Life of a One Year Old
So...my intentions of getting a few blog posts done over the summer holidays didn't happen, did it?! Two troublesome beach trips. The end.
A lot more happened over the holidays than that, but as many more experienced parents than me will have realised, there really doesn't seem to be any time for doing anything else other than 'life' with a toddler!
Of course, this is fine, but these blog posts are certainly becoming fewer and farther between! October half term has also now happened, so as you can see: not much time for writing!
I started this blog post writing from a car park. I'd just dropped our tot off for her final 'stay and play session' at nursery and I had gone into hiding, to see how she would get on independently.
I sat there hoping to God she didn't have a huge meltdown or poke her own eyes out with unfamiliar toys or catch a wildly ferocious case of flu. All of these, I am sure, were vaguely natural thoughts of a parent leaving their tot somewhere new-ish, right?
She's 14 months old now. She's walking. She's babbling away. It feels like she's properly mastering toddlerdom...... hence I shall now refer to her as 'tot' rather than 'baby' when blogging!
And as I say, over the summer holidays we did get up to lots of stuff but the main memorable thing was our tot's first birthday!! It was so much fun! And we will always treasure how thoughtful and generous friends and family were to our babe on this milestone birthday.
We kicked off celebrations with a baby party in the garden; followed by a close family gathering; then friends and family joined us for afternoon tea on another day. Fabulous. Chilled. Fun times!
(Mummy and Daddy made her a rather special cake...The dog had a mouth and then didn't have a mouth, after a 'slight' bicker over whether it was 'realistic' for the dog to be smiling or not....)
Then it was back to work. Slightly more chaotic feeling in life. Morning questions I frequently ask myself are: is there a baby sock vortex in this house? Why is Iggle Piggle in the bath? And why the flipping heck did I put half a banana in my coat pocket, alongside a board marker and a crumpled tissue, now all clumped together in some sort of snotted mass (genuinely was all in my pocket?!)
The answer is that usually our little lady is up to fun and 'experiments.' I always say this, but it's totally fascinating watching her figure out the world. She explores it in the most random of ways (random to me; I guess Dr. Psychology would deconstruct!!)
One of the things she LOVES to do is fling the toilet seat up whilst I am trying to brush my teeth. This is hazardous for the sake of trapped fingers, and so it resorts in me cleaning my teeth with one foot on the toilet bowl to prevent such activities. I've tried saying, "No" of course when she does this, but 'No' is not very effective when I am frothing Colgate at the mouth.
However, the other day I must've taken my mind off the mark (and my foot off the the toilet seat) as not long after tot and I had been in the bathroom, my husband went in.
Suddenly there were cries and calls of,
"You have to come up and see this!" "I can't believe this is what happens in my life now!"
I was wondering what amazing feit there could be in our bathroom: money erupting from the loo? A surprise sauna?
No..... of course... my husband had found a small wooden snake (yes, yes, pun, jeer...) floating in the toilet!
How unglamorous.
Very much a 'hash tag parenting' moment!
Here it is ( yes he did take a picture... partially proud of her ability to have put it there.....!!?)
As you can tell, at the moment our tot loves putting smaller objects inside bigger objects. In addition to the toilet, she has a ride on car with a section that lifts up to store the shapes that come with it. But our tot can spend hours opening and closing the seat, putting various objects inside and shutting it again. It's become our go-to place when things go missing. Recently both her toothbrush and the baby monitor have been found, after much searching, inside the car.
My husband and I also got a good bout of the giggles lately, as we discovered a poor toy duck had been crammed- with clear force- into the bottom: his poor beak by his eye and his face mushed. It was nearly RSPB level.
And lastly, now that she's walking everywhere, we've gone up the scale of baby proofing the house. Along with walkers etc., she mainly learned to walk with this very beach ball. She'd drop it: it'd roll; and she took her first few steps trying to retrieve it! Just goes to show that flashy gadgets for tots aren't often needed: a £1 beach ball from Morrisons did the trick!
I was so excited for her to walk: I thought it'd mean we could just walk round shops instead of lugging the pushchair and going on walk outings. It turns out we're not quite at that age yet.
When I did attempt walking round the supermarket just to pick up a couple of bits, I quickly discovered our little lady had alternative ideas of removing pots of multivitamins from the bottom shelf.
And if you saw my recent pic on social media, you will have seen my attempt at a beach 'walk' which resulted in us inspecting every piece of sea weed along the shore (and there was A LOT of sea weed!!) Therefore, we only made it 2 metres across the sand!
But- you know what?- it is lovely. Inspecting sea weed and searching for hidden tooth brushes and seeing our tot just play reminds me that she is developing so fast but is still so little. And I'm pleased when I find some time to blog because, as cheesy as this sounds, I find such pride in treasuring all the small-yet-big things our precious person does!
