The Dower Family

I woke up yesterday morning at 7.11 am to a blissfully quiet house and knew at once that the boys must have gone to the park. It is not often that I get such a sleep in lately and I was especially thrilled. While Ollie is a pretty good sleeper, he has been waking at least once a night most nights lately and is definitely out of bed by about 5am every morning. It can be pretty draining (especially as I am always the one to hear him cry out - Nick could sleep through a hurricane) but it gave me a good laugh on Saturday morning. I had been in to him around 4am and tried to get us both to go back to sleep but he wasn't interested and trotted out one his new fave sayings "go away mummy". I'm not a big fan of this saying and given I have a much more comfortable bed of my own I decided to take the hint. I managed to get another 15 or so minutes of horizontal time in our room before he summoned me again. As it was getting close to 5am I couldn't be bothered battlin...

The weather has finally been on our side so we took full advantage of it over the weekend, going to both the Saturday and Sunday markets on the harbour. It is just so lovely to have things like this within walking distance and Ollie is a big fan of just getting out of the house. He was such a good boy that we lashed out and got him a windmill. It was on one of those incredibly windy days though so it was almost spinning enough to power the household energy. Naturally we chose the windmill that had a ladybird on it (his fave) and he took great delight in tearing around the park with his "fan". It probably also helped that he had his daddy (i.e. favourite person in the whole wide world) to chase him around. The weekend also saw a bit of light reading by Obear. He just had to read this book after all the positive reviews he had heard! And to wash down all that reading and windmill carrying? Why babycinos of course. Nick is making beautiful babycinos at home now so Ollie...

In the last week the weather here has been absolutely terrible. We haven't been able to get to a park in over a week and I have had to get pretty creative about rainy day activities. Unfortunately the copy of "Activities to keep toddlers entertained" only arrived in the post today so there has been a reasonable amount of TV time. This might explain why I have had the theme song to "Dora the Explorer" running on repeat in my head all day at work today. It also might explain why Ollie keeps saying "me did it" (as Dora and her pals are always singing "we did it"). Besides watching TV, another activity that has been keeping B amused is hiding. His favourite is to hide behind his hands or his dinner plate but he is also quite partial to hiding his food under his plate or most fun of all, hiding behind a curtain as taught to him by his Aunty Emma. Here he is showing off his super duper hiding skills. He thinks it is absolutely hilarious when ...

When Nick and I found out we were having a little boy we bought this book on raising boys. It described the various phases of a boy's life and in one part talked about the change from a baby whose world is completely centred around their mummy to a little boy who is in complete awe of their daddy. Well, in recent weeks I have completely witnessed the beginning of this process. While Ollie still thinks I'm a pretty big deal (as is evidenced by his desire for me to hold him and all 15ish kilos of him far too much, especially while declaring "cuddle"), he has made a real shift to becoming a daddy's boy. He is Nick's number one fan and is either playing games with him ("daddy sit here, play", "daddy play trains") or he is trying to copy Nick in some way. An obvious example of this has been Ollie's regular wearing of Mr Potato Head's glasses and pointing out that they are the same as daddy's. The other night saw the three of us ...