baybeasts

We have always hoped that our boys would inherit our love of books. Since they were both tiny they have loved to look at them, and now Loey has really got it - many times a day he goes to the shelf where the board books are kept, gets a pile down and then looks at them for ages, turning the pages back and forth. Being read to is fun too, for a little while…

huey is still not rolling. but he is now getting up onto all fours and rocking. he’s got the legs, but has absolutely no clue about the arms. it’s hilarious to watch. we’ll try and get a photo of it tomorrow.

Proof of Huey’s push-ups:

And that Loey can sleep.

PS The day after I wrote the last post, Huey rather nonchalantly rolled from front to back, twice, as easily as if he had always been doing it. He hasn’t done it since - push-ups are far more important (and have now progressed to include getting his knees underneath him and launching forward, sometimes onto his face, poor bugger). Also, in ec news, Loey went for five hours without doing a wee today. He has a cast iron bladder, that child.

March has come in with a wall of heat and we are all baked and damp. Our boys are particularly sweaty, and are waking up with wet waves of hair plastered to their little heads. Despite the heat, they are still working hard at their current tasks.

Huey has rejected rolling as a fun thing to do and moved straight onto crawling. Over the last week he has gone from lifting his tummy off the floor a millimeter to full body pushups, sometimes even getting his knees up under him and often inching forward in the process. For some reason these extraordinary feats of strength are usually followed by an equally extraordinary swimming motion - head and chest lifted clear off the floor, arms and legs paddling madly, exactly as if he is on a surfboard making his way out to the back of the break. Well, he is our little surfer dude after all! Talking has shifted from the protracted conversation in vowels to a lot of excited squeaks and squeals. We think he is talking to us in Dolphin. His other great mania is for putting things in his mouth. Now all babies do this, but there is something rather gorgeous about the intense look that Huey gets as he reaches out, grabs hold of the object of his desire, scrunches up his face fiercely and with gums bared and few preliminary head shakes chomps onto it. He is now chomping so hard that he hurt my finger the other day! All these activities are done with great concentration and effort, and often quite a lot of frustrated and unhappy sound effects. This is more than made up for by the rest of his awake time, which is spent half in quiet contemplation (usually on someone’s lap) and half in giggling and smiling at us as we kiss, blow raspberries, sing songs, and otherwise entertain him (we’re lapping it up while it lasts - when he’s ten he definitely won’t find us funny anymore).

Arlo is well and truly on the move. He is crawling like a pro now, and cruising with confidence around the furniture. He has been working hard on sitting back down again, and sadly this has involved rather a lot of donks on the head (accompanied by an outraged cry). He is more and more madly in love with us, and so being able to crawl means that if one of us leaves the room he now follows if he really wants us. Usually he only gets about three quarters of the way before he puts his head down and sobs until we come back from wherever we were to get him, but one memorable day he crawled from the lounge to the bathroom and then to the bedroom where I was settling Huey. He loves to be carried around still, and will often crawl up to our feet and put one or two hands up to ask to be picked up. We’ve taken to putting him in the Ergo on our backs to do household chores - it’s much easier than trying to do them one-handed or with him grizzling at our feet! And he seems to enjoy watching what we are doing. His favourite method of being carried though is on our shoulders - oh the joy! The sucked in bottom lip! The bouncing with glee! His comprehension of language is getting more and more amazing - words that he recognizes now include Huey, Mummy, Mumma, duck, ball, cat, chook, and up. He is absolutely fascinated by Huey and is working on how he can interact with him without us moving him away - for example, pulling hair is no good, but patting on the bottom gets a great response from everyone. He’s taken to zooming up to Huey (thereby putting us on red alert), only to bow his little brown head next to Huey’s blonde one, and then zooming away again.

There is so much more - there always is so much more than we manage to post (and we do tend to leave out the harder stuff). They take up about 98 per cent of our lives, both time-wise and brain-space-wise, and this probably makes us very boring to other people, but we never run out of things to say to each other. But the most important thing of all, of course, is how much we love them. We love them fiercely, protectively, adoringly, intimately. Every day, a thousand times a day, they do something - fall asleep in the car with mouth wide open or mid-play with toys; rest a head on a shoulder or light up when they see us; cry with frustration or flap with joy - that makes us melt with love all over again. We feel more and more blessed as the months go by.

We all went to visit my grandmother in Brisbane for over a week, and we used disposable nappies while we were there. We learnt a few things that surprised us.
• Disposables nappies smell worse than cloth nappies. It was weird. We kept checking for poo only to find them clean.
• The boys both got a bit of thrushy nappy rash. We change our cloth nappies fairly often, but got a bit lazy with the disposables.
• Having two in cloth nappies is a lot of washing! We are lucky to have a nifty front loader which gets them clean without using heaps of water, but maaaan… you gotta be committed.
• It seems we are indeed committed. Despite the week-long flirt with an easier method, we couldn’t wait to get them back into cloth. We are also trying to catch the odd wee in the potty!