Fun at the Farmers Market

Alice, "Cora Mummy", Cora and I had more fun at the Farmers Market this morning. Alice and I had shopped for an inordinate amount of rhubarb products (every stall seemed to have a yummier version than the previous) and had tasted as much ravioli and pesto as we could manage, so we decided to enter the baby animal enclosure rather than adopt Alice's usual pose of pressing her nose up against the fence, looking at the luckier kids.

From the start, Alice was in heaven, terrorising the ducks, the chicks and the sleeping piglet. However, she and one of the (other kind of) kids took a real shine to each other. I tried to keep her away from its hind legs but she kept hugging it and was very excited to feed it some grassy stuff. (No photos of these incidents because my hands were busy fussing around her).

Here she is with her chum


The other goats came in for a look and tried to nuzzle against her



You can't really see clearly, but she is covered in goat hair in this one - from all the hugging. She doesn't seem to share her mother's side's allergies to fur.



We exited stage left as the enclosure started to get really packed. I can't tell you how many pictures of other mothers' legs I ended up taking - they were all pushing and shoving to get Little Tarquin to the piglet/llama/calf and managed to get between Alice and I at crucial moments. "Cora Mummy", originally a farm girl, is sad that this is the only interaction that Alice and Cora have with farmyard animals, but Alice was delighted. Plus it's the price you pay for easy access to all those types of ravioli, I suppose.

Counting

Captured on video - a short version and the extended remix for the Grandparents...


Non-grandparents should kindly not tune into the LP - I sound like a show-biz mother. Plus it is just more of the same, so you wouldn't be interested anyway.

Little friends

Alice has been a social butterfly of late. Sometimes she even plays with her friends, rather than just alongside them (which I believe is optimistically known as "parallel play"). I think it is more like "the law of the jungle don't really want to share bickering", but hey ho.

Some shots of Alice and her entourage.

A kickabout - the four feet of David Beckham meet the sheer artistry of Stevie Gerard. "But who will be Torres?", moaned Little Friend Charlie.

Lila, Marley and Our Heroine - more a case of being in the same room



At the typing pool with new friend Isla

"Wokking"

We are now firmly on our feet and even requesting hiking trips to the local shop. The excursion only takes about 40 minutes to get there and back - sometimes taking "the gang" for a stroll and sometimes just holding one hand.

Iggle Piggle was not allowed to come on this walk because he was, somewhat ironically, "in bed".

BFF Cora came round the other day and the chums walked around the lounge again and again, holding hands. Seeing the tops of their little heads passing by together, from the other side of the sofa will, I think, remain one of my overriding memories of Alice's toddlerhood.

So, despite the fact we are on week 6 of the antibiotics and the ears are still playing up, she really seems to have found her confidence. Some very-unlike-me-pushy-mothership now has us seeing an ENT specialist in late November as I would rather broccoli than Augmentin form a staple part of her diet.

Big excitement

Fellow Night Garden sufferers may have noticed the deliberate error in the previous post. Alice counted six Haahoos?! But wait, surely there are only five in total?! Pedantic as I am, I decided to let it go when she included Igglepiggle in the total, so excited was I at the counting.

Yesterday she independently counted all ten Pontipines. I was quite beside myself with excitement. The feat has not yet been repeated - we now regularly arrive at eight...nine....eight but I am sure that she is a child genius. Now she will need to learn it in french and mandarin to keep up with aforementioned chum.

Oh, and we are back on our feet now that the drugs have kicked in and the ears are better. It's all go here.

There is a purpose...

...to the Night Garden. Today its biggest fan counted six Haahoos. One of her little friends can apparently count to ten in three languages, so we are on a bit of a mission in this area.

Really walking

As we drove home from Sunday dinner on a public holiday weekend at Little Friend Charlie's last week, spirits could not have been higher. Alice had set off around the living room on her own two feet, not once but many times. The next day she took herself off for a walk around a local playground - at least 50 steps and we thought we were there.

In my joy, I was mentally composing little gags for the faithful readership..."Sell all your shares in baby jeans companies, we won't be buying any more"; "lock up your toddler sons" and also planning some eBay sales, "EUC baby shoes, size 2. Sole unused. Top of shoe very scuffed". However.

Firstly, our little strider took a bit of a spill in the playground after her marathon effort and secondly another ear infection took hold. I think she lost a little bit of confidence from the former - she forgot to put her hands out and bruised her chin on the ground. We went back to the same playground today and she told me that "It hurts, Mummy". I asked where hurt and she pointed at the ground, so I guess that she still remembers the incident! The ears are really driving us all bananas and have caused her to give up entirely. We had the emergency doctor out on Sunday and he pronounced that we need to insist on seeing a specialist. So we are off to the GP next week to do just that.

She is still going strong with the pram though, so I am sure she will be back on her feet soon. Updates as they come through....

"Cheese"

This was supposed to be a video of walking unsupported (the $10 buggy from Target doesn't count) but it was a battle to stop Alice posing for the camera.

She is saying "Cheese" and "Smile". We have certainly had the promised language explosion, but some words still need a mother's love!

Isn't that a pip?!

Iggle Piggle iggle onk…akkar pakkar ikker akkar knicker knocker…arrggghhhh

True to her form of doing nothing in half measures, Alice has become completely obsessed with 'In the Night Garden". Maisy and Dora DVDs and books have been completely discarded, with Dora only included now as part of "The Gang" (a triumvirate of soft toys, consisting of a miniature Makkar Pakkar, a miniature Iggle Piggle and a miniature Dora, who get wheeled around and around [on her feet] in her toy buggy).

Now we have Night Garden on the telly from what feels like dawn to dusk (in reality, morning and night when I am trying to get dressed/cook dinner), Night Garden songs on a CD in the car and a Night Garden $6 book from Woollies to read every night. I blame myself - with the combination of the dust storm and another ear infection, I treated her to some bits and in doing so, created a monster. We managed grown-up radio in the car for about 90 seconds this morning before the cry for "Pakkar" went up and we are heckled from the back to "dump" (she means "jump") to the jumping song, to dance to the dancing song and to sleep to the main theme tune. Her backseat dancing is so cute it nearly makes up for it. Nearly.

I guess that a program designed to make going to bed appealing has a lot of good points, but the general weirdness and trippy feeling of it all tends to set my teeth on edge. Also the scale of the obsession. How did we come from complete disinterest (at a friend's house, pre-UK trip) to surprised delight when it came on the telly Chez Madison (and fighting over the Iggle Piggle toy, which Lucy eventually threw in the paddling pool) to allowing me to put her hair up because she will then look like Makkar Pakkar?!

Pointing out a good bit to Lucy...

See any resemblance...?

I suppose that I should be grateful that she wasn't born in the ear of the Telly Tubbies, who are surely even more weird and also that she has Christmas and a birthday in a few months, so all toy requests that she makes are waiting until then. This I told her in no uncertain terms as I wrestled a Makka Pakka dancing bathtoy out of her hands in Myer yesterday...harsh, I know.