She knows exactly what to do with it – the first thing she did was put it in her mouth and move it around. I’m still giving her the toothpaste and making sure all her teeth are clean by just finger brushing them as well, but then let her use the toothbrush for a bit to get used to it.

Her 5th tooth is pushing it’s way through now – slowly but surely. She’s had a bit of a break from teething for the past few days – she hasn’t even needed any Calpol, which is unheard of of late!

I’ve also finally got a spam filter sorted so I don’t get any stupid bot dudes coming in and writing stupid comments. That’s all gone. So now, all I need to do is sit down, pull my finger out and write about my beautiful baby girl that just won’t stop growing! She has come on leaps and bounds since I last blogged – that’s a pretty obvious point, considering I haven’t blogged in 2 months. She’s 9 months old now, nearly 10, and has learned so many new skills. She can eat finger food super well now, and her appetite is like that of a horse. She loves her food, and isn’t fussy at all. As long as it tastes good, she’ll eat it. She can tell the difference between homemade food and jarred stuff – she’ll turn her nose up at the jarred stuff. To be fair, it is super bland, so it doesn’t surprise me. She loves beef, fish, chicken, vegetables, fruit, cheese – everything I make she will devour. It makes me so happy watching her eat. I’m so pleased she isn’t a fussy bugger who doesn’t like anything. She’s truly amazing and her appetite astounds me. In a typical day, she will demolish a massive bowl of porridge and a yoghurt or 2 for breakfast, then she has some milk. At lunch, she’ll have a sandwich and another yoghurt, or beans on toast or something. Then for tea, she’ll have a huge bowl of whatever’s going, meat fish potatoes veg, whatever. In between, she’ll snack lots too. She’s amazing.

Apart from that, she’s learned to clap, and looks so pleased with herself in doing so. She has also learned how to put shapes in the holes in her toys, and how to get them back out again. And the piece d’resistance is she can stand up and walk along the furniture. She’s dying to be able to walk unaided, and I doubt it will be much longer before she does so – she just needs to perfect her balance. Oh yeah, and she can crawl the normal way as combat now. She’s awesome.

She has also perfected some of her babbling too, now saying dada, mama and nana. She doesn’t know quite what they mean yet, but she’s getting there.

Since my last post, we have all been over to France twice. We went over Christmas, followed by a week in Andorra. Freyja quite liked the snow, and had her first go on a slide and a brief go on a swing, which she loved. And her first Christmas was fab – both sets of grandparents were there, which made the day, and Freyja loved all of her new things, in particular the wrapping paper that they all came in. We arrived back to the UK on the 4th January, after a big drive and ferry crossing – Freyja behaved wonderfully as always. She’s a true credit to us both and her behaviour and sociability makes us very proud parents. We have just returned from another weekend in France via plane. It was Freyja’s grandad’s 60th birthday, and we all surprised him by turning up on his doorstep. He really enjoyed it, and it was a lovely time had by all. So now we’re home, with a mountain of washing to do, and a bit of a poorly Freyja who has caught a cold/cough which she is struggling with at the moment. She’s never had a cough before, so I don’t think she knows what to do! Hopefully it doesn’t develop into any more than just a cough.

In other news, we are going to be moving house soon! Yay! Cannot wait! The completion date has been put back a month due to a particularly harsh fortnight of snow, so we should be moving in to our brand new pad at the end of April. It’s so exciting. It’s our first home, and it’s also closer to Portsmouth than we are now, so we will be closer to our friends again, which is something we have truly missed since moving away.

Before then, we have my birthday and Freyja’s 1st birthday to look forward to – we’re hoping to do some sort of 1st birthday party for her, but not sure what yet. Will have to get my thinking cap on. I know for sure that it will be lovely.

Right, that update is enough for now. But I have promised myself I will be more on the ball in future, and will write more often so that I don’t have to cram everything into one post. It gets very difficult!

Edit: She now has 3 teeth and a 4th poking through. We could easily keep Calpol in business by the amount we get through because of this. Since my last post, she can also sleep through the night, and if she wakes up, doesn’t need me to settle her anymore. So our sleeps have infinitely improved. I’m still lazy though – I really need to get out of that habit.

A month has passed since I last wrote anything here. I seem to remember that the last one had a lot going on in it as well. Freyja’s over 7 months old now. Time really does fly. It’s strange really. It seems like many moons ago that I was enduring labour, I have only a vague recollection of the pain. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t seem 2 seconds since I was writing on here that Freyja had laughed for the first time. Now she laughs ALL the time, and it’s amazing to hear. She’s usually laughing at either James or myself acting like complete wazzocks, but still, it makes her smile and that’s all that counts.

So, what’s happened in the past month. Well, she’s yet again NOT sleeping through the night. We have decided that it’s got to be due to teething. She’s been having a terrible time of it. She goes through stages of not being bothered by her gums – these stages coincide with wonderful sleeps. The rest of the time, she wakes up and I settle her off again. It’s not a problem really – I’m only up for 10 minutes, but when it comes to settling myself off too sleep again, I question why I bother – Going to sleep from 5:30am until 7am seems to do me more harm than good. All the teething pain has resulted in ONE tooth emerging – that’s not even fully fledged, just a little gravestone. But it does seem to have come out a little more. It’s too cute for words. Very sharp though – as I found when she decided to bite me. I believe the sharp nibble was the same day that my precious daughter gave my jaw a lovebite. I was covering it up for 3 days with concealer.

She’s also getting more and more active and mobile by the hour. We have had to cover the DVD player/Sky box (she has a thing for machines) with parts of a big foam jigsaw. That way, she can’t meddle with the volume or turn everything off. Just a sheet of this foam jigsaw worked a few weeks ago. As of today, I’ve had to build a foam brick – the sheet form just wasn’t sturdy enough (she had figured out how to move everything to get through to the machines.) This, in a way is very smart and wonderful – it demonstrates her fantastic ability to problem solve. However, on the other hand, it’s a pain in the bum, trying to think of innovative ways to keep her away from all things technical. Especially as she has a huge thing for wires. She’d be chewing through them all if she had her choice.

Anyway, back to the moving around. She has the commando-shuffle down to a fine art. She’s really bloody quick. She can balance on her knees, and can pull them up to a crawling stance, but hasn’t quite figured out how to move one forward to start crawling. However, she can almost balance (with the help of the sofa) on her feet, and really enjoys weight-bearing. Makes me wonder whether she’ll walk before she crawls. It’s possible. But she’s still young.

We’re gradually encouraging her to have other milk as well. She still doesn’t like it much, but we’re getting there. I can’t breastfeed forever, so we do really need her to have other forms. She still despises the bottle. But she does drink it from a beaker (when she’s in the right mood).

She also has an ever-developing palate for food. She’s still abit iffy with savoury stuff – she loves fruit though. It’s just the veggies and meat that she has to be in the right frame of mind for. But she does eat it. She’s tried quite a lot now, and we blend almost all of our meals so she eats the same stuff. She’s had so far: cottage pie, chicken, fish, broccoli, spinach, lentils, butternut squash, pumpkin, sweet and normal potato, as well as toast, yoghurts and loads of fruits. She’s pretty easy to feed really. Similarly to the sleeping, it all depends on how badly she’s teething. Let’s just say that Calpol has taken a battering.

All in all, she’s wonderful. We can’t be happier. She makes us so proud – is enormously sociable and happy, hardly ever cries (and when she does she has an obvious reason), and is absolutely gorgeous with heaps of character. She has learned to nod her head, can guide a spoon to her mouth and can almost handle her beaker without any help. She even waved at James as he went to work the other week. She’s also learned how to click her tongue, blow raspberrys and can say “dada”. She’s just amazing. A true pleasure.

Note to self: Hoover the carpet more often. Your daughter seems to have a growing obsession with bits of fluff. She also is currently laughing at the living room door. Also, throw away the Bumbo – she has figured out how to get out of it. Not very gracefully may I add – it did involve her face-planting the floor. She was just so desperate to get to her dropped spoon so she could continue to try and chew a hole in it.

She’s also well and truly found her feet. She sucks her toes all the time! Which sometimes proves to be difficult – especially when I’m trying to change her nappy and she doesn’t put her legs down. Or, like what happened yesterday, she put her legs down at the LEAST convenient time – i.e. when there was a dirty nappy to stamp in. Thanks Freyja. Poo inbetween toes is not the easiest thing to get rid off before she tried to suck them again.

She’s decided that she doesn’t want to sleep through the night again now, but has decided that having naps in the day is a good idea – the complete opposite to my last post! It doesn’t really bother me to be fair, shen she does wake up during the night, she’s only awake for about 20 minutes. But, and I’m sure every other parent could agree, the waking up 2 hours before your alarm really does throw your body clock. To the point where, on numerous occasions this week, we’ve slept through the alarm. Not the best thing to do when we both have work to do!

I also want to quickly say congrats to Vicky and Matt on the safe arrival of their baby girl, Gracie-May. She’ll be just over a week old now, and she’s absolutely beautiful. Hopefully her and Freyja will grow to be good friends. And, it’s Steph’s due date on Saturday! My, how that has flown! So there will be another little baby to meet and cuddle soon, in the form of little Henry! And I can’t wait to meet him!

In other news, my wedding planner is out in full force – I’m starting to make invitations etc for our forthcoming wedding. We’ll be going up to Tutbury to see the venue at the end of the month – and will also, by then, have a set-in-stone date! Busy Busy! It’s going to be fantastic – even if Freyja does steal the show from me

We attempted to weigh her on the bathroom scales yesterday (she will be weighed properly on Wednesday at her 12 week jabs – not looking forward to those!), but I wanted to see how close we could get accuracy wise using the bog standard scales at home. They say that she’s 12lb, which is about right.

The other thing I want to quickly write about is baby swimwear – it’s CRAP! We went into town yesterday to try and find a UV suit for her, so that she won’t be confined to the shade when we go to France. They don’t do UV suits in her age group. Which is understandable, seeing as she won’t be able to run around in the sun anyway, and should be with us in the shade all the time. But what if we want to quickly introduce her to the pool? They do swimming costumes for her age group (very cute btw), but they don’t protect her as much as I’d like. And we can’t just slap on some suncream because of her delicate baby skin, which, to make matters worse, I have the gut feeling is like mine. If this is the case, she will have endless trouble trying to find a suncream which doesn’t bring her out in heat rashes. The only allegedly baby-friendly suncream I have seen is sun block, but if she does have skin like mine, it won’t be any good for her. I recommend Piz Buin Allergy by the way – if your skin hates sun block/sun cream like mine does!

So the plan is to keep her in the shade at all times. She can have a quick introduction to the pool, at like 8am or something, so that the sun isn’t too high in the sky and the heat is bearable. Other than that, she’s being a recluse with me!

The main reasons for thinking she is, is the constant dribbling and the constant obsession with sucking her fists. She has problems settling sometimes, and just won’t be consoled, like EVER! The teething powder sometimes does the trick – other times, she just won’t be helped. Calpol is becoming more and more of an attractive option, I’m trying to stay away from it at the moment, at least for the time being anyway.

Poor little mite. She’s still so happy most of the time though – she really is a joy.

In other news, we have decided we will be investing in a baby bouncer thing in the near future. Probably towards the end of next month I reckon. We like the ones with activity stations on it, and also help her weight-bear. It may dent the Mothercard for a bit, but she’s worth it. We’ve decided to get one because she loves being upright! I think that if she had the choice, she would sleep sitting up. Personally, I think she’s just nosey. She can see more of the stuff around her if she’s sitting up. There’s only so much ceiling she can take, I guess!

One thing I can’t help but want to question though is the Doctor’s remark about a baby’s ability to recognise their own hands. He said that at the current stage in development, hands are merely things that flail, and the baby doesn’t realise that they belong to them. It’s apparently not until they are approx. 16 weeks that they begin to think that these extremities actually belong to them and that they are the ones who are in full voluntary control of them.

I appreciate the fact that I may be wrong when I say that I think Freyja is beginning to realise these hands are actually hers. But I really think she does know. She pays meticulous attention to them, follows them round, and watches them as though she’s making purposeful movements.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she is just flailing. Personally, I’d like to believe she’s a child genius.