Well, since my last post which took place during the packing of what felt like endless amounts of boxes, we have successfully moved and have been in our new house for approx. a month. It’s a lovely home, it felt right as soon as I walked through the front door. We have had oodles of help in the form of our parents, helping us to make our first home so special. James’ parents have helped enormously with the fees as well as our lovely garden accessories (shed, table & chairs, barbecue) and my mum has helped with the furniture. Because we were living in a part-furnished rental house, we had hardly anything to bring with us – the important things like beds, sofas, dining table all needed to be sorted, and mum helped us massively with that. In fact, because of their help, our first home looks like it’s been lived in and added to for a couple of years, where in fact we’ve only been here for 4 weeks – currently considering ourselves immensely lucky. Here’s a few pictures of our place – I need to take more now it has stuff in it, but that would require tidying it up a bit, and it’s half 10 in the morning (too early for housework).

In other news, Freyja’s Birthday has been and gone! It feels so strange to say she’s one. It feels like yesterday that we were bringing her home from the hospital all tucked up nice and warm in her little Maxi Cosi car seat. And here she is, outgrown the car seat and in a Britax one, in 9-12 month clothes and growing by the day.

And… She can walk!! She’s been walking properly for just under a couple of weeks, having made a few steps beforehand. She’s like properly walking! It’s weird! And she’s fast – meaning I have to be doubly on the ball at every minute, because now, she just doesn’t stop!

I’ve got a few blog posts planned for the next month or two – I can’t guarantee I’ll write them as often as I’d like, but I will try! Now I have the internet back, I don’t really have an excuse!

She can stand alone for longer too, and has perfected her balancing – it helps when she’s got something in her hand, such as toast, because then, she has no choice but stand without the support of furniture. That seems to work!

Other than that, and mastering how to get out of her high chair (!) there’s nothing else new to report. Other than Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box is an awesome DS game and holds a well-deserved play-time slot during Freyja’s naps

Oh yeah, and Freyja’s birthday present has arrived. There’s a lot to be added to it, but it’s arrived

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

Who knows how long it will take for her next rolling-over adventure. I’ll try and get a video next time!

I’m going to try to make blog posts as often as possible. Some of them will be beneficial to me, and hopefully any readers I may pick up along the way. The majority of posts will be to document Freyja’s milestones, however minor they may be (Although to me, everything she does is a major milestone).

Like today for example, she was grabbing at her pink jingly bunny rabbit whilst watching her musical flashing sun. She’s been obsessed with the musical flashy sun ever since we switched it on a few weeks ago (It decided to break the other day, but James has successfully fixed it, so the addictive jingles are back). However, she’s never really tried to grab and keep hold of anything before. She’ll madly flail about and touch things in the process, but it always seemed so accidental. Today, it seemed as though her grab of the jingly rabbit was with total intent and purpose. So well done, Freyja

Apart from that, my day has been pretty chilled out. It’s consisted of a few bits being put on Ebay, doing an occasional wash load, and the rest of it, trying to get the annoying flashing musical sun jingles out of my head. To no avail though, seeing as James is currently singing them at me. Freyja is enjoying it though, so I’ll grin and bear it.