I could get used to Alex putting the girls to bed on a Saturday. This means I get to knit in peace - see the results of this productivity below? - while I watch the remains of X Factor. Sad, I know, but what the hell else is there on a Saturday that only requires two brain cells to keep track of?
So we've finally kind of almost settled in the house. There's a routine, and I'm still revelling in the sheer space the living room has. Also in the fact that we no longer have to push through the rack we had in the hallway of the last house. Even if our front door is also slightly awkwardly spaced.
The door is right in front of the stairs (ignore the feng shui, parents) and so when you try and open it, it bumps into everyone who is right behind putting on shoes and jackets and things. Something that should be sorted once we've got the shelves we want built in the living room, so we can unpack the remaining boxes in it and put a shoe bench under the window.
We still have to visit Ikea. Again. Argh. But at least Izzy is very excited by the prospect of Smaland so hopefully next time one of us will spend the hour or two with the two of them in it and the other can just whizz through and pick up crap.
I figure if nothing else the time I have to take off to cover Izzy's Christmas holidays should be put to good use... assuming we can get that damned storage in place before then.
Roz's grommets
Roz's grommet surgery went well. Although one of the grommets has already fallen out. The nursery girls spotted it in her bib, which was good going considering it's the size of a pen nib. The poor bub has had some discharge coming out of one ear, which is perfectly normal, and now has to take antibiotics for it.
Other than that though she's behaving perfectly normally and I don't think it's entirely my imagination that she's pronouncing words more clearly. The first day we were back she said 'please' - as in really please, not just her usual please tone - and 'downstairs' and I could actually hear the p and d sounds, whereas we normally just get the long vowel sounds in words.
So bribing her to have to take another course of medicine is fun.
Because I probably didn't mention it earlier but Roz went through a bout of constipation severe enough to scare her into now clenching her bum every time she needs a poo. It is driving me absolutely round the bend because we were getting three days of clenching followed by one very desperate day of much wailing with poos. So now I'm dosing her regularly with lactulose.
Because I have more or less given up trying to get the monkey to actually eat vegetables or fruit on a regular basis. When she feels like it, she will. And when she doesn't, you would sooner get blood from a stone. So now she is praised extravagantly when she does a poo and I think I am going to have to ask the nursery to put her on a vegetarian diet.
Last night I cooked up a huge pot of peperonata and froze cubes of it. I should have pureed it before but I suppose it should be easy enough to mash up on the spot and mix it into whatever she will be eating. And it will have to be mash given that she will stop to pick a sprout off a piece of sushi, or pull wilted spinach off pasta.
Chatter
Roz is also starting to talk a lot. If she's playing by herself, you'll hear her sometimes chatting away as if to someone else. In fact some mornings on the way to school and nursery I feel like pleading with the two of them to be quiet for a bit. Izzy will be chatting away and asking questions and Roz, when in the mood, will be calling 'Mummy? Mummy? Mummy' repeatedly from the back.
And god help us if Alex and I are trying to have a conversation because then you hear
'Mummy? Mummy? Mummy?' as well as 'Mummy, mummy, 'scuse... mummy 'scuse, mummy, muuuummy, I'm saying 'scuse me!!!'
Oh and Roz's first-ever sentence came about three weeks ago on a phone call to Alex. Sometimes the girls get whiny about missing him when they're going to bed and so we give him a ring. So Izzy starts off, as she always does, with 'Daddy, where are you?' and carried on, before Roz started going 'Daddy, daddy... daddy whereyou? Daddy, whereayou?'
OK she was probably only parroting, but it counts.
