DorkySon and I made some pretty good chocolate brownies yesterday. I turned away from him to stick them in the oven, and when I turned back I found this.
Apparently licking the spoon is not enough these days. Much more effective to just shovel fistfuls of uncooked dough into your mouth by hand.
I can honestly say that I have never been one of those parents who express regret about the passing of time. It has given me great joy to see my baby turn into a toddler, and my toddler turn into a preschooler.
I want DorkySon to grow up. I want him to become more confident and independent of me, to do things on his own without my help.
Perhaps it has been easier because he is naturally a quiet and fairly reserved boy, and I am more used to giving him gentle, encouraging nudges to try new things, rather than trying to hold him back from activities that he’s not yet ready for.
That said; all his big developmental stages have started on his say-so rather than mine. He indicated very clearly that he wanted to stop breastfeeding at 9 months. He decided when he was ready to start using a potty, and when he wanted the bars taken off his cot.
The next big thing on the horizon is probably going to be dropping his nap. I feel incredibly lucky to have a three year old who still reliably takes an hour’s nap after lunch every day, but I am very aware that this time next year DorkySon will have started school, and it won’t be possible to keep that going.
On the spur of the moment, when I dropped DorkySon at nursery yesterday, I decided to go for a walk instead of going straight home. The light is so beautiful on these autumn mornings that it seems a shame to waste it.
Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera so these are just phone quality photos, but they still give a sense of what a lovely half hour I had ambling through the fields.
A few days ago I did a post over on the Blog4Charity site about my blogging friends Michelle and Jen who are currently in Ethiopia with the One Campaign.
Jen (who is a co-founder of BritMums) and Michelle (who blogs as Mummy from the Heart) have both been hugely supportive and encouraging in my short time as a blogger, and I’m really pleased that I can help tell their stories to a wider audience.
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Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I lie in bed and try to remember the exact layout of houses that I’ve lived in. I’ll imagine myself walking around them, picking out as many small details as I can.
There are four that I can remember with real clarity; the house on Harris where I spent all of my early childhood, my Grandpa’s house in Staffordshire, where I used to spend lots of holidays, the farmhouse in the Borders where I spent most of my teenage years, and the house in Edinburgh that I lived in until a year ago.
There are other places that I can remember a few details of. There was a white cottage on Lewis where I lived with my Mum for a year, and then a townhouse in the Borders where I also spent about year. And of course, there were several flats in Edinburgh where I lived as a student. But the memories of those places are a bit fuzzier.
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