It's apparently International Comment Leaving Week in the blogging world (OK, it was at the time I started this - by the time I get it posted, it'll probably be IComLeWe 2010), so it's a touch ironic that I'm not making the comment I was initally going to make on [...]
Although I was determined, after turning up half an hour late to Jamie's first ever day at nursery two years ago, to avoid making the same mistake on his first ever day at school, I hadn't quite expected to succeed so spectacularly that we would turn up a full [...]
I'm always pleased and flattered to stumble across links back to my own posts (assuming the context isn't "For an example of an atrociously poor piece of writing, click..."). This (the main part of the sentence, not the parenthetical bit) happened to me last night while blog browsing - I [...]
"Tomorrow," I told Jamie as we made our gradual post-dinner way upstairs, "you're going to nursery. But tomorrow..." slight pause for emphasis "...will be your last day at nursery. After that, you'll have finished. You won't go back any more."
Jamie considered this. "What will I do after I finish nursery?" [...]
The title of this post, by the way, is an extremely obscure reference. Full marks to anyone who gets it. Anyway, our particular Day of the Three Things went very well. Details as previously promised:
Thing The First. [...]
"On Monday, 8th June," Jamie told me excitedly as he got ready for bed, "we will sing 'Happy Birthday' to you!"
"That's right!" I agreed. (It wasn't, as it turned out - in the general rush of getting dinner done and presents opened and two children upstairs to get ready for [...]
Jamie had his latest orthoptist appointment last Wednesday. I must confess here that I'm actually an appointment behind, since he had one in, oh, probably about last March that I never got round to recording here. Not that there was much to say about that one, but it was the [...]
Well, the end of another month is approaching, which means I feel I should get a post up - otherwise there'll forever be a gap in my monthly archives, which disturbs my obsessive-compulsive soul far too much. Which means I've been mulling over the question of what to write about. [...]
Having settled on a breastfeeding routine compatible with my newly pump-free lifestyle (feeds before breakfast on the three mornings each week when I'm home and before bed each evening, thus adding up to a grand total of ten a week), I'd tentatively planned to continue this until around [...]
The other day I stumbled across this blogpost, which is basically a verbatim post of an article by Peggy O'Mara, editor of Mothering magazine (a woman with whose rhetoric I have been somewhat unimpressed since reading a well-known article of hers in which she interrupted her prolonged diatribe [...]
The recent furore about Wakefield's original paper on MMR reminded me that one of the numerous posts I never got [...]
I meant to keep doing separate updates for each month of Katie's life, as I have been. However, her thirteenth month passed without anything much more exciting to report than a changeover from two naps a day to one. She did at one point shuffle one of her feet a [...]
Parenting Tip #10537 - Do not, if you can avoid it, try to toilet-train an unready child on the autistic spectrum at the time that your other child is in the one-and-a-bit-years-old more-mobility-than-sense into-everything stage, particularly not if this also happens to coincide with a time when work is in [...]
A quick collection of bits that either don't easily fit into another post or that I omitted to include in the post they should have fitted into:
We had the LISM (Local Inclusion Support Meeting - the get-together of relevant people to discuss how Jamie was doing and what he needed [...]
My pumping days ended not with a bang, a whimper, or even the cheer I'd have expected to give, but with a bewildered feeling of "Wait... was that it?"
As soon as I'd finished my last day of pumping for the milk bank, I dropped Katie's middle-of-the-day breastfeed on my [...]
Katie's main milestone from her twelfth month was that very popular and hotly controversial one in ParentingWorld - sleeping through the night. There is a longer story as to how this came to be (a somewhat timely one, since I've once again been embroiled in debate with another [...]
The title of this post, by the way, is a family in-joke. Do shout if you want it explained.
Anyway. Longstanding readers of this blog may distantly remember that, some months back, the Interview of the Three Hundred Questions officially confirmed that Jamie had mild autistic spectrum disorder, and that [...]
One year ago today - one year ago almost to the minute, as I start typing this - our daughter hurtled screaming into the world to complete our family. I lay in bed first thing this morning, looking at the numbers on my clock radio, remembering myself doing the same [...]
On Thursday, 20th November - my son's fourth birthday, the fourth anniversary of the day on which I entered the wild, challenging, fascinating, wondrous world of parenthood - I spent the morning driving out to a distant service station to meet a woman in the car park and give her [...]
"It's stopped!" Jamie announced, halting midway through putting his T-shirt on. I looked up at him.
"The batteries," Jamie continued with deliberation "have fallen out. We must put them back in."
And he proceeded to bend over, carefully pick up an imaginary battery, and insert it into an imaginary slot on the [...]
My mother sent Hallowe'en cards for both children and a small present for Jamie. I was a few days late in passing these on to the children due to having mistaken them for birthday presents and put them aside until closer to the date; it wasn't until I peeked inside [...]
Things that Katie learned how to do in her eleventh month:
Cruise. For those not familiar with the lingo, this refers not to holidaying on expensive boats but to the sort of sideways shuffle babies do while holding onto furniture. She rarely actually does this, preferring crawling as her means of [...]
On the basis that I'm probably not the only person who finds it useful, or at least interesting, to read about how other people have handled various parenting problems, I'm posting the detailed night-by-night record I kept of how the night weaning went. If you're not interested in such things, this will [...]
"Can you see the fireworks, little one?" Barry hoisted Jamie up into position on our bedroom windowsill.
"Oh, yes! They're over there." Jamie pointed, bouncing up and down with excitement. "And there are more! And more! And maybe that one's red. More and more! They go 'Zeeeeeeoooooooow', and then there's a [...]
(With backdrop of Sodor Adventureland)
'One day, Diesel had a square face. He went to visit James who had a round face and Spencer who had an oval face. They were on the turntable. Diesel went on the turntable. The turntable was switched off so they went to see the [...]
Katie, at almost eleven months old, is still breastfed. I don't think she's actually taking more than a token few ounces a day now, and, with a horrible cold and incipient tooth dampening her enthusiasm for the whole thing, currently I'm not sure she's even getting that much. However, while [...]
Katie can now pull herself to standing. She will imitate us when we clap our hands for her (a cute milestone for any parent to see, but with extra significance for us; Jamie never did this, and the fact that Katie does is another indication that she probably isn't on [...]
Update on the latest of the perennial assessments of various aspects of the children:
10th September was Jamie's latest orthoptist appointment. It was a joint appointment with the ophthalmologist, which meant it was on a different day of the week from usual and hence at a time when I was at [...]
"So what's this?" Jamie mused to himself as he explored the gift shop.
'This' was one of a jar of rubber globes, an inch in size, intended as desk ornaments. Before I could tune in enough to answer him, he had done so himself: "It's the Earth!"
I was surprised, and pleased. I hadn't [...]
Barry and I have never pushed the boat out when it comes to celebrating our wedding anniversaries. This is not due to any lack of romantic inclinations on our respective parts, but the result of having moved so quickly, after the wedding, on to both reproduction and relocation. At the [...]
...then that mountain would be shrinking fast enough to cost environmentalists sleep, compared to the speed with which my backlog of paperwork at work is diminishing.
[...]Katie's first milestone in her ninth month, only a few days into it, was to learn how to sit herself up from lying flat. We would probably have greeted this new accomplishment on the part of our little girl with more joy if we had been organised enough to get [...]
If the calculations I made with a little help from this website are correct, today is the day that Katie has spent as much of her life outside the womb as she has in it.
From here on... Actually, I can't think of anything with which to finish that sentence [...]
We have had the Interview Of The Three Hundred Questions, on which I hope to write a full post in due course ('due course', of course, [...]
Libby Purves, author of the wonderful How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, says that the first few months of having two children are particularly chaotic because of (among other reasons) the differences in their developmental stage with regard to routine; one child in an age group that thrives [...]
Although Katie first managed to roll from her back to her stomach some time ago, it took another two months before I really felt able to describe her as A Baby Who Can Roll Over - it seemed to be a matter of luck rather than skill whether she [...]
I'm going to try to shoot for doing monthly updates on Katie. That strikes me as possible. Theoretically, at least.
The 'interesting' in the title is meant quite genuinely, not in some sort of quasi-euphemistic 'May you live in interesting times' sense. The interesting bit, as far as I'm concerned, is [...]
I just remembered I didn't get a post up about Jamie's latest orthoptist appointment. Not through lack of trying - I started writing one that same evening (it was on Tuesday just gone), and got half-way through when Typepad did one of its occasional crash-and-burns and lost the post. Fortunately [...]
Over the past month, I've been watching an episode of 'Child Of Our Time' which looked at gender roles in children. (As you can gather from the fact that it took me this long to watch a one-hour episode, this was something squeezed into ten-minute slots here and there, [...]
Katie's fifth month was really the stage in which she moved away from the cute-but-dull newborn period and started actually doing interesting stuff. I meant to write a lengthier Katie Update Post to mark this, but, as usual, didn't have time until now. So I'll make this an [...]
This post is in reply to Sidheag's query, which I was pleased to get as it gives me a handy excuse to blog about a couple of things that are not the stuff of which nail-bitingly thrilling blog posts are made but that I like recording for myself. (I [...]
We got our copy of the speech therapist's report. As measured by the test she did on his understanding of language (presumably the third of the three tests she did; for those who are interested, it's apparently called the Reynell Developmental Language Skills 3), he understood language structures at [...]
Katie rolled from her back to her stomach twice this weekend (stomach to back is, of course, old hat by now). The first time she got her arm stuck under her, and the second she ended up with both arms down by her sides and didn't seem quite clear [...]
Jamie had his appointment with the speech therapist last Tuesday. To clarify the momentousness of this, I will explain that we were put on the speech therapy waiting list over fourteen months ago, after having made our first initial inquiries about Jamie's (at the time) near-nonexistent speech development [...]
...according to the somewhat optimistic promise on the button that you may have noticed on the left of my blog, I am now supposedly blogging for autism awareness.
You may also have noticed that I don't, so far, appear to have been living up to this promise. This is not [...]
From my husband, as he shepherded Jamie up to bed last night after some after-dinner playing: "We're a bit late going upstairs. The fish had to get in the camper van and go to Sainsbury's and look at all the numbers."
[...]The world is a complicated place, especially when you've only had three years to learn about it. But Jamie is making headway.
He knows, for example, that, just as you can form words from letters, so you can form numbers from digits. It's one of the games he likes playing with [...]
First of all - if you haven't yet responded to the post below this one, please scroll down and leave your comment! And many thanks to those of you who've commented so far.
Meanwhile, a further bit of trivia for the Jamie And Katie Show:
As we ate dinner a couple of [...]
Happy birthday, Mom! Many happy returns!
Anyone care to join me in wishing my mother a very happy birthday? If you want to help make my mother's birthday as special as she is, please go ahead and add your birthday wishes to the comments. Let's see how many we can get!
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