Julie's Boggle

To our lovely little boy.

This has been a year of so many changes in all of our lives, I can only look back now in wonder at your development over these brief 12 months, and how each day passing developed us too.

Throughout it all, it has been a joy watching your sunny personality develop and your horizons expand — from those first tentative wriggles in your Moses basket, to rolling all over your cot no matter how tightly we tuck you in at night.

On this first anniversary of the momentous day when we were introduced, I wish you a very Happy Birthday. We are so looking forward to sharing many more of them with you. May your happy spirit never grow dull.

Next week Monday, we are off on a little family holiday — our first time going away alone as a family, as opposed to going to stay with friends or relatives.

For this trip, we’re staying in a “baby-friendly” B&B on the Isle of Wight; very much unexplored territory for all of us. It’s not very far, just 2 -3 hours’ drive south, to the coast, and then a short ferry trip.

I’ve been looking up our B&B on an online map and took the following screenshot of its satellite image:

Aren’t Google Maps cool!

If you click on the image and have the bandwidth to zoom out, you’ll see that the B&B is in the middle of lots of green fields, quite close to the sea, on a bit of the island that pokes out on the west. It looks splendid and I’m very excited about our 5 day break.

(On our way back we’re spending the weekend with some lovely friends who relocated from London to Dorset a few years back. They haven’t met Jon yet, so that should be lots of fun too.)

It’s amazing how few of the things that will amuse a not-quite-one-year-old boy can be classified as “toys”.

As I write this, Jonathan has discovered a large sheet of clear plastic – a bit like the material used for overhead projection transparencies – and he is jerking at it vigorously with both hands making the wonderful (to him anyway) sound of cracking and crunching plastic. Other more colourful and obviously baby-oriented toys are being ignored in favour of this novelty item.

In some ways, it does make managing him a lot easier. Just present him with something a little unusual that (1) definitely doesn’t come from any legitimate toy manufacturer and (2) doesn’t appear to have any inherent play value to the adult mind, and you’ve got a winner.

But naturally, the “toys” he finds for himself are far superior to anything an adult could come up with, so the general roving around the house in search of fresh playthings requires a fair amount of parental vigilance.

The current sheet of plastic joins other unusual items in the favourite playthings Top 10, like a fold-up hairbrush, the cardboard packaging from his Plum baby food, a wooden spoon, an empty plastic hand-soap dispenser, the bathroom scale, any kind of paper, and the tea-towels in the kitchen.

(The interest in the tea-towels is unchanging – as long as they are hanging temptingly on the little rail above the oven, young Jon will be absolutely unable to resist trying to pull them down!)

That’s not to say that he never plays with conventional toys, but it does encourage us not to try too hard when it comes to providing him with new ones!

At 11 months, our little fellow weighs in at just a shade under 10kg, and is around 72cm in length. While people comment that he looks like a “big” baby, appearances are deceptive in this regard because he is actually bang on the median for both his weight and height for this age. It surprises me too.

Aside from noting the minor, incremental changes that I see week to week (this week’s special was the sudden introduction of wanting to lie on his front in the bath), it’s hard to pinpoint the ways that Jonathan is actually changing. But then I read the last “milestone” entry and suddenly there was a lot to compare with.

Nothing has changed with his lovely sunny nature. One of my mum-friends described him as “the most placid baby I know”. And that’s so true! It seems a real blessing. He’s not at all clingy, although this is one area where, purely from a parental satisfaction standpoint, we wouldn’t mind seeing some change. Just a little sign that, perhaps, we mattered a touch more – nothing too extravagant, just a small show of affection – than whoever we were currently “abandoning” him with.

Food does seem to be a key area in Jon’s life (until recently, he ate pretty much anything), and it’s interesting to see him become more aware of its preparation and other people eating…

This first manifested itself at the weekly afternoon tea that I take him along to. Everyone there used to feel sorry for him because they were eating and he wasn’t, but frankly he didn’t care! Until recently that is. Since we’ve been back from South Africa, I’ve had to be particularly diligent in packing snacks for him on this outing because he gets very grumpy if he’s at all hungry and he sees the rest of us munching away!

And then there’s the formula preparation. Woe betide you if you let Jon see a bottle being made up if you’re not going to give it to him this instant!

Jon is not generally a fussy eater when the food is coming at him on a spoon. He’s also not a baby who wants to hold the spoon himself so that solves that problem.

But with finger-food, the smallest particles of which he can now dexterously pick up with his ever-improving “pincer grip”, he is far more discerning. So it’s thumbs up for banana, cooked carrot, raisins and cauliflower, along with any bread or biscuit-type goodies, and a big thumbs DOWN for the likes of broccoli, apricot, roast butternut and fresh tomato. If he does venture to sample these, it is usually not long before they get fished out again and are carefully deposited over the edge of his table like so much unwanted rubbish.

We’ve been trying to introduce a cup to replace bottles for a while now and “trying” is a word that can be applied to the process as well! Jonathan seems to view water filled sippy-cups as an opportunity to wash his mouth out. On these occasions it helps to have him wearing a scoop-shaped bib as the water comes out at quite a rate.

Jon’s rolling around, covered previously, hasn’t developed into anything more as yet. It still seems fairly random a lot of the time although he now covers quite a distance on most of his travels. He shows an strong tendency for being a bit of a dirt magnet which has alarming implications for the years to come.

Jon has lots of fun in the bath these days with his new rolling abilities. Turning over and skidding back and forward on his tummy is a current favourite.

He is also learning the valuable lesson that bath water can be sipped but not breathed! The main parental challenge in all this is persuading our slippery little fish not to do it while he is being washed…

Around Christmas time, we reached the conclusion that we could not practically continue to go on holidays as a family without expanding the family motor. Our little two-door hatchback was packed solid for just a few days up in York over Christmas, and that was a trip we made without our own travel-cot!

Time to move on.

So last weekend, we waved a sad goodbye to the trusty Polo that had served us so well. At 8 years old, it was still in remarkably good nick – but then it did get a lot of time off each year!

Judging by all the attention I got from the online AutoTrader advert I placed, we probably could have asked for more… But anyway, we found our buyer quite quickly so we needed to move with some speed on getting our replacement.

Bearing in mind that we hope to take up our diving again someday, we opted for one of the, er, larger models available. I thought a 7-seater would be about right for the job and we short-listed Volkswagen’s Touran and Vauxhall’s Zafira (that’s Opel for the South African readers).

As it turned out, the CarGiant dealership we visited didn’t have any Tourans that fitted our price, age and mileage specs but there was a Zafira that matched nicely. The only catch was that it had a really smoky smell in it.

We um’ed and ah’ed over that for a while, but a week later, it was still available, nothing better had come up, and the Polo’s buyer was coming to pick it up the next day. So we went back and took it.

And here is “Smokey Joe” – our 2-litre, turbo-diesel, 7-seater Zafira. (Fortunately, the smell isn’t so bad any more!)

It doesn’t have all the fancy features of the higher-end models, but it does have a CD-player, alarm and air-con (less of a necessity here than in SA). And we thought a diesel would be good for fuel-economy.

What we particularly liked about the seat configuration in these cars is the way the two very back seats drop completely into the floor when stowed – leaving PILES of space for the boot, a real treat!

Our first proper trip is going to be to the Isle of Wight (about 2 – 3 hours driving each way) at the end of June. I’m very much looking forward to it, both as a family holiday and now as a chance to test out Smokey Joe with a good long drive!

While we were in SA, my Mom noticed that Jonathan seemed to be experimenting with scrunching up his eyes from time to time.

Sometimes it was in response to a hand, covered in a facecloth, coming up to his face to give it a good clean; but more often it was a random gesture, just for a few seconds at a time. He seemed to enjoy the novelty of it.

Several weeks on and it’s still one of his little games. And funnily enough he now seems to like doing particularly when the camera comes out…

(P.S. You can just see his two sweet little teeth at the bottom if you click on the image to see the enlarged version.)

It’s taken a little while to get organised but I’ve finally got the photos from our trip to South Africa into some semblance of order. AND I’ve completed (with help from Tom) some upgrades to our photo pages.

Most of the changes are on the page that displays an individual photo, as shown on the left.

For the observant among you, the revised design and behaviour does pay more than a passing nod to the ubiquitous Facebook. But there again, they did have some clever ideas when it came to displaying photos.

The biggest ease-of-use feature for me, is the ability to click on the picture itself to display the next one. That’s one I borrowed straight from Facebook, along with the cute button shading on the Next and Previous links.

But a cool feature that we added (well, okay, Tom added) is the link on the right of the photo to “Download full-size”. This gives a link straight to the original photo, obviously a bigger download, but much more suitable for zooming in or printing out if required.

This extra facility meant that we could set the ordinary size of the basic image to be a bit smaller (to suit our bandwidth-starved friends and family in SA) without depriving them of the one or two they wanted to see a little larger or print.

Click here to view the latest album.