Hiya Baby!  Guess what? You’re 10 months old!  How did that happen? Just yesterday you were…in your father’s words (a shitting potato) and now you’re standing up on your own and quite close to taking your first steps!  We’ve been busy in the last few months, but I hope to write proper posts in the next few months.

After a long night…we are trying to wean you off of night feeds…and an early morning in which I awakened to find you eating parts of your nappy…(good thing they’re eco ones made of corn…but it was if you were saying…”fine!  Don’t feed me!  I’ll just slum it and eat nappy bitches!” Needless to say I was pretty disgusted!) I got up and cleaned a little to clear my mind and tackled your clothing drawer and guess what?  Nothing fits you anymore!  I’d been keeping cute outfits for months and months and realised that you’re never going to shrink back into them so I’d better put them on the charity shop pile.  Even so I am so sad to say goodbye to monkeypants tennesee, and the swank gap bear suit and most of your cute growbags.  Sigh.  We did get some more wear out of your clownfish suit though!  You wore it to Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jody’s wedding in Berwick!  We figured that it was a suit (of some sort at least) and you were a major hit!  Who can resist an adorable baby in a fish costume??  Nobody that’s who.

We took you a week or so ago to have you weighed and measured and you’re still considered underweight…not yet having doubled your birth weight…but you’re at the top of your class for height!  Good work!  So tall in fact that a Romanian lady in the same room was getting all upset because her girl was 5 inches shorter than you despite being over a year old.  You’re a tall drink of water little man! You weighed 18lbs 6oz…I can’t remember the precise height at the moment…I’ll put it in later.

Let’s see what are you up to of late?  Crawling everywhere….talking like mad…though we don’t always understand what you are trying to say.  You now say EJ, bear, up, hiya, hey, mmmmm, good, mumma, dada, ning ning (which means milk for some reason) and I’m sure a host of other things we haven’t yet caught onto.  Your level of understanding really astonishes me…I can ask you where your dog is and you’ll pick him up, or where Louis Lizard is and you’ll grab him too.  You give me bites of food when I ask (and lots when I don’t ask too…shoving your food in my face). You LOVE food and sometimes eat almost adult portions of things.  Pretty astonishing to me.  Lately your faves are sweet and regular potato, whole apples, blueberries, nectarine, rice, wheat-free pasta spirals, hummus, and toast.  You have 5 teeth and a few more on the way which helps with eating…and are the bane of my breasts!  You’ve had a really bad cold of late and you’ve been biting so much!  It’s facilitated the stopping of the night feedings really…though it needed to happen.  You used milk during the night for comfort as well as food and we getting a bit cheeky about waking me up 4 or 5 times a night for a little drinky drink.  I was beginning to feel like an all night pint of beer.  You’re starting to ask less during the night but are loudly indignant when I refuse.  I feel a bit sorry for Gurkhan, our neighbor as his bedroom is on the other side of the wall from ours and it must wake him up sometimes.

We’ve been offered a wonderful place to live after we leave here in November…we are house sitting in Muswell Hill for a friend who is going to the US for a while.  His house is huge and gorgeous with a beautiful garden and right around the corner from one of the most gorgeous parks I’ve ever seen.  We’re really looking forward to stretching out a bit…but I will be quite sad to leave this place.  So many good memories here for us all…and I think you’ll miss the little cave that is our bedroom.  You seem to love this flat so much.  When we got home tonight from our hour long bus ride home…you squealed with delight when we came into the flat.  Let’s hope you like the new place just as much.  At any rate…I’m sure we’ll be moving back to South London once our friend is back next year.

So to celebrate your 10 month birthday….I made you your first curry (potatoes, carrots, apples, apricots, cinnamon, coriander, mustard seed, cumin, turmeric and garahm masala…with pilau rice) and you LOVED it.  You ate an adult sized portion and seemed to have no trouble whatsoever with digestion.  I’m looking forward to feeding you more exotic food.  I’ve also taught you the concept of dipping…with toast soldiers and hummus, and you tried to dip your rice cake in my coffee today!  Good work.  The second part of your birthday celebration was you pulling yourself up to standing for the first time on your own.  You did it three times in a row just for good measure…and also so Daddy could see and film it as well.  You spend a lot of your time standing or trying to stand these days and I figure you’ll be walking by 12 months.  We’ll see how it goes.

Fave toys:
Shakers, Books, Stuffed Animals, Car Rocker/Walker, Ball, the Hoover, Ipad Baby Flash Cards and Peekaboo Barn

Fave Music:
Dan Zanes, Banghra, his Mum and Dad, She Makes War, Pomplemoose

Fave things to watch on BBC IPlayer:
Third and Bird, Teletubbies, Cooking Shows

Fave Activities:
Going new places! Looking out the window, Riding the bus or train on Mummy or Daddy’s lap, stalking the hoover, watching Pomplemoose videos on youtube, watching snooker on youtube, crawling down the hall and busting in on whomever is having a cheeky poo in the bathroom, finding old food on the floor and eating it like we never feed you, playing with Mummy’s Ipad!

You’re everything we could have wanted in a little man and more.  As much as we try and teach you new thing we learn from you as well.  I’m so happy to be able to be here with you along every single step of development and be smart enough to let you explore things on your own as well…though we often want to make things as easy as possible for you…we know that you’ll never learn anything that way.  Plus we don’t want you ending up on Young, Dumb and living of Mum in future…;)  Alright little Beans…it’s late and I miss you.  Time for snuggles!