Thursday 13 September 2012

Half a birthday and a First Day at School

Today was a big day for the kids. Danny is 6 months old today, and here he is trying to escape from his ring:

He's a big old lad, and 2 weeks ago we started weaning him on to baby rice & porridge, and since then we've introduced jar food too. He's still on mother's milk too, but his reliance on that is diminishing. He's sleeping well, or at least he has been until last weekend, when he started a trend of waking up at 5am rather than 6.30am. It's most likely something in his feeding, so hopefully he'll go back to giving us a solid 12 hours once he's on bigger portions of food.
He's a very happy chappy, only skriking (I can say that now I live back in Bury) when's he's properly hungry, and even then his cries are a little muted rather than ear-splitting.
We've got a nursery place sorted for him, starting in mid-November, for four days a week, and he'll bond with Grandma on the other day. Baba Luda returns to Russia at the end of November for a well-earned break!

Then there's Lara. Today was Day #1 at Springside Primary School, about a 10 minute walk away. She has been getting very excited about this, all the more so since we bought her the school uniform 2 weeks ago. She couldn't wait to put it on this morning, and we took the obligatory photographs (and one video!):









The school is having some remedial work done at the moment, but Lara's classroom is brand new, so we're not complaining about a little bit of disruption outside, when her room has all the latest facilities. It would have been fascinating to have been a fly on the wall there today, but we had to do with Lara's rather breathless account of what she'd done when we went to collect her at 3.30pm. She'd baked some fairy cakes for us, she had two friends (one boy and two girls, apparently, leading to a recount on the number of friends), and from her description we think she had a chicken burger, beans and chips for lunch, with vanilla ice cream for dessert. I suspect Jamie Oliver will be straight round once he reads this post. I do suspect the chances of her having free-range chicken breast (skin off) with organic vegetables and a low fat mousse for dessert are pretty low, but hey, it's what I had at school and I stayed skinny and healthy (until I got a proper job, that is).
We're deploying bedtime rules for the first time, having been pretty laissez-faire about it until now. She is to be in bed, ready to go to sleep, by 8pm on a school night, and at the weekend, we'll just play it by ear. It takes me ages to bath her, wash her hair, dry it and brush it, and after starting the bath at 7pm tonight, it was still 8.15pm before I left her reading a story (a made up one, she can't ready yet!) to one of her cuddlies.
She was asking if she could go to school again tomorrow, so I guess that means today was a success, but to be honest, we always thought it would be. She's been at full-time nursery since she was 9 months old, so she's used to the routine, and really it was only a case of how long would it take her to settle in.
About 15 minutes, by all accounts...



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