It’s been a while…..hmmm, that could just be one of the biggest understatements I’ve made all year and if I didn’t post something now (I should be writing copy for our website really) then there was a very real danger that 2009 would arrive with no blogging having been done since May! If you’re here then you’ll know the blog has been moved – I did this for various reasons but mainly because it was open for the whole world to read if it came up in a google search or they got an email from one of our sirah emails and decided to go and have a look at what sirah.co.uk was, it was never intended for such a wide audience. It was also being spammed about 50 times a day and so I took control of it – all references to sirah.co.uk have been removed from Google (that reminds me I must do the same for Yahoo!) and I’ve added some code that tells the search engine robots to ignore it and not index it again. Perfect! All nicely tucked away from the masses – just the way I like it.

So anyway, on to the exciting news of the time! On Saturday Edward decided that he wasn’t going to wear nappies any more and that was that!
“Edward, do you want some pants (nappy) on?”
“Nope, potty please.”
“Now?”
“Yes please!”

So Jack dutifully ran off to the utility room to get the potty, he put it down for Edward who duly stood over it and peed! And that’s how it’s been ever since. We’ve had a potty or two and a step for the toilet downstairs in the house for a while and decided that by far the most effective way forward was to let Edward get his head around the whole deal in his own good time, rather than force the issue and have it turn into a stressful nightmare.

Ellie and my mum went shopping in Leicester for the day to spend Ellie’s birthday money (came back with Crimbo pressies too as it turned out – it’s going to be a bit sparse under the tree for them this year) and also picked up some ‘big-boy-pants’ (BBP) for Edward. He wasn’t too keen to start with but poor Jack spent most of Saturday not knowing where to look or put his hands as Edward bounced around all over him so the BBP will spare both their blushes. Edward’s new nicknames for the day were ‘Bear-Bottom’ and….wait for it…..wait…..it’s a good one……’FREE WILLY!’

Being two years old the world is simple and uncomplicated – you decide not to wear nappies any more, everyone seems very excited and clap and cheer a lot when you pee on the potty, they buy you BBP and THEN they try and put a nappy on you when it’s time for bed!!!! OH. MY. GOODNESS! You’d have thought the world had come to an end and so I had to wait until he was asleep (which wasn’t very long as sleeping in the day time is for WIMPS!) and put one on by stealth.

Saturday = No Accidents

Sunday was much the same other than there were a couple of accidents whilst he was engrossed in building steam engines on the computer, but apart from that it was all good.

Sunday = 2 Accidents

Today: Well today, there hasn’t been any accidents so far and we put another piece of the potty training into place….a trip out to the shops in BBP!!! All the banking etc was ready and so it was a case of waiting for Edward to go for a wee. Straight after it was on with the socks, trousers and shoes (much easier trying to learn these things without having to negotiate trousers but not such a good look for going out to the shops!) and AWAY to the shops in record time . It wasn’t just the shops: first it was a stop off at Charlie’s office to drop off some Drayton paperwork, then it was off to Thrapston (3 miles away). Into the bank to do the banking, down to the Post Office to queue for ages to get some stamps and post some letters. Then a quick dash home. I’d packed some spare clothes in the bag just in case but he came back wearing the same clothes and all had gone well!!!!

So that’s another achievement we can tick off – now all we need to do is plan where we’re going to stop on the M1 (there’s nowhere to stop on the M40 after Oxford) and the M25, A24 so that he can pull off the three hour journey to Sussex on Christmas Eve!!

And there you go – a blog post to break the 6+ month ‘silence’!

I will endeavour to update again within the week…..

Sarah x

No more sleeping in a cot for Edward! He’s been perfecting the art of trying to climb over the sides for a while but it was all a bit half-hearted so we didn’t worry about it too much, but the other day he called me into the bedroom (“Muuuum – c’m-here!”), told me to sit down on the bed (“Sit there.”) and then proceeded to climb over the side of his bed and landed head-first in my lap!

To our knowledge he hadn’t been trying to do that if we weren’t there, and we can only say that because he hadn’t landed in a heap on the floor between our bed and his – but the seed had been planted and yesterday afternoon when he woke up and called me, I arrived in the bedroom to find him half-way over the sides so that was it, decision made; the sides came off, the bottom feet taken off and his cot converted in a bed all in the blink of an eye (actually, it was more like half an hour). This was followed by lots of giggling and running up and down the length of his bed and jumping on and off it.

Then it was bedtime which went something like this…

• Drank milk and listened to bedtime stories on our bed
• Laid down on his bed and fidgeted around into favourite spot sleeping horizontally across the bed on the pillow
• Came to see where everyone was and said goodnight to Daddy and the dogs (again)
• Went back to bed and asked for more milk
• Daddy brought in more milk and read Smoke and Fluff (again)
• Went quiet for five minutes
• Called out at the door to see where everyone was
• Went quiet again after being told that everything was ok, everyone was still here and to go back to bed

By the end of Heroes we figured that he must have gone to sleep and took bets as to exactly WHERE he’d fallen asleep – he had gone back to bed and was back in his favourite position across the pillow. With such an unorthodox sleeping position comes a lot of fidgeting around (Edward is not a tidy sleeper, unlike Jack who tends to wake up in the same spot he went to sleep in, he’s much more like Ellie used to be – a real fidget PANTS!) and so we put one of the spare duvets on the floor between our bed and his so that it wasn’t such a hard landing if he did fall out in the night. We’ve also put a bolt on the inside of the door and the last one to bed has to lock us all in so that Edward can’t sneak off out of the bedroom and end up in the lounge on his own with the dogs – it gets more and more like Fort Knox here every day!

Well he didn’t fall out of bed which is quite amazing, woke up at 5am and had some milk, dozed until about 5.30am and then climbed up into bed with us where he stayed snoozing with Simon until he appeared in the lounge at about 7.30am (I got up at 6am as space was at a bit of a premium by then!).

So all in all it was a great success – now we’ll see what happens when it’s daytime and time for sleepy-snoozy! Could be interesting…watch this space.

Sarah x

I think we have the next Simon King in the making!  Edward can identify, and say the names of, the following birds either from pictures or from the window opposite the bird table:

Robin, Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Blackbird, Sparrow, Starling, Jackdaw, Magpie, Dove, Duck, Cockerel, Dunnock, Chicken and Captain (Woodpigeon).  I did promise to tell the story as to how woodpigeons came to be called ‘Captain’.  A fair while ago now we had a beaten-up, bent-beaked, one-footed woodpigeon visit the bird table, he really does look a bit of a state compared to the other birds and we called him ‘Captain Jack Woodpigeon’ (as opposed to Captain Jack ‘Sparrow’ from Pirates of the Carribean).  Well the Bear struggled to get to grips with Captain-Jack-Woodpigeon so he just called him ‘Captain’ – the thing is, as far as Edward is concerned woodpigeons are not woodpigeons, they are Captains and nothing will persuade him otherwise!

Not long after I wrote the last blog entry – and I’m talking maybe an hour – me and Edward went into the new garden to potter around for a bit.  When we got out there we discovered that Arthur was there with his very big green John Deere tractor, so the pottering was put on hold whilst Edward just pointed at it saying, “Mum! Look! Tractor! Mum!  Tractor!”  We were standing there long enough for Arthur to appear from inside the house (Arthur works for the Estate and is working very hard in what was Margaret’s house doing all the work that needs to be done there before someone else can move in) and he said that Edward could have a sit in his tractor if he would like to!

So we did!  We both had to sit in it as Edward wasn’t going to do it on his own (to start with anyway) and I’ve never seen a grin SO big! He was absolutely BEAMING, and had a lovely time pretending to drive it by waggling the wheel around and making lots of tractor driving noises.  We must have been sitting up in the cab for a good 10 to 15 minutes and then it was time to go….you can imagine the wails of protest and hanging on to any bit of it in an attempt to stay ‘driving’ the tractor but, thankfully, it was short-lived.  When we went to get Ellie and Jack from school, Edward told them all about his driving of the tractor and he started beaming all over again – a grin so big it would melt even the coldest of hearts!

What else has happened…?  Not much really, it’s half-term at the moment and the kids are enjoying dossing around and not having to do any school stuff.  They go back next Tuesday and then there’s only about 7 and a half weeks before they break up for the summer holidays – I’m sure the school terms were longer when we were at school and the holidays not so long!  Before the end of term we need to go to Prince William (Jack’s new school) to get the bits and pieces of uniform that have to come from there (which is only a jumper and rugby top I think) and sort out his bus pass and the time that the bus comes through the village.

July weekends are completely booked up for them – on the first weekend Ellie is having her braces fitted and Jack might have to wait a little longer for his last baby tooth to come out before they will fit his, the second weekend they are away for The Festival of Speed, the third weekend they are away to Bournemouth for this year’s Pier to Pier swim (Ellie is determined to finish it this year and I think her triathlon training will definitely stand her in good stead!) and then the last weekend sees them go away for a week to Wales on their PGL holiday – Ellie is doing horse riding in the mornings and multi-activities in the afternoons and Jack is learning to drive in the mornings (yes you read that right…lock up your car keys!) and multi-activities in the afternoons.

So it’s all go!  Dinner’s ready, so better run.

Sarah x

Some people enjoy being woken up by the sounds of the birds singing their pretty early morning songs, some people choose to have the radio switch on at a certain time, whilst others prefer a simple beep or bell sound to rouse them from their sleep – we have an Edward and his current alarm style of choice is…UP!!!!! and the time seems to be set to random any time between 5.30am and 7am.

Whilst the weather has been quite nice on the whole over the last week, it’s not been anywhere near as warm so there hasn’t been much work going on in the new garden; everything else has been coming on in leaps and bounds though and the rose we planted against the side of the house last year is now blooming and she looks and smells absolutely stunning.  Actually, she is the second rose we planted against the house (I’ll remember her name in a minute) the first one was ‘Dance de Feu’- a very red rose that is lovely, but then I changed my mind and decided that a big frilly pink rose would be better.  So I moved Dance de Feu to the big pot in front of the lounge window and then it sulked for the rest of the summer (well I did move it at the wrong time really), but now it’s throwing out flower buds again and is threatening to bloom just in time for the village open day on the 1st of June.

Me and the Bear are taking Simon to Gardeners’ World Live at the Birmingham NEC for Father’s Day on the 15th of June – we are both very excited about that (me and Simon that is, I’m not sure how excited Edward is about it).

Aside from all the usual, we didn’t do a great deal over the weekend – there wasn’t a Grand Prix on (after my superb start to the Nightmare Grand Prix season I am now in 27th place – I WAS 8th at one point, I was quite overexcited about that – and Simon is already in his , now, customary last position!).

Jack and Ellie went to my mum’s for the day on Sunday – Ellie has been working on her bike with Tony so that it is ready for the cycling phase of her triathlon training and Jack has been helping my mum in the garden.  Me, Simon and the Bear went to one of our local gardening centres and bought a beautiful crimson Japanese Maple and a very minimalist black square pot to plant it in. It’s going to go in the other new bit of garden that we have acquired – the little courtyard bit outside the kitchen window that looks out towards the church; against the white of the wall it’s going to be quite eye-catching I think, and it was a bargain because we ‘belong’ to the garden centre we had a 50% off any one plant voucher sent to us and they also had 20% off pots too!

Right – it’s that time of day when me and Edward must take Simon a cup of tea and then take Jack and Ellie to school.  The rest of the day will go by in a flash and before I know it it will be midnight again and another day will over!

We measured Jack and Ellie the other day – Jack has grown an inch and a half in just 12 weeks and is now 5 foot 3 and a half, Ellie is shooting up just as much and stands at five foot 2. Edward has also grown about an inch and a half in the same amount of time and is now the grand height of 2 foot 9. And don’t even get me started on the size of all of their feet!!

Edward is beginning to get his head around numbers – if you start to count he will join in and has got the sequence of 7, 8, 9, 10 down to a fine art along with 2 and 3.

He is also a boy who knows what he wants – he says, “Mum/Dad/Jack/Ellie c’m-here,” if he wants you to go to him and yesterday he was calling me from the lounge, “Mum, c’m-here!” I asked him what he wanted and he came into my office, “Finley…?” he said, whilst pointing to the TV.

“But Finley’s not on now Bear, it might be on later.”

“Finley!” he insisted pointing frantically at the TV, and then he disappeared back into the lounge. He returned moments later with a Wii controller, thrust it into my hand and went back to the lounge, “Mum, c’m-here, Finley,” he said pointing to the Wii. THat’s when it dawned on me that he wanted me to turn on the Wii, connect to the internet and BBC iPlayer so that he could watch Finley ‘on demand’!

He also knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like – whilst Meer-Meer (Thomas) is still a firm favourite along with Pocoyo, Bobber (Bob the Builder) and Pingu, he can’t stand this weirdo ‘In the Night Garden’ programme and isn’t overly interested in the Telletubbies either. So he’s not a boy that is content just to sit in front of the TV and watch anything that’s on; if he doesn’t like it, then he’s OFF preferring instead to play with his trains and tractors (the tractors have to go to bed with him now and be read Smoke and Fluff and Downy Duckling as many times as he can get out of us!)

The church website that I built is becoming a bit of a beast – I must say that it’s been a lot of fun doing it. There are all sorts of things going on and news to read about (and some GREAT pictures of the village *wink*) and the barn dance tickets are now available to buy online (I spent a lot of yesterday adding that facility to the site) so if you’re coming, go and buy your tickets because numbers are limited to 200! And if you’re not coming but haven’t seen the site lately go and have another look www.lowickchurch.com

The weather is lovely here again today and Edward is enjoying spending lots of time in the garden; a month or two ago I approached Charles (our landlord) to see if we could extend the garden back to where its original boundaries used to be now that Margaret (the lady that lived in the house over the back) has moved to another house in the village. He came round the other day, we went and had a look at where the new/original boundary is/was and he gave us the go ahead to start doing whatever we like to it!

The Estate are going to fence it all in so that it matches the fencing we already have but we don’t have to wait for that before we make a start. There’s a HUGE pampas grass there and some other big ugly shrub so we’re going to dig those out (hopefully with the help of the Jeffs’ and their digger!), move the hundred-weight of aquilegias and delphiniums and forget-me-nots (they always remind me of you now MIL) to the edges and then turf the rest. Below are some pictures of the new bit of garden as it is today so for once we actually have a record of before and after, somehow we always seem to forget the before photo. It’s all very exciting especially as all of our favourite plants and some of the new ones we put in last year are growing away like crazy.

Simon’s ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ plant showing off its first flowers of the year (this is one of his favourites)…

The centre of a ‘Mrs Bateman’ clematis flower – it reminds me a bit of a sea anemone – she is currently smothering the trellis that we put in front of the oil tank to hide it and is doing a fantastic job!

Here are a few pictures of the new bit of garden – this first one is looking away from our garden fence with the house and the back of Simon’s shoffice to your right. The tree at the end is a fabulous pear tree and under it are a couple of very established peonies that are just stunning – we are very lucky to have inherited them!

This one is standing further into what was Margaret’s garden – you can see the MONSTER pampas grass (it’s easily 12 feet tall!) and other funny shrub thing and where I strung the boundary up for Charles to come and have a look at.

And this last one is from underneath the pear tree looking back towards our current garden fence with the house and Simon’s shoff’ there on the left…

And finally, a photo of Edward relaxing in the garden this morning – I think this is my most favourite image of him to date!

This is a sentence we hear lots from Edward every day.  It can be used to say that a tractor has driven past or to try and explain that he can’t find his tractor, with lots of activity going on in the fields at the moment and with the work that is happening at the house behind us, Edward is in tractor heaven every day.

His skills of identification are quite remarkable – he can spot a Land Rover at fifty paces, “Lan!” he says, and he can identify several garden birds: robins, jackdaws, blue tits, goldfinches and of course captains!  He does get confused when it comes to chaffinches though, he seems to think they are robins too.  Then there are the aeroplanes – “eobeans” and boats – “boat” and vans and lorries and car, always lots of cars.

This time 3 years ago we were running around all over the place getting things ready for the wedding! The day’s agenda went something like this:

Get all the muffins for the ‘cake’ and the lottery tickets from Tescos.

Roll and tie all the lottery tickets with ribbon and arrange on the glass stand.

Pack the car with all the various bits for the reception like balloons, ribbon, cakes, cake stands etc

Drop off the suits to Pages Lane and collect the VAST amount of drink and take it across town to Marilyn and Chris’s. Meet mum and have lunch there whilst forming a battle plan for the afternoon.

In the afternoon, Simon went to collect Niki and they both went on to get Jack and Ellie from school, then back to Marilyn’s where they started blowing up all the balloons. Me and mum went into town to try and find a tie for Tony and then dashed across county to Horsham to collect my dress, then back to Littlehampton to drop it off at Peter and Sarah’s – we didn’t get back to Boundary Road until about 6pm whereupon I had a glass of wine thrust into my hand and given my only job of the evening…to put the champagne in the fridge. It was tough work!

We got home at around 9ish and finally got to bed at just gone midnight.
I can’t believe it was three years ago! WHERE has the time gone? Simon keeps reminding me that we have packed a lot into those three years but even so it CAN’T be three years ago, there has to be some sort of mistake!!  It’s just as incomprehensible to think that Edward will be two years old in just 9 weeks time – he is going through a really funny phase at the moment, funny-ha-ha not funny-peculiar.  He is stringing lots of words together and talks pretty much non-stop, he’ll say things like, “Tractor – all gone – farm,” or “Captain – all gone – fly-away.”  (Captain is his name for all wood pigeons, I’ll explain another time) And if you say, “That’s right, Captain flew away,” he’ll come back with this real sing-songy, “I knowww,” that has the sort of tone you’d use if someone had just told you some amazing piece of news, it’s so funny!

He says all sorts of single words, too many to list now, but he also says “Oh noo!” “I-don’t-know” and “What’s-that?!” “Lou – good-girl” “Minky – big-dog” and “DAD!  Come-here!”  Come-here is courtesy of Jack and Ellie.

They had their second appointment with the orthodontist this morning and had the moulds taken for their braces.  Ellie is having hers fitted on the 6th July and Jack’s will be slightly later as he still has a baby tooth to come out and they won’t start anything until that’s gone, the xrays also showed that neither of them have any wisdom teeth like me (apparently this means that we are more evolutionary advanced than mere mortals who have wisdom teeth LOL!).

It’s the May Fayre this weekend (fingers crossed the weather stays fine) and Ellie is out each evening at the park practising the maypole dancing and helping Maud (she teaches the dancing) to show the younger ones what to do.

Jack and Ellie are both going to go to the tennis club after school that starts next Tuesday and Ellie is doing really well with her triathlon training on Wednesdays – they are introducing the running element this week.

Everything else is just the same-old-same-old: very busy, we don’t eat until late and go to bed even later!

And on that note, I must go and get on.

Sarah x

We’ve put the blog back to how it used to look in a bid to try and update it more often (well at least the intention is there!), with the other style the login ‘button’ wasn’t easily accessible and it was a bit of a faff to get in to the admin’ section – it’s a naff excuse but it does have an impact.

So it’s back to the old look and maybe a new start in writing here more regularly….that said, I’m not going to write much today – time is a commodity that we just don’t seem to have anymore and it’s rapidly heading towards dinner and bath and bed time for Edward. Dinner for me and Simon is rarely before 9pm and bed is often later than 1am so it’s a case of grab spare moments when you can, the thing is…there are so many little things that need to be done it’s almost impossible to know where to start.

So what’s the news – lots of Edward bla-bla, he talks LOADS, says the funniest things and can mimick almost everything you say (we have to be very careful). He also seems to have the memory of an elephant! He met my Grandma for the first time last month, we were only with her for a couple of hours, long enough for a couple of photos, a quick potter around with her pots and pans and a tinkle on the piano; I processed the photos today and Edward came along and sat on my lap – he pointed at Jack and said, “Jack,” he pointed at Ellie and said, “Ellie,” I pointed at Grandma and asked who it was, “Grandma,” he said. Quite amazing!

Jack and Ellie are growing too fast for their own good, Jack took part in the football tournament at the Pocket Park on Sunday and Ellie goes to triathlon training on Wednesdays. There doesn’t seem to be much to say about them, but it seems like we don’t see them very often in the grand scheme of things.

What else? Lots of business bla-bla…..not enough time bla-bla so here are some photos bla bla (if you don’t watch Al Murray then the bla-bla is just going to pass you by).

Corporate image – lovely!

Business Bla-Bla

The Generation Game

And again…

Child prodigy…

What are YOU looking at?

Strike a pose…

 

And r-e-l-a-x

None of the big kids – apparently there’s to be no more shots of them first thing in the morning in pyjamas….does that mean that evening shots in pyjamas is ok I wonder?

The concept of Christmas for Edward is an interesting one – what are you all doing with that paper?  Nothing?  EXCELLENT!  I will go and play in it then!

Edward is currently asleep, Simon is creating a culinary masterpiece in the kitchen, the big kids are upstairs watching Pirates of the Carribean 3 (one of the day’s presents) in Ellie’s room so I’ve sneaked onto the computer to put some pictures up.

Jack and Ellie have been adding music to their iPod Shuffles and eating chocolate for breakfast.  Edward has had fun with his rocking horse and singing-talking book from Anna and Gary – we already know the ‘Tad the Farmer’ song off by heart – but as soon as he got into the kitchen, it was down to the serious business of helping Daddy do the cooking (…I really do cook by the way).

After the carnage that is Christmas dinner has been cleared away I’m going to light the fire and we’re going to do nothing other than ooh and aaah over our lovely presents and batten down the hatches in readiness for watching Dr Who.

Hope you’re all having a lovely day so far…