On the move

Sorry the blog’s been a bit quiet – it’s been quite a busy couple of weeks! Alex is now well and truly on the move, so life is even more exhausting :-). He’s crawling at high speeds around the house, pulling himself up to standing and just about starting to cruise around furniture. It’s hard to believe that a month ago we were encouraging him to crawl.

So life is certainly more interesting now! After going to music class with him every week for the past five months, with Alex showing marginal interest in the group, he is suddenly interested in everything there – crawling after the teacher throughout the class, and trying to climb up her legs as she’s singing. Poor woman. All the other babies in the class sit with their mummies in a nice semi circle – but here’s Alex up at the front having a great time!

And sleeping is more interesting. Instead of falling asleep where we put him, Alex now crawls all around his cot and sleeps in ridiculous positions. And regularly we go in in the morning to find him standing up with a big grin on his face – like this:

He’s enjoying our massive television quite a bit – watching “In The Night Garden” from about 20cm away – can’t be good for him! Here he is praying that Murray wins at Wimbledon (sadly this point in the match was where it started going wrong):

Alex’s new found mobility means he’s having even more fun with his childminder. He had been getting frustrated that he couldn’t keep up with the other children, but now he’s more independent he’s much happier. Yesterday she took her charges to a local softplay which Alex loved:

And, with the sunny weather last week, Alex could really enjoy all the toys in Jacqui’s garden (check out the dribble!):

Besides the huge breakthroughs this past fortnight in Alex’s mobility, Matt and I made a big step forward of our own – we went away for an afternoon and evening all by ourselves! For the first time, we left Alex with someone else for dinner, bathtime and bedtime so we could enjoy a Foo Fighters gig in Milton Keynes. We’ve found a lovely local Australian girl called Jess who’s doing some babysitting for Alex – he loves her and she’s doing a great job of learning his routine so we can get out and about a bit more. It felt very strange leaving him at 4pm, but it all went smoothly so we’re looking forward to some more dates!

That’s not to say we’re not enjoying spending time with Alex of course! We’ve had some lovely weekends. Last weekend we visited Leeds Castle and enjoyed the bird of prey show, the aviary and the adventure playground. And we spend a glorious Sunday having a leisurely picnic in Dulwich Park with some of our NCT friends and their babies. It was hilarious watching all the babies stealing each others toys and snacks – they are still a bit too young to really play together so they tend to just crawl over each other.

As I type, we’re halfway through a lovely weekend. We’ve had Katharine visiting for a couple of days so Alex has enjoyed even more cuddles and playtime – here they are reading together: