I’m back, phew it’s been ages, I’ve been so busy for the past few weeks I’ve barely been able to collapse on the sofa watching Australian Masterchef before bed, let alone writing a blog post. Firstly I survived the girlie road trip to Manchester, me, my sister, Princess and Monkey had two nights away, the first night all sharing one bed in a family room of a Premier Inn. Actually lots of fun and briefly fulfilled my co-sleeping fantasies, sadly I’ve never managed to persuade Bigmac to do away with our bedframe and just go for a load of mattresses, duvets and pillows on the floor, so this was the next best thing.
“the megabed”
Just as an aside, we do part time bedsharing with Monkey as the girls share a bedroom so in a bid to maximise everyone’s sleep we bring Monkey in with us at different hours of the night, whenever she wakes up. Invariably Bigmac protests more than I do as the default sleeping position seems to be the “Roundhouse Kick” position from this funny blog
Baby Sleep Positions
Anyway, we saw friends and played in the park and had lovely food, we got through the driving with a ton of snacks and endless playing of the Frozen soundtrack, and mostly slept well, it was great!
The following weekend I went to stay in a cottage for a couple of nights with three friends from work, and it was bliss, consisting of wine and talking and cider and chatting and walking on the beach and gin and planning our exit from the NHS and wine and crosswords and tea and lie-ins (and a little bit of missing the girls and Bigmac).
And then this weekend me and Bigmac went down to London for our first night away together in nearly two years. For his birthday I had bought him tickets to see The Herbaliser but it was going to be a late one so we decided to book a hotel. It was really lovely to spend some time together and have a boogie, and then we got to do some shopping in Camden before getting the train home to our girlies 🙂
I had a thought that what I need to record in this blog is the little snippets of life that are hard to capture, that feel significant in the moment, but are easy to slip away as time ticks on. Even thinking back over the four years of Princess’ life so far, it is easy to recall the days out and the holidays, things you can take a photo of and so on, but not the funny little moments in between. Princess is in a great stage of life where she is learning so much at school and is so excited by it that it spills out all day in little snippets, so last week they had been learning about the origins of bonfire night and fireworks, Princess told me in all seriousness “they put a pretend man on the fire and his name is Sky Forks”. The first couple of days back at school after half term she was obviously missing being at home with me and was saying she didn’t want to school. I tried to explain that I would get in trouble if she didn’t go to school and as the conversation continued I said I could even go to prison for it (bit harsh I know but we had been talking about jails recently), her reply? “Well that’s okay because Daddy would still be at home to look after me”!
Monkey is 18 months old now, and we’re starting to see some mega stroppiness happening as she clearly knows her own mind but cannot communicate it to us. She is also learning so much, particularly new words, Bigmac surprised me last week when I came home from work and he got Monkey to count! I didn’t know she could do it, but apparently he has been counting to her at every nappy change, so there she was in her highchair at the table going “one, two, three”, her favourite number seems to be “NINE” which she shouts with a massive toothy grin on her face, like this one…
toothy grin
Together they have had some very sweet moments too, they have only just started properly interacting with each other and playing together in a way that you can see developing over the next few years. Yesterday Princess was pretending to be a cat, so was crawling around meowing and letting Monkey stroke her, then chasing her around making each other laugh. And at bedtime they have a big cuddle in Princess’ bed before they go to sleep and it is adorable to watch. What special little things have your little ones been up to this week?
Princess & the Monkey 