Sugar and spice and everything nice. Or dirt and muck and everything yuck. She has lunch on her t-shirt, she’s eating sand and she could do with having her nose wiped 
At the risk of repeating myself (again) - wow, she’s so nearly one!
Hugo went to the Show this week. He had a lot of fun! He totally scored on Show Bags (they seem to be SO much better than when I was a child) and he got his face painted
(look familiar?)
He also got to try Fairy Floss (which I think was one of the big draw-cards for him). “Mummy, I had blue. Not pink”.
He made that fairy floss last and last. Until yesterday, when he’d finally had enough.
Thank goodness! … because you don’t want to know what that colour looks like at the other end of the digestive process.
Yes, her hair is getting lighter. She has also finally got another tooth (up the top) so now she’s a three-toothed-rusk-cruncher.
It’s a funny thing … she loves food, and if anyone is eating in front of her they’d better be prepared to share OR ELSE. She will eat toast, sandwiches, fruit - all kinds of things that she needs to chew but if I dare to try and add lumps or thicken her pureed foods she refuses to eat it and gags like I’m trying to choke her. I can easily see her going straight from puree to normal food without any in-between steps.
Someone very lovely gave me a really fantastic gift for my birthday, a flickr account! I’m just working out how to use it but it does meant I can load more photos than I show here on the blog. Click HERE to see them. (There aren’t many of the children but will add more as I work out what I’m doing :P)
I realised today that parenting in the post-internet world must be easier than in previous generations. Now, instead of heading off to the library in the hope of finding a full-colour illustrated book or video on the life cycle of a cicada for example, we can do a quick search on youtube and have in front of us in seconds, clips on almost anything you can think of. In this way we’ve showed Hugo how clockwork mechanism works, what a cuttle fish looks like when it’s alive (after finding one on the beach), watching a cicada shed it’s skin, explored carnivorous plants in their natural environment with Attenborough … if you want it, there’s probably a youtube about it.
I listened as Hugo re-enacted the Attenborough clip, using a hair clasp as the venus fly trap and demonstrated how to make it close by poking it with a stick, almost script perfect.
However, like everything there is a dark side of youtube that you should beware of. In this case it is the seemingly endless homemade ‘episodes’ of Thomas the Tank Engine, ranging from the clever and quite well done to downright scary! Our favourite is Thomas and the T-Rex … be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart!
… you have conversations like:
“Mummy, what’s a meteor?”
“It’s a kind of star, I think”
“No, it’s not! It’s a ROCK in SPACE!”
or “Mummy, what’s a good name for a cat?”
“What about Nik or Louis or Barney? Or Chairman Meow? Pussolini? What about Sinbad?”
“NO! Sinbad is NOT a cat, he’s a PIRATE.”
Just scraped in at the end of the day 
Sophia is three quarters of a year old! The last month has been full of achievements. She is pulling herself up and starting to cruise the furniture (although her dexterity is slightly lower than her intentions, so we do have quite a few tumbles). She loves music and ‘dances’ to anything (even my singing, she really is not discerning). She loves to clap and shouts something like “YAAAAAAYYYYY!” which is what we say every time she claps.She loves to eat finger foods such as sandwiches and vegemite toast, rusks and dry cat food (I am less horrified by this than Daddy is … I have distinct memories of eating dry cat food as a child, and quite enjoying it).
We’ve given Hugo some space by putting a safety gate in his room so he can play in there without Sophie “annoying” him. It’s quite heartrending to see her standing up holding onto the gate, watching him in adoration while he plays, all but oblivious to her.
She really misses Hugo the two days he is at preschool, and greets him with a huge grin and babbles away in delight when we pick him up. He is settling into preschool quite well. He will sing songs that I haven’t taught him, and tell me stories in the course of the day but if I ask him specifically “what did you do today?” I get the age-old reply of “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” or “nothing”.
I guess it’s nearly time to start thinking about Sophie’s birthday. These past nine months have flown by. I get a bit teary and nostalgic when I look at photos of her as a tiny baby, but am delighting in the little girl she is growing into.
