Happy birthday!

Miss Evie is officially one month old. Thank goodness. As you can see she is getting chubbier everyday and looks less like an incredibly fragile newborn. I'm not that into teeny tiny newborns, they are too scary small. I like a few chubby rolls on the legs.

The first month has flown by in so many ways, but it does also feel like we have had her around us forever. Or at least that is how it feels when you are getting up every night!! But that continues to be wonderful - if I feed her around 10pm she still wakes around 2amish and then only wants a feed around daybreak, when I am sneaky enough to bring her back to bed with me. Completely civilised. Big snaps for Evie for being such a big superstar and sleeping so well from such an early age. It means I don't have to have a nanna nap everyday just to survive the day, which means that I am able to actually achieve things around the house.

One of the things I have achieved around the house lately is a hell of a lot of cooking. Putting two kids to sleep in the evenings take the efforts of two adults and once that is done there is only really enough energy to pour a glass of wine and flop down in front of the telly. Cooking dinner is not really an appealing prospect. Enter 'once a month cooking'. This might sound a bit odd but it really makes a lot of sense. Nick, Evie and I went out to this super awesome butcher last week and bought enough meat for the month, then came home and planned our meals, shopped and then cooked up a storm. It really wasn't that much effort as there is so much doubling up between meals anyway, like everything needed chopped onions so you just chop them all up at once. We now have 50 meals in our freezer (please don't let our fridge break down!!) that require little effort to be transformed into yummy nutritious dinners each night. Best thing since sliced bread. Can't believe we didn't cotton onto this years ago. Only downside is that the entire house smelt of onions for days. Like really badly. I am still getting whiffs of it. Maybe onion free dishes next month?

It was while doing all this cooking that I decided to turn Ollie into some kind of spaceman with the alfoil. Not surprisingly he thought this was pretty awesome. As did Nick who got in on the act and made a much better tinfoil hat (modelled on the one the kid wears in that movie "signs"). I actually have a pic of Nick wearing the hat that is quite fetching but I exercised some restraint in not publishing it. Yet. If he annoys me at any point he might find it making its way onto this blog. Or better yet, facebook!!!

It seems that structured activities (like alfoil hat making) is the way to go to keep Ollie occupied at the moment. Luckily with Nick still home we have been able to have lots of these. We made the trip into town last week to the big library to catch Ollie's favourite guitar man Tim rocking it out to the nursery rhymes. He probably didn't reveal his true groupie core as much as usual though as he was distracted by playing with one of his favourite girls, Miss Audrey. But the two of them had plenty of fun tearing around the place and playing on the special little kid's computers which O seems to be quite taken with.

Another great activity was a trip to the indoor playcentre with Nanna Carmel. This is going to be a regular playdate which is super dooper awesome given how much Ollie loves it and how much I love peace and quiet!! O has such a great time that apparently he was hiding in the play equipment to avoid leaving. It was then that he tried to negotiate a "deal" of four more plays and one drink, instead of one more play. It seems that Ollie is a born negotiator. Nick has been striking "deals" with him for some time now. Things like "if you have a sleep we can go to the park this afternoon, deal?". Now O has taken this right on board and is always saying things like "we'll play with the toys and then we'll go to the shops, deal?". It is hilariously cute. Deal?

You can see just how much bigger Evie is in this pic. She is actually wearing real clothes instead of those boring onsies (with the ridiculously high number of snap buttons on them - seriously, have you tried doing them all up properly in darkness through sleep deprived eyes? while the baby wriggles like an octopus??). She is also even big enough now to fit into the fancy cloth nappies I bought for her. My inner hippy insists that I use cloth nappies at least part-time on Evie - for so many reasons. Since she's been born I've been using a mixture of disposables as well as prefolds (which aren't too far removed from traditional cloth nappies). But these fancy ones are so much better. Nick hasn't had a go at one of them yet though so I guess that will be the real test as to whether they are easy enough to use to pass the husband test.

We took Evie on her first trip to Ikea (or as it is known around here "Mecca") the other day. Funnily enough I seem to recall we took Ollie there around about the same age. We like to get them hooked young around here. An unplanned purchase was a lamp for Obear's room. We've had this battle lately (really??) about the light switch. He keeps turning it on and off and also turning the fan on - not the smartest move in the middle of winter. So we saw this cool lamp and thought it might be a good idea. It looks very cute over his bed and he was beyond excited to have his own big boy lamp to read books with. But we were a little apprehensive about whether he would be able to withstand the temptation to read books in the middle of the night. Cut to early this morning and I was woken by a banging noise. I'm not that brave so I woke Nick up, thinking that it might be a burglar or something. Obviously it had escaped my mind that we had the new lamp, but Nick went straight to the culprit - you guessed it, Obear sitting in bed reading books and thumping them onto the ground. We'll have to set a few ground rules it seems, but he looks super cute sitting on his bed reading.