Vampires versus Lions

Halloween is fast approaching and AG is growing her final two teeth, her canines.

The unfortunate downside of these vampiric teeth is that she sank them hard and painfully into mummy's arm and didn't seem the least bit remorsefull, unfortunatly for her, she wasn't prepared for my insticntive response when she went on to do it too me, I roared YOU DON'T BITE DADDY, which scared her and then the poor little thing was then inconsolable repeatedly saying through her tears "I bit daddy".

So now I have a sore arm and the guilt of upseting her, but at least she'll be wary of biting anyone again.

Happy halloween :-[

Managing expectations

As usual bath time can be quite challenge, from persuading her there are inappropriate places on her brother to blow raspberry's to stopping her throwing water and toys out.

The most tiring is the battle over brushing teeth, just getting her to stay in the bathroom and give her teeth a good brushing would break the will of even the most hardened soldier.

I thought I'd cracked it last night however when I made a deal with her that she would get two books read to her if she stayed in the bathroom and did it properly.

From then on the bedtime routine all went rather smoothly but what I didn't realise is she thought the deal was three books, and had a look of shock when I stopped at two and put her to bed.

Once downstairs I could hear the call "daddy? daddy?" so after a while I went upstairs to find not only had she got out of her sleeping bag, she had escaped the bed and was waiting patiently by the door with her chosen third book.

It seems we have a determined negotiator on our hands.

Words

AG for a while has been learning words, but lately has been stringing them together, for example when presented with some food she didn't like she handed it back to us with the words "Mummy, Daddy, Eat".

I was a little taken a back last night though, when I returned from my first day back at work to AG saying clearly and with the right timing "Hello Daddy!"

She seems to be growing up so fast now, it must be said of course her favourite word is still "no"

girl meets boy

Two weeks on from child numbers two's birth I thought I'd better write about how the older child has reacted.

The reason I gave it a while (apart from laziness) is that there hasn't been much to report.

Her maternal grandfather and partner brought AG to the hospital to meet TC, my parents were already there, she simply walked up-to TC, said hello, donated her woolen blue elephant toy to him and gave him a kiss and a hug.

She then preceded afterwards to point out and name his various limbs and organs, it was all very cute (even though she was worryingly close when pointing out his eyes).

She is really very caring to toward him, he gets lots of hugs and kisses, and is constantly re-presented with his elephant and he's on of her first visits whenever she wakes up.

From a writing perspective it'd be useful to have something more dramatic to work with but from a parenting point of view, I couldn't be happier.

Chuck Norris in a floral-print dress

just got from the soft-play centre were AG had a whale of a time clambering around, it's a great place she really enjoys and its only real drawback is the "boisterous" older kids who feel the younger ones shouldn't get in there way.

Normally AG takes this in her stride but today she decided to take a stand as a girl twice her size tried to clamber over her on the first steps of the ladder to the top of the slide, AG calmly looked back and gave her a gentle roundhouse kick to solar-plexus, the girl wasn't hurt but did seem more respectful to the smaller kids for the rest of the of the time she was there.

plagarist

my bubble has been burst by one of AG's cousin (who is not much more that a toddler himself).

He pointed out the lyric that AG loves so much is from an excising rhyme, it describes the explosive demise of a bathing turtle that ate a bar of soap.

On the upside, she clearly likes macabre dark humor, so that means my daughter is potentially a goth!

Lyricist

AG has written her first song (or at least I think she has, I've never heard it elsewhere)

It has four words and actions, you must start with you hands together by the third have them out in a messianic pose and at the fourth clap them together loudly.

The lyrics are :- bubble, Bubble, BUBBLE, POP!!!!

clearly she is going to be the next great lyricist, is it too soon to buy an outfit for her inevitable successful award ceremony's?

back home

I'm back home on paternity leave surrounded by my newly extended little family, but how did I get here?

Well it started on 2:30am on Thursday morning, AG woke with teething and I noticed CK was up already and had been since ten minutes early when contractions had started.

After quick call to the maternity ward we found that they were full and we'd be in the posh "Oasis birthing centre" instead and that we'd would have to worry about coming in for another hour.

Well, a few minutes later the idea of us waiting an hour when out the window when the time between CK's contractions dropped from 6 to 2 minutes, we raced to car (well waddled quickly in CK's case) then flew toward the hospital (with only one wrong turn due my addled brain).

So far so good then halfway there, CK said we needed to phone them as she felt the baby was close, then a few minutes on she could feel his head between her legs.

Thanks to the cars handfree kit as we screamed into the car park the midwives were waiting, as mounted the car onto the pavement the team surrounded the car and ordered the security staff to get some privacy screens as he was going to be delivered in the car!

Luckily it seems if an animal is not happy with their surroundings they can temporarily halt a birth, thanks to this, he popped his head back in and we were able to get CK upstairs and on a bed, a few seconds later, I was a dad again.

Lessons I've learnt is to have all the hospitals numbers in your phone (we had to pull over to get the numbers from our bag) and to check the pain relief machine actually turns on, not just the battery's work.

Really it was a bit of luck he came in the middle of night as if we'd been any more time getting there I would have to have delivered him myself.

14hrs later were sent home exhausted but happy with a little boy called TC

still waiting

despite some hopeful tingles last night there is still no sign of baby, so back to work I go for another day of waiting.

drums fingers....

I then phoned CK that afternoon and she said she had feeling like mini-contractions but not contractions, so I headed home to work from home for the rest of the day....

I arrived home out of breath to find CK asleep when she awoke, when she did she announced that after the nice little sleep they had stopped.

so back to waiting for daddy.

14411

Everyone we know, even strangers in the street are asking when he'll arrive, even CK's sister has been locking herself in cupboards at work so she can skype us about it.

The latest from the hospital is CK has nine points out of a potential ten that say she's ready to go, he's in position she's more dilated than ever before (3cm) and now we are just waiting for contractions.

I hope it'll be on the 14th as it'll be quite an easy date to remember and I am told by other people it's a great time to have a birthday as you get a heady mixture of presents, party's, time off school and chocolate.

anyway, fingers crossed

Hat-on Hat-off Hat-on Hat-off Hat-on Hat-off

AG like me and especially CK is very fair skinned, so it it important on our unusually sunny April days that she wears a hat.

Now given that she will pull on her winter woolly hat when she wants to go out you would think that the transition to a nice pink sun hat would be easy.

Well..no, the whole of Sunday was spent replacing it on her head, you would think it was something to do with comfort but her woolly hat is quite tight now and her cycle helmet is ungainly but she has not problem with either.

We have even all tried demonstrating how cool it is to wear, even CK's father had a go (oh the dignity of parenthood)

Perhaps its the rather unfashionable elastic chin strap or bubblegum pink colour, whatever it is we are currently doomed to retrieving the hat from wherever she has last discarded it and spoiling her triumph by replacing it on her head.

Hat-on Hat-off Hat-on Hat-off Hat-on Hat-off

Glimpse of the future

Yesterday morning at 2am AG wakes up, we tried everything we could tag-teaming between us all the way, eventually CK gets her to sleep at 5am by "rebooting" her by repeating her bedtime routine.

I realise that although this little episode was caused my another molar pushing through, this sleepless night was a glimpse of our future for the next few months.

There was a second glimpse in the evening when CK felt some unusual feelings around the baby and wondered if it was time, however it was just a false alarm and we spent the night asleep at home rather than in a birth pool.

However with tomorrow being the due date, it won't be long now...

Escapism

Picture the scene, it's early Sunday morning and AG and I are getting changed in a tiny cubicle after a swim.

I've managed to get her changed and now it's my turn, it's then that I noticed she had prostrated herself on the floor, rotated her head on her side and is wiggling out through the tiny gap under the door.

So here I am, in a cubicle naked as the day I was born with a toddler who is happy to of escaped and is now running around unsupervised outside in the changing room.

I had to think quickly and with no time pull pull my trunks back on ended up running around the changing room after her with a towel barely covering my embarrassment,

AG of course, thought this was a great game and ran even faster and tried even harder to avoid capture, eventually I got her back to the cubicle and I was able to start changing again, then I noticed her trying to escape all over again..

not always as supportive as I could be

I walked into the dining room to a look from CK as if to say "I need your support on this" however the action she needed help on, was that AG was balancing a spoon on her head, being the mature supportive type, I burst out laughing and continued laughing for a long long time, things were not improved when AG took the spoon off and replaced it with a fork, I was almost on the floor with tears of laughter, CK shaking her head at my immaturity and AG well on her way to a talent act based on cutlery balancing.

It's so much fun being a dad :-)

time flies

This is getting weird, AG has just turned 18 months and duck-duck will be here in a matter of days.

It doesn't seem that long ago that CK and I got together, now I'm looking at getting a bigger car, spending my weekends scrubbing double-buggy's and jumping out of my skin whenever my phone rings, this is weird, very weird...

I guess I should paraphrase how I started this blog, hurry up duck-duck, daddy's waiting

and the baby is going to be called....

It's not go to be long now till the boy arrives and that we haven't revealed his name yet is a cause of frustration for our family's, so my parents took the sneaky approach of asking AG, hoping that she would reveal the secret.

This backfired on them somewhat as although AG knows the name, she decided on her own alternative, she thinks he should be called......"duck-duck"

we have lot to learn about room planning

Upwards is AG's new frontier, she has found a real little talent for climbing which should be pleasing to outdoorsy types like us.

However this new found talent is being used to take her to places that were intentionally inaccessible such bathroom selves full of lotions, potions and sharp little gadgets and now all the way up to standing on her bedroom windows sill (via her bed and across a table).

Maybe I should attach magnets to everything, so we may stick them to the ceiling instead, that'll stop her (at least for five minutes)

Three house guests, one trashed laptop, one tidy garage, one swapped bedroom and a big fat tumble dryer

Another weekend zipped by in our preparation for the arrival of the boy.

It didn't start off too well with a virus crashing the hard-drive of CK's windows skype laptop.

However things soon picked up with the arrival her great-grandfather and enough vegetables to sink a battleship and her grandmother who proceeded to turn it into enough soup that you could then re-float it again.

A day out for AG and big tidy-up of the garage followed, the plan being to turn it into a utility room to cope with the increased amount of washing, our efforts were rewarded with a local Italian meal, nice.

Then onto Sunday and following the arrival of my Irish friend we swapped the guest and children's rooms over and added in AG's new cute little bed, which she found made for a good trampoline, hiding place, climbing frame and no-where that she was interested in sleeping.

Then a flying visit to my parents to fix some lighting and then home to a vampire program and a well earned beer.

Up again with the dawn on Monday to take delivery of a tumble dryer for our utility room before heading to work and wondering where the weekend went!

a few of my favourite things

*Brushing my daughters hair
*Her cheeky smiley look
*The way she looks like her mother when she yawns
*That she likes pressing her face up against glass and making silly faces
*That she came up with the idea of changing her dolly's nappy all by itself
*The way she'll present you with a book she has decided she wants read
*That she likes getting out her old birthday cards and going through them one by one
*that she runs to her own timetable and has little ways of telling us bath time, bed time etc.
*that she says "bye bye" and waves to people

Behold the green-eyed monster

We only have a month and a half now till baby boy will be with us, so it was time for an evil experiment.

At a family party we borrowed my brothers three weeks old baby and had CK cuddle him, we then watched our spaghetti Bolognese stained daughter toddle over and try to force herself up onto her mum’s lap for a piece of the action.

So far our preparations have been reading stories about babies joining family’s and giving her a realistic doll to play with, looks like we need to go back to the drawing board, because the clock is ticking…

words

AG is beginning to learn words now, her record so far was learning to say "bubbles" in just three attempts.

This mornings word was accompanied by pointing at my "average daddy belly", which chose to describe with the word "baby".

I think she's telling me it's time put down the chocolate, pull on my running shoes and go and get fit again!