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2006-11-12 - 1.17pm previous entry next entry
Arthur's 2nd Birthday (lots of photos)
Sooo behind again! But here, at last, is the entry about Arthur's birthday, which was 3 days ago!
My baby is twooooooo!!! Waaah!
And now I shall compose myself and tell you all about his special day :) Neil has taken the boys to the park (it's Sunday) so I have a window to update here. I need to hurry though, and I have 28 (yes, twenty-eight!) photos to post in this entry (sorry if the page takes ages to load!) so I had better make it fairly brief on the actual typing! I need to write another entry today if I get the chance, because I have other things to write about and more recent photos, which just can't go in with a special entry all about Arthur's second birthday! But if I don't write about those things soon then they'll become past news and I'll have new things to write about AGAIN which will have to wait till I've caught up with the old stuff. Again. So, on with the entry!
Arthur had a lovely birthday! Thank you all so much for the birthday greetings for him and the sweet comments on the entry about his birthday party! Those were all so nice to read! :)
I took photos throughout the day on his birthday, and here they all are! When he got up, he ate "see-youl" (cereal) for breakfast and then played happily with his cars for a while:
The postman came and brought an eBay package that contained a couple of pairs of warm winter mittens for Arthur! They are a bit big but oh well. Arthur loved them and wanted to try them on straight away!
The postman brought other things for Arthur but we had decided to go to the farm in the morning and open presents and cards later in the day, so we subtley put those aside while he enjoyed his new mittens! We ran late getting the boys ready to go out to the farm and packing lunches, etc, but we finally headed off to the farm at about 11am. We got there at about 11.45 so Arthur's anniversary of his actual birth (11.28am) happened en route to the farm!
Matthew instantly fell asleep and napped the whole journey which worked out wonderfully, and when we arrived at the farm and parked up, we got the biggest surprise when we turned round and saw this:
Arthur never falls asleep in the car any more, unless it's like mid-afternoon and he still hasn't had his nap yet! He always takes an afternoon nap now (after 1pm usually), never in the morning. So we sat in the car and waited for him to wake up. Matthew woke pretty soon after we arrived, but he was as good as gold and didn't make a peep for the first 15 minutes! He is such a good baby :) He just looked around and tried to grab his feet, etc. When he got fidgetty, we walked him around in the car park for a bit (it was colllld though) and then Arthur woke after a half-hour nap. He was hungry so he ate his packed lunch in the car and then Neil put Matthew in the Baby Bjorn on his front, and I dressed Arthur up against the cold - we didn't have a winter hat for him to fit so he wore one of MY hats for a while! He has such a big head for his age! It was big on him, and he took it off after a while, but still. A couple of really nice hats have since arrived from good old eBay, and we've discovered that he SNUGLY fits age 3-5 hats!!! Yikes! But anyway, here are my lovely boys, all ready to go to the farm!
The first thing we came to inside the farm entrance was a big barn which we had to go through to get to the place where you pay to get in. It had different areas in it with different animals. There were cows, goats and sheep. And a big hutch with black rabbits! Arthur looked interested in them and kept breathing, "Wowww!", but he got somewhat wary of them as we got really close up to the bigger animals. We bought a bag of feed for the sheep and goats, and I showed him how to feed the goats. He fed them once with my hand under his, and then said, "Like..." which means, "I don't like that..." and didn't want to see animals any more!
So we went through the barn to the huge open air part of the farm, where Arthur walked around the numerous adventure playgrounds and up over the grassy hills! He especially enjoyed just walking and climbing over the grass and things:
Here is a video clip of Arthur climbing the hill in the above photo - Neil was filming while I took the photo!
He walked further and further till we had to encourage him to turn back a bit, as it was getting a long way to walk back to the farm buildings! After that we wandered around in the farm area for a bit, hence several photos of Arthur standing in large spaces looking at things:
He liked the big tractors and other vehicles. We saw pigs and chickens and ducks outside, which he was interested in, but he didn't like them up close. He liked to wave at them cheerfully from afar, calling, "Heyo Piggy!" or "Heyo Kickin" - very cute! :)
He still didn't want to go back in the big barn and see the bigger animals, so we found some ride-on tractors for under-5s. His little legs were still too short to pedal them, but I pushed him around for a while. He loved the tractors and kept going back to them afterwards!
When we had paid to get in, the lady had told us that Mrs. Pig had her piglets YESTERDAY so we had looked for her (Arthur kept asking, "See pigs? See pigs?" right from the start) but we couldn't find her anywhere. Finally I found a stone enclosure where Mrs. Pig and her babies were, but Arthur was in run-around-madly mode and didn't want to see the pigs. After a while of riding on all the ride-on things, he let us lift him up to see the pigs over the wall.
Here's a little video clip of Arthur seeing the pigs:
Matthew was surprisingly fascinated by them too! Mrs. Pig had ELEVEN babies!!! They were soooo cute. I felt quite akin to her, watching her lying on her side with little scramblers climbing about and suckling away, hehe! Even though I only breastfeed two ;)
I fed some more of our bag of feed to some more sheep and goats (Arthur didn't want to) and we looked at the cows again and some rabbits and guinea pigs and chickens. Arthur liked the ducks outside :) After that, we went to the handwashing station and washed our hands, and then we walked to the lavender garden (they harvest lavender and sell products made from it), which had some benches and a sort of ornamental wagon frame for little ones to climb onto. Arthur and I shared an apple there, and then Arthur sat on the wagon and looked around, pointing at lots of things in the distance and saying, "Wowww, look!" :) Neil took some video footage of him and Matthew never once took his eyes off Arthur from his position on Neil's front! He watches him constantly, whatever he's doing. I managed to catch this in quite a few photos from that day which I'm pleased about! There are only two photos from the whole day with Matthew and Arthur near each other in which Matthew ISN'T looking at Arthur, and one of those was where he was more interested in the pigs, and the other one where they're in their car seats and Matthew just wanted his feet more than anything else in the world! He just adores his big brother. I love watching him so eagerly attentive to him all the time!
Here is a little video clip that Neil took while Arthur was on the wagon (and sharing my apple!):
After the lavender garden, we made our way out of the farm. Arthur didn't want to go home, but we had seen everything and Neil and I were hungry (we had stupidly only packed a snack for us with Arthur's lunch, and it was already after 2pm), and we suddenly realised that Matthew had been over 3 hours since he was last fed! Matthew was SO good, we kept on saying to each other how wonderful he was being! We were just so proud of him. He didn't cry or fuss or want to get out of the sling ONCE in the whole 2+ hours that we were there. He slept well in the car on the way to the farm and didn't fuss while we waited for Arthur to wake. He had been 3.5 hours since his last feed at home and he still wasn't fussing. He is a very alert baby and always extremely interested in the world around him, so I think he must have just been enjoying the outing so much that he didn't think about food! But it was so nice that he was so good. It made the outing even nicer for Arthur, that we didn't have to stop and focus on Matthew at any point.
Anyway, so we figured it was time to go home. Arthur went on another tractor thingy that wouldn't go anywhere, back at the entrance to the farm:
Then he was very excited to go up to a big tractor that's there for viewing and climbing on. He wanted to sit on the seat and "drive" so I lifted him up. The light wasn't very good for photos by then, so they've come out a bit bright and dark all at once, but here they are anyway:
Then we went back to the car and drove home. Here are the boys all strapped in and ready to head home!
Matthew napped (amazingly!) all the way home in the car, and when we got home I nursed him which he was very happy about, since it had been 4 hours since his last feed by then! I can't get over how GOOD he was! Lovely boy :)
When we got home, we continued with "things that Arthur would like to do on his birthday" - after Matthew was fed, Arthur got to snuggle with me on the sofa and have some milk. Neil took a photo of him breastfeeding on his first birthday, and so we thought it would be lovely to have a photo of him breastfeeding on his second birthday too. Did I mention how ULTRA PROUD I am to have made it to 2 years, and still be nursing my two-year-old?!!! I'm sooooooooooo happy I made my goal! I'm so incredibly thrilled to still be breastfeeding Arthur at age two. Yay!
After he had some Mummy-milk, we brought out the last of his birthday cake with extra Smarties and new candles to blow out! He ate a little slice of cake (very happily!):
After the cake, Matthew went for a nap and Arthur opened his presents and cards from us and from people who sent things in the post. He got a little Postman Pat train and figure (not actually Postman Pat - some other character from the programme) from Millie, one of my online M.E. friends, some paintbrushes and pencils and a video of a farm story that I don't know from Grandma, and some lovely cards.
Neil and I gave him a whoopee cushion (found a self-inflating one on eBay for a couple of quid!), a wooden train set and a dress-up Noddy soft toy. Here he is opening his presents!
He wanted to play with his train set so we put some of the tracks together and he played with that for a while. He got very frustrated (much banging of forehead on floor *sigh*) when the trains came off the tracks by accident, but otherwise he LOVED the train set! Here he is playing with that right after he opened it:
Arthur loved his whoopee cushion! We took a while to get some good farting sounds from it, but he laughed and laughed till he hiccuped! I may have a nice video clip of that for you soon![edited to add: here it is!]
He still loves the whoopee cushion and requests "Mummy, sit!" on it, several times a day!
He also loved his Noddy and gave it cuddles! Also Noddy had to be put to the breast very carefully (by Arthur) after Arthur had had some more milk! Arthur even tasted Noddy's nose just to be sure I had really given him some milk! He didn't show loads of interest in the dress-up activities on Noddy, but he played with Noddy for a long while :)
It was so nice to breastfeed Arthur on demand on his birthday :) He nursed a lot, and I'm sure he would have done so a lot more if we hadn't been out and active part of the day. He ate his sandwiches really well for lunch, and the apple at the farm. He ate yoghurt-covered raisins too, but he didn't have tea. He had lots of breastmilk during the afternoon and wasn't hungry for tea. He did have a cereal bar before bed, and obviously a bit of birthday cake! He had a few Smarties as a treat at the farm as well, which he was so excited about :)
After he opened all his presents and played with them a bit, Matthew got up from his nap, and Arthur blew raspberries for the fun of it, anywhere he could find a suitable "surface" to blow on! This was mostly Daddy's bicep, as it amused Matthew, who was on Daddy's lap at the time :)
The last big activity that Arthur wanted to do on his birthday before bed was to empty the dishwasher, hehe! This child LOVES household chores - he always has done, from before he could walk! He especially loves to fold clothes and process the laundry (in and out of the washing machine and tumble dryer), and his very favourite thing is the dishwasher. He helps to empty it every time and knows where everything goes. I often find the spoon drawer awash with spoons, big and small, where Arthur has taken them one-by-one from the dishwasher and dropped them over the edge of the open drawer :) He's such a sweetie. Here he is helping Daddy unload the dishwasher:
The very last photo of Arthur on his birthday was taken during some fun rough-and-tumble time with Daddy - another thing he enjoys immensely!! I really like this photo because it has caught the feeling of the moment well, and I like that it's against a backdrop of party decorations, on his birthday :) He was being eaten alive in this photo, hehe!
Then he got ready for bed, read the Toddler's Bible ("Mummy, read Buh-boo!") and breastfed TO SLEEP, which I never really do for him at bedtime any more. But it was the perfect end to the perfect day for Arthur, and I was gladder than glad to do it. He nursed to sleep pretty quickly as he was tired after his exciting day!
And that was Arthur's 2nd birthday! I think he had a lovely day. He was more wary of the farm animals than we'd expected, but there were other things to do at the farm so it was fine. We have quite a bit of video footage from the farm and of him opening presents - and especially him trying out his new whoopee cushion, haha! I am behind on writing this entry because I had planned to get both the photos AND the video clips up for posting in the entry about his birthday. But I still haven't had a moment to make the video clips and upload them, and time is passing, so I had to just do the photos and write the entry. I'll hopefully get a couple of birthday clips up soon though. Maybe I'll just add them to this entry when they're done, and mention that I've done so in another entry, just in case anyone wants to see them.
I took Matthew and Arthur to the baby clinic the day after Arthur's birthday, so I have that to write about in another entry - hopefully this evening if I get the chance. I got Arthur's weight and height so that I could have accurate "stats" for his 2nd birthday :) I'll write about that later, and also other stat-type-things for his 2nd birthday, if I remember! And loads to write about Matthew! He's nearly 5 months old and growing and changing all the time! I neeed to write about my sweetest tiny boo! But his lovely big brother has had reason to take the limelight here for a week or so :) Such a big boy I have now! A 2-year-old!!! I have a 2-year-old. Wow. I can hardly believe it.
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