The rest of January – over already!?!!

Saturday 15th Jan, time for some mixed media artwork…

Both girls were stickering, colouring and finger painting, it was going fantastically, then Fidget decided she needed a poo (and urgently), but we had to quickly get all the paint off her hands and get her to the loo, meanwhile Squidge decided to experiment with sucking her fingers, so when i rushed back to the table, her face and mouth was covered in blue paint. So that was the end of that!

Sunday 16th Jan, after lunch, I made one of my experimental deserts. Some apple puree defrosted from the freezer, with a load of dried fruit, breakfast cereal and broken up chocolate thrown in…

it was a hit.

Tuesday 18th Jan, M was doing Daddy Day to cover for me needing to work. He and the girls had great fun, building a zoo…

and cuddling up together…

Saturday 22nd Jan, while I had a lie-in, the girls and Daddy hit the dressing-up box (shame they didn’t get a picture of how well he accessorised his pyjamas!)

Later on in the morning Granny and Grandpa arrived. Grandpa and Daddy spent the day working on the en-suite (and a few other jobs). Granny and the girls played.

Fidget does great dancing, she says “watch my movements!” then runs up and down, adding in twirls and jumps. Squidge does her best to copy, just running up and down and shouting. It is loud, but cute…

breaking off to give Daddy the DIY hero a hug…

One day, I can’t recall when, I suggested for Fidget that as a treat I make her a “special coffee”. I took an expresso cup, added a little hot chocolate, then filled it half with milk and half with hot water. It has the look of coffee and Fidget loves it.   Sunday 23rd Jan – another special coffee…

Grandpa had been off to his flying group, but there was time for cuddles when he got back…

More playing and dancing. The girls got the musical instruments out, and we all joined in…

Tuesday 25th Jan was another Daddy day as I was in London for a conference we were running. Fidget wanted to go fly a kite, but it wasn’t windy enough. So Fidget had a go at flying it on the kitchen floor – coooool.

At the weekend we decided finally to move Squidge across to the big room. The nursery is above the garage and has been hard to keep warm over the cold weather, whereas the spare room has an oversized radiator and extra internal insulation. So anyway we moved all her stuff across and set up the old nursery as a study/spare room.

Sunday 30th Jan, taking photos of the new layout. Squidge’s new room…

The study…

with bed being demonstrated by Fidget…

Uncle A came over for Lunch. M did a lovely roast pork. Fidget was still keen to fly her kite. We wandered across to the park, but no wind. So we had a great time playing on the swings instead…

31st Jan, M was looking after the girls and had a dreadful day with Squidge. She was being so cheeky, kept terrorising Fidget. If Fidget had something Squidge wanted, Squidge would go grab Bear (who would usually be sleeping in a bed lovingly set up by Fidget), then Fidget would yell, grab Bear back and in the meantime Squidge would swooop in and grab the toy that Fidget would have dropped in order to rescue Bear.

Later that evening, just before bed, M checked Squidge’s mouth and found hey-presto 2 new teeth! Right at the back on the top so she is cross-teething to. Aw well.

I have been doing lots of very back dated posts, so feel like I want to give a quick update on generally what the girls are up to.

Squidge is at the moment doing lots of talking, she is always copying words and sounds with varying success. Certain words she can say fairly clearly – spoon, toes, shoes, nose, no, more, bear, mummy, peep-o, daddy,  ‘igger (something like “tigger”), various animal noises and associated signs. She loves the signing and sees real utility in it. You can see her really concentrating when she is trying to pick up a new one. She is hilarious, and her facial expressions and huge smiles with her little front teeth beaming away, just make me smile so much.

Fidget now is very confident with pretty much all the alphabet, she loves me reading to her, and we try her reading, she can sound out the letters, but alot of the time it is still a bit of a stretch to put the sounds together into a word – but getting there. She can recognise some of the rules or exceptions to phonics, like the oooooooo sound in “look” and “I” as in “eye” rather than the phonic sound. She can spell and write her name and is getting more and more confident using a pen to write – doing activities eg maze games or dot to dot. Fidget really is thoughtful and great to talk to. I am so proud of both my beautiful girls.