Things James has now:
- Hair. Enough to go curly when it gets long, and to look worryingly ‘Hawaiian Sunset’ in the right light. Or should that be the wrong light?
- Teeth. 3 at the last count, with more coming. He’s had 2 for what seems like an age, but the telltale signs of proper teething started about a week ago and he’s now sporting a nice big upper incisor to go with his 2 lowers. The scarcity of teeth hasn’t really stood in his way though, as he half-munches & half-gums more or less anything we give him, including apple, raw carrot, chips, banana.
- Shoes. He’s not walking yet, but he’s nearly there. To help him on his way to full mobility, we’ve got him a pair of slipper-ish shoes to wear whilst he’s taking his tentative assisted footsteps. With a steadying hand or two, he can walk, and there are moments when there’s no physical reason for the handholding. Around and about the house, there are the odd moments, say when he’s standing, holding onto the sofa, when he forgets he can’t stand on his own, and lets go of the sofa; there follows a couple of seconds of standing before the brain kicks in saying “Oi, you can’t stand yet”, and down he goes. It feels like one day he’s just going to ‘decide’ to walk, and he’ll be off.
- A temper. He’s turned into a proper little person, with good moods and bad moods, and times when he’s happy to sit playing with a cardboard box, and other times when he needs constant interaction. When he’s in a bad mood, and he doesn’t get his own way, we get the full on “laying on back kicking the floor” screaming ab-dabs. Our usual reaction is to smirk a little, wait for him to ‘get over it’, and then carry on. It rarely lasts for long. We keep telling him he’s a little early for those terrible twos we keep hearing about. He doesn’t seem to care.
- Words. Just a few, but the available vocabulary seems to grow each week. He has recognisable versions of ‘Hello’, ‘Bye bye’, ‘Mama’, ‘Dadda’, ‘Harry’ and ‘Brother’, as well as a very expressive ‘Oooh’, which can mean a number of things, including “That’s new”, “I want that”, “I’m excited by that” and so on. We also get nodding and shaking of the head, although not always in the right places.
- Waves. This is a real charmer, and he knows it. If he’s being cheeky and wandering off somewhere where he probably shouldn’t be, he’ll try to buy some time by giving a little regal wave on the way out. Strangers in the street get the same treatment (sometimes accompanied by his ‘hello’).
In general, he is a happy, inquisitive little soul. He’s growing in personality all the time, and acquiring new skills at a blistering rate. I’m well aware that just about every parent in the land would say something similar of their own offspring, but I make no apologies for that. Our boy is special, because he’s ours, and we love him to bits.
Published on
January 22, 2009 in
Family.
I have just sat with my good lady wife whilst she added a veritable forest of content to the Drupal installation we’ve been procrastinating about for ages. It’s cool to see the site starting to take shape and even cooler to see Mary tapping away at HTML with the odd pause and question like: “so the ending tag has a slash, right?”.
I think I may need to throw a few spanners in the works. She’s picking it up way too easily, and at this rate she’ll start wondering whether this web stuff is difficult at all!
Published on
December 30, 2008 in
Family.
So… since I’m laying the blame for the lack of activity here at his door, let’s kick off the new batch of updates with some news on how the little time-sink himself is doing.
Well, he’s almost seven months old now, and overall I think we’re really quite lucky. He is sleeping through the night (mostly), and gulps down pretty much whatever food we put in front of him. He is, however, showing his dad’s tendency for any cold or sniffle go straight to his chest, so he has his own Ventolin (complete with scary volumiser / gasmask attachment, which used to freak him out, but he’s used to it now). He started to crawl about a week ago and though he’s still pretty flat on his stomach, he can get some speed up when he wants to, which is usually when something potentially deadly is in view.
For the first 6 weeks or so he was quite difficult to settle, and would only sleep if Mary or I were there with him, even if we were just resting a hand on his chest. At about 6 weeks though, something changed and he decided that sleep was a good thing. We moved him into the cot in his own room, and ever since then we have been blessed with a relaxed, happy baby. We chill him out further with a bout of baby massage now and then (he loves his legs being done, not so sure about body and arms).
He melts my heart every time he smiles at me, and I do that new dad thing of gushing about his latest skill to every one who’ll listen (or at least pretend to…). Someone emailed me about being a new dad and ended a sentence with “…but you love him more than you thought possible, right?”. Right.
I’m going to stop now, as I hear murmurings from his room upstairs (that’ll be the ‘mostly’ sleeping through the night, then…). I suspect he just needs someone to find his dummy – he has a habit of launching it into the corner of the room a couple of times each night.
Here he is with my dad. I’ve converted the photo to black and white in an attempt to disguise which football team’s colours he’s in (ner ner 
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Published on
June 8, 2008 in
Family.
In a rare blog entry with text, I’d like to introduce my reader(s) to my new son, James. Here he is alongside a handy ’scale-device’:
James was born on Monday the 2nd of June at 1:13am, weighing 7lb 13oz (or the same as about 3 and a half bags of sugar). We have been somewhat inundated with kind words, presents and facebook wall-writings from friends and family, for which I would like to say a huge “thanks“. I think, all things considered, we’re doing pretty well. Mary isn’t getting much sleep at all, and I’m getting an awful lot less than I’m used to, but we are alive, and we’ve even managed to venture out of the house as a whole family a couple of times.
James’ big brother is sliding into the role beautifully, with the confidence that comes with having “magic big-brother fingers”. He has, of course, been spoilt rotten, and will no doubt expect the same ‘double-birthday’ effect this time next year; that might be a hard lesson to take…
The birth was at Canterbury Birthing Centre, a midwife-led unit based at the Kent & Canterbury Hospital in Canterbury. Mary and I cannot recommend this place enough; the staff were wonderfully supportive, helping us to give birth to our baby rather than have him delivered. After the birth, we were tucked up in a double bed with tea and toast from the kitchen down the hallway. Later that day we were free to welcome our visitors, make them cups of tea, and relax in the large lounge. Despite being in a hospital, the experience wasn’t medical in the slightest, and we couldn’t think of a better way to welcome James into the world.
For those of you wanting a blow-by-blow account of the birth, please bear with me; I’m working on it. It’s a busy time at the moment, and I’m finding it a little bit tricky to put feelings into words.
Published on
September 1, 2007 in
Family.
Many congrats to Mr & Mrs Ant & Cally Hogbin who tied the knot on Wednesday in North Wales. As was to be expected, there are somewhere in the region of ten thousand images of the day in various places around the interweb, with a central repository in the pipeline (but let’s let the poor sysadmin guy have his honeymoon first, eh?)
It was a lovely day – well done to all involved
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…or “Pimp My (Brother’s) Site”
Whilst playing around with Garry’s bookmarking site I came across some old links which could do with an airing. The first of these is a transcript of an interview on Nicky Campbell’s radio programme involving Will Self and journalist Richard Littlejohn. Will Self just about wipes the floor with Richard Littlejohn – it makes an amusing read.
Ooh, Firefox 2 RC3 now has builtin spellchecking (as long as you download the dictionary file) – cool
Published on
June 12, 2006 in
Family.
Best wishes to my big sis and brother-in-law on the arrival of their daughter Emily at 10:30am today, weighing in at 7lb 14oz (or 3½ bags of sugar, comparison fans). Mother and baby are doing well. All being well I’ll be able to scoot over and see everybody tomorrow.
More catching up to do…
For my birthday, the lovely Mary took me on a trip up to London for a good old-fashioned touristy weekend. First stop was Her Majesty’s Theatre for the Saturday matinee performance of The Phantom Of The Opera. This was my very first musical, and it was absolutely fantastic. You can read the story to ‘Phantom’ in about 2 minutes from one page of A4, but we were hooked from the first chords of the overture all the way until the cast took their final bows. The songs are still going round my head even now, 2 months on, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Next we took a walk from the theatre to the Thames, via Westminster Abbey and the Houses Of Parliament. My second treat was a ‘flight’ on the London Eye. Although slightly marred by the family from hell (who pushed in front of us in the queue for tickets and then proceeded to do that annoying thing of using other people to discipline their own children: “That man’ll hit you in a minute if you carry on…”), the trip itself was very good. London is quite impressive at night with all that well-designed lighting. I recommend a flight to anyone who doesn’t have a morbid fear of heights. And even those that do — just don’t look down, you’ll be fine.
Click the thumbnails for bigger versions, or there’s an album in the gallery.
Finally, we took the tube to Earl’s Court and amazingly found our hotel without getting lost. The hotel was lovely. Our room was a bit on the cosy side, with about half a yard’s gap between the end of the bed and wall, but its saving grace was the fantastic balcony. We supped bubbly stuff, and then, in the morning, made like good old fashioned Englanders, and insisted on breakfast out in the winter air. It was fantastic.
More than just catching up, this post is a longwinded way of saying a huge THANKYOU to Mary for spoiling me rotten for a weekend. I had a fantastic time, even if I am now stuck with that Phantom melody endlessly going round my head. When do we go again?
Happy New Year everyone – I hope you had a good one, and that the new year holds all that you expect and want it to. I’m not so sure why we, as a society, look to the ticking over of one figure on our home-made time system as a new start and some kind of punctuation mark, but we all do. You hear a lot of talk about fresh starts and clean leaves – I would rather not be doing something that needs restarting or cleaning in the first place…
Anyway, the new year does indeed hold a fair bit for myself and a few of the people around me. Good luck to everyone who needs it – congratulations to everyone who deserves it, and best wishes one and all
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