She’s been struggling with nappy rash over the past couple of days. We have just got back from a holiday in France, and whilst we were there, she tried some runny cheese. It smelt (and tasted) like sweaty socks, but for some reason, Freyja liked it. Her bum didn’t though and for the next couple of days, she had a bit of a pooey problem, which made a particularly bad bout of nappy rash flare up.

Anyway, we got back from France yesterday, and decided that this morning, a bit of nappy off time was in order, to let the fresh air get to it and hopefully improve the state of her nether regions.

My mistake was letting her run around the living room without the nappy on. 15 minutes later, I find her squatting, right in the middle of my lovely cream carpet, leaving a lovely turd for me to clean up. Nice. Thanks Freyja.

More blog posts to follow…

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 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!