No

Can you believe I started writing this post over a month ago?? I just checked, and it says I began typing on 22nd of August, and it’s now 25th of September. 

I have either been really busy…..or really lazy…..

Either way, the absence of updates in some ways reflects – not a lack of movement – but a slight easing of acceleration on the day-to-day changes being experienced by our little human. 

Catch up

That doesn’t mean he’s not been busy. He’s been up to all sorts of stuff this summer. Meeting new friends, going to music classes(!), learning new words – it’s been a busy few weeks. 

We took him to Florence at the end of August for his second wedding of the summer. He absolutely loved that. 35°C pretty much every day, so he basically spent a week in only his nappy. 

Pox?

He gave us a little chicken pox scare midway through the trip, too, when a bunch of small, red spots started appearing all over his legs. 

It was only when a whole load of little red spots started appearing all over my legs, that we realised they were mosquito bites….

Another first

As well as being bitten by an Italian mosquito for the first time, he experienced another ‘first’. We took him on his first bike ride, around the walls of the medieval city of Lucca. 

We spent a few days there after travelling from Florence following the wedding. The B&B where we were staying happened to have some bikes and a baby seat available to us. The little man absolutely loved it (although once we’d got beyond the halfway mark, I started to feel him nodding off behind me)

Talking

Since we got back to the UK, Marley has had plenty to say. 

His “mamma” and “dadda” are pretty much perfected now, so he’s moving on to more complex words like “nose” (with his index finger inserted so far that he’s almost touching his brain) and “plane” (while pointing at anything in the sky that moves).

But it’s his use of the word “no” that has dominated the past couple of weeks. 

He uses it when he means “no”. 

He uses it when he means “yes”. 

He uses it first thing in the morning when he wakes up alone in his cot. And he uses it last thing at night, after his evening milk feed. 

He also says it when I ask him if he wants to try and walk. And although I don’t actually know whether he means yes or no in that case, he is definitely edging ever closer to his first unassisted steps. 

He loves to stand up on his own and throw himself back down, usually with a huge grin on his face. And he now often clambers around the edge of the sofa – usually in an insanely risky attempt to pull our (incredibly unpredictable) cat’s tail. 

I’d be very surprised if my next post isn’t on that exact topic. Especially if it takes me another month to write it….