baybeasts

Gee it’s hard to get back on the horse when you’ve taken a big blog break. There seems to be too much and yet too little to post about. Life goes on - up close, it is vivid and interesting, but from a distance (or a blog break) it takes on a rather bland texture. We get up, we get through the day, we go to bed, we get through the night, and then we get up again.

We haven’t posted much lately because bean being sick made the days harder to get through than usual for a little while there. But from Arlo and Huey’s point of view, life has been very eventful indeed. It is rushing by so fast - sometimes it seems like they hit new exciting milestones every day, and I can’t keep up. We’re long overdue for a list of milestones achieved and cute things done, but today I give you only a few:

• Sometimes they play together in the living room - well, more strictly, they parallel play, but it doesn’t always require our input (though we spy on them anyway!). And now that Huey can crawl, sometimes they set off on expeditions around the house together, accompanied by many delighted squeals and giggles. Arlo is still much faster than Huey (though Huey is catching up fast), and so he travels about twice as far as he goes backwards and forwards between Huey and their destination (usually the kitchen or the bathroom).
• Arlo’s love affair with books continues. Many times a day he will bring a book to one of us, waving it in the air and pushing it into our faces, then climbing into our lap so that it can be read. When we read to him he does his special concentrating heavy breathing, and cries if we stop before he is ready. He doesn’t like to share reading with Huey though, because Huey is still at the eating books stage and that really annoys Arlo. Pointing is Arlo’s second favourite activity after reading (accompanied by an emphatic ‘deh’, and either signifying want of an item, or wanting us to name or talk about the item), and now the two have come together so that he happily points to things he likes in the books (ducks, kittens, babies etc).
• Huey is now pulling up to standing, and cruising rather unsteadily around the furniture. His favourite place to pull up is the toybox, and he stands there for ages holding on precariously with one hand and pulling things out with the other. He’s working on sitting down but he hasn’t quite got it yet, so when he’s had enough he stands there grizzling and occasionally bending his knees until one of us comes to save him. With pulling up has come babbling - ‘hey-dah!’. It’s adorable.

But let me tell you the story of what just happened as I was writing this post. Both boys went down for a sleep around 10am (earlier than usual for Arlo because they have another cold). Bean went out to get a long overdue haircut, and I settled in for a bit of computer time. About 40 minutes later, I heard a sad cry from the bedroom. I rushed in to find Arlo red faced and upset and still mostly asleep, with Huey looking up at me from the far side of Arlo with a bright cheeky grin. Huey had silently crawled across the width of two queen size mattresses and over Arlo to play with his brother (or maybe the curtains), but his brother was not impressed with this feat at all. Somehow I managed to re-settle Arlo while Huey pulled up on me saying ‘hey-DAH!’ at the top of his voice (Arlo really is sick and sad to go back to sleep through that commotion). And now Huey is pottering around at my feet smiling at me and trying to amuse himself in the study (mostly by playing with the heater). Time to split them up for their daytime naps, perhaps?

And because we haven’t posted a photo of Arlo for a little while, here he is pushing around the pumpkins that he helped me pick from the garden. Cute, hey.