On Monday Gwen had her last ballet class. It was a twice-weekly class at the community centre with 3-6 other little kids and oh my god did she love it. It was so adorable too, all these tiny kids concentrating and trying so hard to get the positions and movements right. I don’t think Gwen is ready for “real” ballet class at the dance school yet, but I’ve already picked out another community centre class for her to start in September.
The closer Nicky gets to being one year old the more I’m surprised by how fast his first year is going. This is so silly but with the two girls born in early November in my mind that’s the “birthday month,” so September seems like too soon for him to be one!
July has been a pretty epic month for milestones with Nicky. He finally graduated from army crawling (on his belly) to crawling crawling (on his hands and knees). He still drops down to his belly when he gets tired or wants to put on a burst of speed (he’s so fast!). He also started pulling himself up into a standing position and can climb on top of low furniture (like my little mushroom table). We lowered the mattress support in his crib and have had to do another “layer” of baby-proofing for all the new things he can reach.
He’s growing in leaps and bounds and is now about 75cm tall and weighs a whopping 10kg (approximately). He’s unsurprisingly tall, so much so that I actually gave some of his old clothes as hand-me-downs to a friend’s baby who just turned one! Another friend gave me a big box of her one-year-old grandson’s hand-me-downs and almost everything was already too small.
The most progress he made this month though was with teeth. TEETH. SO many teeth. In his 9 month post I believe I said he was getting three new teeth, bring his total to five. Well, he did get those three, and another, and another, and then this past weekend, ANOTHER. This brings his total tooth count to eight, and getting six teeth in five weeks? Seems excessive.
Even with all the teething his personality continues to delight us. Nicky is such a happy, friendly baby, with smiles and giggles for everyone.
At the end of June I was offered a raised garden box for myself & the kids. My neighbourhood had received a grant to build some for people who can’t access any of the community gardens for whatever reason, so it was totally free and even came with all the dirt it needed! I’m notoriously terrible at gardening but I figured WHAT THE HECK and said yes. The garden box was built and left in the part of the yard I’d specified, and over the long weekend Gwen and I went to pick out some plants. We got two tomato plants, a yellow pepper, a green pepper, one pumpkin, a strawberry, a blueberry, sage, parsley and chives. I put Gwen in charge of watering them and she’s very diligent about doing it every day.
We’ve had our garden for two weeks and amazingly, not only have I managed not to kill any, some are even starting to bear fruit! The pumpkin seems like it might not be long for this world, and I have my doubts about the blueberry (which is basically a single twig with some leaves that squirrels have dug up twice, but I dearly want it to live and grow because it is actually a PINK blueberry bush) but everything else is growing and thriving. The tomatoes especially, but the yellow pepper looks like it’s ready to blow up, and the sage and chives are doing well enough to use in meals already.
At the beginning of July, there was a huge change here at our house, and the difference has been like night and day… because it literally is! After fourteen years Taylor is no longer working nights. This was a change I pushed for, by which I mean I sent him a series of texts with all the awful health problems you incur from working night shifts. He put in a request to switch to days, and we were expecting it to take some time to get approved (we figured they’d need to find a new night person to replace him) but to our surprise the change was effective the very next week. He’s been on days for two weeks now and it’s been really great.
Now instead of being home alone with the kids in the mornings, he’s here so one of us can get up with the kids while the other sleeps in- or even goes for a run! That’s right, I FINALLY got some use out of all the new workout clothes & shoes I bought at the beginning of the year. We’ve been taking turns so I can go running Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and he goes Tuesday and Thursday. It’s also nice that one of us can take the dogs out while the other stays at home with the kids because me trying to get Gwen and Nicky dressed and fed and out to walk the dogs before I start work at 8am was NOT easy!
He’s working 8-4ish, so he usually gets home a little earlier than I would wake him up in the evenings, which means he has more time to spend with the kids then as well, or help with dinner. He no longer has to go to bed early Sunday afternoons before his Monday shift and can spend the whole weekend with us. And of course the best part is that instead of him leaving at 11pm to go to the office all night, he gets to sleep in the bed with me at night (which means he also gets more sleep). We’ve never slept in the bed at night together for more than two weeks in a row for the entire 10 1/2 years we’ve been together, so it’s pretty amazing.
Of course, such a big change coming so suddenly has not been without its upheavals as we get used to our new family schedule. Now instead of Taylor being home during the day to look after the daycare kids in a pinch when we have doctor’s appointments, dance classes, or speech therapy, I have to figure out how to do it by myself. Gwen has ballet class two afternoons a week, a class I chose specifically because it was during naptime so Taylor could easily supervise the sleeping children while I took Gwen alone. Now I have to take her, and Nicky, and the daycare kids with me. It’s not far, about a 15-20 minute walk, but when I have three or four kids under five with me instead of just one… it takes a bit of doing.
However, none of that matters if it means I get to spend time with my husband during NORMAL hours, and for years longer than I would have been able to if he kept working nights. Working nights for so long can increase your risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, mental illnesses, early onset dementia and certain cancers, so as I like to remind Taylor, by pushing for this change, I saved his life!
Nicky is nine months old today! It’s also 39 weeks and 1 day since he was born, so he’s now existed in the world longer than he’s existed in my body, so good job, Nicky. Way to be alive 🙂
Nicky is very mobile and his army-crawling has reached incredible speed. He will pop up onto his hands and knees to rock back and forth but hasn’t yet mastered actual crawling yet. He can now getting into and out of a seated position on his own with no head bonking, and has started pulling himself up into a kneeling position on the couch and toy shelf, which he delights in emptying all over the floor.
He is definitely getting at least two teeth on the top, possibly three. It’s been slow going and while he continues to be mostly ok with teething his emotions are a little hair-trigger at the moment. He’s liable to go from happy and smiling to screaming and crying at the drop of a hat, and he’s been waking up at night more frequently.
His favourite toys are his foxy & dolly that he has in his crib. He is still loving every kind of solid food we give him; this month it’s been a lot of multigrain cheerios, grilled chicken, broccoli stems, cucumbers and bell peppers. And donuts, I guess!
(don’t worry, I didn’t let him have all of these)
I should have posted this yesterday but I forgot how many days there were in May? My brain is just straight up mush these days y’all.
Nicky is eight months old! At eight months he is a busy little buddy and army crawls around the house at great speeds and sits unassisted for long periods. He eats everything I give him with his two teeth, especially enjoying broccoli stems, chicken and sliced pears. After a few weeks of having a mixed-up schedule he is back to napping twice a day and sleeping through the night, although we have been putting him down a little later in the evenings. He loves spending time outside in the Ergo, in his stroller or on a blanket on the ground, but he HATES car trips and yells through them non-stop. He doesn’t have a favourite toy at the moment (any toy he can put in his mouth will do just fine) but loves playing Round and Round the Garden and being sung to.
Last year when we visited Taylor’s family over May long weekend we took Gwen to a small fair and since then she’s been obsessed. We usually go to the Fair at the PNE in the summer and go on a couple rides, but last August I was so pregnant & we were so busy we didn’t manage to do it, so Gwen has been waiting a whole year to go to a fair again. We went on Saturday and she was SO EXCITED. She’d been talking non-stop about going on a ferris wheel so I was happy to see they had one, and that she was tall enough! I took her on the ferris wheel and she went on a couple kiddie rides with her cousins and by herself and had a blast. She probably could have done more (and definitely wanted to try the bumper cars) but it was getting late so we had to leave. I’m happy that I will have someone brave enough to go on rides with me at the PNE this year though (Taylor and Sym are total chickens and literally will not go on a single ride with me).
Nicky did not go on any rides but it was incredibly hot that day so he very much enjoyed eating ice from my sno cone.
I have been confused all week about what day it is. Gwen has speech therapy on Tuesdays and so on Tuesday I knew it was Tuesday, but I thought it was Wednesday. When we got home (from her Tuesday speech therapy appointment) Sym was here and I asked her “what are you doing here???” because on Wednesdays after school she goes to her dad’s. Then yesterday Gwen had a hair appointment and I knew it was on Wednesday because I scheduled it for Wednesday, but on our way home we stopped to get a burger for her dinner and Taylor asked if I wanted one I said no, because I thought it was Thursday and we always get poutine on Thursdays so why would I spoil that with a burger???? But it was WEDNESDAY and there was no poutine and I also missed my opportunity to have a burger. I also thought today was gonna be Friday and that I only had one more day of work left this week, how cruel.
Anyway, Gwen’s haircut. She told me she wanted to “see her neck” (I think she was very inspired by Sym’s cut a few weeks back) and after a couple talks where I explained that once it was cut if she wanted it to be long again it would take a long time to grow again, I made her an appointment. She was so well behaved at the salon and I can’t get over how cute the result is! She loves it so far as well.
(Those curls aren’t natural btw, she requested our stylist “curl her hair a lil bit,” again like Sym.)
Gwen woke me up this morning before my alarm went off, to ask me if it was still my special day. I told her no, Mother’s Day was just one day, but that we could still have a nice day today. She told me “yeah, we can build your new Lego together!” (I got the Lego Disney Castle this weekend and she really likes to help me build it, which is good because with over 4,000 pieces it’s going to take me FIVE-EVER to finish it).
My Mother’s Day was very nice and relaxing, I slept in a little (what a sorry state this world is when sleep is seen as a treat, though) and then watched Guardians of the Galaxy* with Gwen while Taylor made stuffed French Toast with strawberry compote for brunch. Later, after he’d gone to bed Gwen and I started building the Lego castle, and played in the backyard with Nicky. In the evening we got a babysitter (SUCH LUXURY) and went to the movies- to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Yes, I watched three movies this weekend; two were Guardians of the Galaxy and the third was its sequel.
* With Gwen’s speech therapy, we are working of F, S at the start of a word when followed by another consonant, S at the end of a word, and two-syllable words where she drops the middle consonant. Gwen gets bored/frustrated/overwhelmed if we do too much at a time so I’ve been incorporating it into all of our games and activities, including watching this movie (which she is obsessed with). Stuff like… “That’s Drax. Drak-ssssssssss. Drax says the Sakaaran are paper people. Pay-Per. Pee-Puhl. That’s Gamora, she has purple streaks in her hair. Pur-Puhl. Sssss-treak-sssss. Groot is drinking out of the fountain. Fffffff-ountain. That boy goes by the name of Starlord. Ssssss-tarlord.”
I ordered these dolls for Gwen & Nicky in NOVEMBER lol glad they arrived in time for something.
Because Easter weekend fell the week before we were having our floors replaced, we were able to celebrate with the kids. We had to finish packing and get out of the house on Sunday so any kind of special meal or Easter egg hunt just wasn’t happening. So instead, we did it this past weekend. I bought a bunch of Easter stuff on clearance (really to best part of the whole thing) and after brunch Taylor took the kids on a dog walk-slash-Pokemon hunt while I set up in the backyard. I laid out a blanket for Nicky to roll around on and hid candy, toys and other treats (the Easter Bunny brought Sym a giftcard to Forever 21, so modern) around the backyard. Gwen in particular had a BLAST hunting for all the candy-filled eggs hidden in the flower gardens.
Historically I haven’t done an Easter egg hunt for my kids (except for one year when we did one with a tiny Gwen at the beach), because hiding chocolate around a house full of idiot dogs is… not a great idea. Usually a basket of treats just appears in their rooms when they are sleeping. But It was so much fun I think from now on we’re going to do it every year.