Nathaniel and his Spaniel

Nathaniel has never shown any great interest in soft toys. He has a fair few, but aside from an episode where he liked to dribble on and try and bite the nose off of a giraffe, he has always prefered toys with wheels to turn!

However, recently he has discovered the furry nature of a lot of his toys and he is loving them! His favourites are an owl called Olly (named after a rather similar owl that Ian owns), and a spaniel that his Spare-Gran-Anne gave him for christmas.

If passed his spaniel, Nathaniel will hug it, sorry, him, and kiss him and then carry him around by whichever limb is most accessible. He also likes to treat him to his, that is, Nathaniel's, favourite activities. Rocking on the rocking chair is now a daily activity.



Nathaniel also spends a great deal of time pointing out the spaniel's features. The nose features prominently.



It's obviously a snuggly time in Nathaniel's development. As well as hugging soft toys, he is enjoying his fleecy blanket in his cot. In the past he just kicked off all covers, but now he holds onto his blanket when he goes to sleep and snuggles up against it. It might be time for a new fleecy blanket - the current one is smallish and rather yuck - it has a rather tacky bear appliqued onto it!

Building Things

Nathaniel takes a great interest in stacking things. He stacks his wooden food (a steak between two slices of bread equals a sandwich!), tin plates, jigsaw pieces, books and occasionally, bricks!

Today he stacked everything that was on his highchair tray.



We have here a jar of jam, a flora tub lid, a beaker, half a red onion and a plate.

The addition of the plate to the pile led to the inevitable:



I don't usually give Nathaniel half onions to play with. He liberated this one himself from the fridge and proceeded to play with it for the next ten minutes. This is when he thought he'd see what it tasted like:

York mothers' flood evacuation terror

Actually it wasn't exciting at all, but I've just been past an Evening Press bill board and it's put sensational headlines in my head. Everything is always "tragic" or a "terror" according to the Evening Press.

All that happened is that Nathaniel and Rosie and Esme and I went to the deserted park on a bitterly cold day. We played on the swings until a man came over and told us that we had to leave because he had to close the park because the river was coming up too fast. He even left the gate nearest our house open for us to evacuate through!


Nathaniel is not happy to leave

Visitors

Nathaniel greatly enjoyed Alex and Juliet's visit!



He has always been mildly fascinated by both Alex and Nimmy. It must be some strange genetic thing where he immediately takes to the people to whom he looks the most similar.

He also enjoyed the new toys that Alex and Juliet brought him.

Jo's Wedding

We had a lovely time at Jo and Ade's wedding! Despite a really long journey full of exciting detours in order to avoid motorway queues, Nathaniel was pretty impressive in the car. We think that his forward-facing seat is making all the difference - now he can see out and watch what is happening as we drive down one-track lanes with grass down the middle!

After a short wobble during the first hymn, Nathaniel was relatively content during the service and played with trains and cars and horses and ate Martha's (Sophie's daughter) food. Here he is when we ventured out of our pew to get a better look at the worship band. Yes, it was that sort of wedding!


It was wonderful to catch up with friends from school and see Jo and her family again.

Art

Nathaniel has now got to the stage where we can actually make things! He still prefers to eat crayons rather than colour with them, but he has begun to see the fun in covering surfaces (his favourite is the toilet seat), with pencil! Here is him creating his first masterpiece - a work on paper with pencil and crayon.


Every week at the Steiner Group we attend there is a craft activity. This week it was lattern making so that we could use the fruits of our labours for the Martinmass Lattern Walk. Here is Nathaniel's lattern.


He chose the leaves and pushed them down into the glue that I spread, stuck together the two sheets of tracing paper, and hid the stapler while everyone was trying to staple their latterns into shape!

One of the advantages of nursery is that they organise activities that I am too scared to do! Painting definitely falls under this category until we have a bigger kitchen! Here is Nathaniel's halloween bat mask, carefully painted black.


Either they were very careful in their post-painting cleaning (which seems unlikely as he comes home with food in his hair most days!), or he didn't paint his surroundings too liberally!

Toys

No-one can have too many forklift trucks

A month or so ago we borrowed a wooden forklift truck from the Toy Bus (our mobile toy library), and Nathaniel has loved it. It is normally the first toy that is got out and is greeted with "tra-ta, tra-ta, tra-ta" or "truk, truk, truk" depending, we think, on whether his attention is on the vehicle as a whole or just its wheels. He is extremely fond of the driver and carries him around the house a lot.

Its been renewed from the Toy Bus, but this kinda defeats the idea - we are supposed to be sharing toys with the other children, and as every child from the age of 1 to 31 who comes into our house plays with it with such enthusiasm, we figured that it would be a good investment. And investment it is - its not a cheap toy.

So we had a look on the internet and found it most cheaply on an ebay shop. When reading their deatails more closely we found that they were in York and had a shop in the middle of an industrial estate. So off we went!

Oh wow! It was amazing! A storage facility filled with wooden toys. I don't know who enjoyed themselves the most! Ian almost took out someone's eye with a cross bow arrow and Nathaniel wouldn't be parted with the wooden airport filled with cars and trucks and airplanes and cones and cranes and all the things you would hope to find in a wooden city.

So please let me introduce you to Plan City. It's wonderful!

Tractors

Today we had lunch at the Farmer's Cart which is a local farm shop. The food was wonderful! I had a pork pie that was so rich that I actually had had enough when I got to the end of it. Ian had a quiche and Nathaniel demolished a child's portion of sausage rolls and salad. Then we browsed in their farm shop and Nathaniel played with the pumpkin patch. Each pumpkin was stroked and all of the little pumpkins were picked up and (sometimes) carefully replaced.


Then he peered round the corner of the building and started saying "tra-ta, tra-ta, tra-ta!" with great enthusiasm. Never has there been such an excited Nathaniel.


Despite our efforts to encourage him to enjoy all sorts of different toys, Nathaniel is simply obsessed with things with wheels. The bigger wheels the better. And all of the large wheeled vehicles (fire engines, forklift trucks, lorries) are called "tra-ta", which is pretty much (apart from "duck", "baa" and "woof") the only recognisable word he can say. In fact we suspect that it's actaully the wheels, not the vehicle that have this name, as the wheels in his colours book are also named as such.

So meeting a real life-sized tractor in the flesh was a pretty brilliant experience. There was lots of exploration of the wheels and fuel gauges and even some driving.


Then we went and looked at the animals. Nathaniel was perfectly pleased with the pony and the goats and the rabbits and the turkeys (whose noise is absolutely nothing like "gobble gobble"), but he was greatly impressed by the pig and the piglets.

He was so impressed that he got rather annoyed when we wouldn't let him feed his fingers to the pig!

I feel that we might be spending many more afternoons here!

Polzeath

Even though we are not at Polzeath, the universe knows that that is where we are supposed to be this week. Nathaniel and I have the traditional Polzeath cold (hacking cough developing into copious amounts of snot) and the weather is absolutely spot on. This morning there was torrential rain coupled with seemingly gale force winds. The rain smacked against the windows and we were pleased to stay in the house. This afternoon the sun came out and the south westerly was pleasingly warm. Nathaniel and I went out to try and get our temperatures down!

We had intended to go over the bridge, but the wind was so strong that the buggy was impossible to push!

Trees bending in the wind

But it was well worth going to the park because it was so pretty!


We did some duck feeding, made complicated because the wind was too strong for Nathaniel to stand up! After falling over a good few times, he retreated to the buggy.


It was just as well, as we were then approached by two ginormous swans who wanted a bit of the bread. Even I had to back off when they started to flap their wings at us. Nathaniel was a typical baby and was totally unbothered by them and wanted to stroke them!


Then we headed into the woods that were full of good crunchy leaves.

The trees acted as a bit of a wind break so Nathaniel was stable enough to good some good leaf kicking.


This was exhausting work, so Nathaniel went to sleep and left me to take far too many photos of leaves!

Buttons

Nathaniel now has a good deal of control over his fingers and has developed an interest in pushing buttons. It has not taken him long to discover that a particular button on the oven will make a beeping noise when depressed and he aims straight for that one each time. He is also enjoying the video (yes, we still own such antiquated equipment!). Hours can be spent pressing the eject button followed by pushing the video back into the machine. Repeat ad infinitum.

Dance Macabre

Nathaniel seems to be settling in at nursery okay and is enjoying the opportunity to get paint everywhere and refuse to eat anything that sounds like school dinners (he won't eat strawberry mousse or jelly and ice cream!). Today they had a Halloween party and had to come dressed up. Without wanting to sound like a religious nutter, I'm not a big fan of halloween and would happily ignore it, but it seemed a bit mean to send him costumeless so we acquired one. Here he is dancing around the living room:

A very busy day

Nathaniel and I have had a very busy day! As it is half term, there was no Steiner Toddler Group this morning, and so we decided to meet instead at the local community centre. Being the person with the keys, I had to be there to open up at the start which was not entirely convenient as Nathaniel would really have rather had a nap.

But it was worth the tiredness, because everyone brought a toy along to share. One of the toddler group parents owns our local cycle shop and brought along with him some of the tester trikes. You should have seen Nathaniel's face as Andy came in. I have never seen eyes so wide!

The object of Nathaniel's affection (yes I know it's not really a trike)

Eventually, after lots of triking around, tiredness overcame Nathaniel, and so leaving the others to lock up (and managing to leave our tea caddy full of tea in the kitchen!), we zoomed home so that Nathaniel could have a mammoth sleep. Two hours later it became necesary to wake him up in order to fit in some lunch.

Then we jumped into the car and braved half-term traffic to drive up to Creepy Crawlies. You would all hate Creepy Crawlies. I hate Creepy Crawlies. But Nathaniel loves it. First of all we went outside and Nathaniel and Maisie found trikes which they asked to be pushed around all the animals on. This wasn't back breaking at all!!!!

Once the goats and ponies and rabbits and chickens and sheep ("baaa baaa") and dogs ("ooof ooof") had been exhausted and we had played on all the outdoor equipment that could be reached by one year old hands, we left the delightful piped muzac and went indoors. I can't really describe indoors. It's giant cage on many levels filled with soft play obstacles. Think Fun House and Pat Sharp and you're almost there. Here is the under five's section (which Nathaniel treats as a recovery area from the over-five's area!) - its tiny in comparison to the main cage:

In the past, the kids have been interested, but not enthralled. But now they can walk! We have never been so exhausted. Four one year olds running around, trying to climb onto the slides on their own, drowning in the ball pools and trying to play on the equipment designed for much older, taller and more stable children, equals chaos. I tried to take some photos on my phone, but the camera isn't really up to much. So you'll have to imagine the faces of the four of them riding down "one of the UK's longest four lane astra slides" on our laps. Here is some flailing around in the ball pool:


When enough fun had been had, we packed the tired children into cars and sat in more half-term traffic on the way home. They all fell asleep which would have been fine if it hadn't been five o'clock. So we woke them up when we got home and Mahine and Phoebe came round for supper. We had made Tricolor Couscous Salad, and on realising that Mahine had not been able to bring the highchair with her, I should have aborted the plan. But common sense did not prevail and so we proceeded to have a picnic on the floor with a large bowl of couscous and two over tired one year olds. Anyone see where this is going?


There was a bit of a mess. This picture doesn't do it justice. There was couscous everywhere. On the sofas, on the piano, in the cracks between the floor boards, mashed into our socks. It was just as we started to get the giggles that Paul, our estate agent called to let me know about two house viewings tomorrow. It was all very silly. Its a good thing that Nathaniel now likes the hoover, because there was no escaping the need for using it before bed!

What a fun day!

Reading

I have already mentioned that Nathaniel is rather fond of books. But his obsession has been taken to a new level with the era of The Very Busy Spider. When you get to the last page, you turn back to the beginning and start all over again. And again. And again. And again.

I didn't think that anything could top his enthusiasm for Andy Wharhol's Colours but it seems that I was wrong!

On the other end of the scale, Ian has managed to totally freak him out with I Don't Bite. At the end of this perfectly pleasant Rod Campbell book, there is a pop out crocodile who snaps your fingers. However, it seems that there has been one snap too many, and now just a glance at the cover sends Nathaniel backing away from it. Opening the book results in tears. I never realised that a book could be so scary.

Needless to say, the proper "scary" books are just really good fun. Here he is enjoying the Scary Sid book:

Ill

What's worse than looking after a baby with D and V? Having D and V yourself.

What's worse than having D and V yourself? Looking after a husband with D and V.

Whats worse than a husband with D and V? Everyone having D and V.

Anything worse than that? Everyone having D and V, it being your first week back at work, and having to tidy and keep out of the house because people are looking round it!

Needless to say, we are all feeling a bit sorry for ourselves.

Who lives in a house like this?

Someone who has taken all their stuff to Mikey's house!



See the full story here

Shoes

As Nathaniel is now prancing around on his feet, we decided that it was time to get some shoes. After all, its a bit chilly for wandering in the park in bare feet.

So we took a trip to Clarks and Nathaniel spent a good 15 minutes removing all the shoes from their display and playing with the foot measuring device. Then out came the shoes and he crumpled! It seems that playing shoes and wearing them are completely different situations!

After much gentle coaxing, we found a pair that fitted, and Nathaniel demonstrated that the velcro fastenings were ideal as he could take them off himself. The patient sales lady disappeared off to get the box and returned with a certificate to say he had his first shoes and a special card with his size written on it (and a reminder to come back so that they could sell me more shoes on a 6-weekly basis!). You even get a photograph taken, but the little boy was all blotchy and refused to put the shoes near his feet, so they wrote on the receipt that I could come back another time to immortalise the occasion.


For a day, Nathaniel would only carry his shoes around on his walker. He was very particular that they should come for the ride and picked them up everytime they fell off, but that was as close to him as they were getting.

The bike helmet was his request!

The next day, he became more curious about them and would watch with interest as you put them on his feet, but once installed, he wouldn't move his feet at all - he just leant in the direction he wanted to go until he fell over!


On day four he suddenly realised that actually, they were quite comfy, and it made walking around outside a much more pleasant experience. And off he went! Now he walks everywhere with them, and if he wants to go outside, he'll bring you a pair of socks and then his shoes! He tries to put them on himself, with limited success, and given half the chance will help you put on your shoes or try them on himself!

Nathaniel helps Ian put on his shoe

Our travel options have been greatly widened by the shoes, and the other day we spent a happy 20 minutes walking to the butchers.