Ellie the mermaid!

On Sunday we had our first Waterbabies lesson at the hospital hydrotherapy pool. It was really lovely. The water was as warm as a bath, and it was nice and intimate - only 5 babies at a time. Ellie's boyfriend, Thomas, was part of our class too.

Ellie really loved being in the water - she was really relaxed and didn't cry once, not even after the periodic dunkings. I think it helped that since she was born we've been splashing water in her face so that doing her hair doesn't become an issue when she's older! We did lots of word association exercises which are designed primarily to get the babies to hold their breath before they go under water. We won't be doing any actual underwater swimming for quite a few lessons yet. so, all in all, a successful first swimming session. I'm looking forward to the next one, but not the getting dressed bit afterwards! Ellie really screamed her lungs out for that! She really does have an aversion to sleeves!




Here she is being all nice and relaxed whilst I float her along...

...and here she is after a dunking - as you can see, she's mostly concerned with getting her fist back into her mouth!

Can't wait to move in

Here is a quick photo showing the new house without it's old front porch. With a pebbledash top render (over the old render) and a bit of tidying up it'll look quite good I think.

Teeth

Teeth eh? What a pain, quite literally. Ellie has had her hand stuck in her mouth pretty much continuously for the last week or two now. She's got about 4 teeth coming through now and they are causing her quite a bit of pain at times. It is only fitting that the photo I post for week 15 is one with her hand in or somewhere near her mouth and this one was taken just before bathtime ce soir.We had a pretty good Saturday, up early at 5 ish with intermittent grizzling and for the first time we had her in bed with us, in between the two of us for an extra hour and a half. Feeding hasn't gone particularly well today but it hasn't been too bad a day.

I mowed all the grass and hopefully if the weather is nice tomorrow we can take some replacement external photos of the house for the estate agent. There are quite a few nice flowers out now and the place looks quite good. I don't think it will do much good and we'll end up having to rent this place out but you never know?

Righto, dinner time!

A week 14 photo

Well, I'm here at the home computer sorting out some photos so here is a week 14 photo of our little girl. She's had a funny weekend, lots of everything, smiles, grizzling, kicking, hand in mouth, cooing at her toys and generally making sure we are aware of her every living second, which we are!!


The photo shows her sleeping with what might become one of her security things, a lovely little elephant blanket that a colleague of mine from France, Jean-Noel Lagier, got for her on a recent trip over from France. Cheers Jean-No.

Progress

Well, there were lots of us up at the house today. Myself, Smee, Ellie, Diane, Nicola, Shaun, Sophia and Isabel. I'm sure it would have been more productive to have left the kids at home but they did have fun hopping through the stud walls and generaly getting too close to the gaping hole in the side of the house where a 'naily and gnarly' fate awaits in the pile of debris.

We stripped 80% of the wallpaper off the walls to allow the plasterer to get on with plastering, not decorating! Speaking of which the plasterer has started to put the boards up and the downstairs toilet, utility, kitchen and porch area and mostly done. We now finally have some new rooms, hoorah! They all still need plastering of course but once the boards are up (including insulation) we will really see a big difference.

Hopefully this week there will be a delivery from TP (blocks, lintels, plaster, bead and a few other bits and pieces), the damp proof plasterer will start, our plasterer will really get going and the two doorways that we don't want will be bricked up. Add to that the bricks that need to be put around the window apertures and we have a busy, productive and costly week!

Yesterday I went to Ikea at around 10pm to take advantage of their '21st birthday in the UK ' offer which was a 21% discount on everything, including the kitchen we wanted.

If you look below you will see a post describing our glee at finding the Ikea kitchen at a very reasonable price a month or so ago. I was ultra delighted to discover the 21% offer a few weeks ago on the internet in a money saving forum and waited until yesterday to cash in. All in all we spent about £2500 on a £3200 kitchen that we already thought was excellent value! It was a bit of a nightmare at Ikea, I have never seen so many cars in the car park, especially at 10pm. But, an hour and a half later I was all done and I even managed to get soem stuff for Nicola too.

Right, that's all for now, more photos to be added next week I hope.

Congrats to the Waltons who just announced the arrival of Evie Grace.

Ellie stuff

Our little girl is growing so fast - she's now well into her 3-6 month clothes, I can't quite believe it. We got given some 3-6 months clothes when she was born and I remember thinking she'd never fit into them! Here she is in her lovely knitted suit from Auntie Angela...


We had our NCT reunion a week or so ago and finally managed to get a picture of all 6 babies together - in date order too! Here they all are...Thomas, the youngest, is on the left, then Ellie, Stirling, Sophie, Georgie and Lucy. There is 10 weeks between Thomas and Lucy. Thomas and Ellie are holding hands, it's so cute!!


Ellie and I have a pretty hectic time of it at the moment. Mondays we have Baby Bookworms, Tuesdays my sister often visits, Weds is Mini Music (when we make it!) and Ellie's weigh in (with a visit to Mamgu afterwards), Thursdays we have either BURPS or Bumps and Babes (where we meet up with our usual gang). Fridays are pretty much our only free day! I am only going to take Ellie to be weighed once a month from now on, so that'll help I think.

I've just bought Ellie some scrumptious new pocket nappies - a particular type of reuseable nappy where you "stuff" the pocket full of booster pads, and it's ready to go - the outer part is plastic backed so that you don't need a wrap over the top. Once you've pre-stuffed the nappies after washing, they are as ready to go as a disposable. One of them is covered in a really soft and cuddly fabric. I'll have to get a photo of her in it, it's adorable!

The windows

Well, the windows and doors are in - all of them! Some great, some not so great but ultimately, they are all going to be good and we're very happy. The install so far has been a bit of a hit and miss affair, not quite like any ordinary installation due to the slightly decrepit and bent nature of the house! The patio doors are cool, the front stable door is even better and the new dining room window makes it a very light room now. The problems that we have suffered revolve around the brickwork in the back of the house not being perfectly level due to the movement the whole house has suffered from. The bedroom 3 window is half a bubble out on the spirit level yet it is the kitchen window that looks out of horizontal! This is also due to the fact there was no lintel above the kitchen window and a lot of the brickwork sank and sagged. To end it all we are currently having it all patched back up and the builder may try and use some skinny bricks to try and blend it all back in. Ultimately I think it is going to look weird regardless of the remedies we try, but that is the nature of the beast I suppose?

I want to see the house, now!

Well, I spoke to the builder, Tony, earlier.

He tells me that Banbury have done a cracking job installing the windows and doors. He was impressed with the way they look and likes the light oak finish. I know it’s a fake wood finish, but I think it’s going to look great. Tony asked us to get a few more lintels delivered asap so things are moving on nicely. I’ll try and squeeze a visit to the house tomorrow as I can’t wait to see how she looks and maybe to enter via a door that fits in the frame and actually offers some security!

Sam and I went up the other night to extract nails from the ceiling joists. Fun work for an hour and a quarter before the light faded. I hear that a labourer has been up there today and he’s finished all the ceilings and has started to remove a bit more rubbish from anywhere and everywhere.

Mum and Dad said that they would sort me a out a decent size shed for my birthday too which is good. I think it’ll be a 13 x 10 ft metal Yardmaster job, very nice indeed. Here's hoping it will be big enough to accommodate the contents of our shed and garage at Woodhall Close.

Hopefully i'll be able to take some pics tomorrow or at the weekend and we can beging to see how the house will look for the next period of its life.

Thats all for now, more news soon...

First Tooth!

It's official - our little girl is growing up! Today her first tooth finally broke free!

I'd been wondering for the past week or so whether Ellie was teething because she's been grizzly, both during the day and during the night. She's also been dribbling like you wouldn't believe, and trying to stuff her fist in her mouth too, which she hasn't done since she was a couple of weeks old.

So, hopefully, now the tooth has broken through, it might not be so sore and disrupt Ellie (and us!!) during the night. Having said that, tonight will be the first night that she sleeps in her cot in her room for the whole night. I'll miss lying in bed listening to her breathing but I certainly won't miss her grizzling in the night! She's just getting too big for her Moses basket so I think she'll be happier in her cot - it's where she has most of her naps and she's quite content in there.

Decision Time!

Well it looks like Jono and I are going to have to make the decision to put Ellie in her cot at night (in her own room), rather than the Moses basket in our room. She just seems to be getting too big for her basket and is waking in the night quite a lot. I have been putting her in her room when she's been waking up and it seems to suit her much better in there, as she has so much more room!

Although it's a real pain having to get up 4 or 5 times a night to settle her back to sleep, I'm going to really miss going to bed and listening to her breathing whilst I go to sleep. What a dilemma! I was expecting to have her in our room for much longer than this but unfortunately we can't fit her cot in our room so looks like she's going to have to go in her own room. Poor Mummy!

A week 12 photo

Well, we reached the magic goalpost that is week 12, well done all of us! I must say things are better than they were a few moons ago with new challenges and things to learn and do.

Here is a a week 12 photo (which I suppose is her 13th week really but who's counting?).

How's the house doing?

Well as usual things are busy on the home, work and new house front. The series of photos here shows a bit of the first fix. We've got the new stud walls up and the electrician has been and gone. On the left here you can see the porch from the kitchen.





Other news includes the discovery of a little bit of woodworm in some of the downstairs ceiling joists. Its nothing major and in fact the electrician commented that they are still as hard as nails, probably because they are oak!

On the right here you can see some upstairs studwork looking into the bathroom from bedroom 3.



The plumbers have started their first fix too, no photos as of yet but they'll be done soon. They are going to split their work each side of the damp proof plastering as that might be a tricky job with pipes all over the place.

On the left here is bedroom 2. You can see the landing cupboard we have asked for and in the background there is a blank corridor that we have created that will eventually house the stairs leading up into the loft. That'll be a long way off though!

Next week we've got the windows and doors going in so we're really going to see some differences. There will be some replacement lintels and a bit of brickwork to get those guys in as planned! Hopefully the B&Q insulation delivery will have been made too. I got a great deal on 15 rolls of 14 metre squared 100mm thick insulation. It was half price, all that for the bargain price of approx £240. I think we might be looking at the water next week too, we'll have to dig a trench for that, all the way from the corner of the property, round the back of the house and into the kitchen.

Anyway, half a day off work tomorrow to have a big sort out of the next load of jobs with Tony. More news to follow...

Week 11

So, tomorrow we are going to reach the magic 12 week age. I'm not sure what this will mean in reality but when we had a few problems with colic etc quite early on, everyone said that she's grow out of it by 12 weeks! She actually got over it much earlier than that though.

Here are some photos from the past week...

Here's one of Ellie looking cute in her teddy coat, on a walk with Daddy down by the weir one evening.








And here's yet another of those changing mat moments - looking adoringly at Mummy...


And here are a couple from this evening. What a cheeky little monkey she is!