One

Dearest David

At 3.14pm today you turned one year old.  My word.

This has been an awesome month.  You’re still sleeping well, and having two or three solid hours’ sleep in the morning, and an hour or two in the afternoon.  This makes you happy and bouncy and full of energy when you’re awake, until you crash and fall asleep again: you’re hardly ever grumpy and tired.  You also like people other than Daddy and I.  This is a relief, I can tell you.

You’re still a fussy eater.  You won’t eat ANY fruit unless it’s pureed: if it’s not, you poke it and look disgusted, and refuse to put it anywhere near your mouth.  Vegetables are similar, but you do at least eat potato, peas, and carrots mashed together, and vegetable soup.  However, bread, biscuits, breadsticks, and ESPECIALLY garlic bread go down very well, as do Swedish meatballs from IKEA.  Oh, and chocolate birthday cake.

You’re getting better at walking: you can do it when you forget to be scared!  I don’t think your current growth spurt is helping, because it makes you fall over all the time.  You’re also too lazy to try sometimes: why bother when you can speed-crawl?

Daddy has been working a lot this month, and we haven’t seen him as much as we’d like.  You miss him dearly when he’s away, and you’ve figured out how to press the redial button on the phone so that you can talk to him.  (This means we need to keep his number as the last-dialled, so that you don’t confuse anyone else.)  When you’re together I no longer understand what you’re both on about, you’re so much on the same wavelength.  It seems to centre around fart jokes.

You play like a toddler now.  You sort things into groups, put things in places, try to fit one thing inside another or stick things together.  You are starting to use language and sounds to describe what you’re doing and what is happening around you, too.  New words this month include “Stop!” “Go!” “ERIC!!!” and too many others to count.  Eric prefers to hide (currently under the Christmas tree, which has the added bonus of things to BAT!) than to play with you.

You now travel in the front of my car.  I was getting fed up with the back of the passenger seat being kicked!  You have much more room in the front and you stay still while I strap you into your seat.  We then have a conversation until you fall asleep without a fuss, and I find myself talking to myself without realising.  When a traffic light turns green, you shout “GO GO GO!!!”.  (You have also done this when we followed an old lady in her Nissan Micra.  I’m teaching you patience, honest!)  The view in the front is much better than the view in the back!

You’ve had two birthday parties so far, and a constant stream of presents over the last few days.  That’s what happens when your birthday is so close to Christmas!  On Sunday we went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house and had cake and presents there, and today Kathryn and Harry and Benjamin and Naomi came to visit at Nana and Grandad’s house.  When you wake up from this nap you can open some more presents!  (And tomorrow, and the day after, and probably the day after that.  That’s why we’ve brought Daddy’s car down to Kent and not Mummy’s!)

A year ago today, I held you for the first time, and you were perfect.  You still are.  I love you.  We both do.

Love,

Mummy and Daddy

Big Fat Eric Cat

I’m participating in the Best Of 2009 Blog Challenge.  Every day this month, I write something different about what’s happened this year.  Apologies for lack of posting yesterday, we spent the day in London and the weekend at my parents’ place; I’ve come back slightly more insane than before.  The answer to yesterday’s question?  Falafel.  Could NOT live without the stuff now.  Anyway, today’s post is about the best change we made to the place we live.

Eric.  Introducing him into our home and our family has been the most wonderful thing.  He and David are growing up together.  They sleep next to each other, play together, and annoy the crap out of each other.  They cause me equal amounts of worry, and have roughly equal numbers of hugs!  (Eric is a very snuggly, clingy cat and I’ve worn him in a sling so I can work before now.)  They are both in this lovely in-between stage: David is neither a baby nor a toddler, and Eric is no longer a kitten, but not quite a cat.

The older cats have mostly accepted him.  Snowball still dislikes him, but then Snowball doesn’t like anyone or anything apart from Joe.  Wily puts up with his adoring attentions with great patience and grace.  “Oy boss, have you been outside, where’ve you been, did you catch any mice, will you teach me how to catch mice when I’m big, oh please, please, PLEASE…”  He will catch mice when he’s allowed outside: Snowball has brought the occasional live one inside, which he’s finished off, but I still don’t want my little baby boy going out.

So again, I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

A Little More Conversation

David dropped a book on the floor this morning.  We’ve been having little “conversations” and I’m never sure whether he’s actually talking to me or not.  Today, I knew.

“Have you just dropped a book on the floor?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we having a conversation?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like your book back?”

“No.”

“Would you like some milk?”

“BO!”  (“Bo!” is his word for bottle.  It’s pronounced with a hard “o!” sound, not “oh”)

We’re not doing too badly for eleven months old, are we?  Apart from making a mess in the bathroom and blaming it on “Eh-Rh!” (Eric.)  Well, it was blatantly his fault.

Cat Naps

Before David was born, nearly everyone warned us that we’d treat the cats differently when we had a real baby.  We were warned to make sure we put a cat-net on the cot, that we shouldn’t allow them to sleep in the same room as him, that we’d have to be extra-cautious about sterilizing everything.  Our midwife was horrified that we weren’t “getting rid” of them.

Well, we’ve never really been bothered about germs.  The cat-net on the cot lasted for the five minutes before Snowball worked out how to remove it, we let the cats back into the bedroom after ten minutes on the first night home from hospital, and the ten-second rule applies to everything that touches the floor in this house.  Joe goes by the mantra “if it hasn’t got cat hair on it, it’s probably OK.”  Snowball is fed on the side in the kitchen, otherwise the boys jump on her, and we keep a litter tray in the kitchen, too.  We clean the side and the floor pretty regularly, and make sure we disinfect the side before preparing food (which, to be honest, I’d do anyway.)  There is a frequent exchange of toys, especially balls, between cats and baby: we just make sure that none of the cat toys are a choking hazard, as they’re pretty much guaranteed to end up in someone’s mouth.

Now, I know that there’s a school of thought that says you should keep pets, especially cats, away from children whilst they sleep.  We never had a problem with Snowball or Wily sleeping in the Moses basket or the cot when David was tiny, although there were occasions where Snowball would sleep next to David on the sofa.  They still don’t really go near him, especially now that he’s big enough to chase them and pull their tails.  Until this morning, Eric hadn’t shown any interest in sleeping in the cot, either.

I caught him there when I went to collect David from his nap.  Well, he’s certainly showing interest now.  It’s in a nice, warm spot, and the duvet is soft and comfortable.  There are snuggly soft toys, including Mini-Eric.  It’s not easily David-accessible unless we put him there, and Snowball and Wily have never slept there or marked it.

You know what?  I’m not going to bow down to pressure or paranoia on this one.  The stories about cats smothering babies are clearly an old wives’ tale: no cat would ever go near those grabby hands.  (Eric, certainly, would not sleep within reach of David.).  David, meanwhile, is clearly benefitting from growing up so close to these three beautiful creatures: he is mostly very gentle, and he can now say “puss!” and “miaow”.  I want him to wake up to a cat sleeping on the end of his bed, like I did with Jenny and Charlie.  One of the reasons that we got Eric when we did was that so he and David could grow up side-by-side, and I’m so very glad they are.

The Three Stooges

Unusually, all three cats were in the mood for posing yesterday.  Here they are, in all their feline glory.

First to pose was Snowball.  This is especially unusual, as she’s incredibly camera-shy.  She tolerated me for ten minutes or so before stalking off to bug the crap out of her big brother.

Next was Eric.  He is most definitely not camera-shy, but he has the attention-span of a knat.  I’m trying to take a picture of Eric (and David!) every day, to document how he’s growing.

And here is Wily, the posiest poser of all.  He knew full well that I was taking all of these photos, but kept posing until I was done.

I love these cats to bits.  Any more need saying?