Photos

Bored of photos of a small man yet? I may have gone overboard today.

Anyway, for those of you that are still interested, here is Nathaniel playing his Sleeping in the Cot game.

Pig-faced, Ugly.....

Spring, spring, spring

Its been a proper day today. The sort where it was sunny right from the word go and it was nice enough to play in the yard immediately after breakfast. Ian and I took turns in going for runs in the cool morning sun and the other person got to watch Nathaniel doing important things.

Here's one I made earlier

I decided to continue in my "have egg boxes, will create" theme, by making some picture frames for Nathaniel. The idea was that these would be displayed at Nathaniel height in his bedroom and he can pick them up and carry them round and do important shuffling. Each week we will have a new theme.

So I spent a happy nap-time (hooray for 2 hour naps), playing with pritt stick and PVA and cereal boxes and coloured paper and remembered all the things that you know when you are 6 but forget in the subsequent years. Things like if you pritt stick something, you inevitably get some on your working surface, and that residue sticks to the front of your item leaving a wierd translucent smear that you'll never get off. And that if you get even the tiniest bit of PVA on your fingers, you leave traces of it everywhere and your fingers get covered in minute particles of carpet hair (if you are silly enough to do your making on the floor).

Anyway, the prototype was a success, and I managed to create two more in approximately one fifth of the time in order for Nathaniel to enjoy this week's theme, trains.

From General 2010

We have a photo of a stream train, a photo of a modern train (from the company that runs a good proportion of the trains that stop at York station), and a print of a Monet painting featuring a train. All very nice. And for future weeks I have prepared pictures on the themes of owls and tractors. (NB Its hard to find interesting representations of tractors. Its pretty much photos of tractors in green english pastures or dusty american fields or nothing).

And as expected, Nathaniel was delighted and did lots of stacking and sorting and carrying and explaining to us that what he had in his hands were "tray, awuvva tray, AWUVVA TRAY!".


He was so attached to his new pictures that he was both confused and slightly upset when I removed the prototype because my sticking was not really up to scratch!

Big fish

Now that we are a suburbia-dwelling, child-having family, current culture dictates that we must spend our bank holidays sitting in traffic jams, driving to an overpriced leisure facility to be over-stimulated.

We attempted this by a trip to The Deep in Hull with two other families. Fortunately, it being Yorkshire in April and hence 2 degrees centigrade, there were no traffic jams and so we had fun driving in convoy along smallish Yorkshire roads and sending each other silly text messages about the view.

And The Deep was wonderful. I shan't bother describing it - you can go to their website and get the gist. But we greatly enjoyed it!





Nathaniel decided that although looking at the fish was fun, what he really wanted to do is to get in too!

He was less convinced by the magic pond, a computer generated, projected image of water on the floor, complete with fish that swam around. The clever bit was that it was all projected onto a touch mat and the swimming fish "reacted" to your presence. If you chased them, they would scatter! I had fun "creeping up" on them, but Nathaniel showed some of his trade-mark cautiousness. He'll happily stroke a giant dog, but he is freaked out by computer generated, A.I. fish. Not all that silly really.

"I'm not sure about this"

We had fun taking arty photos of other people's children. Maisie wasn't this angelic all day!


And like any good day out, Nathaniel enjoyed the simple as well as the fantastic. Lunch was had (by some careful table bagging), surrounded by three walls of glass overlooking the Humber. And there were tables to climb on. Repeatedly.


Oh, and we saw some fish....

Complicated games

Nathaniel has invented his first complex toddler-game, ie one that has several stages, doesn't directly involve toys, and has to be repeated ad infinitum.

Step one: Ask to be lifted up onto the bedroom window sill and draw the curtains (without falling off)!

Step two: Ask to be carried to the cot. "In co(t), in co(t)"

Step three: Lie down in the cot holding on to the nimmy-blanket and go to sleep "slee(p)"

Step four: sit up, stand up and ask for the curtains to be opened; "ope ca, ope ca"

Step five: Ask to be lifted out of the cot; "daaaawn, daaawn" (while pointing at the ground).

Then repeat!
And again.

And again.

Its lots of fun. Really.

Doesn't make great photos though, so here are some other things we've been getting up to.

Doing busy things with two watering cans at once:


Building towers:

That March kind of feeling

March is never a good month for us. It is the month of National Science and Engineering Week and so one of the busiest weeks (actually we do a two-week festival, just to be extreme!) of my year. Hence, everything else goes out of the window and poor Ian has to cope with a birthday which is almost totally overlooked! I also find that I have very little time for blogging!

But now the festival is all safely over, so here are some highlights of the last few weeks.

We enjoyed the spring-like weather with many outings to the park and have become obsessed with the grown-up swings which are much more exciting than those safe baby swings!


The warm weather also meant that everyday could be a triking day, even if it was raining.


We had friends around to play and had lots of fun outside "painting" the yard (with water) and building flower pot castles (some toddlers' features have been (poorly) disguised to protect their identities).


We had many cups of coffee and croissants and plates of bacon and eggs at York's most Chelsea-esque (but totally wonderful) coffee shop, the Pig and Pastry. We pass the P&P on pretty much most days and Nathaniel has taken to leaning towards it and making hopeful "In there?" noises every time. It is a truly wonderful cafe, but you have to limit the amount of lovely coffee and ridiculously tempting sticky-gungies that you have there. On this Saturday morning we timed it just right so that we got a seat (a mean feat at any time), and Nathaniel enjoyed his view into the kitchen. He also enjoyed the coffee!





So despite lots of busyness, it has been a most pleasant March!

Outside

Spring is officially here! The dafodils in the garden are blooming and you can go outside without the wind nipping your cheeks!

Nathaniel and I celebrated with our first visit to the Very Young Friends of West Bank Park, a toddler group that meets in the park that will soon be round the corner from us. It wasn't really a venture into the unknown - the group is run by a good friend, and we already knew most of the children and mothers at it!

So we poddled off to the park in rather too many layers to learn some new songs and look at some frogs. Today we all went to the pond and watched the frogs do what frogs do at this time of year, and made houses for suitably themed cuddly toys (chicks and ducks and owls rather than purple dinosaurs) out of sticks and straw. Well, everyone else made houses. Nathaniel learnt how to operate the gate from both sides (you have to fit your hands through the gap in a specific way to lift the latch from the other side of the gate), and let people in and out of the wildlife area. Is he just the son of two scientists, or just not not inclined towards ducks at the moment?

After learning a new song about a farmer and a tractor ("trac-da-da-da, trac-da-da-da TRAC-DA-DA-DA!"), we went to see our friend Paddy's favourite hidding place - a hollow tree accessed from a hole in a hedge. It took Nathaniel a while to decide that he wanted to push his way through the hedge, and in the mean time he spent a very jolly time picking crunchy, dried leaves, holding them up high and dropping them. They floated on the wind and swisted and turned as they floated down. Cue giggles and clapping of hands.

Its too complicated to catch this on a rubbish phone camera (I am really tempted to go and buy a decent phone that has a reasonable camera on it), but here is the picking of leaves:

Talking

Nathaniel's speaking is really improving! He has got to the stage where he is repeating the last few syllables of everything you say, especially when it is entirely inappropriate eg
Tassy: You know, censored is a real chunk!
Nathaniel: chunk, chunk

So far, his limit seems to be about four words as long as they don't have too many syllables. My favourite is him repeating "Things that go" which is one of his favourite, and my least favourite, books. (It is really boring - its four pages about trains, planes, cars and boats, and has rubbish text and not much to talk about in the pictures. But each page has a two part jigsaw embedded in it and N likes to take out the pieces and stack and rearrange them in important ways.) He say "Ings a goooo...." Its really cute!

As far as words that he will use independently go, apart from sticking mainly to one syllable, his biggest problem is that he hasn't managed to grasp that the ends of words are important. He focuses on the first starting consonant and the primary vowel sound. Therefore buggy is bu(g) and banana is ba. There is a sort of sound of the next consonant, but it's not fully pronounced. This means that things are normally understandable (at least by me and Ian) if you have the context. If you are standing in a room with a bucket and a buggy you have to look for hand signals!

But it is surprising how many words he knows well enough to be able to do their first syllable. Some of the weirder ones are sleeve (sli), combine harvester (ha(r)) and trap (tra). Should he ever actually visit a farm, he'll be able to converse happily with the far-far (farmer), tra(c)-ta, caaw (cow), la (lamb), shi (sheep) and gay (gate).

Although he can get Da's attention, he knows that his real name is Da-dee and will say it proudly for you if you ask. He will also say Dee-da hopefully.

He is also putting words together. Mainly this is "more something" (eg tscheese, bre(d), hat (satsuma), bra(n) (bran flakes), "biy biy something" eg bu(s), ta(t) (cat), da(d). and "no something" eg ba(t) (bath), taw (towel). He has also progressed onto "no more something"

Of course, we are already regretting letting him talk at all. His favourite meal is breakfast where, in addition to the boring shreddies and pillows you can also sometimes get bra(n) (Bran Flakes) and kay (Special Kay). He knows where the cereals are kept and will point at the larder hopefully asking "more kay?" several times a day!

We are also enjoying teaching him how to say things like offensive stereotype (he made a good stab at that!) and evil multinational (he made some good attempts at this while going round tesco!).

So he is a generally happy boy and is finding that more and more he can get what he wants, especially when that is, "no more bre(d), dow....(n), more soo (sofa), boo(k), ki(s)". Yes, that is a accurate transcription of the sixty seconds that occur ed at the end our snack this afternoon!

And no post is complete without some photos. So here he is enjoying being able to play outside this afternoon.

I know a little snowman......

So, here goes. A video of Nathaniel doing the actions to his favourite rhyme. We don't usually say it this slowly and patronisingly, but we had repeated it about one million times at this sitting and we were a bit bored! Of course, Nathaniel did more of the actions on the times that we weren't recording, but we figured you'd enjoy anyway! The bit at the end when he is putting his hand in his mouth is how he asks for the rhyme. Not sure why. Ian thinks that he has got confused by miming the carrot nose with eating carrots!

Not sailing

Today was the first day of sailing, which means that there was no sailing whatsoever, just a lot of clearing and sweeping and washing. The annual clearing day always happens just before the season starts and is supposed to be about getting the whole place in working order after the winter break. We clear up the club house and remove any boats that have been sheltering in there. We remove all the debris that the river has flooded in and sweep out the layer of mud that is left on every surface that the water has touched.

Of course, traditionally the river the floods the week afterwards, destroying our hopes of a frostbite series and ruining all our good work.

This year it was all a little closer than we would like. We cleaned and cleared with the river pretty much lapping the edge of the enclosure. We were pretty sure that it had been in last week and therefore was, in theory, going down, but you can never be too sure. Nevertheless, an executive decision was made to clear up anyway. So we did.

The best bit is definitely sweeping the mud. We flood the whole place with the hoses and then sweep the muddy suspension into the field next door. It is very wet and very very muddy. Despite being dosed up to keep his temperature down, Nathaniel seemed to rather enjoy himself. Early on he took control of the hose.


He seemed slightly confused as to what the rest of us were doing which is quite reasonable, some of us weren't really sure either!


He didn't look well!


But there are few ailments that can't be relieved by a tub of dates!


Of course, everyone else was working hard. Here are Max, Hugh, Phil, Ian and Nicky hard at work supervising James and Pete actually doing something!

Behind them you can see the swirling, brown, sticky stuff that is the river. Its usually a good metre below this.

The little boy is much better now (Wednesday). He's got his first lot of banana medicine and is now prancing round the house like the kids in the calpol advert (I have never seen a truer advert in my life!).

Crochet

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I am totally scared of knitting! I am really inspired by Nimmy's amazing blanket and Mf's wonderful jumpers, but when I see knitting needles, my fingers just get tangled up and I feel like I have been tied up with stringy bits of wool. So, inspired by this woman, I decided to learn to crochet and make Nathaniel a hat.

While in progess, we check to make sure it'll fit. Nathaniel is saying "ha(t), ha(t), ha(t)!"


And now finished!

Holiday

We have all had a few days off and so had time to do lots of fun things like eating out and playing at the park. We had a fun day in town visiting friends and playing in Marks and Spencer. Nathaniel would have ridden the escalator all day! There were almost tantrums when it was time to go!


We went swimming twice in the new pool. Unfortunately, we have been rather spoilt by the Abingdon pool, so we were not totally blown away by the new facilities despite them being a million times better than the previous ones. But we still had lots of fun and enjoyed drinking coffee afterwards and watching everyone else.


Today Nathaniel went to nursery and Ian and I had a holiday! We spent the morning sitting in window-seat sofas and drinking coffee and reading paper and books and having conversations that didn't revolve around the washing machine and the highchair.


Then,after a quick poddle in town, we went to Loch Fyne and ate far too many courses of delicious sea food! It was delicious! I like Loch Fyne because the atmosphere is so pleasant. Its in the building that housed Stubbs' for years and years. They sold everything from screwdrivers to kitchen stuff to planks of wood. It was really sad when it closed so it was nice that Loch Fyne have left a bit of a tribute to them.


We've had a lovely few days!