Goodness those 6 months have flown by! I can barely even remember what’s happened in the last 4 weeks since my last post, let alone the last 6 months, so this may be a little lot rambly….
We had a wonderful time helping Grandad Jenkinson celebrate his 60th birthday! Once again, A thwarted our plans by being unprecedentedly unsettled in the week running up to the party so we decided not to leave him with Nanna P (for everyone’s sake but mostly mine I think!) and take him to the party. I think he just wanted to stay up late and be woo-ed by all Grandma and Grandads friends!
We borrowed some awesome ear defenders too but the music wasn’t that loud so we didn’t use them but this is too cute not to share!
We made the most of the sunny weather and went on a lovely walk up Mam Tor:
Then we packed for our holiday in Belgium…sadly, we couldn’t take Lyra even though she was keen to come along
We broke up our journey there by staying with our friends parents in Reigate and had two ‘incidents’ on the way. Firstly, Mr.J found a wallet belonging to an 86 year old man at the services and arranged for it to be collected and secondly, we found out that A will drink out of a cup. Unfortunately that discovery was made because A got very upset when we were on the M25 and there wasn’t anywhere to stop so I had to hand express into the cup and feed him that way. Thank goodness we’d packed the cup and for tinted windows!
We took the Tunnel to France and I was very impressed with the efficiency of the system to ‘check in’ as it was all done through a touch screen and involved no people, other than passport control but they didn’t seem very interested! We had a lovely week in Belgium with our friends though. Mr.J went kayaking , did laser quest and went on a bike ride, we all went on a tour around the dam – which was rather surreal at one point as it took us through the laser quest room and it got a bit awkward as the lady doing thw tour did her best to translate into English even though we got the gist of it in Dutch, we had ice creams and a picnic, we hired a family bike and we went swimming a couple of times which A really liked 🙂 I had lots of balloons and a garland decoration hung up for me as a surprise for my birthday and we had a lovely chocolate mousse cake. I also ate tons and tons of chocolate in the evenings whilst we played board games! We got through quite a few Spiel des Jahres games but they’ll have posts of their own soon (ish…)
The journey back was loooong. We left Belgium at 9am BST and arrived home at 8pm. So, we went out for breakfast on Saturday as an extra holiday treat 🙂 And on the Sunday we went for a walk around Bradfield and did some geocaching. We got the first 4 caches from a series of 14 and it’s a Cluedo-esque series so we need to get the rest in order to solve the murder and find the last clue. I carried A on my back so it was trickier to search for some of the caches but we found 4 of the 5 we walked to and both enjoyed searching for the others as they were tricky but gettable!
As for A, he has given up attempting to roll over really and has started to make consonant sounds instead and often says (shouts) “Brah brah brah brah brah” and a few “guh” and “duh” sounds. Most recently, he’s started chomping on his own bottom lip which not only gives my fingers a rest but has helped him start making “Pffft” sounds too. His gums feel reeeeaaaallly hard and I can see the top two teeth sat in his gums and really feel some big lumps in his bottom gums too but nothing has emerged just yet.
He’s really enjoying eating playing with his food. Now that we’re home we’re trying to offer 3 meals a day but it’s blooming hard work cleaning him, the high chair and the floor after every meal! Lyra is enjoying baby led weaning though as she is like a cat ninja swooping in to eat things that get dropped. I think she ate about 80% of a weetabix today, although 19.5% of it got dropped on her and into her fur and A ate about 0.5% of it! He is very good at getting the food into his mouth though and there’s definite evidence that some stuff is getting swallowed albeit very little at the moment. He’s definitely enjoying meat a lot though as he deliberately went back to pick up both the chicken and lamb he had and he swallowed a decent amount of lamb (worryingly for Mr.J all in one piece!). Strawberries and kiwi have been going down quite well as they’re very easy for him to suck and I can also report that both myself and Mr.J have eaten some strawberries too but sadly Mr.J refuses to try the kiwi as he thinks that the centre looks like banana…..Hummus and bread sticks and/or pepper sticks remain very popular too and as a result I’ve been having some super healthy lunches.
His hair is also starting to get a bit longer on top. It’s very fine and low growing so he gets that from me but it’s starting to get lighter and where it’s growing back on his bald patch it’s very very light indeed (so it still looks quite bald!). He is able to sit up for quite a long time on his own now, in a kind of Silverback Gorilla position, but now when he leans forward to pick things up (or chew his toes) he is able to lift his head back up too. He’s really strong too; this is especially noticeable when he pulls your hair, which is an all too frequent occurrence which means I now permanently have my hair in a pony tail! The glasses grabbing also continues so I may have to switch to lenses if they are to survive too – cheeky monkey!!
All things JenkinSunts! 