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 )