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2008-10-11 - 12.24am previous entry next entry
Arthur and Matthew bits and photos...
It's been too long yet AGAIN since I updated here! And I totally plan to fix that, but I have so many photos, and also I'm not sure what to write about first! I mean, there are no life-changing things happening here right now, but as always there are so many things in my head that I wish I had time to write down. I am finding it really hard to lose the things that I'm trying to keep in my memory that the boys are saying, meaning to write them here, and they just are GONE now :( I really must do something about that, because it means a lot to me to keep a record of these precious memories!
I have photos from the last time I uploaded from the camera that I still haven't posted, but also my camera currently contains FOUR HUNDRED photos (and some videos!), so aaaaaargh, how am I ever going to sift through those and edit, and post to Photobucket, and get them here before they're old news and I have 400 more waiting?!?!?! Again, it's something that means a lot to me to keep up with, but HOW?! And WHEN?! I don't know. I will just plug on whenever I can.
Like now! :) Yes, it's after midnight, and I'm thus daft. But it's Friday night, so at least I will be able to rest a little more than usual tomorrow. I wanted to post a few photos of the boys (individually, not group shots for once! There are perlenty of those coming once I get the 400 off the camera!) that are just sitting getting out of date.
Here is Arthur a month or so ago. Neil had been at his new job about 6 weeks I guess, and it still seemed like quite a new thing to the boys (after 9 months with Daddy at home all the time! Was it really that long?! It seems a lifetime ago already!). Arthur found Neil's tie one evening after Neil got home from work, and tried to put it on, saying he was Daddy going to work :) So I dug out a shirt (that, incidentally, came from Sharon a while back - thank you Sharon!) and he put that on with the tie. And Neil's HUGE work shoes :) I found him some black trousers and voila! He was proud to bursting when he saw himself in the mirror, and then he set to "being Daddy at work" with the laptop. He was perplexed at first, though he's used Word to do "my numbers" a lot before, so I don't know why, but Neil showed him how to do things and he had a GREAT time! Here are some photos:
I do not know how, but folks, he is nearly FOUR! He wants me to tell him how many days until his birthday, every day at the moment. For the record, there are 30 days left. I can NOT believe my baby is going to be four! I know every. single. mother says this, but sign me up too. I can't believe it. We're going to France for his birthday!!! He had the choice of what to do, and he loves going to the farm for birthdays but he said he wanted to go and see Nana and Grandy's house in France more than ANYTHING (bless!) so that's what we're doing! We are staying with them for a week, from a few days before his birthday to a couple of days after (his birthday is a Sunday so it's midweek to midweek which is good). Neil has booked the time off work without any problems. The ferry crossings were booked yesterday so we're actually GOING! I'm so excited! I miss seeing my parents sooooooooo much, and we haven't been to their house since I was 17 weeks pregnant with Matthew. That's a long time now! So, Matthew and Nathan have never been there. Arthur has, but he was only 14 months (almost) so he can't remember it. I know they are going to LOVE it. The house is so big and it's just so open and spacious in the countryside there. The people are lovely and friendly, and ahhhh I just can't wait! :) Arthur absolutely adores Nana. He refers to her a lot in daily chat, even though he only sees her a few times a year. When they're together, it's like they're in their own little world together, like they're best friends the same age (not 3-year-old age either, like Arthur is older somehow, and my mum is younger - they meet each other in the middle somewhere!). It's lovely. I know he's so excited about going!
I'm somewhat nervous about the journey though - the part which has put us off going all along so far! Well, that and lack of passports, but we all have those now :) We're travelling on an overnight ferry to get there, which will HOPEFULLY go okay! :S And a late evening crossing (5 hours) on the way back from a different French port, that will get us home after midnight sometime, but hopefully that will work well because the boys will all sleep in the car between the ferry and our house. I reeeally hope we don't have a totally sleepless night on the ferry! The drive from the ferry port in France to my parents' house is just over 3 hours, which probably doesn't sound like much (especially to any American readers out there!) but it's a LOT to me! That time will possibly double with little ones. I remember we stopped doing drives longer than an hour after we drove to Neil's family 5 hours north when Arthur was 13 months old and it took TEN HOURS. It was just too long for him to be stuck in the car, and we had to stop really often and take time to let him run about and nurse or eat and change his nappy, etc, each time, so the time literally doubled. We haven't been since as a family, because it was that AWFUL, so I'm nervous about carting THREE littles for several hours straight! Hopefully it'll go much better than we think it might. We are armed with several story CDs (Thomas the Tank Engine, Postman Pat, Winnie the Pooh, Dr. Seuss, etc!), a couple of which are new, and should therefore keep them occupied for a good while! They LOVE audiobooks.
Arthur is now exactly a metre tall! I think that's 38.5 inches, or something? Anyway, that was a few weeks ago. I haven't weighed him in a while. He has really outgrown his car seat (birth to age 4) and needs a "big boy" car seat now, but we're struggling to find The Perfect One. We got a Maxi Cosi one recently and it had a fault so it went back, but I got a refund because I'm not sure I liked the shape of the headrest enough - it comes very far forwards so that he has to lean forwards to see out of the side windows of the car. But it scores top marks in safety tests. The other one we're considering is the Concord PT Lift Evo. The boys currently have Concord Ultimax car seats and they are just fab. We bought them because they're "different" with a billion designs to choose from, and have won safety awards - you can't find a higher scoring car seat when it comes to safety. The next one up (the PT Lift Evo) is the same way, but it has a REALLY high backrest that sticks up high enough to obstruct some of the view through the back windscreen, and we want Arthur to be in the middle of the row of 3 seats that the boys are now in (we have our new Citroen C8, yay!), so hmmm, we can't decide! We ought to just go to a store and try them out, but absolutely NOBODY stocks them, that we can visit anyway! Tsk! So, we'll keep thinking for a bit, but we really must get him in a new car seat soon. He's too big for the other one. His old one is more worn than we expected (straps are fraying a bit, etc) so instead of moving Nathan into it (who is verily CRAMMED into his infant "bucket" style seat now, poor love! He's used it almost THREE TIMES as long as Arthur did when he "outgrew" it!!), we think we'll buy a brand new Concord Ultimax for Nathan and toss Arthur's old one. Better to do that, safety-wise, anyway.
This is turning into a long update, aaargh! I have to go to bed! ;)
Okay, photos of Matthew. Matthew is just changing in leaps and bounds with his speech, constantly. Week by week he's communicating completely differently to the week before! He still pronounces many many things ever so sweetly, in toddlerish ways, which I love! :) He's such a mixture of complete sweetness and total mischief! I only have a few photos of him because he's at that age where he's difficult to catch in a decent photo (tsk!), but funnily enough they do illustrate my point, hehe! Here he is at Bible Time (we still do this every morning for 30-45 mins or so), "reading" my Bible in my chair, in the exact position I like to sit in to read it! :)
When he's not being utterly gorgeously adorable (and he does this part SO well, trust me!), he is either doing this:
Or involved in learning new things, or expressing himself like this:
And the rest of the time (probably more than 50%!) he is in THIS mode:
That's Matthew in the porch, which is where the boys go (a thousand million times a day right now) for being naughty, for however many minutes they are in years of age (that doesn't feel like it made sense!). They can't get out once they're in, and I go and get them when their time is up. I then sit down and ask them to tell me why they were put in the porch, and we talk about why that is not something to do again, and they have to apologise, etc. I OFTEN find Matthew in this kind of state when I arrive. He takes his nappy off pretty much immediately and then puts on a hat and welly boots or something! He has started to put his trousers back on and hide his nappy under shoes so that I don't necessarily notice when he's taken his nappy off, until he wees in his trousers a bit later on! Monkey! He also wees in the porch sometimes. I am not a happy mummy when he does this!
Anyway. He keeps me on my toes! :)
I remembered one thing I wanted to post for memory's sake a while ago! I was putting the boys' shoes on in the porch ready to go somewhere or other for an appointment, and we were late as always, so I was being impatient and barking orders at the boys, etc. *sigh* Anyway, in mid bark, I looked up and saw Arthur looking at me all sort of fondly, with a funny little half-smile and his head a bit on one side. I said, "What?!" curiously, and he shook his head, again sort of fondly and said, with a little amused sound, "Precious Mummy..." I sat stunned for a moment, and then he said in the same very grown-up tone, "You're so precious to me!" just like I say it to him at bedtime sometimes! I asked him what made him say that, and he said, "You're precious because you make milky for all the boys." Love that boy :)
But, that said, he IS weaning, hehe! Poor Arthur, he really would not choose to. I am not forcing the issue as such at the moment. I just am ready for him to stop nursing now. He is nearly four. I have two other nurslings, and would like to have another baby any time God is happy to bless us that way. He has been nursing 3 times a day at regular times for a long while now, with Matthew. They nurse after breakfast, together, on the sofa snuggled up to me, and then I nurse Matthew for his nap (usually to sleep), and Arthur has his turn when I come back downstairs to him, and then they nurse at bedtime (together on Matthew's bed).
Lately I have changed that somewhat. I nurse Matthew first at bedtime, like I do for his naps (in the hope that he might sometimes nurse to sleep and we'll be spared the 60-90 minutes of Matthew-related palava at bedtime *sigh*), and THEN I will go to Arthur's bed and nurse him for less than 30 seconds. He usually complains that it's too short, but I say that's all there is for tonight, and I think he's getting the picture. Also I have cut out the morning breastfeed for both of them in the last couple of weeks. I would still like to be giving that to Matthew, but they nurse together and I can't think of a smooth way to cut it out for Arthur (who cares more about it, to be honest) and not for Matthew. So it's gone. Arthur regularly asks for milky in the morning as usual (Matthew only rarely does) and I always tell him, "Oh, we don't do morning milky any more, remember?" and keep it light and casual and then change the subject or distract with an activity. People have suggested the "don't offer, don't refuse" method for Arthur, but people! If I adopt that method, he will probably nurse till he leaves home or something, haha! Or at least it's beginning to feel that way! He ALWAYS asks. And in fact, he asks probably 6+ times per day EVERY DAY regardless of the fact that I never ever let him nurse more than 3 times a day, and haven't done for many months now! I already "don't offer" and have even started to refuse! So that method is not something that will work for Arthur :) I still let him breastfeed if he has a BAD accident and hurts himself (ie. huge-o bruising, blood, shaking with the shock of it, etc) but not for any old random bump, which by the way he never fails to ask for milky for, and I always tell him no, but that he can have a big cuddle instead. He's VERY attached to his milky. I can't believe I have nearly been breastfeeding for 4 years without stopping, tandem nursing for 2 years and 4 months, and triandum nursing for nearly 9 months, and I've never weaned a child yet! Craziness. But I'm so very proud of my achievement! :) I wish Arthur would have self-weaned before I got to the (unexpected) point where I just plain don't want to breastfeed him any more. But never mind, eh.
Okay, it's so late. I'm going to bed! I'll be back with the million photos (or a small fraction of them!) soon! :)
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