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2007-04-13 - 11.53pm previous entry next entry
Easter, Meg, photos, and update about the boys...
Toooo late to update yet again, but I'm SO behind that I simply HAVE to write something! I have dozens and dozens of photos to post, so maybe I'll just post a bunch of those tonight and then catch up in a more wordy way another time?
Thank you so much for the comments after my last entry about the mouldy muffin! I felt reassured as soon as I read them :) And of course, Arthur was fine. He was also fine earlier this week when he ate mouldy leftover baked chocolate pudding (what is it with mouldy chocolate things in this house lately?!). It was WELL out of his reach, but yeah, he makes stepping stools out of anything and then climbs. It wasn't horribly mouldy, but Neil said it had some on it. *sigh*
Arthur had a temperature last night though. I am totally confused about it, because he's otherwise okay. And we have had NO contact with other kids lately. He had had outings, but lately only to the park, not even the type of park with swings and stuff. Just for walks in the park. He hasn't even touched things like gates or door handles or shopping trolleys at the supermarket, etc. So it can't be viral. Well, Meg did come round this week - yay! But I phoned her last night to check (I'm so paranoid, haha!) and she's healthy and fine :) So it's weird.
Yesterday he looked kind of tired and sometimes a bit pale, although he DOES look like that sometimes these days. I put it down to his diet (STILL not eating anything I cook for him), but he seems healthy and energetic otherwise. So I asked him a few times yesterday if he felt okay, and he said yes and played actively, etc. About mid-afternoon, I put my hand on his forehead and just instinctively knew he wasn't right. I was SO surprised when I took his temperature and it was normal! Even so, his forehead just didn't feel "right" to my hand. At bedtime I couldn't bear the zing of that mother's gut instinct feeling in my bones any longer, so I took his temperature again, and it was 100.2. Ha! I knew it! I felt soooooooooo proud of my mother's instinct being all functional! I still sometimes can NOT believe I have children now, that I'm actually someone's MOTHER, and that I really do have such things as a mother's instinct! I'm always amazed when I experience an example of it, and it reminds me afresh that I Am Mummy. Which is so precious and wonderful!
Arthur said he was okay though, again. He said he didn't hurt anywhere, even his teeth or his tummy, etc. He said, "No, I not feel poorly, Mummy" and even, "No, I not tired - I alwight!", so I couldn't figure it out. He did SEEM a little off to me though, and he went to sleep unusually fast while still on the breast, at bedtime, which NEVER happens, ever. He was restless in his sleep, and I worried half the night (tsk, I'm just like that), because I didn't know what was up and I hate to not know, especially when I could pretty much (ish) rule out something viral.
I felt his forehead several times over the night and he seemed to get cooler, not warmer. We didn't give him anything for his fever at all. I figured unless it was HIGH, it was probably better to let his body do what it was doing, to fight whatever it was trying to fight. He woke around 4am and told Neil his tummy hurt, but then he sat up and said, "But I just need to burp..." hehe! And he did too! ;) This morning he ate breakfast well, acted normal, and said he felt fine. His forehead still felt "not right" to me during the morning, but his temperature was normal. And later in the day I didn't get that feeling when I put my hand on his forehead so I guess whatever it was has gone now. What was it?! It just seems weird. He has never (ever) had fevers with teething, so surely it can't be that after allll the teeth he's had. The only unusual symptoms he's had at the time of his temperature being elevated were teething ones though. He was chewing his WHOLE hand (shoved into his mouth up to the wrist!) like crazy, almost absentmindedly. He had teeth marks in his knuckles. I kept asking him if his teeth were hurting him, but he kept saying no - which was odd, because he usually answers yes if he has any teething pain. He said he didn't hurt anywhere at all.
Tonight I checked his teeth while I was helping him brush them, and he has pretty much completed his bottom two 2-year-old molars now. One is completely in, and the other one almost completely. There's almost no sign at all of the top two coming, but I wondered if I saw a slight grey mark on his gum over the top right one.... That grey mark might turn into the typical "eroded" patch that usually precedes his actual new teeth by about 3 days. One new thing that I DID notice though, was behind his new bottom 2-year-old molars, there's suddenly a hugely raised new area of gum with hard white pressure marks under them - his SIX-year-old molars!!! I can almost see the shape of them under the gum, and they feel awfully close to the surface, especially the back ends of them. I am SURE they weren't there the last time I looked at his teeth. Could they just be getting into place? I have no experience with kids beyond age 2, obviously! Anyone with older kids who know whether it's normal to get signs of the 6-year-old molars yeeeears before they come through?
Arthur has ALWAYS been one to teethe (symptom-wise) for miserable ages before his actual teeth appear, poor thing! He started needing pain relief and teething rings for teething symptoms at ELEVEN WEEKS old, and didn't cut his first tooth till 8 and a half months! He teethed awfully, almost continually through that whole time. It wasn't even as simple as just drooling and biting on things. I remember him have patches (maybe a few days at a time) where he would get flaming swollen cheeks and cry all day and night, and need Calpol round the clock every month or two, the first one being when he was 3 months old! We always thought it MUST be a tooth coming at last, but no. Poor love, and all his suffering didn't even seem to have a point to it, as it was still many months before he got a tooth! So with that in mind, could he be unfortunate enough to get discomfort from the VERY "pre" rumblings of teeth that aren't set to arrive for years? I don't know if it's possible, but Arthur has such a bad run with teething that I just wonder...
Oh, I just realised I'm kind of behind on some general updatey things here. I had a chemical pregnancy (ultra early miscarriage) last Thursday. Thoughts about it are over at my Pregnancy Diary as that's all I want to say about it here. But then Neil had 4 days at home over the Easter weekend - Good Friday, the weekend, and then Easter Monday. Which worked out wonderfully for me - not in a holiday sense though, because I was feeling weirdly physically ill after getting my period. I couldn't even lift Matthew without feeling dizzy and shaky, and I had to nap and stay in bed a lot. Thank goodness Neil was home, as it took me till the end of Monday to be able to do anything without coming over funny.
Anyway so that was our Easter! Poor Neil had a LOT on with the boys as I wasn't up to my normal stuff, though I did a lot of breastfeeding as normal! We really don't do a THING for Easter anyway, so it didn't matter, but the long weekend would have been nice to enjoy together. I'm always amazed to read American diaries and message boards around Easter, because it's so alien to our concept of Easter over there! When I was little, we used to get Easter eggs (chocolate, that is) from family members. Grandparents would bring them over maybe during the week before Easter, and my brother and I would be tormented by them sitting in a tantalizing way up on an out-of-reach shelf until Easter Sunday, as we weren't allowed to eat them till then! But that was it. I was not brought up in a Christian family, so we didn't do anything remotely religious about Easter either.
Once or twice, my mum made Simnel cake, and some years she helped my brother and I make Easter-ish things to eat when we got bored during the school holidays, like shredded wheat chocolate nests with a couple of mini chocolate eggs in them! But no actual traditions. We did sometimes have a big roast dinner on Easter Sunday - one year we had been in the States over Christmas so we'd missed our traditional British Christmas turkey dinner! So we had that at Easter instead :)
When I was very little, like under 7, we sometimes went to stay at a very old thatched cottage in Gloucestershire that my grandparents used to own. It had a huge rambling country garden with all sorts of nooks and cranies, and my grandparents used to hide eggs for us to find. It was such a charming little tradition! I would love to continue it, but I don't want to change it at ALL from how it was when I was tiny, and I'm not sure if I can replicate the details. The eggs were tiny chocolate eggs, the type that are wrapped in shiny foil of all different colours. So they caught the eye like little treasures, and they were hard to find - that was the point. Also, they were left by fairies. I am thinking that the Easter Bunny is an entirely American tradition - but I might be wrong. I just have no recollection of it in my childhood. But I'm pretty sure "Easter" fairies were not any sort of tradition either! ;) Those were specific to my family, I think. And they weren't Easter fairies. Just fairies.
It was SO exciting to go looking for the eggs on Easter morning! It would take a while because fairies do not leave them out for all to see! That made it so much fun. LESS fun for a significantly younger person with an older sister, I think! Sometimes my grandparents laid out a seperate lot for my brother, as it wasn't that fair with him being so much littler and me being so much more able to find the eggs than he was! We knew it was them laying them out, but it was fun to pretend/imagine that they were left by fairies! They were small and shiny and beautiful, so it was easy to imagine...
I would find one in the crook of a branch in a small tree. Or in a hole in an old tree trunk. Hedges were places that fairies liked to go, as they could be well-hidden there, so we would look extra carefully there (and usually find some eggs!). Fairies also like shaded streams and brooks, and our cottage garden had a beautiful stream (with trout!) running through it, with a little wooden bridge over it and weeping willows shading it all the way down. It was pretty magical under those willows with the sound of the water chattering away as it ran along, at ANY time of year, but you could practically SMELL fairies in there if it was Easter and you were 6 years old. We always had to be careful near the stream because Grandoug told us that about a Century ago (or maybe longer?), one of the 15 children who lived at the cottage drowned in the stream. That always stuck in my mind, but that was a good thing, as it reminded me to be careful.
Anyway. The fairies would also leave the shiny little eggs in nests and bird houses (always unused!), and little holes and nooks that were WAY out of a child's reach. We could see them from the ground, and they looked like just the kind of place that a fairy might leave a treasure. So I would ask Daddy to lift me up so I could see in, and sometimes the places were so high that he had to hold me as high as his arms could stretch over his head, but there was always an egg in a place that made me think a fairy might have been there :) It was just like MAGIC to see one in such a place. I can remember gasping at the sheer wonder of seeing it, and not being able to breathe again till the moment passed. The whole air seemed to tingle with fairy dust or something, hehe! Anyway, it was the MOST fun, and I would love to recreate it for my little ones. Not so easy without really "fairy-ish" places to hide eggs though. A big part of the charm for me was the old-fashionedness of it - the countryside hiding places and not a square inch of concrete, plastic or brickwork in sight. But maybe that won't matter to our little ones? Anyway.
So that is how we used to celebrate Easter when I was little. Only at the cottage when my grandparents were with us though. At home we would just have a couple of big Easter eggs to eat on the Sunday. I don't think it's ever been "done" here to give gifts at Easter, as I had no concept of such a thing as gifts at Easter until recently. The only gift times of year here were Christmas and birthday. There weren't even small gifts on any other occasion. I still keep feeling amazed when I see on the message boards I go to, the US families pretty much buying their kids gifts at a holiday almost on a bi-monthly basis, what with Christmas, Valentine's, Easter, etc! I TOTALLY am not out to offend anyone, and I know that lots of Americans read my diary, but I have to say that it seems nuts to me! I'm sure it's fun for the kids to have lots of opportunities to get gifts though. It's just so different here, even with the same actual holidays being recognised on the calendar. It's interesting how different cultures do things differently.
Soooo, Easter... I can't think where my point was going originally! Oh, I remember - it was that we did nothing for Easter, but it's not actually a big deal because we don't actually DO anything for Easter anyway. It just would have been nice to enjoy the long weekend if I had been feeling okay!
Then on Tuesday, Neil went back to work, and Meg came to visit! Yay! She stayed from about 11am till somewhere after 6pm and was a great help entertaining the little boys and just being someone to chat to! And she brought me LUNCH - homecooked lunch! It was chicken and pasta bake, and totally yummy! AND she brought an After Eights Easter egg for me and Neil - our ONLY Easter egg this year, well, except for the enormous quantity of Cadbury's Creme Eggs that I've been steadily polishing off since about... oooh, February?! ;) AND she brought a mini tea set for Arthur! She read in my diary that he loved playing with Jaya's at Jove's birthday party, and was thoughtful (and generous!) enough to buy him one! I had actually been meaning to go out and buy one last week before I felt too grim and didn't get around to it. How lovely that she turned up with one just days later! He loves it, of course! Matthew likes to chew it. And chew it. And also he really enjoys chewing it. But Arthur does cooking with it and serves cups of tea to us and everything! Thank you Meg!! :)
We went on a short walk to the park late in the afternoon, and saw some ducks and dogs and diggers (?!), and Arthur walked up and down a hill while Meg and I sat on the slope of it with Matthew. It turned out to be Matthew's FIRST time sitting on grass! That sounds craaaazy since he's 9 months old, but it's been winter for at least 6 months already, and before that he wasn't sitting, so... He seemed eager, but it only took him about 30 seconds (if that!) before he ate a lump of mud, so that was the end of that, for that occasion! He was NOT pleased to be removed from the grass, poor love!
Matthew is standing for 5+ seconds now, without holding onto anything. He is also cruising at sort of a "run" this week, haha! He seems to be practising it, as he does it purposely without any particular reason for doing it. He can go very fast along the sofa like that. He seems to just take 4 or 5 huge "running" side-steps to zip along the 3-seater sofa! He squats to pick things up, holding onto something with one hand while he does so, and he doesn't wobble any more when he does that. He can reach up and to the side to get something from a previously out-of-reach spot, by standing on his tippy-toes and raising the opposite foot right off the floor as he leeeans out to reach the item with his hand. He claps all the time and has now started waving. He doesn't wave daintily with his wrist - he is a "shoulder waver", hehe! His whole arm flaps up and down with some vigour! ;)
Matthew understands some words which I can tell by his response - If I ask him, "Matthew, can you clap?!" without any sort of change to my physical actions, he instantly gets an "I know what you're talking about" look in his eye, drops the toy he's holding, and starts to clap enthusiastically. He is the same when I ask him, "Can you dance?" - he immediately gets a cheeky little smile on his face and starts a careful bop-bopping up and down at the knee :) He spontaneously "dances" like that to music on the TV or stereo, if it's bouncy and catchy enough. Sometimes he nods his head to the music along with the bopping-knee thing, which is very cute!
It has now been a full week since he has stopped waking during the evening to breastfeed. I don't even know why he stopped, he just did! He used to wake somewhere between 10 and 11pm without fail, every evening, and I'd nurse him. After that it was pretty much 2-hourly - somewhere between 12 and 12.30, then somewhere between 2 and 3, then again between 5 and 6 (the longest gap). If he woke at the 5am end of that patch, he would nurse back to sleep till maybe 6.30 or 7am, but if it was the 6am end, he would be up for the day.
For about a week now, he has been waking as usual at the somewhere-after-midnight time to nurse, but completely missing out the evening session. Then 3 nights ago he ONLY woke at the midnight slot, and then not again till about 5.30am! And then he was back to sleep till 7am! Wow! I was too tired to know much about it, to be honest, so it didn't feel much different for me. The next night, the same thing happened. He woke at 12.45am and then not until 6.15, when he was up for the day. I immediately wanted to write about it here, not least because when I do that, it tends to mean that it STOPS happening, hehe! And I couldn't believe it was really going to continue, so I wanted to get it over and done with before I got my hopes up too much! Anyway, last night he woke twice - at 12.30ish and then again at 3ish I think. But still, that's a huge improvement on what was the absolute NORM until last week - FOUR wakings over his 11 hour night. I didn't mind them a bit. I feel vaguely excited about the prospect of him starting to sleep longer blocks, but it seems really weird that it doesn't feel like it matters a bit to me. I am SO used to multiple night-wakings, for 2 and a half years (without a break) now, that I feel like my body doesn't care that much about it any more. I feel just as exhausted, perhaps oddly MORE so, when I wake after a night with longer blocks of sleep. Since it doesn't matter to me whether Matthew continues to wake me frequently or not, the only significant thing I'm left with is a sense of SADNESS that he is dropping his night feeds! I cherish every single one, and I'll miss them. A full night's sleep really should feel like a much-longed-for luxury, but it doesn't feel that thrilling actually. Maybe I'm just crazy?! It's no big deal. I'm so incredibly sleep-deprived now that it would probably take me YEARS of good nights to repay alllll that sleep-debt, so it's not like I'll feel all that refreshed for unbroken sleep for ages yet. So there's no instant gratification. All that remains is a sense of loss - a cherished time that I can never get back. Something that reminds me I have to let my babies go and grow up, BEFORE I'm ready to! *sigh*
Anyway. It IS good news if he is spontaneously cutting out some of his night wakings. As and when I get pregnant again, I know my exhaustion will reach a whole new level and I will need to night wean like I had to with Arthur. I HATE night weaning my children. I hate any sort of weaning that isn't entirely their decision. And, since neither of my kids have decided to do any sort of weaning yet, I haven't even experienced that, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate it even when THEY decide to wean! I love breastfeeding them soooooo much, and I love the bond I have with them while I'm still doing it. I know there are other ways for a mother to be close to her children, especially as they get older, but there is nothing like a breastfeeding bond, and I'll hang onto mine for as long as they'll let me, thanks! ;)
I haven't really talked much about things that Arthur is doing or saying here, but it's way too late to start that now. I'll have to try and remember it all for another time. I MUST post some photos before I go, or there will be another huge backlog! There are too many now, as it is!
Okay, I have a huge set of photos to post, all from one occasion. The boys are still increasingly playing together, and having SO much fun with each other! They are starting to do rough and tumble play, which scares me silly as they are always coming within millmetres of cracking their skulls together, but almost all of the time they manage to miss each other, and they do sooooo much cute giggling and squealing during the whole game that it is worth the adrenaline rushes it gives me! ;) Matthew's favourite place these days is the sofa. He doesn't care if Arthur plays with him or not, he just gets stuck in, throwing himself about - backwards, sideways, forwards - just like a sack of potatoes, as heavily as possible for the maximum fun-factor, it seems! He giggles and squeals at his own game, even without Arthur's involvement! Matthew is about the most playful baby I have ever met. I thought Arthur was playful, but Matthew is noticably more so than Arthur was at his age. It's not just that he has an older brother to play with - half his "games" are things he initiates and plays on his own, without input from anyone else. He is great at self-play already.
Anyway, so one time the boys were throwing themselves around on the sofa and laughing and squealling and having so much fun, and so I took photos :) They also do a fair bit of gentle wrestling-type-behaviour as part of this kind of game, where Arthur stands rather threateningly over Matthew once Matthew's thrown himself down and landed on his back, looking up at Arthur. Matthew loves this! Then Arthur pretty much throws himself down on top of (or next to) Matthew! And hugs his head and stuff. Matthew loves it. It usually turns into very cute cuddles and even kisses from Arthur sometimes - he loves his brother soooo!
Here are the (many!) photos!
See all his FOUR teeth in the last photo?! No visible signs of any new ones coming, but he is very bitey/drooly/fussy at the moment in the day, so who knows.
Tomorrow I will have a TEN-MONTH-OLD baby again! I can't believe how fast that has come round. Arthur was 10 months old when I got pregnant with Matthew, and in so many ways that feels like just yesterday. Especially when I look in my diary or at photos of Arthur, and see what he was doing then. It just seems soooo recent! And here I am AGAIN with a cute little 10-month-old boy bean! I am so blessed :) It just seems crazy that Matthew is 10 months old already. Arthur had 5 teeth as he turned 10 months, and Matthew has four. They were/are both crawling and cruising well. Arthur was climbing waaaaay beyond Matthew's ability, but he had opportunites and we really haven't given Matthew any yet. We have started to let him try out the bottom of the stairs, but he is just patting his hands on the bottom step, not climbing yet! Arthur was literally climbing the entire flight at 10 months, actually 9 months even!
But otherwise they are really sooooo similar in what they're doing and "saying". Matthew's babbling is really changing all the time. His personality is starting to shine and we feel like we are getting to know him more and more each day, and at a faster and faster rate. He is truly blossoming, and it's beautiful to watch and be a part of! I wish I had the time to capture it more clearly here, but alas, my bed calls! Thank goodness it's weekend (lie-in tomorrow, yay!) but all the same, it's way too late for me to be up. I will leave you with a couple of photos that I discovered tonight and which surprised us with how uncanny they are! Our boys may be different in almost EVERY way to look at, but they are pretty similar in many other ways!
Here is Matthew, today, aged 9 months and 4 weeks, doing something he does a LOT lately!...
And here is a photo I came across this evening, quite by chance, of Arthur when he was 9 months and 3 weeks old, almost exactly the same age as Matthew today:
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