Commando Baby!

It doesn’t seem two minutes since Freyja was sitting up by herself. Now she has mastered that and doesn’t topple much at all anymore, it seems as though she has her eyes set on a new skill… the Freyja shuffle. She is trying so hard to crawl – she can bring her knees up, but hasn’t quite figured out how to keep them up and support her torso with her arms; instead, she brings her knees up and then splats back down again. She’ll figure it out in no time though. In the meantime, it’s a commando-like shuffle that has taken her fancy. I can’t take my eyes off her for 10 seconds without her shuffling to some place she shouldn’t be – her favourites of late are shuffling to the laptop, to the dvd player and also to the clothes airer – it was only yesterday where I popped to the loo, only to return to my gorgeous daughter wearing some of the clean washed clothes she had dragged off the airer. Knickers as a hat isn’t that great a look… Wearing any sort of undergarment for a hat should only be done by a particularly mischievous mummy…

Freyja in Tights

An Interesting Week…

This week has been interesting to say the least.
Freyja has been pretty much an angel – minus them naughty gummies of hers, which are causing her a lot of grief at the moment. She is finally sleeping through the night again though – ONLY when she has 4 solid feeds a day on top of her milk. She’ll be on pureed food soon – I’m really looking forward to cooking them veggies!!

In other news, we are waiting on a call from the bank – hopefully approving our mortgage application! Eek! We have seen a lovely house in Portsmouth that we are really hoping we get accepted for. It won’t be ready until March, as it’s a new build, but we are waiting on a call from the bank. It’s nerve racking to say the least! And one helluva big step. But a step we both so desperately want to take.
We’re off t’up North for the weekend to see friends – it’ll be a nice break, and hopefully get some pictures. I’ve just realised I’ve been pretty slack on the photos in September. In fact, I’ve been pretty slack on everything.
I need to get some pictures of Freyja sitting – she is so good now! She seems to have perfected her sitting technique, and her balance, over night. She hardly wobbles now! Clever girly – 5 months and sitting like a star. We are so proud of her!

Sitting Up

Freyja is coming on leaps and bounds – it’s quite scary just how quickly time seems to be flying. It doesn’t seem 2 seconds since I was praising her for rolling over unaided, and smiling because she had learned to laugh. Now, she has learnt how to sit up. She hasn’t quite mastered the art just yet, but she is most definately getting there. She seems to be better at it if she is sitting on me or James, or on the settee. She isn’t quite so good at the whole balance thing if she tried to do it on the floor. But she’s getting there – and it’s so adorable!

Freyja Sitting

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.

Sucking Toes

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 :-)

Fighting Naps

Freyja has been an absolute delight lately, she really has. That sounds as though I’m saying that she wasn’t before. She’s always been a delight. But now, she’s sleeping through the night again, which is awesome. Although I thought that since she is sleeping through the night again, and we are getting proper, unbroken sleeps, then I would feel less knackered. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened yet. I’m still feeling pretty exhausted, but I’m sure that will improve with time.

She’s loving the extra food we give her. Her favourites being rice pudding, and anything with banana in it. She’s completely mastered how to use a spoon, and opens her mouth wide for the “aeroplane”. She’s trying her hardest to grasp onto the spoon when I’m feeding her, and I have, on occasion, given her the spoon to handle, to see what she does with it. She knows it’s supposed to go in her mouth. She just hasn’t quite figured out how to turn her wrist to put the spoon in the “hangar”.

The only problem I have at the moment, is sometimes, she fights her naps so bad, that sometimes, she doesn’t even manage to nap. She will cry and whinge and throw her weight around. But I’ve gotten into the habit of just leaving her to it. There’s nothing I can do – she’s clean, fed, nice temperature, and isn’t in any pain. What more can I do other than let her cry it out? It does usually only take her a couple of minutes to settle herself, so it’s not too bad. Last afternoon though, it was crap. She just cried and cried. Then quitened down for half hour. Then cried and cried some more. In the end, I just got her up and let her play on the playmat. She didn’t sleep at all yesterday afternoon, which in turn, takes me away from work which I can usually do for a couple of hours when she’s napping. It can be so hard to juggle sometimes – but she will always come first.

She still slept 12 hours last night though, so I can’t really complain!

Festival No Go

Bloodstock 2009

So this weekend was the weekend for us to trek up to Stoke, to go to Bloodstock. The plan was to leave Freyja with my mum, whilst we gallavanted off to Catton Hall, to enjoy some metal bands, catch up with friends and have a super fab time. We wouldn’t be leaving Freyja with Nanna for too long – we weren’t camping, and we were only going for the bands we were bothered about.

We watched one band. They were very good. But that was all we watched. My mum had to phone us in the end, because my poor baby just wouldn’t settle. No amount of consoling would help her. She wouldn’t eat. Anything. Mum tried giving her milk from a bottle, from a cup, from a spoon. Everything. But nothing would suffice, because it wasn’t a boob. I guess that’s one downfall about breastfeeding – nothing else is good enough. Ah well. It was a shame we couldn’t go, but at the end of the day, Freyja comes first. And it was a lovely relaxing weekend anyway – mum loved having Freyja, and we chilled out for longer than we usually can, and I got to see some friends and family.

Remember: Next year, Freyja is coming with us. We will be investing in some ear defenders, and she will have her first taster of a metal festival at the ripe young age of 16 months.

Clever Sproglet!

Freyja rolled over for the first time today! Yay! She’s been trying for a while now, but never properly made it. We have both tried to encourage her, supporting her and stuff, but she’s never made it on her own. She was always getting her arm stuck, which then made her grumpy, which then made her cry, which made her give up. But today was a different story! She perservered through the arm squishing, and then literally FLUNG herself over her arm to land on her tummy. Fantastic. Well done Freyja – Proud of you!

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

Holidays – Been and Gone.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything. It’s not because I don’t want to, or have lost interest – more that I struggle to find the time when I have nappies up to my knees and a baby who doesn’t like settling herself to sleep. Not to mention full time work on top of all this!

We did have a well-deserved break last week though, and popped over to France to see Freyja’s granny and grandad (James’ side). It was a lovely holiday – not too warm (at least on some of the days), and it was very relaxing for us all. We both really struggled to return to normality today.

It was also Freyja’s first plane ride – she was as good as gold! She fed on take off and landing, to try and prevent her ears from popping – she was a true star – much better than all the other kids on the flight. She also had her first meeting with a swimming pool – she didn’t really know how to react to it, with it being a completely new experience for her, but at least she’s been introduced.

The only main problem we are having with her recently is her inability to settle to sleep. It can take hours some nights. She is absolutely fantastic, once she has drifted off to sleep, it’s just the getting to sleep that’s the problem. We have tried and tried, resorting to leaving her to cry it out when we were in France, much to the dismay of everyone. It seemed to be the only thing we could do. We were recommended the Pick Up Put Down method, but I really doubt that will work with her. We have also given the cot a go tonight, thinking it may be because she doesn’t have as much space as she would like in the hammock. I’ve been feeding her lots more today as well, thinking it may be a lack of milk causing her upset. She’s napping fine during the days, so it’s not lack of sleep. She just cries and bawls and whinges for so long, UNLESS we rock her to sleep – I’m sorry, but we can’t do that forever. She won’t be in her hammock for much longer, and we have things to do of an evening!

Even the most patient, mother-earth, of parents need a bit of “Me Time”. We’ll see how it all goes.

Jabs, Take Two!

Today is the day for Freyja’s second set of immunisations, so, yet again, the poor blighter is going to get stabbed in both her thighs, leaving bruises and a very upset baby.

I’ve asked James to come with me this time. It was rather upsetting last time, so at least I have a bit of moral support. And James is great at soothing her anyway, so he may be a handy addition to the visit!

Still not looking forward to it though. She was a bit poorly last night – had a case of volcanic sick all over James, so I’m hoping she’s settled enough for this afternoon. She seems happy enough this morning. It won’t last though. Poor girl.
At least there’s only one set of baby jabs left after these ones!

Where Does the Time Go?

It only feels like yesterday that Freyja was too small to fit in her Newborn clothes. Yet, here I am, packing them away into one of them funky vacuum bags, because she’s too big for them! She’s in the 0-3 months clothes now – most fit her fine, some are a little big for her at the moment. So, hopefully, she still has plenty of wear from them yet. The sizing of the things just baffle me though. It depends what shop you buy them from – some 0-3 month clothes fit up to 12lb babies, some up to 14lb, some 15lb. It’s very odd.

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!

An Afternoon at Castlefields

I haven’t written for a while. I really need to pull my finger out and update this more often! Another week has passed – it’s been quite a difficult one in comparison to some, and I’m blaming the excruciatingly hot weather. Everybody else seems to love these temperatures, but I don’t. And it seems that Freyja doesn’t like them either, so has decided to not nap at all during the days for a week. This week has had some sort of a British Heatwave, reaching temperatures of 30 at some points, which, in comparison to some parts of the world, is pathetic, but to me, is VILE. I like temperatures that hover around the 20 mark, and can deal with temperatures higher than that, as long as there’s a nice breeze to go with it. But, this week, there’s been no breeze, and high humidity. Not nice.

We did manage to get out and enjoy the sunshine though last weekend. It was James’ birthday, so we decided to pop down to Castlefields in Southsea, as there was some sort of event happening, to celebrate 500 years since Henry VII’s coronation. I didn’t personally go for this, I was just happy for us to go out as a family, catch up with friends and show off our gorgeous daughter! We arrived, in the blistering heat, only to find that we had forgotten her sunhat. Stupid buggers. So I crafted a makeshift bandana out of her (clean) muslin. Personally, I think it looked awesome! She suits bandanas, and makes a very cute pirate.

Pirate Freyja

It was a lovely afternoon. And I think James had a nice relaxing birthday. I cooked him a three course meal, only to find that if I want to make a cake that rises, I should really use self-raising flour. Numpty. So the third course ended up being a blob of ice cream. But he said he enjoyed it nevertheless.

This weekend involves a visit to Mothercare to try and find a UV suit. We’re going to the south of France next weekend, so we need to get something that will cover Freyja up and keep her skin nice and healthy!

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