marc.vic.max.elliot

Two quick pictures (and a sound file!) to give you an idea of how the kids are coming along.

The first is Max.  Yesterday he disappeared upstairs to his room and wandered down about 15 minutes later dressed like this!  These are all clothes that are on a shelf for when winter arrives but he’d got them down and added (on top of t-shirt and shorts) trackpants, a shirt, a fleece dressing gown and a wooly hat.  The funniest thing was that he came down and proudly announced “Mummy, I’m all fancied up” ! lol! Where he got the term fancied up we have no idea….  When I was editing this picture for the entry this is what he said:  mp3 file (if you want a translation email me or leave a comment)

This picture shows that Elliot is getting everywhere he shouldn’t be!  The first flight of stairs is eight steps and he was up the all the way on his first go.  We now have a couple of gates……

Not much to say except that the boys are growing up fast.  Vic walked in on Elliot today half standing up in his cot and we have since dropped the level of his mattress down…. Did I mention that he’s been crawling for about two weeks now?  We keep finding him in all sorts of interesting places that are much further away than we would have considered possible!

He’s also just moved into his big boy, forward facing car seat – and Max has moved into a booster seat that just uses a normal seatbelt.

On another note Max’s playgroup bought a pirate outfit today and Max just had to try it on

We’re back! Well, actually we’ve been back since Monday……

The first four days of my trip to Sydney were work so not much to say there – same shit, different city really.  Friday night Vic turned up though and my focus somewhat shifted I won’t detail the weekend but suffice to say that we had a great time chilling out, eating in nice restaurants and going shopping mad.  I think the main thing that Vic enjoyed was being able to go into a shop and wander around, try stuff on etc. without having to worry about a child (or two) getting in the way or running off.

Monday saw the kids delivered back to us in one piece and all the baby-sitters involved (thanks!) reporting that both kids had been little angels, slept through the night, blah blah (little buggers!) Max was pretty glad to see me back though and gave me big, squeezy hugs for the first 10 minutes bless him.

Here’s a picture of Max taken while I was away.  A couple of times he’s grabbed his “steering wheel”, put a seat up on the couch and pretended to drive a car.  This time however he piled everything he could find behind the seat and told Vic “Me have van now Mummy” lol!

Just a quick update on how Max’s little excursion to Granny’s went the other day.  In a word, brilliantly!  We went around about mid afternoon and had a barbeque for dinner.  We’d taken Max and his stuff up to the spare room soon after we got there and Max seemed perfectly at ease with staying in “his room” for the night.  He went to bed without any trouble and my Mum said that the only problem she had is that he woke up at midnight, she found him standing by the bed but he got straight back in and went back to sleep.  Nice!

That was Saturday night and on Monday (long weekend here) my Mum rang up and asked if she could take Max for a ride on the ferry as she had planned it for Sunday but the weather wasn’t conducive.  Sure, we said, and Max was off on his first boat trip The ferry runs between Petone and the city and crosses the harbour on it’s 20-30 minute sailing.  The next bit is so New Zealand The ferry had got most of the way across the harbour when the captain came over the PA and asked if anyone was in a hurry – strange!  He then said that if they went a bit out of their way that there was a pod of dolphins in the harbour that would probably be attracted to the boat and follow them for a while.  So a bit of a detour later and the ferry was surrounded by dolphins!  Whilst Max wasn’t really all that interested (although all fish are now dolphins in the books we read) it was a real buzz for my Mum.

All in all it’s looking good for Vic’s trip to Sydney where we will meet up after my next business trip there.  It all happens the weekend after next and we’ll be away from both the kids for three nights – nice

Max is at his Granny’s house tonight as a trial run for when Vic and I go away for 3 nights to Sydney at the end of the month (yay!) I’m pretty sure it’ll go OK…….

This is Max at his third birthday party – he’s such a poser for the camera

Happy birthday to our wee man Max who is three today!

Where does the time go?  Here are some pictures – exactly the same day a year apart.

But things are crazy busy at both work and home….

I hope all your Christmas preparations are going well.  We’ll update properly in the next couple of days.