Where did the rest of December go???!!

Christmas seems to have whistled by as fast as it approached, we took all the decorations down yesterday and everywhere looks huge again. It also sparked off a complete house tidy and throw-away session – Jack’s bedroom is now a haven of peace and tidy tranquility and is two black sacks of RUBBISH lighter, I’ve never known anyone hoard as much junk and crud as Jack.

Ellie’s room is half-way there and so far we have removed one black sack of detritous from her skanky pit of doom! Edward’s room is a little den of playful heaven and all of his toys and puzzles are in the same place with all of their pieces present and correct.

Our bedroom/my office still has a few things hanging around that need to be sent away – a 4X4 wheel cover that I designed and had printed for Daniel’s new business and Lori’s crimbo pressie, but apart from that it’s a nice place to be.

All of this has taken a lot longer to achieve than normal because I have come down with full-blown flu and have felt wretched these last few days, worse still is that I have given it to Simon and the way he is at the moment it’s not looking likely that he will be fit and well enough to be admitted for his operation next week – he’s ‘disappointed’ as you can imagine.

Other hot news of the New Year – just a few weeks after deciding that nappies were not for him, Edward is now dry at night time too! For the last week or so, I suppose, Edward has been waking up in the morning with dry nappies and for the last two nights we have left nappies off altogether and he’s woken up in the morning with dry pyjamas – I’m very impressed and proud of our little Bear.

Jack and Ellie go back to school tomorrow and normal life will resume once more…as normal as things ever get in this house anyway!

Sarah x

…the scrolling images are done now. Almost there! But bedtime now and an early night – HURRAH!

Sarah x

PS – the painting was a GREAT success, not even a sniff of chaos – the artist was SO tired afterwards that he had to have a lay down on Ellie’s beanbag (the new resting place of choice) in the kitchen with his ‘Mear-Mear’ pillow and blanket and the noo-nee-blanket. It’s hard work being creative!

Now that I know how to write the code to create themes in WordPress (that is the software that powers this blog) I thought it would be nice to have something a little more personal than a generic picture of something, nice as some of those generic pictures are! You might notice it’s not quite finished yet but it got to 2am this morning and I figured I should probably go to bed (so much for that early night I was telling you about Niki!!) – the scrolling images are test images from the business blog on the new site that isn’t live yet, I’m aiming to have it done by New Year and certainly by the time Simon goes in to have his operation.

Me and the Bear are going to be doing some painting today – it’s going to be quite involved and to work will need to be quite precise (I can’t say any more than that at the moment) so it’s either going to all go to plan OR it’s going to be complete and utter CHAOS! I’m putting my money on the latter!

Potty training moved up to the next level this morning. We have progressed to standing at the toilet on a step and, “Peeing like Daddy, that’s right!” Yes, that’s right Edward, peeing like Daddy…splashes and all!!!!

Sarah xx

Lucy went back to my mum’s this weekend – she lashed out at Edward and so having her stay here was no longer an option. Jack and Ellie were in the lounge, Ellie was playing Indiana Jones Lego (one of the BEST games in the whole world!) and Jack was mooching around. Edward went in to the lounge, made a bee-line for Lou-Lou and GRABBED her legs – she didn’t like it and lashed out. He’s fine – a couple of scratches on his forehead and a ‘tooth-graze’ and a deeper almost puncture wound higher up on his head under his hair, I say almost puncture wound because it was a perfect tooth-shaped triangular hole about 2 to 3mm deep but the skin wasn’t actually broken and bleeding if you see what I mean. He was a very lucky boy as it could have been at lot worse. He’s none the worse emotionally for all of it and isn’t showing any fear with the dogs, which is good on the one hand and not so good on the other as he is still trying to pull Cypher’s nose and cheeks if he can. I hope this phase passes soon.

It also means that Neo has come home – as Lou-Lou has a certain fatal history with cats…although having said that she’s been exceptionally well behaved with mum’s cats over the last 24 hours! Cypher on the other hand has done nothing than bark and cry at the gate at the bottom of the stairs because he knows there is something up there. Poor Neo, his quiet ‘retirement’ at my mum’s has come to an abrupt end! He seems quite happy at the moment though camping out in Ellie’s room – under the bed during the day but comes out to say hello and roll around on the carpet like an overgrown kitten and he slept on Ellie’s bed all night last night. Morpheus isn’t interested in him being upstairs, it’s just Cypher who’s a bit over excited at the moment.

And so that is all the weekend news. Christmas seems to be hurtling towards us at a staggering speed and we are probably the most disorganised we’ve ever been, it’s going to be over in a flash and all of a sudden we’ll find ourselves in 2009 which will probably race by faster than this year has.

Sarah xx

LOOK! LOOK! A second post within the week!!! Just like I promised!!!!

So after the successful trip to Thrapston in BBP (big-boy-pants remember) the next test was to go further afield. On Tuesday Simon and Edward went shopping to Asda – this can take anything up to three hours if they faff and meander around so everything was ready to GO and again all they were waiting for was for Edward to have a pee and then they would be OFF.
They were gone for ages and I was really expecting Edward to come back in different clothes but NO! It was a great success and has set the tone for going out for longer in BBP – so maybe we’ll only need to stop once, if at all on the Crimbo Eve there and back journeys.

Nothing much else has happened this week other than I decided (again Tuesday I think) to take the dog gate down the separates the kitchen and the lounge. Morpheus was getting increasingly unhappy at being shut on the the other side of it and come that evening he was acting very strangely, he almost had a really wild panicked look in his eyes and wouldn’t settle down. All in all the gate was causing more stress and agro than it was worth – Edward was shouting at the dogs because they were always being told to shut up and settle down, Cypher would rarely move out of the way if someone wanted to get past – making it very difficult for Simon to manoeuvre his way through and so would make him cross. Edward would stand and rattle the bars like a little prisoner if he was shut out of the kitchen and CRY, “Bear’s come too! Bear’s in kitchen! Help cooking!!!!” and so it would go on!!!!
Without it all of that has gone: no squeaking dogs, no crying Edward, no fluff and skank piling up either side of the bottom of the gate because the Dyson can’t quite get there, no kids getting told off for forgetting to tie the gate shut with ever-increasingly complex knots that Edward can’t untie it and break into the kitchen etc and I LIKE IT!
Simon, on the other hand HATES IT! It does mean that you have to follow Edward around the house and be close by him all the time so he can be whisked out of the way of the dogs if they decide to get silly (rolling around on the floor and kicking their legs around, rushing to the window to bark at someone who dared to walk past etc) and as a result it means that you can’t just sit with the laptop on your lap and let Edward get on with something. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing to be honest, I think the TV babysitter has had a long enough run. So me and Edward have been doing ‘stuff’ this week: building fires – he helps to clear out the fireplace and build a new fire, we decided to teach him and involve him with the fire so that he learns about how to be safe, feels useful and included and as a result he has no interest in it when it’s lit because it’s boring – you can’t do anything with a hot fire but you can do LOADS when it’s cold like play diggers in the ash and get absolutely FILFY! We’ve been to the park – he rode his tractor down there (he sits on it and someone pulls it along) and he cooked me stew in the little wendy house, we swung on the swings, he rode the springy horse, slide head-first down the slide (that is the ONLY way to go down a slide) and we went on the roundabout – I felt sick for the rest of the day! Give me an extreme rollercoaster and I’m fine, love it but stick me on a roundabout or one of those carousels where you bob up and down on the horses and I’ll get off feeling really sick! I’ve got some little videos of our trip to the park on my phone so I’ll need to see if I can compress them and put them on here!

And so there you go, that’s about it – Jack’s gone beating today, Ellie’s playing with Edward, I’m in the kitchen (I can sneak in a bit of work if I keep my laptop out here when Edward is playing on his computer in the kitchen) and Simon is still snoozy in bed. I’ve got some pictures to stick on here but they are still on my camera – I’m hoping I’ll get a few minutes to do them sometime today.

Have a good day
Sarah xx

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