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Wednesday 25 April 2012

Ah, the money train that is Nursery begins

I love the nursery that E is attending.  She goes twice a week - Monday afternoons and all day on a Wednesday - so I can get some work done.  She has a fabulous time and even after mashing her finger, she'll come home with a smile on her face.  The staff are great and they've helped to introduce E to some new foods as well.  I do find that she'll eat a lot of things at nursery that she turns her nose up to at home, which is frustrating but at least she's eating.

I bought E's first piece of nursery memorabilia today.  It's a tea towel with all the nursery children's drawings on.  E's class are too small to draw a picture of themselves so they have either a hand or footprint.  So very cute!  It's the first thing that we've been given the option to buy but I know that this is just the start.  As she gets older, it'll get worse as well.  There'll be fancy dress days that you donate money for and cake sales where you buy back your own cakes.  There's school photos as well and you don't want to forget what your child looked like when they were 7 so you buy the school photo every year.  The school trips - oh the school trips!  They get bigger and better as the child gets older, so I'm guessing they get more expensive too.  I already knew all this, I'm prepared for it, but I wasn't expecting it to start at the grand ol' age of 16 months.  Now I understand why the cost of raising a child is so high.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy smiling every time I look at my new tea towel.





 

Friday 20 April 2012

So much to tell...

We've had a very busy few weeks here at family HQ.  It's mainly been lots of rushing around, work, pregnancy sickness on my part and E being ill. 

I'll start with the pregnancy news.  Yes, I'm pregnant again!  I must be insane....  I really enjoyed being pregnant with E and am very excited to be pregnant again, although it's quite a different experience this time around.  The sickness itself has been more intense this time but hasn't lasted for nearly as long, which is grand.  I'm approaching 19 weeks and was only just starting to feel normal at this point when I was carrying E.  I've been feeling pretty good for quite a few weeks now but am also feeling very tired.  I didn't have a toddler or a dog to run around after last time so going to bed at 9pm is fairly normal for me right now.

And that brings me on to the dog!  We have been wanting a dog for a long, long time but whilst in the falt, it obviously wasn't possible.  We're now in a lovely house and decided to take the plunge, even with the new baby coming in September.  We realised that if we didn't get the dog now, it would be a good number of years before we did and even then there was no way of knowing what our lives were going to be like once baby number 2 was a couple of years old.  There could be something else stopping us so we contacted Stokenchurch Dog Rescue and have rehomed a beautiful Collie called Frankie.  He has a lot of energy but has settled in very well.  I'll post more about Frankie in the future.

E being ill was a really horrible couple of weeks.  It started about 3 weeks ago with what I thought was teething.  E would occasionally cry for no apparent reason, had three short naps rather than one and was a little off her food.  She went to bed early on that first night as she was pretty knackered but ended up having a very bad night.  We were up with her a couple of times before we went to bed ourselves.  She was clearly in some pain so we gave her some medicine and took turns settling her back to sleep.  We also changed her into some lighter sleep-wear as she felt quite hot.  All through the night E would have periods of crying, meaning that neither her nor us got much sleep.

The following day, she was no better and had a high temperature.  A quick trip to the doctors told us that she had an ear infection and we just had to wait it out.  That was a Friday.  She actually had a very good weekend but had a bad turn again on the Monday.  After about 10 days, things were finally settled down but it's only been the past couple of days that E has really been herself.  Now she seems to be having a growth spurt as she's eating like a horse and sleeping for England!

I'll update you all with photos soon.