Momentous

Firstly, I have actually gathered enough time around me to even think about the possibility of toe nail painting, secondly I have finally managed to do it.
Hooray for teal blue toe paint!
Hooray for daughters growing up, going to bed on time and sleeping through!

Reasons

Maila Nurmi

I guess if I just grew me five spanking new razor-sharp teeth I never had before I would spend most of my day biting stuff; but hey, please not your Mother's nose, hand, cheek, elbow, toe, eyebrow and all manner of other assorted body parts.
I know it's irresistible but it really f*cking hurts.

Iced Gems

The Girl has a much better social life than either of her poor, unpopular parents. At the ripe old age of 6 months she had been invited to three birthday parties, one of which we frequented yesterday. I was taking copious notes for future reference and have realised that the whole children's party thang is a highly competitive beast with Mothers outdoing one another on elaborate cake making (apparently it just HAS to be homemade so there goes my idea of purchasing a job lot of those chocolate caterpillar cakes from Tesco) and party entertainment, which is usually an outside job, clowns, magicians, face painters and the like.
Whatever happened to a plate full of iced gems, some butterfly buns and a quick game of Sleeping Lions?
We did have a great time though, Lily was far too little to have a clue about what was really happening so I happily took her place in the face painting queue, ate her share of sausages on sticks (committed veggie that I am) and drank much more than her share of nicely chilled white wine.

Fat Cat Payback

Splash Splash

'Lily Five Teeth'

If only speed crawling were an Olympic sport I could have cashed in on my daughter's amazing ability to perform the 100 cm dash in 0.02 seconds and be sunning myself in Zanzibar by now. She is a speedy little creature living life in the fast lane, fuelling herself up on apricots, tuna pasta bake and hummus on toast. Everything in our home has been elevated above floor-level so it now looks like some crazy Alice in Wonderland illustration of a house and I am constantly removing bits of sellotape, carpet fluff, electrical wiring, cat food etc... from my child's mouth and this is not an easy thing to do, not with her new set of knife-edged gnashers...'Lily 5 Teeth' (as she is now known in our Hood) and all of them protruding a very odd angles indeed.

Food, Glorious Food.

The whole weaning thing has been trudging along, somewhat indifferently for a couple of months now. I was 'VeryConcientiousMum' and washed/chopped/pureed organic stuff til I was sick of the sight of blenders, Lily would sometimes wolf down the whole bowl of unappetizing looking mush but mostly she took a few spoons and gave up. I decided recently that I might go down the whole Baby Led Weaning thing, I enjoy jumping on a bandwagon from time to time so why not?
BLW, as far as I understand it means no purees just finger foods mainly, anything large or ungainly is cut to chip size so it's easy to get ones sticky mitts round it (and the mitts do definitely get very sticky). She seems much happier with this new plan and very contentedly chomped her way through several broccoli spears and cauliflower florets. It is most inadvisable to follow this method if at all anal about mess, my carpet and Lily's leftovers have made very close friends.
Here is My Girl demolishing her first whole nectarine, most of which is now splattered rather picturesquely down one wall.

Crawler

For the longest time Lily has been up on all fours, rocking back and forth and practicing press ups like a demented baby break-dancer. She has been able to scoot about quite happily on lino for a while now and the last two weeks have seen her advancing (or rather retreating as she mainly seems to go backwards) with some knee shuffling and carpet grabbing moves.
Today at 9.12 am she crawled. An honest to goodness bone fide crawl, it wasn't for long and she didn't make it very far but the moves are most definitely there. Slightly nonplussed by her achievements she duly collapsed face down in a heap on the carpet.