Colouring Fun

I printed out some Hello Kitty colouring pages for Lily so that she could unleash her creative talents.

Lily and The City (and the Spitalfields Rabbits)

Country Girl in The City suggested meeting up in the city yesterday with the kiddies. Lily and I arrived at our designated meeting time at 10.30 am at Liverpool Street station. Country Girl in the City and Amelia came via a hospital appointment and turned up an hour later. Lily hates sitting in her pushchair at the best of times, so all this hanging around waiting did not please Lily at all, and despite me showing Lily all that the likes of Boots, WHSmith and Broadgate Circle had to offer, she spent the whole hour, crying, moaning and trying to run away. And I got so stressed, I amost called it a day and went home!

Fortunately, the rest of the day she was a much happier little lady. Country Girl in the City and Amelia turned up and we walked over to Spitalfieds and had lunch at Giraffe. This was mine and Lily's first time at Giraffe and it was surprisingly very baby friendly. We were shown our table and the little ladies were seated in high chairs and given bright orange balloons, colouring crayons and an activity sheet to keep them amused. Unfortunately this didn't keep Lily occupied for long and soon she was begging to be let down to run amok. She ran around the restaurant saying 'hello' to the other customers. All the waitresses were really friendly and very attentive, and made lots of effort to take notice of Lily instead of just ignoring her. Lily even got taken for a tour of the kitchen three times by the waitresses.

For my main I ordered "The Big Greek" Lamb Foccacia Burger which consisted off grilled lamb, feta cheese, roasted red pepper, tzatziki, spicy tomato relish, lettuce, tomato and red onion and served with fries. I didn't think Lily would eat much (or anything for that matter due to being way too excited) so ordered Lily some potato wedges. When the potato wedges arrived, I wasn't keen on giving them to Lily because they were really crispy, so of course I ate them myself! My Burger was very nice, it was huge! Although slightly undercooked for my liking (I had ordered the lamb medium). As is usually the case whenever I eat out with Lily, I didn't get to each much and spent most of the time chasing after Lily who kept running off all over the restaurant.

After lunch, we let Lily and Amelia loose and they had a fantastic time running around by the Giant Rabbits and chasing pigeons.

Lily on the loose in Mr T's

I dread taking Lily shopping. She won't sit in her pushchair and she usually only lasts about five minutes sitting in the trolley before trying to launch herself out and making a dash for freedom. As soon as her little Clarks clad feet hit the floor, she's off and there's no stopping her. She runs up and down the aisles, she waves at random strangers, she picks things up from the shelves and puts them back on different shelves. On our last visit to Mr T's, Lily made a beeline for the toiletries aisle and started to take various bottles off the shelves and put them on the floor. Then she would pick up the bottles and put them back on the shelves.... in a completely random place.

Swimming & A Play Date

I took Lily swimming again this weekend. When we arrived at the swimming pool, a huge queue had already formed. A few of the teenage girls recognised Lily from last week and started waving and shouting "Oooh look there's Lily! Hello Lily!!!!". I let Lily out of her pushchair and being the mini celebrity that she is, got all excited and ran over to the girls and waved at them.

Unfortunately Robbie had a cold so he couldn't go swimming, but he and his mummy Elizabeth came to watch Lily swim. Elizabeth bought along a swim seat for Lily to try, but Lily refused to sit in it. The water in the pool felt really cold again and one of the other mums even complained, but she got fobbed off by the pool attendent who said that the water was normal temperature. Lily accidently went underwater, and I thought she would go beserk and never want to go swimming again, but she was a bit shocked when it happened, but then she just squeeled and started splashing water all over me.

After swimming we went over to Elizabeth and Robbies house for a playdate. Hehe, Robbie isn't very good at sharing toys. Lily and Robbie kept fighting over his Peppa Pig musical ride on toy. Everytime Lily wanted too play with it, Robbie wouldn't let her. So Lily would be grabbing hold off the handle with both hands while Robbie kept grabbing the steering wheel and trying to pull it away from Lily.

The Hunny didn't come home to sleep that night. He finished work and then he had to go and do a power flush in central London and he didn't finish until late so he decided to stay over at his mums instead. I was a bit miffed at first, but on hindsight, it was great because I got a good nights sleep thanks to not having to listen to the Hunny snoring and grunting all night and hogging the duvet. And Lily only woke up once during the night!

The weather has been really nice today (although when I woke up this morning it looked dark and cloudy), so I took Lily to the library, to the co-op and then to the park. In the library, they were doing a stock take on the childrens toys and books. Lily kept insisting on trying to help one of the librarians count books. She kept grabbing books and handing them to him. And she wanted to help the other librarian count the toys too, so she ended up bringing out some of the toys for Lily to play with. Lily got bored with all this after a while and then she grabbed my hand and led me to her pushchair, indicating that she wanted to get into the pushchair and leave. And so we did. We popped across the road to the Co-op and we bumped into a little girl called Leila (aged 3) and her mummy who we met at the library about a month ago.

We took the 'scenic' route home and stopped off at the park. Lily made friends with a couple of little girls who were sisters. Lily ran around, went on the swings, went on the slide and drove a train. All the excitment wore Lily out, and when we got home she threw a huge tantrum, so I put her down for a nap.

It's a miracle!

I can't believe it. We got seven hours of pure uninterrupted sleep last night!!!!! We put Lily to bed at 9.00pm and she woke up and cried at 11.00pm, so I sent the Hunny in to sort her out. He came back out a few minutes later and said that the dummy had fallen out of her mouth and she was scrabbling around her cot in tears trying to find it. We went to bed shortly after that. And the next thing I knew it was 6.00 am!!!! We didn't hear a single peep from Lily for the rest of the night!

We're not going to get too excited though because Lily has lulled us into this false sense of secuirty before.....
Tonight she will probably go back to waking up 3 - 4 times a night.

Waking up from a good night's sleep felt wonderfull and I've been in a good mood all day so far. I've also been giggling a lot today. One of my colleagues said to me "You're a nuisance when you've had a good night's sleep", and another colleague said "I think we prefer it when you've had no sleep - you're more subdued!" while the others all nodded in agreement.

Stairs and more new words

We live in a flat so we don't have any stairs, so whenever we visit friends or family who have stairs in their home, Lily goes crazy over them. She can crawl up stairs without any problem, but she has only just this weekend learnt how to get back down the stairs. Up until now, Lily would crawl up the stairs and then stand at the top of the stairs and beckon for me to come up and get her. Either that or she'd scared the beejesus out of me and attempt to jump down the stairs.

Yesterday morning, I was showing Lily how to play 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm' on her mini piano and when I finished playing I said "ta da!" and Lily copied me and said "ta da!". She kept saying "ta da!" for the rest of the day.

The weather was lovely today and I needed to go to the bank and pay in some cheques so Lily and I hopped onto the bus over to Waltham Cross. First stop Halifax, we queued up for ages only to be told that they were having problems processing cheques today and to try again in a few days. Not impressed, we left Halifax and Lily waved 'bye bye' to everyone in the queue as we left. Popped into Boots and saw that they had a sale on their Mini Club clothing range and ended up buying Lily a warm winter coat and pair of spotty leggins for £10! Bargain!

Lily was getting impatient by this point and kept trying to launch herself out of the pushchair, so I gave in and let her out of the pushchair and let her have a go on the little kiddie rides inside the shopping centre which kept her happy for about 20 minutes. Then we went to Sainsburys to buy a few bits. It was quite empty in there so I let Lily loose again and she spent the entire time running manically up and down the aisles, taking things off the shelves and putting them on different shelves. Luckily this time I didn't leave my shopping at the checkout which is what I did last time because I was so stressed out by Lily.

Lily goes swimming for the first time

Sometimes in the mornings while I'm waiting to catch the train to work, I see a mum from the Baby Rhyme Time class that I used to take Lily to when I was on maternity leave. We say hello, exchange a few pleasantries but that's about it really. Her name is Elizabeth and a few weeks ago she was telling me that she'd taken her son Robbie (who is about a week younger than Lily) swimming, and then she asked if me and Lily wanted to go with them one weekend. So of course, I jumped at the opportunity for two reasons. Firstly I've always wanted to take Lily swimming but never wanted to go on my own, and secondly since my local first time mums group ditched me and I fell out with pyscho Nina, Lily unfortunately hasn't had any little friends her own age to play with.

I was really excited at the prospect of taking Lily swimming, but first I had to buy Lily a swimming costume and I had to find my swimming costume. I bought Lily a gorgeous little pink and white polka dot swim suit from M&S for a bargainous £7.00. It has a built in 'swim nappy' in it but it didn't very nappylike to me. So in a bit of a panic, I emailed my bestest friend in the whole wide world from primary school and experienced mother of two.

"I just bought Lily a new swimsuit with a built in nappy thing (going to take her swimming for the first time on Saturday).... do I still need to put a special swimming nappy on her too????? What if she does a poo in the swimsuit????"

"I always put a swim nappy on too, as I always found that the swimsuit didn't look tight enough to keep anything in should the worst happen!!!".

Saturday arrived and I made sure Lily had her nap before we went to meet Elizabeth and Robbie at the swimming pool. We were early, so I let Lily wander around the reception area. Lily kept wandering over to the viewing area and squeeling with excitement and clapping her hands at the sight of the swimming pool. Lily made some friends with a couple of teenage girls who kept 'ooohing' and 'ahhing' over Lily and telling her how cute she was. After we'd changed and were walking past the adult pool to get to the baby pool, the two teenage girls saw Lily and screamed "Hello Lily! and waved at her. I was holding Lily at the time and she jumped up and down in my arms and squeeled and waved back at the girls and kept clapping her hands together (and slapping me in the face at the same time).

I thought Lily might be scared of going in the pool, but she absolutely loved it. She and Robbie had lots of fun kicking about and splashing each other in the water. Lily kept climbing out of the pool and then wanting to jump back in again. After a while, Lily didn't want me to hold her and kept trying to escape so there were a few hairy moments when I almost lost grip of her!

We're going to go swimming again next Saturday with Elizabeth and Robbie. I want to get Lily some arm bands and a rubber ring by then.