Alex has been on top form today.  It was a pretty quiet day – power pramming this morning, followed by lots of playtime at home.  But unlike most days when he has pretty grumpy spells, he was happy, alert and smiling all day 🙂  So I thought I’d share a few pics of him today – nearly 6 months old!

Here he is looking really rather too big for his bouncy chair

And we tried some steamed broccoli this afternoon – I decided to let him play with it and feed himself rather than puree it.  His face shows that he wasn’t too sure about the flavour, but he managed to eat some of it (ignore the slightly too festive bib!).  I should have photographed the floor afterwards – I’ll be finding bits of broccoli for days.  Next time I’ll get out my plastic mat for underneath – or try a slightly less messy food!

Just before bed, Alex was in a particularly fine mood on his play mat, so I took a quick video of his babbling.  Check out the chubby legs!

Today was such fun with him, that I’m feeling quite sad that next week he’s starting settling in with his new childminder, Jacqui.

It’s been an exciting week and a super exciting day.  With visits from Newcastle Jo and Alex’s Uncle David & Auntie Sarah, he’s been enjoying even more cuddles than usual.  And he had an evening alone with his daddy whilst I had a proper night out at the theatre – such a treat 🙂

But the highlight of the week, and certainly something we’ve been looking forward to for ages, was Alex’s very first swimming lesson!  We’ve signed up to Saturday morning classes for him so that it’s something he can do with Matt – and so at 9.30am today, Alex was sporting a rather dashing (and quite retro) baby swim nappy:

It was a fabulous 30 minute class, designed at getting all the babies used to being in the water.  They were pulled around the water on their front, back and side – and did lots of singing “round the mulberry bush” etc.  They were even totally submerged.  Alex was his usual serious self, but didn’t cry and wasn’t at all bothered at being under the water which was fabulous.  Hopefully he’ll enjoy swimming as much as his daddy – although not sure he’ll be ready for 2012!

Here he is posing with daddy after the class.  He looks particularly sad here – but he really did seem to enjoy the class!

And finally – here’s Alex showing off his funky swimming poncho:

On the way back from the pool, we stopped into the local park and tried Alex out in the baby swings for the first time.  He’s still pretty small for them – but he gave us lots of giggles and smiles as he swung.  Here’s a quick video of him slumped in his swing!

Comedy photograph today – this is Alex’s reaction to my carefully pureed organic swede and carrot lunch:

Thank goodness for Ella’s Kitchen pouches which he LOVES.  Today, for lunch, he munched on sweet pototo, broccoli and carrots, followed by a dessert of bananas and apples.

We had slightly more success this evening with homemade pears and baby rice.  He enjoyed it in his brand new high chair – how grown up!

It’s been a much quieter week in the Agar household. It took Alex a few days to get back into routine after the Manchester trip, but thankfully he’s beginning to sleep a bit better, only waking once last night between 7.30pm and 7am which was quite a treat! We’ve spent our days doing our usual activities – power pramming, long walks (including an excitingly sunny walk where I just wore a tshirt – here comes Spring!) and lunch with my NCT buddies.

Alex enjoyed an afternoon hanging out with his daddy whilst I popped into work for a meeting about my return (5 April – yikes, it’s coming quickly!). And we had a fun visit from Auntie Katharine at the weekend. We all visited Borough Market – such a great place to take Alex as there’s so much to see, although I do regularly feel bad as I used to tut people who took prams to the market on a Saturday!

Alex is currently perfecting his raspberry blowing (which he often does when eating, spraying me with swedes and courgettes – nice!). And his rolling over is getting much more proficient, with occasional success at rolling back at last. He’s starting to make crawling attempts when he’s on his tummy. I suspect he’s a long way off mastering that, but it’s fun to watch him begin to learn how.

Scariest development is the appearance of a little bit of tooth – he’s been teething lots over the past couple of weeks, and his very first bottom tooth is just beginning to break through. I still can’t quite believe it – he’s growing so quickly!

And the biggest challenge at the moment is his complete refusal to take a bottle or cup. He starts settling in with our new childminder in less than 3 weeks, so he’s going to get quite a shock when he suddenly finds he has no access to me! At least he’s almost 6 months old now, when breastfeeding becomes less important and food takes priority.

Coming soon…. Alex’s first swimming lesson!

It’s been a challenging couple of weeks with Alex getting his first proper cold and experiencing serious teething pains.  Poor wee man – and thank goodness for Calpol and baby bonjela!

Looking frazzled in Manchester!

We took our first family trip – a weekend in Manchester to watch the World Track Championships – or at least that was the plan. Alex had other ideas though – so I spent most of the weekend comforting an unhappy baby!  And with Matt and I sharing a room with him for the first time in a couple of months, we didn’t get much sleep!  Hopefully our trip to Dorset next month will be more successful.  Matt and our friend Jo certainly enjoyed the cycling, and I’m glad I at least managed to see the Team GB men’s pursuit team being brilliant 🙂

His appetite seemed to be affected by his cold. -but now he’s feeling better, he’s tried courgette and sweet potato. I’m a little bit offended that despite me preparing organic, steamed purees for him, he seems to prefer shop bought purees (which I only bought for ease for our weekend away!). Oh well – I’ll keep trying to get him to like my cooking, otherwise things will get expensive!

Highlights in the past couple of weeks include:

• Taking baby massage classes with my NCT friends.  The babies love being naked and massaged, and, when not dodging al fresco peeing, it’s fun for us to have something to do with them to get them nice and relaxed.  Alex loves it – but tends to get the giggles quite a bit, or wriggles and wriggles trying to improve his rolling over skills!
• Alex finally managed to roll all the way over – giving me hope that I will no longer have to spend much of my day helping him onto his back!  Sadly, he only seemed to perfect this skill for one day, and hasn’t repeated it since!



• Alex meeting his Great Auntie Elaine, who dropped by for a couple of days on a whistlestop tour of the UK from Washington DC
• Hanging out at Kew Gardens with his little friend Sasha (and our bigger friends John and Sladana) – we were so lucky with the weather, so Alex had a great tour of the grounds and got to see all the gorgeous crocuses that are blooming.  Such a stunning place.
• Trying out a door bouncer – and absolutely loving it!
• Screaming so loudly with excitement that he set of the window intruder alarms!!  His scream pitch must be exactly the same frequency – will make a singer of him yet!
• More power pramming!

He starts swimming lessons next weekend – more on that soon!

It’s been a busy week for Family Agar as February gets underway and Spring begins to feel a little bit closer.  Alex and I started the week at the incredibly sad wake following the funeral of a friend’s baby girl – made me want to hug little Alex tight and not let him go.  I’m thinking of my friend every day and sending her all our love.

The weather earlier in the week matched the mood – and so Alex and I stayed tucked up in the warm on Tuesday.  The major excitment of the day was introducing Alex to pears.

He’d been doing very well with baby rice and so, following Gina Ford’s weaning guidelines (!), we moved on to some fruit.  His face was a picture when he first tasted pears – but he very quickly decided he liked it and munched it down without pause.

On Wednesday, the rain had gone, so I met an NCT friend, Bryony, and we marched our little boys around Dulwich Park whilst we had a good gossip.  We then undid all our good exercise with fish finger sandwiches in the pub in the village – yum!

We were back in Dulwich Park early on Thursday morning for our first “Power Pramming” class.  I thought this would involve a slightly faster walk around the park, but it was actually an hour of pretty intense exercise!  Having done very little for the past 18 months, it was quite a shock to the system running round the park pushing Alex and doing lots of exercises whilst the babies watched from their prams!  It was certainly an excellent workout – although my thighs are seriously objecting right now – and I’ll be back next week.  Alex wasn’t entirely sure whether to sleep or cry throughout the class – I’m hoping in future he decides to sleep!

Alex and I ended the week with a much more standard maternity leave day – a leisurely morning followed by lunch out in London with a friend and an afternoon of playing at home! We also met the childminder we’ve chosen for him again to plan his settling in period – we start with her in only 5 weeks time, with a gradual increase of hours until he’s ready to spend the entire day there.  I can’t believe how quickly that’s approaching – but I’m confident we’ve found a great lady to look after him and it’s still 8 weeks until I return to Imperial (3 days per week).

Despite the sad start, it’s been a pretty good week.  It’s been fun introducing Alex to solid food – and he’s been gradually sleeping better – still a ways from going through the night, but far fewer wakings.  Long may that continue.

I’ll finish this post with another video – this time of Alex having a good kickaround on his playmat!  More soon.

Well – I’ll start this post with a big apology to my friends and family waiting for Alex updates.  I’ve been the worst blogger ever – which is ironic given my job is running a digital media team!  My main excuse is Alex’s refusal to nap properly, particularly in his first three months.  The only way he’d sleep for any length of time was to go out in the pram/car.  Plus he was pretty bad at sleeping in the evenings – which made blogging nearly impossible.  But after some hard work over Christmas at sleep training, involving a lot of tears, Alex now manages pretty regularly 45 min naps during the day, and now sleeps from 7.30pm for the entire evening (although sadly not through the night!) – so i’m getting my life back at last!

So I promise to try and blog properly about what we’re up to from now on 🙂

I hope you’ve been following the photographs on Flickr (you can see them on the right hand side of the blog homepage!).  We’ve at least remembered to take pictures daily.  And Alex is certainly growing quickly – he’s still a pretty big baby, in the 75th percentile for weight and about 91st percentile for height (would expect nothing less for an Agar!).

Big news this week is that he started rolling over!  Only in one direction, and he can’t yet roll back – but it’s fun watching him get more mobile.  I’m starting to look around the house and think about all the things I’m going to remove before he starts crawling!

He’s a pretty serious little man – preferring to stare at things taking them in rather than smiling, but he is developing a very cute little giggle.  He particularly likes being naked (!), being tickled and being sung to – all sure fire ways of getting a grin.  Check out this little video of his new chuckle:

More from me soon about what else we’ve been doing, including trying solid food for the first time (not a great success yet), music classes, first fireworks and hanging out with his little friends!

So, everyone told me that once Alex reached six weeks, things would start getting easier – so we woke up optimistically on the big day!  And we were delighted to find Alex in a very cute mood – so we took the opportunity to take some decent photographs of him.  Hopefully you’ve spotted them on Flickr already, but here’s one that makes me smile:

All the photos we took that day are on Flickr.

Later that day, Katharine came up to visit and we celebrated Alex turning 6 weeks with a stunning lunch at Dulwich Picture Gallery complete with my first glass of wine in weeks 🙂  On the way home, we popped into the local off license for some supplies (!) and I spotted that the light was gorgeous and Alex looked particularly thoughtful – so we snapped our favourite picture of him so far.  Hope you like it too:

As it turned out, Alex screamed all evening that day – so it wasn’t quite the transformation we’d hoped for. We’ve since been told that they get easier after three months – so that’s the next milestone to look forward to!!

Well, it appears that keeping up with Alex’s wants and needs has meant weekly blogging wasn’t quite possible in the first few weeks – so sorry for our silence! I will endeavour to post updates more regularly. But first, let’s catch up on the last few weeks…

Luckily, Matt’s return to work coincided with the arrival of my parents so I still had plenty of support – and Alex had an unlimited supply of cuddles!

Highlights of the first few weeks include:

• Our huge number of lovely visitors and incredibly generous gifts – Alex met his grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and plenty of new friends.  And he received so many presents – thanks to everyone!
• Our first trip on a train as we ventured into London for the very first time – booking Matt for a lunchtime meeting.
• Hanging out with our NCT friends – and their new babies!  All seven babies have now been born – and they are all boys!  We have a Herne Hill 7-a-side rugby team in the making.  A weekly sighting at the Brockwell Park lido is our NCT lunch at the gridlock caused by seven prams for seven babies!
• Starting a bathtime routine – Alex now enjoys an evening bath with his daddy followed by an almond oil massage with his mummy!  All in an attempt to chill him out so he falls asleep for the night easily!  Most of the time it doesn’t work – but it’s still a really nice routine to have.
• Alex growing ridiculously fast – he grew out of his newborn clothes so quickly and is by far the biggest baby in our NCT group.  His first weigh-in with the health visitor saw him climb from ‘just average’ into the 75th percentile in terms of baby weight – the NHS’ polite description is that he’s “thriving” 🙂
• Registering Alex’s birth – so he’s officially Alexander John Cameron Agar.  John – after Matt’s late uncle on his mother’s side and Cameron – my mother’s maiden name.  Alex managed not to cry in the Lambeth Registry Office – and didn’t get too overwhelmed by the bustle and noise of Brixton.
• Discovering the wonder that is white noise.  We have a fantastic white noise feature on our phones which has proved completely invaluable.  When we can’t get Alex to settle or sleep, we can select any number of noises – from hoovers to hair dryers – and most of the time, Alex completely relaxes and dozes off.

So that takes us up to about 6 weeks.  Promise to post more frequently from now onwards!