The Dower Family

It fills my heart with such joy that Ollie loves books more than pretty much everything else. This has been made pretty clear to me this week when: - he refused to leave daycare because he hadn't finished 'reading' a book - we caught him reading books in bed when he was meant to be going to have a nap - he took great delight in following along at just the right pages to a Toy Story book on CD that Aunty Hayley and Uncle Simon gave him - he continued to try to negotiate for an extra book each night at bedtime. O continues to exert his two year old influence around the place. This week has seen a little bit of tantrum throwing. I really thought we were immune to this since every other two year old we know has been doing it for quite some time. But alas, I was wrong. Perhaps O is just a late bloomer in the tantrum stakes? The finest example of this was when I went along to a morning tea at daycare on a non-Ollie daycare day. Which meant that when the morning tea was over

It has been a crazy busy week around here. The weekend kicked off a day early with Nick taking Friday off so we could head back to Seaworld again before our return passes ran out. I was contemplating doing this on my own but am SO thankful that I had Nick there to help out. Turns out trekking around theme parks with a toddler while eight months pregnant isn't the easiest thing to do. Even if for no other reason than they don't let pregnant people go on the kiddy rides. Who knew? I mean the adult rollercoaster I can understand but the merry go round? Perhaps they were worried I might be too heavy?? As well as the kiddy rides we checked out the dolphin show (or the whale show to Ollie, he keeps getting dolphins and whales confused), the sharks and of course our favourites, the penguins. Saturday morning saw us wander down to the local farmer's markets to pick up some goodies. Not of the fresh produce variety but of the seriously delicious sweeties kind. We have disc

It has been absolutely freezing here this week, well by usual standards at least. Our house is definitely a lot warmer than the old house which, being a post-war house, had gaping holes between the floorboards to let the freezing air in. Nick has found it so cold in fact that he needed to pick up some gloves and a beanie to see him through his mornings catching the train into work. Of course Ollie thought that they looked better on him, perhaps they did, but only because he was also wearing his super gorgeous little ugg boots as well. I have also managed to get through my first full week as a stay at home mummy. It hasn't been too tough let me tell you. It is actually only one extra day with Ollie at the moment as he is still in daycare for two days a week and will stay there until the baby is at least three months. So I find myself with a nice little mid-week weekend to myself each week. It is pretty surreal given how little time I have had to myself in the past two and a h

So you might have noticed that there was no blog last week. There are two competing theories as to why that was. The first is that it seems someone temporarily replaced Ollie with one of Satan's offspring. And perhaps I figured that if you can't say something nice about someone then perhaps you shouldn't blog that week at all. I guess we have been pretty sheltered from the terrible twos and this latest assault on boundaries really hasn't been that bad. It has meant getting him to sleep for his nap and at nighttime (and getting him to stay asleep) has been a bit trying. But I was explaining it to someone at work who has kids, and I told him that it had taken an hour to get Ollie to go down to sleep and then he had woken up again around 3am. This person pointed out to me that it sounded like nirvana to him. Perhaps we have been spoiled by such good behaviour and just don't know how good we have it? But still, it has been pretty trying at times, especially when