cross-generational colour co-ordination

I haven't been doing it on purpose, but Dulcie and I keep wearing matching/complementary outfits this week.  Here we are with our navy-and-red-with-a-touch-of-stripe look.  I learned on this day that it is very hard (nay, impossible?) to take a flattering photo of yourself when you are lying on the floor.

I hope no-one is hating me too much for posting lots of things about my lovely baby again.  I say this because I have come to hate anyone who blogs about their babies, which is bad news for a number of my formerly favourite bloggers.  Like they care!  I do try my best to stay positive about things but often fail, and sharing here what IS good (Dulcie) helps to keep me a bit closer to the straight and narrow and further away from the doom and gloom.  Feel free to remove me from your blog reader if I'm making you want to kick me in the ovaries.  I would quite understand.  Oof!

casting the first stone

As of today, Dulcie weighs... one stone!  Can you believe it?  That's nearly four times what she weighed when she was born and while she's still a wee skinny-ma-linky really, she's gradually creeping up the percentiles where once she didn't even make it onto the graph, bless her cotton socks.  And today she bit another baby on the bum.  Ah, I was so proud.

This smiling photo, taken today, does not paint a very realistic picture of our life this week.  I swear Dulcie has been teething since about March, but surely we must be due to see an actual tooth soon?!   She is so grumpy at the moment and has been screaming a lot in a most un-Dulcie-like way, plus her nappies are (quite literally) eye-watering, which we're told is also tooth related.  I'll be a bit sad/nostalgic when a tooth does finally emerge, I'm sure, but I don't know how much more of the neediness I can cope with.

p.s. How cute is her little outfit?  It's a hand-me-up from her younger-but-bigger cousin.  See?  There are benefits to being underweight after all!

rocking that look

 Dulcie likes rocking a street/hip-hop look.  Sometimes she pulls it off perfectly (see above)...

 ... but sometimes she ends up looking more like Elton John...

... or Jane Fonda.  And grapevine!

Yes, I'm alive.  I realise this month has not been so bloggy.  Hopefully this little post will get me back on the horse.  I don't have so much news to share really but I have been away on a wee holiday.  More (or less) on that some other day.  Easy does it.

I made it to the podium!

I am really loving watching the Olympics this year and will be so sad once it's all over.  I've never achieved anything sport or exercise related... until tonight when I discovered (from the comfort of my sofa where I'm lazily watching other people being sporty and successful) that I am one of the lucky winners of these exercise books by the ever wonderful Donna Wilson!  Go, me!  Now please stand for the national anthem of the United Kingdom.  Well, a girl can daydream.  Right, where's me footstool?

clean/dirty

Graham has a week off work coming up (yippee!) and we're planning to take Dulcie swimming at least a few times.  She'd never been in water deeper than her baby bath before, so we thought we should start building her up for the pool by taking her in the full-size bath with us.  I took the first bath duty on Sunday night and it went very well.  Dulcie looked confused and a little worried when she got in at first, but it didn't take too long before she got VERY, VERY excited.  Her arms and legs were flailing everywhere and she soaked herself, her mother and our bathroom because she was splashing so much.  She just couldn't get enough of it.  Check out that happy wee face.  Aw!  I think she really tired herself out too because she was out like a light almost as soon as she was dried off and in her jammies.  I'm taking this as a good omen for the swimming pool and am quite excited for next week, especially since Dulcie has a swimming suit that will make her look like a giant strawberry.

That's the clean part of this post and the dirty part is also Dulcie related.  I took Dulcie into town yesterday on the hunt for a much-needed waterproof jacket for myself.  I was hoping for a bish-bash-bosh sort of a morning, but should have known that it wouldn't be so easy and the hunt was dragging on a bit longer than expected.  I had taken a few snacks for Dulcie but no lunch, so when she started shouting for food (louder and earlier than is normal for her, although I didn't think much of it at the time) I had to stop off and buy her an emergency jar of ready-made stuff and take her to the parent/baby room in John Lewis to feed her.  After wolfing the food down, she was still unhappy and looking for more so I gave her some milk.  After a bit of wind was expelled (more than was normal, but I didn't think much of it again) we eventually set off back on our jacket quest and Dulcie seemed unusually sleepy, but otherwise happy.  Anyway, long story short, in the middle of H&M on Buchanan Street, out of nowhere, Dulcie started vomiting and not in a way I had ever seen her vomit before.  It was very dramatic and quite scary.  She was literally covered in sick from her chin down to her feet and it was all over her pram.  I was wishing I hadn't bought her something so orange/full of tuna to eat!  Once she stopped puking, she fell very soundly asleep with a green face and tears in her eyes :(  I almost never take Dulcie further than walking distance from home when it's just the two of us so it was cruelly ironic that the one day I did venture further afield was the day that the vomiting would strike, and it was a horrible feeling to be stranded in Glasgow's city centre with a poorly baby, something I hadn't really experienced before.  I didn't exactly know what to do about it all.  I had a change of clothes in the bag, but thought it could take me almost as long to find somewhere to change her as it would to get her home and there was a fair chance she'd just be sick all over the clean clothes anyway.  In the end I just ran for the bus and got her home as fast as I could and she didn't wake up or even move the whole way.  I tried to make myself useful by stroking her hair and holding her hand, but I don't think it made much difference.  Once home, she woke up when I took her out of the pram to clean her up and once she was clean she seemed pretty much back to her usual self (phew) although she was less dramatically sick a few more times throughout the afternoon.  The pram was not so easy to sort out as the sick had gone everywhere, in through all the holes where the straps go etc.  I ended up having to dismantle the whole thing to get into all the nooks and crannies and spent hours scrubbing with bleach to get rid of the radioactive orange stains.  I spent a fair part of this evening putting the thing back together and still found some nasty little pockets that I'd missed in the cleaning yesterday.  Ugh.  Anyway, I think calmness and cleanliness have been fully restored to both pram and baby and I am feeling like I can chalk off another formative mum-type experience.  Did anybody else want to read about this sicky nightmare?  Most probably not, but I kind of wanted to record the trauma for myself - a time when Dulcie really needed me and I had to think on my feet but it all turned out OK in the end, another reminder that you really can make up parenting as you go.

bagpipes and bacon

On Thursday morning I very bravely tried to go to a baby and toddler group (I'm doing some reconnaissance work about local childcare for when I go back to work) but it turned out not to be on.  It was a balmy, sunny day though, so Dulcie and I headed to Kelvingrove Park for a bit of a wander.  It was nice to be milling about of a morning and there were lots of people coming and going, exercising, having cups of coffee, walking dogs, as well as this pipe band who were rehearsing.

We stopped to listen for a while.  Dulcie seemed to enjoy the bagpipes, but this photo looks like she's trying to cover her ears and block out the noise.  Mind you, it really was noisy!

Yeah, she doesn't really look like she's enjoying it much here either, but she always stops to have a good look when the camera comes out and was then waiting for the flash to go off, I think, as she seems to like the flash these days.  She's recently learned that the camera flashes when she smiles, so we don't have quite so many photos of her just looking confused/curious.

The pipe band were not the main event of our Thursday in the park, oh no.  The main event was that I (wait for it) ate (wait for it) a bacon roll!  I'd had a mild hankering for some bacon when I woke up, so I thought I would act on impulse and just go for it without thinking too much about it.  I managed to eat the whole thing, but have to say I found it HORRIBLE.  I thought bacon would just taste salty and savoury (that's how I remembered it and how veggie bacon tastes) but all I could really taste was the way a butcher's shop smells and that smell makes me want to hurl.  But it was great progress - the first meat I have consumed in over 21 years.  I hadn't attempted any meat since I failed to eat my own beef casserole way back in April and thought that experiment had put an end to any devegetarianisation for once and for all, so I'm quite glad to have made a bit of progress again.  I think I'm quite clear now that I just want to be able to eat meat in social situations where being a vegetarian can make things awkward/less fun/hard work for other people.  Dulcie seems to really like fish so it would be good if we could include some fish in our family menu from time to time, but I'd be happy to keep meat as a very rare occurrence.

It's taken me days to write this blog post.  Was it worth it?  Probably not.

mark phwoargh-ster

I've been watching lots of the Olympics this week and am quite an expert in the field of swimming now.  I think I would have got into the swimming anyway, but having Mark Foster to look at certainly makes me less likely to channel hop!  What a hottie!  When I googled "Mark Foster" images there were A LOT of topless shots, which I thoroughly recommend you look at, but I felt I should include Clare Balding in the picture as I'm also enjoying her presence, albeit in a totally different way.  Besides, I kind of prefer the fully-clothed Mark, making it easier to visualise him being my actual boyfriend while leaving me more to dream about/anticipate.  (Sorry if that is too much information!)  Mark Foster reminds me a little bit of my new cardiology consultant.  Thank goodness I don't have an appointment with him for a few months.  I'm sure I would be blushing furiously even though the resemblance is really not strong/existent.  I don't feel comfortable saying any more about this thoroughly teenage matter, but just let it be known that I have called dibs on Mark Phwoargh-ster.

And from teenage brain to total senility...  Graham nearly spat out his mouthwash this morning when I asked him if he had heard the new velodrome song by the Chemistry Brothers.  The Chemistry Brothers?!  What has happened to my brain?  Words escape me... on an almost hourly basis!  Thank goodness Mark Foster is only interested in me for my bod ;)