Uh oh
I was trying to give babe one of those angled fringes but I think I may have, in the interests of stopping her hair getting into her eyes, cut her fringe too far to the sides. Like to the start of her ears. So now she may get, instead, the angled dreaded bowl cut. Sorry, baby. She did howl when she looked at herself in the mirror before her bath. But maybe she was just tired. Worse come to worst Mama will fork out for a proper haircut at overpriced baby toy shop on King's Road, promise!

1 yr, 2 wks

Boo's walking!
Have I mentioned she's been taking steps - unaided - for a few days now? I can't remember if I blogged, about a month ago, about her taking a tentative step towards me from the safety gate, entirely unaided. I'd love to say that was her first step but Alex didn't see it and I've begun to get the sneaking suspicion the nursery people are clever enough not to note milestones like that in baby's diary so that parents aren't devastated to find they've missed it.

Pragmatically though I've realised that these milestone moments, like giving birth in movies, take a lot longer in real life and never all happen in one go anyway.

So she's been cruising round our sofa and the safety gate for a long time now and, these last two weeks, has delighted in particular in being led around the room. As long as we've got her hands in ours she can toddle round the living room until our backs give out.

And after our visits to Blue Kangaroo last weekend, where she loved the walker in the baby playpen, we decided we might as well get her one. So today we bought her a little walker, which is a red cart with a blue handle. She's walked up and down the living room a few times tonight, all with a big smile on her face. We're hoping to take it to the nearby playground tomorrow, where she'll have more room to move around.

Best of all though, if she's standing up now with one of us, and you point her in the direction of the other person and say "Can you go to eg daddy? Go to daddy!" she'll grin with delight and, taking very quick steps, bear down in that person's direction, so that she frequently buries her head in their chest. She'll also come to you if she's pulled herself up on something else and you sit, a few steps away. Oh she's the cutest.

1 yr, 2 wks

Cap on, cap off
Boo's latest thing is putting caps on bottles and trying to work out how come her shirts stick together when we button them. Both are great fun to watch her doing.

She's very proud of herself if she can take a cap off and put it back on. So she claps. And we clap. But she has the patience of a gnat so if she can't take the cap off, she flings the entire container down. And if she can take it off, she immediately wants to put it on again.

If she can't manage to get it to stay on, she flings the cap down with an exasperated wail. And if she manages to get the cap to stay on, but then can't get it off again, it's fling the container, arch her back, flop backwards with a cry of frustration and then thump her heels in unison into the floor a few times, before heaving a big sigh of resignation and lying there with her upside-down U mouth.

I keep thinking I should be admonishing her for such a temper but most times I am turning away and shaking silently so she doesn't see or hear me laughing.

Buttons
Now that she has the hang of holding up her feet for me to put socks and shoes on (she loves me taking them halfway off too so she can pull them off herself) and putting her arms through sleeves, she's starting to take notice of buttons.

Yesterday night, after I buttoned her into her PJs, she looked, for the first time, in astonishment at her buttoned-together shirt. And then she began pulling parts of her t-shirt together and - you could see her mind ticking - holding them tightly together, while wearing a faintly puzzled look. Like 'why aren't they sticking together?' Tonight I tried to show her how it works with poppers on another shirt, but she only kept pushing the shirt out of the way so it wouldn't get into her line of sight of her own finger-buttoned shirt.

That kept her occupied a good while.

No evolution
She still says no but now you can see the euro/chav influence. She doesn't just say 'no'. It's 'nooaaw' or 'naay'. What's hilarious is the definite tone with which she says it when responding to questions like. 'Boo, do you want your milk?' 'Naaw.' Even when she actually does want it and will open her mouth for her bottle in the next second. 'Boo shall we go take a bath now?' 'Naaaw.' You have to hear it.

Suddenly visions of my child speaking like Vicky Pollard are chilling me to the bone.

Boo's first haircut ... Before and after.
Wanted to trim her sides too but she won't stay still at all.


Boo's beau









Here is baby's little nursery sweetheart, Sam. He loves her, I love him. Boo lets herself be hugged and kissed daily. He is such a little cutie. Even though he keeps referring to Isabel as "he". First language is Czech you see, so not completely au fait with English yet. He picked some baby playdough for Boo and a lovely violet t-shirt for her birthday presents.

My current favourite t-shirt on Boo... and my nudie rudie baby.

Pictures I've been meaning to post for ages

Eat your heart out, Jackson Pollock









Terror has a toothbrush
Babe has just about grasped the concept of brushing her teeth. She chews the brush most of the time and eschews the silicone one, which is designed to clean teeth as it's chewed on, of course, but worst of all is that she's decided she doesn't need her teeth cleaned as much as we do. And the luckless parent nearest to her when she has a toothbrush in hand often has an enforced session of entire-mouth-scrubbing with her little toothbrush. Which she also uses to scrub the carpets and walls. Nice.










She's learning to climb the stairs
It's a little worrying because the more confident she gets the higher up she'll climb before she calls out to one of us to supervise her climbing. Most of the time we're already there anyway but there have been one or two times when I've been cooking or something and suddenly heard a bit of a thud followed by a wail and found that Boo's slipped off the rather steep steps.

I love the way she comes down the stairs though. At first she kept going down head-first and I had to keep a good hold on the back of her dungarees. Then after about three tries, she suddenly started swinging her feet round first, bum-shuffling to the edge of each step and letting herself plop down. Now she gets me to hold her hands and then totters down the steps or slides down on her bum from one to the next. If you say "plop!" really loudly each time she laughs like mad.














We're going to buy her a masak-masak set soon
Because the kepoh loves feeding herself and feeding us. Once she's had her fill of any meal, she'll start proffering her food on a spoon to either Alex or me and ordering us, very loudly, to "Ummm!" And if you ignore her, she'll only yell more loudly, "UUUUUMMMM". Once you've stopped laughing you can only capitulate.










We went to the zoo this weekend
Baby's stint in the hospital and Alex tweaking some back muscle while there has put paid to our planned beach holiday this weekend so we visited Battersea children's zoo instead, which was really lovely. Babe wasn't hugely impressed by the animals but did at least study most of them with some interest. I think we liked the lemurs best.














Towards the end of the trip she spotted something she really, really liked. And made urgent efforts to get us to take her to it, gesturing with her hand and, when mama and papa were slow to respond, flinging her entire body in that direction.













NB I've added some pictures to the posts below this as well.

1 yr, 1 wk

So where were we?
Right this is going to have to be a whizz-through instead of the long post I originally had, damn fat fingered typing. In the weekend before baby's birthday we:

• Met Uncle Marcus who visited from Kenya and gave baby some lion shoes
• Met the crazy Taiwanese lady, her husband and drooly son, James (I've concluded that she's not really nuts or anything, just what we used to be before years in London warped us: friendly. She'll learn - she's only been here a year and a a bit)
• Attended her beau's birthday party at Krazy Kids in Reading
  

She had a ball at Sam's fourth birthday party even though we arrived an hour late because I was convinced I knew where it was when I didn't. Krazy Kids (god the spelling drives me nuts; it's almost as bad as Baoz) is a soft-play place. You pay about £3 or thereabouts then get to deposit your child in a big padded cage with slides and ball rooms. There are seats and newspapers and coffee for the adults and the kids get to run themselves ragged in the cage.

It's a brilliant idea: you get to chat with other adults and your child exhausts themselves with so much fun they are completely knocked out after dinner and fall asleep leaving you a quiet evening. I think I would willingly pay double the price. Except of course with baby one of us needs to go in with her. So it doesn't completely work but she (and I) still had a lot of fun going down the big slide in the middle of the whole structure.












Sam was in that state of high excitement you get with kids when they are having a really good time. So we got to give him quick hugs and kisses as he whizzed past on his way to the next big adventure here and there but that was it.

So then next weekend was baby's birthday; she - we hope - had a good time too and we spent the Sunday after recovering.

So then this week we figured we'd be taking it easy and heading for our long weekend break, planned all of the summer. We thought we'd go down to Chesil Beach in Dorset and spend a few lazy days ambling down the Jurassic Coast and walking through the New Forest. Unfortunately that's not quite how it turned out.

Baby revisits C&W
Monday I noticed babe had gotten a bit of a cold - runny nose but no fever. Tuesday she had a bit of a cough and more snot. Then on Wednesday, when I went to get her dressed, I noticed she was breathing quite quickly and that her stomach was working its way in and out the whole time.

Was quite disconcerted but baby appeared not to be distressed though she looked quite tired when woken. But I was waking her a little earlier than normal and she had quite a snotty cold - snot caked about her little nose - so I figured that was possibly why she looked so out of sorts. Spent ten minutes agonising about whether to take her to the doctor first or to go to work first and then leave early to take her to the doctor. In the end decided on the latter course of action.

After an hour at work though, the nursery called to say she was really quite listless and not herself at all and that she was still breathing very quickly. So we went back to London and headed to our GP. Except of course the traffic was so awful we only got there after emergency clinic was over. They recommended we go to Chelsea and Westminster's paediatric ward again.

Having been before in a panic over baby's viral infection and had quite a good experience there despite waiting about for about three hours, I decided that would probably be the best thing.

They were really good. As soon as I mentioned she was breathing quickly to reception in the A&E waiting room, they hurried me down to the paediatric ward where baby was seen to immediately.

By this time she'd perked up quite a bit from her reported listlessness at nursery and I was frankly getting a bit annoyed, thinking they'd been a bit panicky again. Her oxygen levels were checked and were fine at 98% and then they listened to her wheezy breathing and told me she probably had bronchiolitis, caused by a viral infection.

The only complaint I have about C&W - and really I wouldn't say I was complaining, it's more of a suggestion - is that they kind of tend to tell you waht is happening right now, not what you can expect next.

So at noon, I was expecting baby to be seen, to maybe be given some advice and meds and then to have a quiet afternoon with her hopefully napping a lot. At 1pm though she was being given puffs of an inhaler through the cutest little air chamber mask with a teddy on it demonstrating what was going on with the whole inhaler-chamber construction.

At 2pm she had a feed and fell asleep, having kicked up an absolute fit when she found the mask held down over her face by a nurse, with mummy having straight-jacketed her in a blanket. At 2.45pm she woke up, was given some steroid solution to help dilate her bronchioles and help her breathe better. The doctor came along and pronounced her breathing much better - it was definitely less wheezy and much less quick, but her little stomach was still working it a bit.

So she asked if I could try giving baby her inhaler - see if I could do it back home. When I'd chased a loudly protesting baby round the bed for about a minute, she hmmed and then suggested that we keep baby there overnight just so they could keep an eye on her and because the trained nurses could then give her the inhaler more easily than I probably would.

Next thing you know we're in the hospital's Neptune ward. Nurse Sarah, who attended to us in the daytime, was really nice and looked very sympathetic but I said it was OK, I've always had a good feeling about C&W since babe was born there. And I was right to, I think. We were shown to baby's little cot and before you could say ah-choo, another nurse had shown up with four huge toys for babe to play with.

She was also overjoyed to discover that, once you raised the sides of her cot, she could cruise all round her little bed. And she remained overjoyed until the stream of doctors and nurses began. Nurses had to strap a monitor to her foot to check her oxygen levels, doctors had to keep listening to her chest, and - worst of all - she had to have the inhaler over her mouth and nose every three hours.

Reinforcements arrive at 7.45pm in the form of daddy with baby's bottles, pyjamas and toothbrush for me. We had a quick dinner at Carluccio's across the road and then returned to the ward, where we tried unsuccessfully to get baby to sleep before the next inhaler session at 10pm.

Didn't work and baby screamed the ward down in a red-faced fit of outrage. So I suggested we do the next ones in a separate room or else the other babies in our ward - and there were at least four others in our room - would keep being woken.

It didn't help that all of them seemed strapped to similar oxygen level monitors, all of which beeped very loudly when their levels fell below 91% - something which happened all through the night.

Poor baby, after a while she stopped fighting so hard to get away from the mask but would look up at me through her streaming tears and red eyes and cry "Aaamama, mamaaa, maamaaaa", all muffled through the air chamber. Nurse Barbara thought this very sweet and I suppose it is, really, if your heart isn't breaking at the sound.

Then after her 2am inhaler session, nurse Barbara decided she needed to have oxygen pumped into her nose because her oxygen levels kept dropping. First she tried to put the soft rubber prongs into baby's nose. BIG screaming bout. So she left baby to calm down, then returned with another nurse. As soon as baby saw them entering our cubicle she began crying.

And I frankly didn't blame her and was starting to question my wisdom of agreeing to her being hospitalised overnight since it seemed very unlikely she'd get any of the rest she no doubt needed to get better.

But the two nurses managed to hold her head steady, strap on some tape to protect her cheeks and then insert the oxygen tube into her nostrils and strap it to her cheeks. It took some doing and yet more hellavu yelling.

The other parents in the ward had the patience of saints. Their children were probably all deaf. I don't know how they slept through it otherwise. I only every heard one little boy next door wake crying once.

Anyway after much grief, once the oxygen tube was in place, I released baby's arms to stroke her forehead and she immediately and decisively reached for the tubes and yanked them off her face, screaming in anger still.

At this point I think nurse Barbara gave a big sigh and left the cubicle to consult with colleagues about what to do with the badass baby in bed seven.

I decided then that it would probably be easier if I just sat near her bed awake all night and held a little oxygen mask close to her nose and mouth instead. (Because of course she wouldn't let us put that on her either.)

And it turned out it was because each time baby turned away from it, the machine would beep its maddeningly loud beep, wake me, and I'd just crawl up from my mattress next to her cot and rearrange it.

And so the night passed in fits of sleep and beeping. I was really tired after the 5am inhaler session and just wanted to crawl into my mattress next to baby's cot with her in my arms. She quite liked that too I think because she fell asleep really quickly that time. Though maybe she was just as exhausted as I was.

Nurse Barbara was very nice. When I asked if the oxygen mask would reach my mattress, so I could just have her sleep next to me she said sadly it wouldn't but she'd check baby's oxygen levels first and if they were OK I could have her on the mattress. Sadly babe's oxygen levels were still faltering around the 87% mark so back into the cot she went.

I was so zonked I think I missed baby waking up early. I was vaguely aware of the nurses coming to her cot and fussing with her but the next I knew was baby's usual wake-up call to me.

Very loudly and imperiously: "Maaa!"

And I opened my eyes to see her standing up in her cot, looking about wonderingly. Someone had turned on the little TV screen over bed to the CBeebies channel and she was hanging onto the side of the cot, bouncing a little up and down on it and looking very pleased with herself.

Nurse Barbara came round with the good news that baby's oxygen levels had actually improved past the 91% mark (and so no beeping) in her last two observations of the morning, despite the fact that the gas mask had rolled away from her face without us noticing.

Earlier in the night I'd been warned that we might have to stay another night because baby had needed to be given oxygen. Normally, the nurses said, the doctors might decide that they wanted her to stay one more night to check she was OK on her own.

Come daytime though, baby'd obviously decided she'd had enough and was looking quite in the pink of health again bart the occasional wheezy cough and raspy drawing of breath. She bounced around the playroom in the ward, flinging colouring pencils across the floor, messing about with all the toys, waving and smiling at the nurses and doctors - she particularly liked nurse Sarah - and looking quite her normal self.

She did enough of this for the attending Dr Hannah to decide - hurrah! - she could be released following a successful demonstration of inhaler application by Alex and myself. Sneaky Alex - who'd said he'd be working from home later that evening - started off saying he would do the evil gas mask bit but then chickened out and just held baby in check while EVIL MAMA did the gassing.

It was obvious after this last episode in the hospital though that baby wasn't actually suffering an discomfort from it because, despite the usual protest, at the end of it, when we removed the mask from her face and praised her extravagantly for her good(ish) behaviour, nurse Sarah started clapping and so of course did Alex and I. One second she was scowling, cheeks aflame. Next she was clapping her own hands, big cheeky smile on her face, making all of us laugh.

And so we went home.

We only just ate the loaf of bread I'd bought that afternoon - intending it for baby's tea on Thursday - tonight.

Her breathing is fine and we've cut back the inhaler sessions to twice a day as instructed. So grandparents: don't panic, all is fine with the chubby one!

1 yr, 2 days

Boo's first birthday
Thank god it's going to be easy keeping track of her age again, haha. Anyway baby had a lovely birthday (we hope). I think she did because she appeared to enjoy quite a lot of her time being bounced up and down on various laps at the party held in her honour. Some very, very naughty aunties and uncles also ignored our stricture not to buy her anything so she was awash in presents as well.

But she obviously needs time to get used to the concept because when Elaine gave her her three little presents from her, Vik and Sophie, baby kept trying to give them back. I blame Vik for instituting his pass-the-parcel-confuse-the-baby game where he kept giving and taking things away from her rapidly just beforehand.

The best present had to be from Weif and Lucy: A bottle of Isabel Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, 2005. Shame it can't be kept though so we will just have to drink it for her and tell her what it was like when she gets old enough to drink wine.

Note to baby: When you're grown up and all these uncles and aunties tell you how they saw you as a baby you'd better smile and say thank you as sweetly as you can! We had people coming from one side of town all the way to our place out west in the boondocks just to say hi before leaving again for their evening engagements back in the centre. Love is commuting to Chiswick, sweetie.

So what did we do?
Not much actually. Alex took the previous day off to prepare, good man with too much leave, so on the day itself he just did a bit more prep while I watched baby. Managed to run out to get some new DVDs so we could record her as well.

And I'm glad I did because her face was a complete picture when we brought out the cake, dimmed the lights and lit the candle. One minute poor baby's crawling about on the floor, the next, she's facing one candle in a darkened room full of adults singing happy birthday to her and laughing because her mouth is agog, and she's looking at all of us like we've gone bananas.









I'm hoping anyway to get round to editing the video clip and then posting it on our Virgin webspace so might link to it later!

Baby did alright till about 9.30pm when she'd had enough. By that time most people had left and Daddy put her to bed without much fuss.

ARGGH have just lost my last 20 minutes of posting dammit dammit.

Package from indulgent uncle and auntie in Singapore