the twinkle in my eye

more fun. tonight the twinkle was in a great mood when her om came home. i was telling special k about the events of the day and i was imitating all the things that the twinkle had done (eg she had a very interactive conversation with a chinese grandmother at hoppers station) and every time i did a twinkle imitation, the twinkle would imitate me back and laugh. it really was fun.

after her bath in her room she was getting all hyped about practising walking and was insisting on lurching between us and turning around really quickly to lurch back. her head was going faster than her L-plate feet and she was giggling keeping on going. hilarious. at times like this we call her “cyril” and we pretend we cyril’s homecare workers from the council, come to help him get dressed. sometimes cyril appears to require a dementia program as well as personal care.

another of her quirks is her favourite bath toy. she has a large selection of plastic toys, buckets, face cloths, balls and so on, but her favourite is the bottle of bath gel. she loves it and grunts and points at it till we hand it to her. then she takes the top of the pump off and chases it around the bath for a bit. then she hugs the bottle closely and sucks on the tube going down into it. we assumed she wasn’t getting any soap doing this, but when i tried it a couple of nights ago i got a bitter mouth full of soap. so we’ve stopped letting her suck on it, but she seems to really want to. weirdo. at least she’s not burping bubbles yet. she also likes to suck on her toothpaste tube when she gets the chance.

on saturday the twinkle took her first few unaided steps. each day since then she’s taken three or four steps then giggled and fallen over. good for her! here she is right before she took those steps:

cute and quirky things she does:

• picks up a hair brush (usually by the wrong end) and strokes the back of her head with it.
• stands up screaming in her cot at bed time - then when we enter her room she dives down face-down and pretends she’s asleep.
• pretends she has strange clothing preferences when she’s at the baby factory, which she doesn’t have at home - eg taking her pants off all day at childcare, or insisting on wearing her woollen hat to bed at childcare.

we still haven’t had heaps of time to get to know our new neighbourhood but today is a bit of a chance for the twinkle and me. this morning i noticed that a lot of older women around here wear green and gold tracksuits. i’ve seriously seen three walk past our house this morning alone. the reasons i have considered are:

• it’s the uniform for the local lawn bowls club (haven’t actually seen this club)
• they’re on special at dimmey’s
• the local laydeez are getting in the olympic spirit.

can anyone shed any light on this for me?

today on our adventures down main street, i found an organic grocer. cool! i bought organic corn chips for the twinkle because last night we resorted to feeding her d0rit0s in the car to stop her from screaming. sometimes it’s a whole world of bad parenting at our house. i also bought a $2 tin lunch box at dimmey’s and a $1.59 singlet with the enigmatic phrase “me too” embroidered in pride-style rainbow cotton. us western suburbs folk love dimmeys and forges. i bought 50c brand new leg warmers for the twinkle from vinnies.

then i bought a $2 plastic potty at the salvos.

it’s not that we’re planning to toilet train her before she can even walk - we’re not that clever (unlike some other parents i know!). but every night in the bathroom before her bath when we take off her nappy she does a wee on the bath mat. so i’m planning to whack her on the potty as soon as we take the nappy off tonight and see how that goes. better than washing the bath mat every day. (the other night i had already undressed her and was undressing myself to get in the bath with her. i looked down and saw her do a little wee on the tiles then kneel down and play in it with her hands. so charming.)

when we got home and i was unpacking the shopping i saw the twinkle pull her poo-face, so i grabbed the potty, ripped her clothes off and whacked her on the potty. it was too late. poo and wee were everywhere except in the potty. i might just stick to the pre-bath wee for now.

oh, and the other thing i found down in main street was a display of some historic photos, including some family shots of people in houses in our street with the train line behind them. i want to look into this a bit more and figure out if any of those people belonged to our house.

tonight i ate here. omg it was divine. for the record i had the pork belly and scallop baklava, followed by the slow cooked duck in olive oil, mushrooms, garlic and parsley, greek kafe, quince paste and sokolata soil. i still can’t get over that soil. and i rounded it all off with an espresso martini. oh yes i did.

today the twinkle and i had a babycino with jen and patrick who were in town for a bit of family fun and bargain hunting. it was so fun to see them!

and i’m really valuing my tuesdays right now - between k and me at the moment, it is the only weekday where one of us isn’t at work. i get to see the sunshine and walk around outside in the light. i get to play with the twinkle. i can even do personal admin when she sleeps.

one more thing which i don’t think i’ve mentioned. the twinkle has a blankie. it’s pink and minky. i don’t mind so much that she has a favourite blankie that she needs to go to sleep. the funny part is that she also has a jumpsuit that’s made of the same pink mink and it has the same comforting effect for her. so she likes to take blankie pyjama everywhere with her. she drags it around the baby factory. she takes it from room to room in the house. when it has been missing for a while (eg in the wash, or hidden while she eats yoghurt) she grins like a madman when it reappears. she’s a crazy little kid. it’s fun.

meme from teo’s mums…

1) What were you doing 10 years ago:
studying genetic counselling, staying with my parents, playing gaelic football, drinking a lot of kilkenny, dyeing my hair orange

2)What are the five things at the top of your “to do” list:
a) cook tomorrow night’s dinner tonight (chicken, fennel, carrots, honey…)
b) put in car loan application
c) pick up new green car
d) sort out mountains of files at work and start a new work plan
e) wash the twinkle’s blankie (ew!)

3) What are five snacks you enjoy:
a) white chocolate
b) kettle chips
c) salted macadamias
d) iced coffee
e) baklava

4) Name some things you would do if you were a millionaire:
take the twinkle and special k to ireland on a private jet. pay off this house and let special k retire at 34. that’s all.

5) Name some places you have lived:
murrumbeena, keysborough, aspendale, parkville, dublin, flemington, thornbury, brunswick, yarraville, spotswood, west footscray, werribee.

6) Name some bad habits you have:
being the boss, forgetting to pick up dog poo, drive-through coffee from maccas when desperate

7) Name some jobs you’ve had:
bakery girl, putting car racing licence renewals in envelopes, cleaner, school business manager, hostel manager, help desk operator (apologies to anyone who ever had me “help” them), genetic support worker, community development worker

if you’d like a tour of our new house you can go here.

the twinkle has six or seven molars trying to break out all at once at the moment. her gums are all lumpy and she is miserable with pain a lot of the time. poor possum. this is how she looks a lot of the time at the moment:

in this shot she is wearing the gorgeous top that pcat and owl made for her. we’ve been avoiding dressing her in it because it is too good and we wanted to save it for special occasions. but we don’t have many of those so we decided to just make the most of it and start her wearing it before she grows out of it! unfortunately it was impossible to get a clear photo of it yesterday while she wasn’t screaming, so here’s an unclear photo:

when i finish here i am off to wash the teething drool out of it.

my parents are leaving to go overseas tomorrow so we went over to say goodbye to them yesterday. it was a little bit sad - i think they found it hard to say goodbye for two months. when they get back she’ll be walking and saying something other than “hello”. i wonder if she will miss them, or if they don’t really get the concept of missing people yet when they’re this little. i don’t know how that works - do you?

i heard this week that apparently they only work on one milestone at a time so while she’s teething with six or seven teeth she’s unlikely to reach another milestone like walking or more talking. so we’ll just have to focus on minimising the pain and distracting her from it and in a week or so she might be more ready to try the walking thang.

how cute is she?

it has taken me forever to get to this point where i sit down and blog again. but maybe life is about to get back under control this coming week and this is the start of it.

the twinkle turned one on 24 may. we had a little party with a super cake made by special k. how good is this cake? the twinkle got a pile of presents and we now have so much stuff that we keep having to start new toy boxes, her bookshelves are full to bursting, and she has a cupboard full of clothes she hasn’t grown into yet, in addition to all the clothes she is already wearing. she was a total party animal - she never lost it once all day. she ate cake and lollies and everything, played pass-the-parcel (because i’m an old-fashioned mum), and played with every toy she got on the day. it was a really happy birthday, so thanks for all the happy birthday wishes.

she is learning fast at the moment. last week, within just a few days, she learned to dance, to clap and to blow kisses. what a joy!

the dancing is a bit of a weave plus shifting her weight from foot to foot. and she often doesn’t do it until after the music stops, as a way of requesting the music to continue. so of course when she does the cute dance we put the music on again so she’ll dance more. the other day she and i danced to YMCA while a locksmith worked on our loungeroom window. being a mother is shameless sometimes. the dancing is sometimes so all-consuming for her that it takes over. like the other night she was busy having her evening bottle when the good guys ad came on tv. she had to spit out the bottle and sit up to dance! what daggy music taste.

the clapping is one she learned the day after her 12 month appointment at the mch nurse. the nurse gave a little tut-tut when i said she couldn’t clap yet. the next day she was clapping like a professional. a professional what? professional audience member? something like that.

and the kissing! you’ve got to see this. i was carrying her down the hall the other day and she was opening and closing her mouth and i thought maybe she was trying to talk. then i kissed her and she did the mouth thing again but this time with a kissing noise and i realised that’s what she was doing. so i kissed her again because i was so proud and she did it again over and over. she does it a lot now which makes me happy - it makes me happy that this is obviously a behaviour she sees enough of to mimic, and she seems to know that it is about happiness and affection. and when she does it over and over it’s like she’s eating.

her first word is definitely “hello” - pronounced “huwwo”. i’m ready for her to pick up some new words now. she’s been saying hello and nothing else for at least six weeks. she will say a sharp “ah!” when i say “up” before i pick her up. and she says “ssssssah!” alot. this is a multi-purpose expression. it definitely means “snuffy” (the cat’s name) (i like to think she’s trying to say “le chat!”). mum and dad think it means “what’s that?” so whenever she says it they name every object in sight. i just think it’s her motor - as long as she’s up and running, she’ll be saying “sssssah! sssssah!”.

she’s not quite walking but she’s close enough that it could happen any day now. it’ll probably happen at childcare this week and we’ll be that cliche that everyone talks about avoiding. “oh, i could never send my child to childcare. i don’t want to miss the big moments like taking their first steps!”

we moved house and are really happy with this house that we have bought. we only looked at it once for five minutes and k was quite distracted with the baby at the time so we were a bit concerned that once we got here it wouldn’t be as good as we remembered it. but it is. and maybe better. it’s been a very stressful two weeks of transition, with lots of things not going smoothly here and at the old house and just when we thought we would try to get back to normal, the twinkle contracted conjunctivitis and couldn’t go to childcare so we had to make complicated plans of working half days and an overnight stay at the grandparents. my birthday was in there somewhere but i was too stressed to really enjoy it. but i will certainly enjoy the spa treatment special k has bought me and i enjoyed my mini lemon and passionfruit cheesecake birthday treat the night after my birthday. thank you k. we will upload photos of this house when we find the usb for the nikon. today i did a super trip to ike@ and brought home a carful of furniture and decor which has made us feel even more like we love this place.

and now she’s sick. and teething. she has spent the day doing a puppy whimper. bring our kissy, dancey baby back!

just letting you know… if you are still there… that we are still here.

actually we’re not where we were before. we’re over here in our new house (that we own!) with our one-year-old toddler with no broadband.

so we’re around, it’s just been crazy hectic in our house and very slow in the interwebs region.

we’ll be back properly soon.

in the mean time i will share this one thing: this evening the twinkle learned to dance. stevie wonder-style weaving.

the twinkle’s new special talent is putting things inside baskets or trolleys and transporting them around. it’s such a simple thing, but to me it seems like the most amazing talent she has. it is like it’s the first thing she’s done that involves planning and decision-making. she deliberately chooses particular items in preference to others and loads them into the basket on the front of her little ride-on car and pushes it around. fascinating, i know.

an even better talent that she might have developed is kissing. i say she might have developed it because she did it several times last night but there was no sign of it today. it was a fairly rugged kiss: wide open mouth plonked onto my lips. if it turns out to be deliberate, i’ll think it’s ace.

tonight it was cold in the house after her bath so i dressed her in this little red dressing gown that she got when she was born. it’s been too small until now. but now it is ridiculously cute and as i tied up the belt i felt like a real mum. there is something about a little dressing gown like that that takes me straight back to my own childhood.

the other thing that made me feel like a real mum tonight was when i made a pasta bake that involved tinned things and frozen things and whatever we had in the pantry. i’m not usually such an economical cook. (dessert was leftover rum and raisin bread and butter pudding, courtesy of jojo’s blog. jealous?)

on sunday the twinkle and i went to the 2nd birthday party of the son of our dear friends f and k. little m was the cutest little birthday boy and it was a happy happy day. these women (and m’s donor dad to some extent) copped a hiding in some online forums earlier this year after a doco about their experience was aired on tv. watching this happy, functional family made me so proud and made me want to show everyone who watched that doco how things have turned out. m’s dad is happy, the girls are happy, little m is as bright as a button and clearly loved and loving, and the family is well on their way to planning the next addition. sure - the doco showed some raw and painful moments, but that is life and the great thing about this family is that they were able to keep communicating all the way to the sunny other side.

this is the twinkle at little m’s party, playing footy. we also played pass the parcel and the weird thing was that these two three year old girls were there and they had never played pass the parcel before in their lives! how can that happen? is it all jumping castles and clowns these days?

yesterday the twinkle got sent home again from the baby factory for runny poo. this time i think it was just a touch of gastro that special k also had and it cleared up quickly in both of them. but the childcare workers make us feel so guilty all the time - trying to get us to take her to a paediatrician and suggesting that she’s lost weight (i’m sure she hasn’t) and giving us their concerned faces. for some reason i’ve always hated people looking at me with concern - i wonder why that is? thank goodness for mothers group which is on this morning (it’s ok, the runny poo has well and truly stopped), because putting the twinkle amongst those kids who are all the same age always reminds me that she is completely average in size and development and poo consistency and everything else.

the twinkle’s current obsession is lids. she needs to put lids on everything. if we give her her bottle and the lid is in the room she will need to find the lid and put it on the bottle. which means she can’t drink her bottle. same with her sippy cup. same with lots of toys and jewellery boxes and trinkets around the house. and same with yoghurt - she will try and stick the peeled-off lid back onto a yoghurt tub.