrhoea yesterday. But none other than that, and he has had some NEON pink nappy rash in conjunction with it, so I think he is teething. His gums have deep pink patches on them here and there, mainly over the bottom two "fang" teeth. I don't really see any sign of new teeth in there, except maybe possibly a little more of a bulge where the fourth top tooth will be, to finish that lil set he has up there! His other teeth have grown in so well now. He looks very "toothy" when he smiles now! He enjoys biting things with his new teeth, and I'm relieved that he is not grinding his teeth as much as he was. I read on a parenting board online that it's pretty common for babies to do that when they have new top and bottom teeth to grind against each other, and test out the new sensation. Most of the mothers said their babies stopped doing it after about a month. Arthur does still grind his teeth, but maybe only a couple of times a day now, whereas it was like every few seconds before! I guess he has had his new top teeth a few weeks, so that fits with what the other mothers are saying.

His new thing is putting something in his mouth and then crawling off with it sticking out! Yesterday he sat chewing a clean bra from the laundry pile, and then set off to the kitchen door with it trailing out from between his teeth like a lil retriever dog! Hehe! Of course it tripped him up once it trailed under him and he started crawling on it :) After lots of effort to fix things, stopping and sitting to reposition it lots of times along the way, he just let the bra go and continued on to the kitchen! He's so funny :) I'm kind of nervous about him falling onto his face and then having a major problem with whatever item was stuck in his mouth, but I take big solid items away from him before he crawls off, like bricks:

And car keys - a big favourite at the moment!...

See the lil man's teeth?! He is so toothy these days! Sometimes it still seems strange to look at his face and see alllll those teeth smiling at me! He looks so grown up in some ways, with a mouth full of teeth. Of course, he still only has five, but they are top and bottom, and they happen to be the ones that fill out the "smile" area. It's so different somehow to those cute first two bottom baby teeth. Babies still look like cute lil babies with those, but they change somehow when the top ones come in and start looking like ROWS of teeth!

Let me see, what things did I want to make sure to record about Arthur since last time?

Since watching Jaya climb the stairs at her house, Arthur has become a stair-climbing expert!! He was already pretty good at scaling the whole flight, but he has become really good at it now. He used to climb them - left knee, right knee, left foot, right foot, pause, hands on next step. Then repeat the whole process. Sometimes if he didn't get his knee on the next step far enough it would slip off and I would have to catch his bottom as he slipped, so that he didn't hurt himself.

Now he is suddenly climbing fast without any help. I am always sitting a step or two behind him, all the way up, incase he does fall, but he never requires any help. He now climbs - left knee, right FOOT, left foot, pause, right knee, left FOOT, right foot, pause, etc. Much more smooth. Yesterday I saw him climb TWICE without using his knees at all!!! Wow. He just raised his foot right up and plonked it sturdily on the next step, then brought his other foot up beside it! Yesterday he seemed to have his peak of interest in climbing the stairs. He climbed them nine times, all the way up from the bottom step, including the corner bend :) Clever boy! We don't use stair gates, so I am going to have to be ultra watchful when he gets near the stairs, as he's fast now once he decides to do something. Here's my lil Boo yesterday, peeping through the corner of the stairway at his daddy after he climbed all the way up there without a a pause. I was right behind him with my arm under his chest to keep him safe. He looks kind of worried in this photo! He wasn't though. He was babbling like crazy to his daddy, and he makes such funny expressions when he babbles. He adds all sorts of emotive faces to get his point across! Anyway, here he is:

He tries to climb a LOT these days. He can climb into the dishwasher. Yes. Obviously I am watching him way more carefully these days, and he doesn't get to help me so much in that dept now! He can climb onto the sofa if he has something to boost his height a little, like if I left a thick book or a box of tissues next to the sofa, or even if I'm sitting there and he stands on my leg first. He is up there with no trouble, but then he climbs onto the arm straight away and yeah that's gonna lead to bumps and tears, so I take him down pretty much as soon as he gets up there. He finds this annoying of course!

Lately he can crawl at a sort of "run"!! Especially if he's on a mission somewhere and he hears one of us coming up to grab him as we tell him it's time to change his nappy, or that he mustn't go wherever he's heading to. He just suddenly crawls at double-speed!!! That boy can move! He can move so fast that it's hard to grab him sometimes when he is crawling that fast.

Hmmm... anything else new to report?... I'm sure there were lots of things. I should write them down as I think of them! It always bugs me so much that I forget things by the time I am actually sitting here to write about them!

His food is going great. He eats half a jar of organic baby food for lunch, but I am starting to try to wean myself off the jars, hehe! I always wanted to cook for Arthur. I feel so lazy using jars. I know that's what they're there for, and there's nothing wrong with making good use of them, but still. It's not quite how I wanted to be doing things. It makes a ton more sense for Arthur to be brought up, even at this young age, on the foods that we eat, and the recipes we eat. Otherwise how weird is it for him to suddenly wean to "table food" as I keep seeing it called on US parenting sites (?!), having had this marvellous jarred stuff all his life, and suddenly be expected to eat a completely different type and taste and style of food?! I remember that really hit home when we went on that picnic a couple of months ago, and there was a lady recently arrived from China with her beautiful 17-month-old daughter. The lady had made this fantastic Chinese food for the picnic, just stuff they always eat at home, she said. While we ate, this lady was shoveling huge spoonfuls of Hipp Organic Chicken and Vegetable Casserole into her reluctant daughter's mouth, and I couldn't help thinking how crazy that seemed! There is no way that child would be eating chicken and veg casseroles with the family once she was off the jars, since they never eat anything but their normal cultural cuisine. I know it's on a waaaaaaay milder scale than that, but it's still the same thing for Arthur. We don't really eat the stuff he gets in jars very often. I want him to eat what we eat. It's the most natural thing for him, and it makes the most sense.

Soooo this week he has had some home-made roast chicken, mashed potato, broccoli and carrot, buzzed up in the blender. I gave him two ice-cubes of it and mixed it with an ice-cube of sweet potato. He ate the whole lot, and loved it! He had that for lunch today actually. I think he would almost eat the same again if the portion was bigger! He seems to love it, and that makes me happy :) It's OUR food, yay!

On Friday Arthur ate with me at the kitchen table (well, in his highchair). That's another thing I am working on now. I want Arthur to be used to eating WITH us, like family meals. I have always had a big thing about doing this, but have just been so disorganised so far (and had such a messy kitchen) that it hasn't worked out. Visiting Jemma and Stu and Jaya was a good kick up the bum for me on this subject, because we ate a nice family meal together at the table. Just how I want to do it here. It was so nice being able to see in person how another family does things with a baby a little bit older than Arthur. Such a great eye-opener, and also good reassurance on the things that we already do the same.

It will be hard for us to eat dinner as a family, because Arthur's bedtime routine starts around 6pm with his bath, and that is right after Neil gets home. No time for a meal. Neil is never home for lunch. The only meal left is breakfast. I really want to work on us eating breakfast as a family at the table. At the weekend we ate lunch at the table together, and that went great. I eat breakfast with Arthur anyway, but sometimes just "on the go" while I clear up in the kitchen or help Arthur eat his breakfast. We often eat lunch together but never because it was planned that way, only if I am hungry while I am doing his lunch.

So on Friday Arthur had a 2.5 hour nap (!!!), during which time I discovered what the mothers who have babies who SLEEP do during the day!! :) It was soooo great. I had time to put my feet up for 30 minutes (normally the most I get with Arthur), then check my messages and stuff on the internet, THEN I actually reached the stage where I could start cleaning!!! Woohoo!! The house is such a tip, because a) I'm disorganised, but mainly b) Arthur never ever gives me long enough to clean anything. I am always so tired from the nights that I either need to nap with him, or flake out somewhere for the 20-40 minutes that his naps usually last. When he's up, he is my sole focus. I do get things done around the house with him, but they are things like laundry and maybe emptying the dishwasher. Unless he is pinned down somewhere - like in his highchair - I can't get the cleaning stuff out. And he will usually barely tolerate the highchair for the length of time it takes to eat his food! He likes to be on the go, this boy, and he likes his mummy with him :) It's hard work but I wouldn't have it any other way!

Anyway so while Arthur napped, I cleaned the highchair big time, did some washing up, cleared and cleaned the kitchen table (hooray!), wrote a shopping list, tidied up in the living room, and decided what to have for lunch! I neeevvvver get the chance to do those things normally. So by the time a little "Ah?" alerted me to a bleary-eyed cutie boy sitting bolt upright on the bed (swaying slightly though, bless him!), we had baked potatoes nearly ready to eat for our lunch!! We both sat at the table and we had the same lunch. We buy mostly organic stuff now for ourselves so Arthur can have organic whenever he eats some of our food. We had baked potato (Arthur's mashed without the skin), baked beans and grated cheese - all organic :) Arthur had his in a bowl on his tray, and he fed himself quite a lot with his hands, but most of it got smarmed everywhere of course! After that he had yoghurt, which he liked a lot! And then I gave him a rusk. This boy likes his rusks! I personally LOVE rusks! I used to buy boxes of them in my late teens! Mmmm.... I don't know what it is about them. I buy reduced sugar for Arthur, and they are still really nice. Of course I prefer the really sugary ones, heh. He likes the banana ones too, but I'm not so crazy about those. When he has a rusk I always have one too, or we have half each. Is that naughty of me?! ;)

Arthur has noooo trouble with biting and chewing things anymore. He munches and crunches his way through pretty much any finger foods that I have tried him on. Rice cakes and rusks are his favourites. He has toast for breakfast. I cut him three toast fingers and spread them with butter and a trace of marmite. He tucks right in and bites the end off the first finger straight away. He chews them up really well before swallowing too. There is still plenty tucked down inside the highchair or on the floor at the end of the meal though! One time last week, I changed his nappy about an hour or so after breakfast and found a hard piece of marmitey toast tucked under his willy! Why does that word always look/sound so daft?!! Anyway. Funny boy! He didn't seem sore or anything, and I have no idea how he got it there! His nappies fit him nice and snug, so it's just weird!

Here are three photos of Arthur crunching big bites out of his rusk at the end of that lunch. You can probably see the layers of previous courses on his face (the potato/beans/cheese layer, and the yoghurt layer!)!

He really does like rusks! :)

Arthur is currently really big on reaching up for things, and he loves brandishing items in one hand while he's standing up, Statue of Liberty style (except twisting his torso round to see us at the same time), looking for approval! Sometimes he just wants acknowledgement of what he's found, and other times he wants one of us to take the item and be extremely excited about it, etc! ;) It's so cute. If we are chatting and don't see him doing it, he can get pretty irate, hehe! He just keeps holding his arm as tall and straight as he can stretch it, with the special item in his hand, with increasing yells or screeches until we notice, bless him!

If he finds a toy in his toy basket (whilst standing at it), and takes it out with both hands, it takes him a little while before he realises the fact that he is holding the toy with both hands means he is not using either hand to hold onto anything! When he realises he sits down immediately (without holding anything). I can also do a little trick on him (how mean, hehe!) whereby if he is standing up and reaching for my hands to walk him somewhere, and I go to give him my hands, he will let go of whatever he's holding onto to take my hands. If I then move them a little so he has to change his aim and find my hands again, and then do it again (just a few inches back and forth in front of his hands), he can stand unaided following my hands for maybe 5-10 seconds, and not wobble despite having to watch something moving and move with it. So I know he is getting good at standing. He just prefers to hold onto things!

He cruises walls and flat things now, and pulls to standing on walls too, without any difficulty. He reaches for things a LOT these days, while he is standing up. His balance has improved so much for him to do this. He used to wobble like crazy when he reached up, as it made him arch his back which threw his balance off. Now he can reach up for something out of his reach, and even go right to standing on tiptoes to try and grasp it! He does this a lot with doorknobs at the moment:

I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but for a couple of weeks now, Arthur has been crawling over things. I mean, without a big problem. I love watching him crawl. He's just this little creature roaming around on the floor, it's too cute! Since a couple of weeks ago, when he crawls and his knee hits something like a toy, he doesn't pause in his crawling at all, he just lifts that knee for a full crawl or two until he is past the object and then puts it back down again! He is now using that manoeuvre (wow, American Word did not like that UK spelling, hehe!) to climb over my legs if I am sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me, and other larger objects like floor cushions. It's funny to watch him crawl perfectly on three limbs and then seamlessly continue as before. I find if fascinating to watch how a baby learns to move about. I know it's going to be just as fascinating to watch him learn communication and other major things. When I think how he couldn't even crawl at 8 months, and here he is not even 10 months and doing all this! It's amazing how babies go through stages where they suddenly learn stuff and change so quickly.

Talking of the big one-oh (!!), I can't BELIEVE Arthur will be TEN months old in just four days, on Friday. How could I possibly have a ten-month-old?! That's just so old. For a little baby! ;) Seriously though, I remember when I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, the thought of a 10-month-old baby made me think "older baby", or "baby who eats finger food", or "very mobile baby who gets into everything", or even "baby with lots of hair and teeth"!! I didn't even associate those things with my mental image of "a baby", which was a much younger babe-in-arms who cried and maybe smiled and cooed, and needed feeding and changing a lot. I just can't believe I am actually a mummy to that older baby I used to picture in my mind. It seemed soooo far out of my reach. It seemed so far beyond just getting pregnant and having a baby that I never even got as far as contemplating it. And here I am. Amazing. I know I will just not be able to fathom the concept of having a toddler who walks everywhere and talks to me about things! But that's the next stage. I will cross that bridge when I come to it!

Okay this diary entry has stopped and started a lot today! Arthur woke from his nap, then we played, spoke to Nana on the phone for a while, had tea (banana pieces - v. messy! - and yoghurt), then Daddy came home and there was lots of giggling and horsing around, and then bath time, and now it's 9.30pm and Arthur has been asleep for a couple of hours :) We just ate our dinner and I am back to finish the update. I added bits here and there before this.

This afternoon I opened a packet of rich tea biscuits - I LOVE these! Arthur's eyes went wide and he cruised two sofas and a table practically at a RUN to get to me, hehe! He isn't usually that interested in me eating biscuits (which I don't usually do that often in front of him anyway), and if I ever offer him something I'm snacking on to taste, he ALWAYS just lets it touch his tongue before dropping it in disgust! Or a crumb will go in his mouth and he'll make a disgusted face! So when he approached me, cruising the last few steps with eagerly outstretched hand, I gave him my biscuit to examine. He put it STRAIGHT in his mouth without a pause, and crunched a big piece off!! He chewed laboriously while I rescued my biscuit and ate it, and then held his hand out for the next biscuit on my little pile! I offered it to him, and CRUNCH! He bit a big chunk out of it again! Altogether I ate five biscuits, and he had a big bite out of each one! He was very pleased with himself. He kept pushing his face right up close to mine and smiling a big toothy smile with biscuit in his teeth for me to see! Funny boy :) Once he was nice and thirsty, he did a dive for my breast and got my T-shirt nice and biscuity, so then he got to have milk with his cookies ;) He nurses standing up a lot now, if he's just having a lil snack or stopping for a thirst-quencher while he's playing or cruising around. I love the "on-demand" thing.

Lately Arthur seems to like nursing to sleep lying on his TUMMY!!! Clearly I have elastic nipples, or so he thinks! Oddly enough, if I am lying right up close to him on my side and feeding him from the bottom breast, this doesn't seem to hurt me. He turns his face well to the side, and sort of rests his cheek and hand on my breast like a pillow :) I like when he does that pillow thing. He does it when he's nursing standing up too, just turns his head to the side. I'm so dual-purpose! And proud :) The pain I was getting from his top teeth is abating now, just like the other mums on the breastfeeding forums said it would. His top teeth have been in for maybe 3 or 4 weeks now I think, so that's about the same time as they all had before the pain started to go. Breasts are just so amazing. They nourish, they comfort, they are pillows (!!), and they adapt and toughen where necessary!

Well I think that is it for tonight. Oh but I almost forgot! Neil was snacking on some melon the other day when it was hot hot hot, and Arthur pulled up on him to try some. He had some from Neil's spoon, but he preferred to sip the juice from the spoon rather than munch on actual pieces. He did enjoy it though! After a while he figured it was much easier to just bite into the thing rather than wait for Daddy to get another spoonful ready:

A visit to see Jemma and Jaya! :)

Thank you so much for the notes and messages about the sleep issues! Bobbie, I couldn't find a place to leave you a note/message, but I wanted to say thank you so much for the lovely long note with all the helpful advice in it :)

At the moment, Arthur is still waking a lot at night. Last night I slept right next to him all night (sometimes I am in and out, depending on how easy I am finding it to get back to sleep) and he slept much more peacefully. He slept CRAZY long naps yesterday, and it was so out of character for him that I worried that he might be coming down with something. But he seems fine today so maybe he's just tired. Or growing. Or something. Or it could be the weather. I was so exhausted yesterday that I went to bed with him in the afternoon and just wafted in and out of sleep while he crawled around and pulled up on me!!!! I am NOT an easy sleeper so that is really unusual for me. I got all worried that we BOTH were coming down with something, but for some reason we were just both extremely tired out. Arthur had a 2.5 hour nap in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon, once he had finished crawling around everywhere for an hour! We missed his tea, but we were just too tired to stay awake. Yesterday evening I feel gross and weak and exhausted, and the BAGS under my eyes... yeurgh, they nearly reached my chin!!! Hehe! I don't know what it was. Arthur was asleep by about 8pm last night because of his late nap, and woke at 9ish, 1.30ish, 4.45ish, and then 6.30, but we dozed back off until 7am. I nursed him all of those times. He gets hysterical if I don't these days. I am happy to though :) So that was a MUCH better night than normal. Usually he wakes once during the evening, once at our bedtime, and then midnight, 2ish, 4ish, and up for the day at around 6am. Last night rocked in comparison! But I am tired tired tired. Neil took him to the supermarket around 8am and I didn't even know they were gone! I slept till 9.45 which was soooo nice. I did wake twice in that time because it just felt weird to be sleeping. How crazy!

Anyway, the weather is hot and muggy and it makes my face feel puffy and my head feel sleepy. Yuck. I know those lovely crispy autumn days are soooo close now that it's September, and I can't WAIT!!! I love cold weather. Hot weather is just hard work. Bleh.

We went to spend the afternoon with Jemma and Jaya on Thursday!! It was so much fun, we had a lovely time. We met them before at Jaya's birthday party, but this was the first time we were able to spend time with just them and get to know them a bit better. It was so sweet watching Arthur and Jaya together. Arthur took a while to adjust to the new surroundings (as always), and just sat there motionless with his jaw hanging down! Hehe! Jaya is soooo sociable! She went right up to Arthur and made lots of attempts to socialise with him, picking up his monkey and touching him and looking him right in the eye, etc. She is such a sweetie. She walks so well now, it looks quite strange to see her walking unaided! I find myself wondering what is holding her up!! I know that's how it will be with Arthur when he walks. It's just such a strange thing when they first walk on their own two leggies.

Jemma was cooking us lunch, and Jaya showed me the stairs, the rechargable batteries plugged into a socket, and brought me BOTH remote controls from the living room, one after the other!! All this time, Arthur was just sitting with his jaw hanging, bless him! He did eventually warm up and crawl over to watch Jaya on the stairs. Funnily enough, since we got back from their house, Arthur has been crawling straight up to the stairs in our house and climbing very confidently onto the first step! He is also feeding himself better with his fingers, another thing he watched Jaya doing on Thursday. What a great role model Jaya has been! :)

I can't believe I only took ONE photo while we were there! I think Jemma took more, but I can't remember. Here's the one I took - at first I thought it was a shame because it wasn't the best photo of them, but actually the more I look at it, the funnier it seems! It needs a trashy newspaper caption like, "Man tamed into a trance by wild woman with whip!" hahahaha!! ;) Jaya had taken the safety strap from the outdoor swing and was brandishing it gleefully and swinging it around, while Arthur seemed to just sit there in awe of her! Anyway, here's the photo:

Jemma made us a GORGEOUS lunch, and Arthur sat in Jaya's wheely thing with a tray, and shoved his feet a bit to wheel himself around while he ate a WHOLE banana (except for a few bits strewn around the floor!), and some little bits of chicken and peas from our meal. I took my doppler and we heard Jemma's baby's heartbeat with it after I failed to get Arthur to take his afternoon nap in Jaya's room! It was soooo exciting!!! It made me feel quite misty-eyed and sort of long to experience that again for myself. I know I will though, one day. Maybe even soon? I lent Jemma the doppler for a while so she can use it whenever she wants. I don't need it yet, after all. But I'll ask for it back when I do :)

We went for a walk after that, as Jemma was feeling yucky. Jaya went to sleep and Arthur got progressively more and more cranky and annoyed, till I was carrying his hefty butt AND pushing the pushchair. In the muggy warm weather. Yeurgh. We went to the local playground and I put Arthur on a swing, but he got cross. He had only had half an hour's nap at around 9.30/10am that day, so by then it was 4pm ish and he was super tired and cranky. But it was just too interesting and exciting at their house for him to fall asleep!

Arthur had tea when we got back, and Jaya slept on for a while, so Arthur used her highchair. I couldn't believe it was 5.45pm when I realised we should be going home!!! Arthur's bedtime routine starts at 6pm with his bath!!!! Yikes! We were home by about 6.15 though, and Arthur was asleep within the first 5 minutes of the car journey. He was too sleepy for his bath and we just put him to bed in a night nappy.

So I hope we will meet up with Jemma and Jaya again! We had a lovely time :)

Arthur is waking from his nap so I should go. He has slept over lunchtime today as he wouldn't take a morning nap, and he's had about an hour and a half now. I will post again asap with the other photos I meant to include, and some more stuff about Arthur.

General updatey stuff and photos :)

Oh thank you all so much for the lovely comments on our family photos!!! I am really pleased with them too! Your comments made me smile so much :)

Well it's late but I have to write a quickie entry to post some photos and stuff. It's so hot and humid today. Yuck. Arthur has just worn a nappy like last time it was this hot, but this time he is soooo mobile and active, and he has just had wet hair all over, from roots to tips, all day - just from sweating!! I kept sitting him in front of the fan but he kept pulling it over. He is "into" everything these days! I wish I had time to write a million examples. I don't want to forget them all by failing to write them down before they're out of my memory.

He is using his forefinger (on both hands) to poke things constantly now. He isn't really pointing much yet, but he pokes and pokes with real focus and concentration! While I was speaking to my mummy on the phone today (or was it daddy?), he pulled up on the sofa, cruised along till he was standing next to me, and concentrated on the side of my head, pokey finger getting nearer and nearer all the time, till he very accurately poked his fingertip right into my ear hole! He also pokes any buttons or detail on my clothing when I hold him, any tiny crumb on his highchair, his own belly button, a stray thread on the carpet, etc, etc. He has tried to poke me in the nostril but I have reflexes, haha! :)

His latest thing is pulling up and cruising till he's at a table (full arm stretch just to hang on to the table top with his fingertips!), and with wild sweeping movements of his hands, getting as much stuff on the table to fall down onto the floor so that he can bump down next to them onto his bottom and examine the felled items! He is very quick at everything these days. If I stop to pick up say a nappy that I just took off him in the living room, and look around the room to see if there is anything else lying around that I can take with the nappy to put in the wash, Arthur can easily use that short time to crawl to the kitchen, pull up on the chair, cruise to the table, sweep the bread off the table, sit down next to it and examine it in some detail!

He still LOVES to be made to jump! Anything that would normally scare the average baby to bits is the funniest thing ever to Arthur! Sudden loud roars and "BOO!" sounds are just hysterically funny still. He laughed so hard after his bath time tonight that he got hiccups, and then still carried on hic-laughing for another 5 minutes when we kept on making him giggle! :) The latest fun thing is making him think we are running up behind him to pounce on him or something! Honestly, that kind of thing would make ME jump!! But Arthur loves it so much.

The other day he was doing exactly the example I gave above, he nipped off to the kitchen and swept the bread onto the floor. I spotted him in there at this moment, just contemplating how to lower himself gently to the floor so that he could sit and examine the bread. He had his back to the kitchen door so he didn't see me. I made my feet slap sloowwwwly on the kitchen floor as I came in so he could hear me coming, and then suddenly said, "Yoooouuuuu MONKEYYYYY!!!!" ("Monkeyyyyy" being very loud!) and made my loud steps suddenly really fast as I ran towards his back! He jumped and clung to the table leg shrieking and squealing and laughing with delight till I got there, and then I swept him up and munched his tummy :) He was breathless and twinkly-eyed and beaming as I swept him up in my arms. Why does this child not get traumatised by things like this?!! He just loves to be scared!

He is often heading for things he shouldn't be touching these days. He will cruise till he finds one of the table lamps on the furniture in the living room, and then he wants to pull at the shade. He broke one of those lamps last week! Our furniture is too low to keep them all out of his reach. I do tell him not to touch when he gets near them, and until now he has always always stopped when I said, "Arthur...." in THAT TONE (!!), and looked at me to see what is up. Then I ask him not to touch it, and he might smile at me and then look back at the lamp. So I will say again, "Don't touch the lamp please" and I might ask him to come to Mummy. He ALWAYS does! He is such a good boy. I think this won't necessarily last though! Today he hasn't been quite so responsive, so I'm sure I will need to change tack soon enough!

Anyway, sometimes if I see him approaching a no-touchy item with eager anticipation, I will say in sing song tones, "Arrrthuuur?... Whatcha doooinnnng?...." He will usually pause at this point, and might look back. Then I pause and say in a sort of sing-song warning tone, "Iiiii seeee yooouuu!" and for some reason this just makes him turn and giggle at me with the most mischievious look in his eye! He's such a little monkey. He's gorgeous. I love him so much. I love that he's such a little character who likes to make mischief! Lil sparky boy of mine ;)

Okay what else? Oh his sleep. I feel okay about it today. He is still waking a lot. I am going to ride it out some more. Usually when he gets to be waking hourly for a while it passes and turns out to have been a phase of some sort. Maybe he's teething? Or growing? Or just wanting extra closeness with his mama? Whatever it is, he probably has a good enough reason - good enough for me anyway, so I will ride it out. I have plans to take his night wakings into hand a little after he is a year old. I read this article and it really felt right to me, for our family. They strongly discourage parents from trying to force night changes before their baby is a year old, and that is what my gut has told me for a long while now, so I'll hang in there. Arthur is not even a year old yet. That's sooooo little. If he wants his mama in the night, I will gladly be there. After he is one I will reassess the family's needs, and our own individual needs, and consider whether to start changing things following the guidelines in that article. I will never cry it out though. I think there WILL be crying, which I am dreading. But I won't ever leave him to it. It just feels totally wrong to my heart, as Arthur's mother, to do that to him.

But for now, we plod on! The only thing that would induce us to start the changes a little early might be if I got pregnant and my need for a less disturbed night became a desperate issue with pregnancy exhaustion and stuff. But I realised recently, there are only about 10 weeks to go till Arthur's first birthday!!! Can you believe that?!! Where has the first year gone?! When I think about giving Arthur my cuddles and milk and closeness at any point in the night that he wants them, for just another 10 weeks, and with him still being such a little baby, I just think of COURSE I will stick it out. Somehow! The countdown helps. I feel proud of having done it the way I have. It has made things extremely hard and exhausting for all these months, but I am glad of it and proud that he has never asked something of me and had it withheld in any way. I know the next 10 weeks will just disappear before I know it.

Sooo sleep issues are easier on my mind today :)

Arthur is doing great with food. He has a finger or two of toast with butter and a smidgen of marmite for breakfast (cut from my toast in the morning), half a jar of organic something-or-other for lunch, and mashed banana with something (the favourite is still avocado!) for tea, followed by some baby yoghurt and maybe a rice cake if he's still interested in eating. He drinks well from a full sippy cup, holding it with both hands, but because the cup is heavy and full, I still guide it for him. If I don't make it full, he never tips it up enough to get any water. I never offer him anything but water in the cup. He gets milk "on tap" (!!) and I have read bad things about offering a baby juice too young, and there's no need anyway so it will be a while before he has juice. He seems to like water, which is good!

He likes to nibble a bit of any finger food that I might have during the day, like a cheese-spread sandwich, or a bite of my banana, etc. Today I gave him one of the frozen meals I made a few weeks ago, from mine and Neil's dinner one evening! Yay! I feel so great when I actually give him a proper meal that is homemade. Today's was chicken, potato, carrot and broccoli. All organic. I got two ice cubes of that out and mixed it with one ice cube of sweet potato puree, left over from the first puree days. Oh my gosh it was the most delicious mixture!! We must try adding sweet potato to that meal for ourselves next time! Anyway, Arthur ate the lot :)

His favourite meals from jars are definitely the veggie lasagna and spaghetti with tomato and mozzarella sauce! Here he is after demolishing a good portion of the latter:

His hair STILL smelt of spaghetti sauce that night AFTER we had throughly washed his hair!!! Hehe!

He is getting pretty good with his spoon now. He always holds a spoon while I feed him with the other one. He likes to participate! Mind you, he always has done this, even before we were even feeding him anything! He is pretty accurate at getting it into his mouth now, and can eat a spoonful of food off the spoon without much of it slopping SOME of the time! The rest of the time it goes down his front :) Here he is feeding himself some yoghurt last week:

See how he puts the spoon in and munches down on it?! Clever boy :) Still terribly messy though, of course! He is lately VERY unimpressed with being cleaned up after a meal, and gets quite hysterical sometimes, which can be difficult. Sometimes he is so upset by it that it takes a cuddle and a breastfeed for a while before he's happy again! I don't know why he hates it so much, and I do it as quickly and cheerfully as I can, but he HATES to be wiped and cleaned and de-bibbed! I always nurse him after a meal, in the living room. Even if he only takes a few sucks and then gets up and cruises off somewhere.

Ohhh nursing is getting FUN these days!!! My little boobie boy is quite the little acrobatic nurser now that he's so mobile! Most of his feeds are in bed before sleep, but the after-meal ones are getting interesting. I sit on the floor with my back against the sofa, and cradle him across my lap. Of course this does not last long because he wants to sit up and look around while he nurses! So I sit him up. He nurses sitting up very well, but he likes to turn his head so that he is also using the breast as a nice comfy pillow as well as chomping away on the nipple! I think he thinks my nipples are elastic. Yow!

Then he will wriggle off my lap so that he's sitting on the floor, and turn round and kneel facing me so that he can nurse like that for a while. But while he's still latched on, he will stand from kneeling and nurse bent over at the waist!

This morning I was soooo fast asleep next to him at 6am when he woke, that I didn't hear him wake and stir. I was woken with a shock when he crawled right up to me and latched on, face down over me as I lay on my back, hehe! I thought someone had pinched me on the nipple, woke with a jump and looked down to see him sucking away, hehehe! I found that so funny! I could just see his little thought process going - "Ahhh, morning time! I'll just sit up and take in my surroundings.... Ooh there's Mummy! I think I'll have a little morning milk for breakfast!..." hehehe! :) My sweet funny boy.

I love all these new ways of nursing. It is painful sometimes with his teeth pressing and my breasts being unused to that, but I am happy with his acrobatics. I know they are very normal for a nursing toddler - not that he's quite a toddler yet, but he's getting there fast! I would not always let him do that when somebody else was present, but it depends on who that somebody was. Sometimes I let him treat me like a milk bar after a meal. I sit on the floor with him for a while with a breast out so that he can choose whether to have some milk, or play or cruise or whatever, and have the freedom to come back for a little more at any time. I know when he IS a toddler he will be so busy that it will suit him more to keep coming back for little short feeds, and I want to let him know now that he is free to do that if he wants. I don't feel like I want any restrictions on him nursing. As he gets older I can explain that I am just talking to so-and-so and he must wait a moment, and then he can nurse. So for now I just want to teach him different ways of nursing. Sleepy time, with its no-wriggling and scrunching me (!!) rules; after meal times, when he nurses sitting up for as short or long a period as he wants; and playtime, when he is free to ask me for a drink or a cuddle-nurse any time he wants. I know right now he is learning to just help himself, but I will start to teach him that he must ask me eventually.

Anyway. I love breastfeeding! :) I hope it continues for a loooonnnng while yet, because I definitely don't want to stop. I am one proud milk bar!! ;)

Well let's see? It's late and I need to think if there are any milestones that Arthur has made recently. I don't think so, since I last updated on what he's doing these days. He cruises along the sofas so fast now that sometimes he stumbles like he is trying to run! It looks so funny! He cruises gaps and walls now as well. He gets down from standing well, so long as he has something to hold onto. He can go from standing to either sitting or all-fours so that he can crawl away, depending on which he prefers. He likes to take objects out of containers, at last! But no interest in putting them in.

He is waking up - midnight is a fairly usual time, so I had better go. We are visiting Jaya and Jemma tomorrow - I can't wait!! We're going round for lunch. I will write about it asap! I will leave you with another highchair photo, since it seems to be a theme this entry, hehe. He just looked so cute and wouldn't stop smiling at me, so I started snapping photos. Here are my favourite two (and no that is not a molar in the back there - he was chewing a piece of bread!):

Professional photos :)

Ohhhhhhhh I have so neglected this diary!!! I feel bad. If you read my pregnancy diary you'll know that there were huge shenanigans with my cycle, so that was rather a large distraction for a while. I didn't mean to get distracted, but I had mega pregnancy symptoms, and ended up with a super faint positive pregnancy test followed by my period on the same day. Blah. I don't need to talk about my feelings about it here - I will keep that for my other diary. But I wanted to make note of why I haven't written here in a WEEK!! Tsk. Thank you so much to everyone who was sweet enough to leave me supportive and encouraging messages throughout. I know most of you read here too, so I'm saying it here as well. You guys rock! I felt less "all at sea" for your support :)

Okay, back to the usual! I have my period, and I napped like 3 times yesterday (soooooo tired) but today I'm feeling a lot better. Arthur is napping, though I think he may wake soon, so I'm just getting this entry started, so that I can add to it throughout the day when I get the chance. Otherwise I might never get it done! And I should have plenty to write about, with a week to catch up on!

On Saturday we went to have our photographs taken again. It was the 3rd session of four this year. The last one will be around Arthur's birthday, or shortly after. I can't believe he's going to actually have a BIRTHDAY!! Wow. And in only about 10 weeks too. Anyway the photos came out pretty crap. The first time we went there, we had a crappy photographer who seemed to have a talent for bringing out the WORST in each of us, when we saw the photos! We came away with one awful free photo of the three of us. The second session, we had a really talented photographer and bought several photos. This time it's probably good for our finances that we had a crap photographer! Again we all looked really weird and not like ourselves at all. I looked dull and chubby (of which I am neither!), Neil looked manic and scary (!) and Arthur looked totally unlike himself. Blah. But there was one nice photo of just Arthur with more of his usual spark in it, so we got that as the free photo and left it at that! Yay, no extra money spent! :) I'll scan it in and post it here when it arrives.

Our other professional photos (the expensive ones!) came back this week! We got them home yesterday. They are so lovely! I forgot how nice they were. They are presented in light wood frames with like a white mounting area and an inner wooden frame too. That doesn't sound very clear! I wanted to scan those too, but they are permanently fixed into the mounting and the frames. I took a photo of each one, so obviously there is a little reflection in the glass and that, but it's the best I can do. I can't wait to get them up on the wall! Here they are - I trimmed the photos so that you can't see the outer frame, just the inner bit and the start of the white moulding. But you get the gist. I will take a photo of them all on the wall when they're up! :)

They will go in this order, side by side - this first one will go on the left:

Then this one (my absolute favourite of all the fantastic shots we had taken!) in the centre:

And this one to finish it off, on the right:

I LOVE them!!! Isn't that one just so lovely, where we are kissing Arthur?! I just love his expression there! I love how his vibrant little personality shows so clearly in these photos, especially the kissy one! I also love how the photos were so spontaneous. We just did our normal thing with Arthur and the photographer snapped away. The session was an hour long so she had lots of opportunities. There were more, but these three are so nice together, that's why we chose them as our prints. We got a free framed desk photo too, and I chose one of Neil holding Arthur, as I liked it so much. I was able to scan this one in as it's just flat in a normal frame - my boys :)

Okay Arthur woke as I posted that last photo, and now it's 4 hours later and he's having his afternoon nap, so I'm back!

I am back to feeling desperate about his sleep again. Ugh. He is currently waking HOURLY at night again, and cries like his heart is broken if Neil goes to pick him up. He wants me, and more specifically, he wants to nurse. But I am so tired out, and I feel like I'm barely getting back to sleep and dozing before he's awake again, and I look at the clock and it's an hour after he last woke. I just feel at the moment like my whole night's sleep is an on-off doze, rather than any sort of sleep. The only time I get chance to sleep deeply enough to dream is when Neil takes him downstairs at 6am when he wakes for the day, and I get to sleep uninterrupted until 7.30. I say uninterrupted, but usually (like today) I wake maybe twice in that time because he will screech or bang toys or whatnot, and those things wake me up.

This morning's nap was okay. He woke after 30 minutes and I nursed him till he went back to sleep for another 30 minutes. He greeted me cheerfully sitting upright on the bed with a big smile. This afternoon it got to 2pm before I put him to bed, because he didn't seem tired enough before then. As soon as he showed me he was tired, I took him to bed. 2pm is late for him though. Anyway it is now nearly 3pm and he just went to sleep. It was a nightmare to get him to sleep. He nursed till he had had enough milk and then kept on getting up and climbing on me or crawling around the bed (heading off it at every opportunity!). After I let him roam a bit, I started to lay him back down when he got up, and this always makes him SO angry and sad almost immediately. So I don't know what to do. He needed a nap. I just kept putting him down and sitting close by him patting him or shh-ing, but he cried and SCREAMED and sobbed and went purple and made choking sounds and tears ran onto the sheets and I felt like the WORST mother in the world. I spoke all quiet and soothing, but it didn't make any difference. After a while I tried offering him the breast again, and every time I put him back down I would offer it to him. He still cried. Eventually he nursed to sleep. Why is it this hard to get him to sleep, day and night? He is 10 months old next week! I remember thinking how I couldn't take another week of it at 3 months, and people saying oh it will probably improve between 4 and 6 months, and I just felt dreadful because I did not see how I would last that long. That seemed so old to still be having such major issues with sleep. And here we are at nearly 10 months, and no real change. He has better patches and worse patches, but basically I have not had a single night of solid sleep since before he was born. I know that for many parents, this is part of the job! But I don't remember what it is like to have more than 2 or 3 hours sleep in one go, or more than 5 hours broken sleep for a whole night. I don't even REMEMBER what it's like. I can't imagine the bliss of going to bed at 10.30 and waking up at like 8am. Or even midnight till 6am. Even that would be bliss! But I never get anything like it.

I just want to sleeeeeeeeeeep. Why does almost everybody else with a baby get sleep most of the time and I don't?! I find myself praying rather desperately at night sometimes, "God please, just let him stay asleep, please, please..." But he doesn't, ever, really. Sometimes when I have nursed him back to sleep at night, he wakes after a few minutes and Neil tries to settle him. Just hearing him getting more and more awake and cross makes my heart sink. I really hate having any sort of resentment over his night wakings, but with them happening this frequently, I am really starting to. But I don't know what to do about it - if anything. I can't bear to let him cry. Even just now it felt absolutely wrong, but I had run out of ideas.

Nursing is more difficult at night at the moment, because my nipples are KILLING me. Nursing is as painful as it was when I first started, right now. Arthur's top teeth are hurting me. He doesn't bite, but his teeth press into me as he nurses, and they graze me as he pulls off the breast. If I break the latch and take him off, it's not so bad, but it wakes him more easily. Mainly it's the action of his jaw when nursing that hurts the most though. I have little grazes and scabs and blisters around my nipples. Owch. Also bruises where the indents happen over and over in the same place. I tried nursing in slightly different positions but it doesn't seem to be making much difference. Somebody told me to just ride it out because nipples can toughen up. I hope so, because it is almost unbearable now, and I have no intention of weaning him because of it, so I don't know what I'd do if it didn't ease off soon! So that doesn't help the night miseries.

Well, I'm cheerful aren't I?! It's hot and humid and too bright outside and I'm just in a flump about things INSIDE. So yeah.

But I do love my little man soooo much.

He is waking again. I will post this and write again another time, with the other photos I still have to post, and whatever else I had planned to waffle on about. I need to write about what Arthur has been up to in the past week too, just to catch up. But Arthur calls! So I will go to him :)

Visit from my brother, and helpful Arthur!

I am so excited! For anybody who doesn't read/stopped reading my pregnancy journal, I just wanted to write here that we are officially trying to conceive again! My luteal phase is still way too short, but we ended up having three "oopsies" this cycle and I am now waiting to see if I get my period or not. I think I will, because like I say, my luteal phase isn't so good. But I started a supplement this cycle which is supposed to help with that, and I have some weird symptoms that are bugging the heck out of me right now. But anyway. The oopsies made us realise that we are both feeling ready to try for another baby, so if I get my period we will be going for it full steam ahead! That needed saying here, since it's super exciting and momentous news!! Woohoo! :) I will be updating over there regularly as we try to make Arthur a little brother or sister!

Also, I FINALLY wrote my very long-winded birth story, only 9 months late, hehe! It's reeeeally long, seriously, only read it if you have like 2 hours to spare! ;) There are new photos in it from the camcorder too (we left the camera at home when we transferred to hospital), which I only just figured out how to upload. Yay. Done the birth story at last!! ;)

Ohhhkay, what to report? I have been so caught up with thoughts of TTC and symptom-spotting and other non-useful daydreamy stuff (!), that I can't think what we've been up to since my last entry.

Oh yes! My brother and his fiancee, Sarah, came to visit! It was so lovely to see them. Arthur was ultra sociable and impressed them with all the new things he's doing since they saw him a month or so ago. They are a very doting Uncle and Aunt. I love to see them with Arthur because it's so clear how much they love him. I feel so blessed that I produced a little treasure for them to love. I don't know why. It's just a big feeling that I have :)

We took some photos while they were here. Neil got some nice ones of me and Arthur too, except I feel a bit pfthth about me in those photos. I felt tired and puffy and hungry and blah when they were here. I love this photo of Arthur walking across the room to me, with Sarah holding one of his hands till he reached me. I love it because you can actually see his blurry little foot as he's stepping away there!...

Here we are a minute later. Arthur was so intrigued by our visitors! He kept on turning round to stare at them and see what they were doing!

Here is a photo of me reading to Arthur. He is still sooooo into his books. We read like a dozen times a day! He still loves that Twinkle Twinkle book, but lately he really goes for a book that I first read him when he was 8 weeks old (and he even looked interested in it then!), called, "What do you say?" It's a lovely bright coloured book with animals in, and under each picture of an animal, you say, "What do you say to a (whatever animal)" and then make the appropriate noise. Arthur loves the pictures. He focuses on them so intently while I say the line, and then immediately looks up at my mouth to watch me make the noise. I make it two or three times, and then he smiles and looks back down at the book. When I have read the next line, he looks up at my mouth again to watch the next noise! It's so sweet! Here he is watching my mouth to see what noise I will make:

So the visit was lovely. My brother looks so much more grown up than he should. He has a sort of beardy thing which, incidentally, really suits him, and I told him this. Then I looked at him and realised how he looks like a man now. I know that's crazy - he's 26! But he seems to have looked sort of lanky and adolescent for the longest time, and suddenly I looked at him on Saturday and thought, "Oh my gosh, he's a man!!" Hehe! I told him he was looking manly and he just said, "Yes. I AM a man!" But I told him he couldn't possibly look manly, since he was still supposed to be nine years old! Why is it that big sisters can't seem to get over their little brothers not being "little" any more?! I never get used to the fact that he is grown up, even though *I* am! It just weirds me out.

On Saturday and Sunday nights, Arthur slept just awfully. He woke up both nights around midnight and just stayed awake. I nursed him till he gagged from too much milk, and then Neil rocked him, and this just went on and on and on for ages. We tried just laying with him in bed, but he was fidgetty and wouldn't be still for long without getting fussy and crying. Once or twice he dropped off when Neil was rocking him, but he woke easily when he was put down and was wide awake again. The first night he didn't go back to sleep till 3am. He was up for three hours. WE were up for three hours! The second night it was 2.30am or thereabouts. Plus his normal waking for a breastfeed at 4am and then up for the day at 6am. Urrrrrrrgh we were sooooo tired. We still are. After 2 hours on the second night, Neil said to me that he wondered if it might be his teeth that were bothering him. He said while he was rocking him that he was constantly biting his hands. So we gave him Calpol, and he was out like a light within 20 minutes, and content as anything. He definitely still has a LOT of teething symptoms during the day so it makes sense. He has a rash on his cheeks from teething drool at the moment, and he bites EVERYTHING he can get his mouth on. Mostly his hands though :( He does seem like his gums hurt a lot too. Poor Boo. I wonder if it's still those new teeth that came through last week, or if he's working on a new one. I can't see any new ones brewing though.

Today he bit the tumble dryer door so clumsily, over and over and over, just banging his mouth into it (crazy child!) that he made his gum bleed where his top middle teeth are. He just kept on butting it with an open mouth, and when I pulled him away I saw blood on the door!!! Yikes! I wiped his mouth with a cloth but it wasn't till later that I could see a little speck of red where the tooth meets the gum on one of his top middle teeth (the newest one). Surely that would have hurt him? He was whining when he did it, but he just kept doing it all the same. Also, he has made his bits bleed twice in the last few days by scrunching them! I am trying to keep his fingernails short, but he scrunches and pulls at his bits like you wouldn't believe - it looks soooo painful! And he won't stop for anything. It's really hard to distract him from doing it when I change his nappy. I wonder if he itches there, because he does have a tiny bit of a spotty rash like the one on his cheeks at the moment. Hmmm. Anyway, one time a few days ago when I finally got his hands out of the way to put his clean nappy on, there was blood on his bits! And today he did it again. I got worried about it getting infected, but so far so good. I just change him regularly and keep things clean. Silly boy! Surely that hurts him? Why would he persist if it hurts?!

Anyway. He is a sweetie :) I hope he sleeps better tonight. He did okay last night.

His hair is getting thicker and longer by the day, it seems! It STILL stands straight up on top! I think he is going to have wavy hair like me. Only maybe even more so. His hair looks straight at a glance, but the top curls back on itself at the ends, and now that the sides are growing longer, they often curl up when he is sweaty or after a bath. Even when they lie flat they can have a strong wave like an S shape against his head. At the back he still has a lil bald patch, but above that the hair grows in a swirl and is now starting to curl under slightly, like a mild version of having used one of those huge old-fashioned rollers to make the hair curl under instead of up and out from the head. I love his hair. It's so soft and beautiful. It always smells so wonderful. I love when he smells sweetly of whatever he has eaten that day, and then after his bath how he smells of baby, all sweet and fragrant. I love smelling rusk or mango or cottage pie on his hair! He is so edible anyway that it's like an added bonus to have him smelling like food, hehe!

We finally moved the mattress in our bedroom! Yay! It's going soooo slowly in there. We swapped the mattress with the triple wardrobe, so the bed is now in its permanent position - yay! Now we need to buy a single mattress and put it next to the kingsize one. Then our family bed will be complete! The room looks so much bigger with the furniture this way round too - a nice surprise!

Arthur was terribly "helpful" when we were moving things around. The second we had the doors off the wardrobe to move it, he was powering off towards it and pulling up on the side. He just goes crazy for pulling things out of things these days. Here he is reaching for the shoe box:

And being extremely pleased with himself after pulling it down onto the floor!

He's such a funny lil man, always busy getting into something or other! He's so fun to have around. The other day I was changing his nappy and his clothes in one go, and he was off in a second when I turned around to sort out a new nappy. After I got everything ready, I followed him into the kitchen, where I found him standing completely naked at the open tumble dryer, in an absolute frenzy of pulling the dry laundry out! It was so funny! He was almost waist deep in strewn laundry, and was trying to yank an enormous towel out with all his strength! I just love him so much. I got it on video because he was so intent on his "work" that he just kept going! But yeah, nakey boy, so you can't see it. You'll just have to take my word for it on the cuteness thing! :)

Today he figured out how to open the washing machine door - that clever little rascal! He looked soooo pleased with himself when he did it this afternoon! I heard it click open, and turned around to find Arthur standing at the machine with his hand on the door latch, the door 2 inches open, and his little face peeping back at me with shining eyes and a HUGE grin, as if he had just found treasure! Once I opened it up for him properly, he pulled out the entire wet white load! The dryer wasn't free yet so I didn't want it out of the machine and wet on the floor, but I didn't have the heart to stop him. He just loves pulling things out of things soooo much, and it's so cute to watch his enthusiasm and hear his little grunts of effort as he works away!

My little man. He's so precious. I love him more than anything in the world.

8-month check and feeding the ducks!

Okay first of all I will get this out of the way:

How You Life Your Life

You are honest and direct. You tell it like it is. You tend to avoid confrontation and stay away from sticky situations. You tend to have one best friend you hang with, as opposed to many aquaintences. You tend to dream big, but you worry that your dreams aren't attainable.

How Do You Live Your Life?

I got it from Megan and I don’t normally do these things, but I just went there and answered the questions anyway, and I’ll be darned if the results don’t EXACTLY describe me!! How bizarre.

Anyway, on with the entry!

Thanks for the nice messages and to Kat and Nicola for being pleased about Arthur and books! I am so happy that he is into stories and books already. I just found my Dr. Seuss hardback books from when I was little. I want to get him lots more of those – I LOVED Dr. Seuss! – but for now he has Green Eggs and Ham (my favourite), Are you my Mother?, and Put Me in the Zoo. Me likey :) I already read him Put Me in the Zoo, but it’s a bit long to hold his attention for alllll that time. I also have story tapes (thanks for reminding me Nicola!) that I have kept from when I was little. I was really into story tapes as a child. I have a lot of Enid Blyton ones and lots of Roald Dahl stories too, and a few fairy tales. Does anyone remember the StoryTeller tapes? There used to be a whole set to collect. We never got the whole set, but we had maybe a dozen of them. I still have numbers 4, 5, 8 and 12, but 8 is all chewy and bleurgh :( Anyway I kept them all for my own children. They are so lovely. Actually, I confess a secret to you, when I am feeling down or insecure, or not too well, or sometimes just because it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and the house feels cosy, I put those tapes on and snuggle in the spare bed, which happens to be the bed I have slept in since I was 2 (till I got married that is!). Sometimes I even do something soothing like cross-stitch, or crossword puzzles, or eeeven get out the coloured pencils and my secretly bought-and-stashed-away children’s colouring book (!!) and lose myself in comforting things from my childhood for an hour or so. Although that has not happened since I had Arthur. I don’t think there will be time for that for a long while! But I did it a lot during my pregnancy.

Ooh it’s just occurred to me. I need to go and make dinner. I am cooking tonight – yay! Poor Neil cooks like EVERY single evening, and I bought salmon fillets and crème fraiche and fresh dill, and it’s something I know how to cook and he doesn’t, so I’m making it. Poached salmon with white wine sauce and dill. And pasta. And veg. Yum. I am off to make it. Then I will return and finish this, later on!

Back! But it’s getting late so I had better get on with it. Dinner was yummy! I had some very nice white wine (that I cooked with too) and afterwards we had raspberry pavlova ice-cream – gaagghhhhghghhh!! And we watched The Vicar of Dibley. I love that programme. It makes me laugh soooo much! So we had a nice evening. Arthur didn’t wake once. He’s a tired boy, and his teeth are bothering him at the moment.

Toothie number four came in on Thursday, the one to the left of his left top middle tooth. And toothie number five arrived the next day, his other top middle tooth! That fourth one is coming in reeeally fast, it’s very visible already. But the middle tooth is taking its sweet time, and causing him lots of discomfort. About half of its width is visible just peeping through the gum now, and it’s all pink and swollen around it so it can’t be comfy. Arthur has been pulling on his ears and crying a lot today :( Although the teething powder worked for the first time in ages, so that’s good, and he hasn’t needed Calpol. Arthur is becoming quite a toothy-looking boy these days! It’s so nice, but also strange, to see him looking so much of an older baby these days. He’s the cutest pie :)

The health visitor came on Thursday to do his late 8-month check – which I found on Babycentre listed as “the 6-9 month check” and not considered late till the end of 9 months. So I felt better about it then! Anyway, Arthur was napping when the HV arrived. He napped an hour instead of the 30 minutes I expected him to take, so he was still there when she turned up, but I said I would wake him and right at that moment I heard a little staccato “Aah!” from upstairs – Arthur’s way of saying, “Hello, I’m awake!” I’ve seen him as he does it too. Sometimes I’m camped out where he can’t see me, waiting for him to wake up! So I know :) He rolls onto his side, opens his eyes, blinks a moment, then rolls onto his tummy, lifts his head and shoulders, and looks straight at the open doorway, and says, “Aah!” Then he waits, watching the doorway! It’s so sweet :) I recognise it as his way of saying, “Hey, Mummy!” but it’s so wonderful because it’s not a question - he never actually ASKS for me to come. He used to occasionally turn the intonation up at the end, making it sound like a question, as he watched the door, and his face would look almost concerned. But now he just fully expects my arrival almost the instant he declares his awake state! I like that. He is so secure, and that’s how I always wanted it to be.

Soooo I brought him down, and he sat blearily on my lap, blinking his sleepiness away for a few minutes and staring at the HV while she did her usual wonderful thing of telling me what a great job I have done, etc :) I love my HV!!

Then he woke up and got smiley and charming, as usual, and that pleased her a lot. He is such a sociable baby. He started to wriggle on my lap, so I put him down sitting on the carpet at my feet. The HV commented on how he sits beautifully, and then suddenly Arthur crawled to the sofa, pulled up on it, cruised to the end nearest the HV, sat down efficiently, and crawled to her legs, where he pulled to standing on her knees and beamed at her, all in about 30 seconds! She just said, “Well, there’s no need to bother checking his gross motor development then!” Hehe! I just about popped with pride. I am soooo proud of my lil Boo for being such a clever boy. Of course other babies are just as “clever” and they all do it at some stage, but still. Let me have my moment anyway! ;)

While he crawled around, cruised the furniture, played with some toys, checked on the washing machine for me (!), and charmed the HV, we talked about toddler safety, Arthur’s other developments, his teeth, dental care, his nutrition and sleep, all those things that you talk about at the “big” checks. I told the HV that Arthur stands for a few seconds and tries to push my hands away when I am holding him upright or walking him. He is so independent and determined with these things! She asked about what he does when upright, and I told her he walks well with support, all over the house without stopping! And he now walks a few steps next to me just holding one of my fingers in one hand. She was concerned to talk to me about toddler-proofing, since she thinks he will be walking in no time. That will officially make him a toddler, apparently. How CRAZY is that, that I will soon have a real live toddler – my own child, a toddler!!! He seems way too little still to be a toddler yet. He is a big boy but he’s still only 9 months old, which is still a baby. But wow. A toddler.

The HV stood Arthur upright and he tried to push her hands off him straight away. She laughed and told him he was too little to do it by himself just yet! She told me he is so strong and confident standing. He bears all his own weight.

Talking of weight! She weighed him and measured his length and head circumference. He barely fit sitting upright in her lil cradley baby scales, the same ones he lay all tiny in when he was a newborn! He weighs 23lbs 3oz, which puts him around the 70th percentile I think she said. She showed me on the chart how his percentile is gradually coming down, which she said she is happy to see. She explained how in the first 6 months, babies tend to put on a lot of weight fast and they can climb the percentiles pretty quickly. Somewhere in the second 6 months they tend to taper off and find a plateau. Arthur was right on the 50th percentile at birth, and she said he may even return to that eventually. She said he may be a tall lean toddler. I can’t believe he would really be TALL since he surely doesn’t have any genes to enable him to be that! But his length measured at 75cm (29.5 inches) – although I think this was a cm or two over his actual length, because he was squirmy and I think the measurement was generous. But anyway, that puts him at the 75th percentile for length. She said he looks tall, and he does I think, but he has such a loooong torso and that can make you look taller. Especially if you’re a little bean who sits a lot (therefore looking “all torso”!). I can’t remember exactly what his head circumference was, and the book is downstairs and I’m lazy. But he’s just at tad below the 50th percentile for that. Neil and I both have kind of small-looking heads (especially Neil, hehe!), so that probably accounts for that. Anyway she was very pleased with all his measurements. I am not surprised that he is over 23lbs. He FEELS over 23lbs! He is just sooo heavy. I’m kind of glad he is slowing down!

Then the HV did Arthur’s fine motor skill tests and the vision tests. He passed everything with flying colours. He saw the ball roll in his peripheral vision while the HV was distracting him. He followed the teddy bear with his eyes without moving his head. He picked the raisin up with his pincer grip. He took the small brick and transferred it immediately to his other hand and then back again. He was very co-operative! She checked his hips, though we already have an X-ray saying they are perfect, and all his creases are in perfect alignment so that’s great.

The HV also commented on how sociable and friendly Arthur was. She said that is something she needs to make note of in this check, and she was so glad to see straight away that he was sociable, happy, secure, and enthusiastic about other people. He spent a long time (at his own choice, he crawled there and pulled up) standing at the HV’s knees and bouncing and laughing at her. She talked to him a lot and told him what a clever boy he is, and how she likes his hair, and how his Mummy has done so well :) He just laughed and babbled at her and bounced a lot. He didn’t once look back to see me, until the HV said, “Where’s Mummy?” She turned him round, as he was more interested in looking at her! Then he looked at me and smiled, but turned away to play with the HV some more. She said he’s exceptionally sociable, and I love that. She also said he is very confident in his new skills and eager and adventurous. She said he seems very secure in himself, and the combination of all the above mean that he may need extra “watching” to see that he doesn’t come to any harm at this stage of exploring and learning to walk, etc. He isn’t afraid to step out and take risks or try new things, with or without us present. She said that’s a wonderful thing, but to be aware of it regarding his safety around the home. Yikes. I already knew that about him, he has been like it for a while. But it was helpful to have her spell it out for me. I never leave him alone anyway, he is with me all the time now. When I go to the loo he sits on the floor in front of me with some toys and tips his head on one side with a quizzical look on his face when he hears the wee hit the water, hehehe! He likes water, and water sounds, and always looks to see where it’s coming from! Today (being a Saturday), I have soooo enjoyed going to the loo BY MYSELF and taking a shower BY MYSELF while Neil spends time with Arthur! But he’s just not safe to be left alone, even for the time it takes to pee, and sometimes I have put him in the travel cot outside the bathroom door where he can see me (still not private!) but it seemed less faff to just sit him on the floor in front of me. I don’t like to put him out of sight while I do things, even quick things. He would probably be fine, but I don’t care to try it out anyway. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t always be able to see me or get to me easily if he wants to.

Arthur is definitely an “attached” baby, and of this I am immensely proud! It has been harder than it could have been, I think, to parent him this way, but I like to think that he is happy, secure and confident because of it. He is so independent and never even thinks to question whether I’ll come to him IMMEDIATELY that he calls. I don’t think it’s spoiling him to go to him straight away. I never finish what I am doing first. He gets me first. He comes first. My MIL once said it’s okay to let him cry a while if he wakes when you are busy doing something, and don’t let your life become too dominated by his demands. That feels to me to be such an old-fashioned piece of advice. Arthur DOES dominate my life. That’s how it should be, I think. He isn’t a spoilt little tyrant who runs the household. He will be disciplined and taught to respect us as he grows older, but gently. And he SHOULD be the centre of our lives right now, and feel like it too. He depends on us totally for everything, and every single time I rush to him when he calls out for something, I am teaching him that he has no reason to be insecure, because all his needs are being instantly met by someone he is gaining trust in all the time. I will never punish his trust by leaving him to ask for me, when he does not understand why. He has never been separated from me physically, well not for like 12 hours or anything. He never sleeps alone. He is held and carried any time he wants to be. I wear him in a sling when I have one that he fits in and doesn’t hurt my back. Otherwise I just carry him constantly. My muscles are stronger now than they have ever been! He is breastfed the instant he wants to be, either for food or comfort. I think I am right to take pride in the fact that he’s so secure that he will happily charm the pants off total strangers without so much as a backward glance. By now, he KNOWS I’m there. I have never NOT been. He doesn’t have cause to think I might not be. Sometimes he has little patches where he’s more clingy, like when he is teething, feeling poorly, or really overtired. He whimpers or cries if I go out of sight for too long, and wants holding a lot. But I don’t think that is to do with separation anxiety, like being scared that I won’t come back. I think that is to do with needing more comfort than usual, and wanting me there constantly to provide it until he feels better. Which I do! :) I feel so proud of myself. Of Neil too – he is a perfect AP daddy, and he has put so much into parenting his little boy these last 9 months. We give him everything we possibly can.

We are tiiiiiired! But that’s okay. Our sweetie is flourishing under our love and constant presence. I love him sooooo much. He is a pure delight to be around. He’s my little ray of sunshine! :)

Well here is Mr A. Cuteness himself, covered in mashed banana and chopped dried apricot (which he was not that impressed with, the dried apricot that is!):

See his new teeth?! The first 3 are really well in now, and you can just make out the fourth one peeping through. You can’t see the fifth one in the photo. It only came through that day and it was still all pink and swollen around the tooth, poor Boo :(

Arthur is still eating much better. He feeds himself well with a spoon. I still feed most of his meals to him myself, with a baby spoon, but we always use two spoons for each meal – he holds one and shoves it in his mouth a lot, and I feed him his food with the other. We swap frequently, as he drops the one he’s got and grabs the other one with a vice-like grip, so that I have no choice but to let go and risk the food slopping all over the place (usual outcome). He puts it in his mouth, sometimes upside down and sometimes on its side, but he is very accurate at putting it in. Food does go everywhere though! And then he chucks it on the floor when he’s done, sometimes fully laden still! There is always a big clean up job after his meals!

Okay, it’s getting way too late, I need to speed this up.

Here’s another photo of Arthur, contemplating his apple rice cake. He is back on rice cakes. I stopped giving them to him for a while because he would just bite off a huge piece, shove it to the back of his mouth, gag and vomit! But now he munches and munches, and uses his new front teeth to mince the food finely (looks so funny and cute as he does this!), and then swallows without any problems. Oh, the photo:

Here’s Arthur yesterday, standing at a chair (randomly placed for cleaning purposes!) in the kitchen. He plays with that saucepan and a wooden spoon sometimes. It keeps him busy when I am unloading the dishwasher, which he really isn’t that safe at helping me with anymore!

We have been out every day this week. I am so proud of myself because Arthur is getting into even more of a routine these days, and I am THE most disorganised woman to ever grace the planet, so this is a big deal which wasn’t easy for me to arrange! :) Arthur usually wakes around 6am, but sometimes as early as 5.30 and sometimes as late as 6.30. He is pretty spot on though, and mostly it’s six on the dot, or a few minutes either side. I nurse him and Neil takes him downstairs to change his nappy and play. I get more sleep :) They wake me usually at 7.30 or 7.45am, so I get about an hour’s extra sleep which is nice. Then I get up and Neil gets ready for work. I make breakfast for myself and share it with Arthur, and he usually has a rusk too. If I ever have a yoghurt as part of my breakfast, he shares it with me. He likes yoghurt! :) Then we always stand at the front door and wave Daddy off to work until the car is out of sight. Then I guess we play and read and stuff, and somewhere between 9 and 9.30am he is tired and I put him down for a nap. Although recently it has worked well even when he ISN’T seeming tired, so I know the routine of it is helping him! Yay! He nurses to sleep in our bed. He usually naps half an hour, but sometimes he just sleeps past that and ends up taking an hour or an hour and a quarter. Never longer. Then he’s up again and we play and read and he does a lot of cruising and exploring while I hang out with him.

Recently I have noticed that somewhere after 11am he is getting cranky and rubbing his eyes. I used to try to put him to bed because I figured he needed another sleep, but it’s awfully early for nap number 2, and these days he will ONLY take two naps. Even if the second one is super early, he simply refuses to go down again the rest of the day! This makes him cranky and tired out long before bedtime. Sooo one day we had to go out around this time and he was already looking tired and cranky. But the amazing thing was, when we got out, he perked right up and had nooo trouble at all till around 1 or 2pm! Then he slept like a log for an hour and a half. So I started wondering, maybe at 11am he is cranky because he’s bored and needing a change of scene? Maybe he’s feeling tired in that sluggish way when you just sit on your butt for too long and end up tired because of it? So I have started taking him out around that time, even just for a half hour local walk in the pushchair, or to get the food shopping at the supermarket. This is working great. Every time it works out that he perks up once we’re out, and doesn’t get cranky and tired for real until at least 12.30.

He has his lunch between 11 and 12, and a drink of water from the sippy cup right after that. If he isn’t ready for bed yet, like it’s 11.30 and I think he will last till at least 1pm before napping, I take him into the living room after I clean him up and nurse him sitting on the floor for a while. He doesn’t take loads of milk at this feed, but it’s some. And I like to keep that nursing in. I don’t want to replace his nursing sessions with meals at all yet. Then he plays and explores for a while longer. He goes down for his afternoon nap anytime between 12.30 and 2pm. It varies depending on how long we were out and when he had lunch, and how tired he is feeling. I nurse him to sleep, as always. He sleeps half an hour, and usually wakes at that point. If I am lucky I can resettle him by nursing him, or rocking him. Neil rocks him back to sleep if he’s home, because he’s a BIG boy and my arms just about wither up and die with the effort! About 50% of the time though, he won’t go back to sleep. Sometimes he just has two half-hour naps in a day. The rest of the time, one of his naps is half an hour, and the other is like an hour or so. It varies as to which one is which. Anyway, I like him to wake for the rest of the afternoon anytime from 2pm. Before 2pm is not good. He is always really tired long before bedtime if that happens. 3pm is ideal, but it’s usually 2.30 or something that he gets up again. Then we play for the long stretch! Sometimes Arthur helps me round the house, but basically I don’t get much housework done. I play with him, read to him, make him giggle, watch him crawl and cruise around, help him as he learns new things, like crossing gaps that are too big for him to do alone, but which I know he wants to try by the way he turns to me with a certain look and holds out his hand for mine to help him. He sometimes practises things over and over during times like this, like sitting from standing, or climbing the stairs, or opening and closing cupboard doors.

He has teatime between 4 and 5pm. After the clean-up I nurse him in the living room, and then I phone Nana (my mummy!), while still sitting on the floor with Arthur, building him towers to knock town, making his spinners spin, and lately reading him (and Nana!) stories. I am usually on the phone for 30-40 minutes with my lovely mummy, or less if Arthur gets fed up with this! He usually “talks” to Nana sometime during the phonecall. He makes grabs for the receiver so I tell Mummy Arthur wants the phone, and then I put it to his ear. He always tips his head to one side with his “listening” expression on (bless him, it’s so cute!!) for a few seconds, and then he gets down to work eating the receiver! Sometimes his attention is held for a while longer, depending on what Nana is saying! She tells me that she sometimes talks to him like she would if she was with him, and sometimes she just talks to him in the babytalk words she has heard him say, and other times she sings him songs! How lovely! Yesterday she sang him Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which he loves), and he listened with a huge open-mouthed smile on his face for ages, and then looked at me as if to say, “Did you HEAR that Mummy?!!” He was just in awe! :) Sometimes he is chatty and babbles a lot at her. Of course she loves this! Other times he is just a heavy breather who drools on the phone as he tries to eat it! ;)

Then after that, it’s usually between 5.30 and 6pm, and Neil arrives home from work at 6pm. If we are off the phone when he arrives, we greet him at the door to exciting cries of, “Daddy’s home, DADDY’S home, DADDY’S HOOOOME!!!” – he gets very excited and leans eagerly towards the front door. When he sees Neil he squeals with delight and shrugs his shoulders waaay up with his fists clasped tight under his chin! He loooves when Daddy comes home. We watch him get out of the car and then as he gets closer, waving and grinning at Arthur, Arthur shrieks and laughs and shouts, he is just so excited! Then he gets swept up by his Daddy and they have some nice play and cuddle time while I tell Neil about Arthur’s day.

At 6.15 or 6.30 they take a bath together, and I gather stuff for getting Arthur ready for bed. I join them in the bathroom when I have it all ready and wash Arthur’s hair if he needs it, or just watch him splash and play. He likes to bang his hands on the shower screen and see me bang my hands on the other side through the glass :) Then we have a pretty specific routine that just evolved that way a few months ago. I hold Arthur wrapped in a towel on my lap while Neil dries off. Then we take him to our bed, and Neil dries him and then eats him and tickles him and blows raspberries on all his chubby clean nakedness!! Arthur squeals and shrieks with laughter and writhes about, and generally has a nice time with his daddy. I soooo love sitting and watching them do this. Neil eats his fingers and toes. Arthur makes this lovely gurgly noise in his throat and sort of sing-songs it up and down when he is particularly happy. He pretty much only makes that sound when we are making him laugh till he has watery eyes, or tickling him. I LOVE that sound. It’s just music to my ears. The fun session usually ends with Arthur grasping Neil’s face with both hands and dragging it to his own face, and planting a couple of big open kissies on his mouth – so cute :) He loves his daddy. He kisses me like that when I have been nursing or cuddling him particularly closely too. So I know it is a sign that he feels extra specially loved and feels the same way back to us. It’s sooooooo lovely.

Then I clean his teeth with his new big boy (although, tiny baby) toothbrush which he LOVES, and I wipe the excess toothpaste off with a clean wet cloth wipe, and Neil rinses the toothbrush and gives it back to Arthur, because he just loves to brush his own teeth for AGES!! Neil puts his nappy on for the night, and we both get him dressed into his Grobag and vest for bed. By then he is usually getting cranky as he gets fed up with us dressing him when he is tired and just wants what always comes next – the breast! I sing him a lullaby (Speed Bonny Boat) whilst giving him a cuddle, which he often arches his back to get away from if he is cranky because he wants a BREAST, not a lullaby!! ;) And then I lay him down and lie next to him and nurse him till he’s asleep, or nearly asleep. These days I take him off the breast when he sleepy enough, because that new top tooth presses slightly into the breast when he nurses. I get a little indent and it’s not too comfy after a long nursing session, so I end it when he is able to go to sleep without it. This can still take 10 minutes or so though.

He usually nurses to sleep around 7pm, that’s how it usually works out. Today he napped later in the afternoon than usual, and then had tea a bit late, and we were rearranging the bedroom (at last!) so his bath was a bit late and then bedtime, etc. So he nursed to sleep maybe 45 minutes later. He was so tired by then. He really needs his nice early bedtimes. He woke at 10.30 to nurse this evening, and now it’s after midnight (aaaargh!!) so I’m sure he’ll wake again soon. It pretty much goes to 2-hourly after the 10ish waking. Bleurgh. Although some nights recently he has had 3-hour gaps between wakings.

Anyway, I was starting to tell you we’ve been out every day, and on Friday I took Arthur to the park and we walked a fair way and then went to a large pond to feed the ducks!!! Feeding the ducks is like a rite of passage for children in my family, so it’s something I had always envisioned myself doing with my own children one day! It’s the first time we’ve done it :) I took a stale leftover loaf. It POURED with rain all day on Friday, but I absolutely LOVE the rain and especially walking in the rain, so we went anyway. The park was empty, and the ducks did not mind the rain, so we had them all to ourselves! :) Arthur rode in the pushchair with his “space bubble” over him (his raincover) and I pulled it up when we got to the ducks so he could see them better, and positioned my umbrella over him as best I could. I got wet. But I never mind that on rainy walks :) Arthur didn’t seem that bothered about the ducks at first, but I threw bread and they got into a frenzy and then they interested him far more! Some of them got out next to us to get some more bread, and some pigeons joined in too. Arthur just sat and stared and watched them carefully over the edge of his pushchair. It was great fun! I just LOVE feeding ducks though, so it was great fun for me anyway. It’s a childhood thing. Gotta love it! :) Anyway, here is Arthur on his first ever outing to feed the ducks!! He held (and chewed) the plastic bag full of bread for me while I chucked it at the ducks!...

And there you have it! Phew! I think I am finally caught up. It’s soooo late, I have to go to bed. I am behind on emails once again, in case anyone is wondering why I have (rudely) not replied to an email yet!! Sorry! I will get to it soon, I promise. Tomorrow, my brother and his Sarah are coming over to see Arthur (and us, of course!). I can’t wait to see them. It feels like ages since we last saw them (at Grandoug’s 80th in July). I can’t wait till they see what a clever nephew they have! They are eager to see all his new teeth and hair and skills! I hope we’ll go to church in the morning, but it’s soooo late…. I should have been in bed ages ago. Night night!