It's been a long time...

We shouldn't have left you. Without a dope beat to step to.

haha That song came into my head as soon as I typed the title. Annnnnnnyway, Caelan's 2 years and 9 months old and Siahn's 8 months. Wow huh? Gotta get back into updating more regularly!

Just before Christmas we went up to Whangarei for Grandma's 98th birthday. It was awesome! So nice to spend the time with her and so super duper nice for the kids to spend time with her. She loved it too. Siahn was teething though so she was damned miserable for the first part of the time there. She is THE WORST teether in the world - it was hell. She was screaming, not sleeping with high temperatures and pulling at her ears, we thought it was ear infections at first but nope just evil teething screwin' with her. She was better for the last part of the trip though which was good. Then we nearly killed her on the day we came home. GULP! It was horrible. We put her to sleep on the bed on queen sized bed we'd been sleeping on as the portacot was already packed up ready to go. She'd taken to throwing herself backwards so to stop her banging her head on the wall we put a folded queen-sized bedspread against the wall. We were all out in Grandma's granny-flat for ages and Chris went inside for something and thankfully went to the door where she was sleeping to see if he could hear anything. He heard a really strange sounding quiet muffled screaming when he put his ear to the door and rushed in to find her tangled under the bedspread, struggling and screaming weirdly with a really husky voice. When he got her out she was drenched in sweat (literally dripping) and bright red with weird looking eyes, had lost her voice and was soooo scared. Our poor little girl. I just about died when he bought her to me and told me what had happened. She was strange and floppy for a while - we took her clothes off, put a fan on and cooled her down with flannels while I feed her to calm and hydrate her. So lucky he'd gone inside then because we don't think she would have survived much longer. Ugh. Caelan had heaps of fun there even though it rained the entire time, he enjoyed going from Makere's house to Grandma's and back. And really enjoyed the never ending supply of carrot cake when he visited Grandma! hehe We didn't even try to kill him at all so he had a super great time ;)

We got back late Christmas eve and had a lovely Christmas day at home just the four of us - it was so nice! We got up and did presents straight away - we got Caelan and Siahn a really cool rocking horse to share that we set up in the lounge the night before so he walked out to find it and was SOOOOO excited. We got him a really cool remote controlled car that flips and has crazy lights all over it, a huge castle set, a big Formula 1 racing track and cars set, a spade and wheel barrow, heaps of Hotwheels and Matchbox cars, a kite and other little things in his stocking - he LOVED them and had the best time opening them all excitedly. Siahn didn't get as many things as him as she already has heaps of his old toys and really doesn't need anything, not to mention even have a room to store anything! But we got her a cool rolling ball thing with a monkey on it that laughs and makes noises as it rolls around to encourage crawling, a ball that's made up for different coloured pieces which comes apart, a cool cube set that has rings and links together, a phone toy that plays songs, has games and sounds etc and some other stuff that I really can't remember along with her small stocking fillers as well. It was so great to have christmas at home as a family! Though a bit of a bummer cause we had no food in the house and no money due to a job Chris had lined up being cancelled and him not working or getting paid for 4 weeks. So we couldn't do the yummy food thing, or even the eating thing! LOL But thankfully we were able to visit Chris' parents and eat when there! Horrah. We came back home and hung out here till late afternoon where we headed over to the lovely Coopers who were kind enough to feed us Christmas dinner - yay! It was a great time, really nice end to a good Christmas day.

The rest of the time was spent hanging around home. Before Christmas sometime we'd bought a wee pool so we set that up and swam quite a lot. Caelan LOVES it, Siahn found it a bit bloody cold and screamed most of the time in protest! hehe Poor thing. We also set up the tent in the yard and spent a lot of time playing in there. We wanted to sleep in there but Siahn had taken to waking 12 million times a night again with the bastard teething and we wouldn't have been able to hear her from out there. We did try to sleep in the tent for one day sleep with the two of them but they just weren't playing the game, Siahn screamed and Caelan just kept talking and playing and doing anything but go to sleep. Ah well - we tried.

We've just gotten back from a weeks holiday in Whanganui and it was sooooooo good to get away and feel like we had a holiday. Yay for credit cards! hahaha The drive down was amazingly good - we were really scared of it after we decided to just do it. Thought we were setting ourselves up for 6 hours of screaming but were pleasantly surprised. They were soooooo good, for that long trip we only had around 30 mins screaming. WOW, we were so thrilled and felt extremely lucky. We had a nice week there, though for the last 2 days Siahn was teething again (top teeth this time) and it was very icky. It rained for the first half and was lovely the last. We didn't do much but went to the best park in the world - it's truly amazing, Caelan LOVED it. We all went on a train ride around the park together which was great. We also we to the pools down there and Caelan went down the hydro slide - it was HUUUUGE and soooo fast and he absolutely loved it. So gorgeous, I took a video of it on Chris' phone, I'll try to upload it to YouTube and post it here. He had the best time. So cool to spend the week with Romaine, Jay and their gorgeous little girl too. We absolutely loved Whanganui and are going to look into moving down there.

Caelan's growing up so fast. It's crazy and pretty sad. I can't believe my little boy is now this kid who knows lot of stuff and can do all these things. He's just the coolest and so freakin' clever, it really blows my mind when I spend time with other kids his age or older, makes me realise just how super advanced his talking and understanding is. We just live our lives with him and although we know he's really clever and he blows us away on a pretty much daily basis (hehe typical parent thing I suppose!), we don't really realise that he really is way ahead of his age with talking and understanding. Not that it's something super important to remember but it's pretty amazing to see and I think it's good because perhaps we can tend to expect a lot from him because he's advanced, then to put it all in perspective like that and realise that 'Wow, he's bloody amazing for his age' and we shouldn't really expect too much. It's a good reality check I think. He's super tall and still really big, Chris weighed him a couple of days ago and he was just under 19kg so still got lead in his bones too. hehe He's really into his little cars at the moment, reading is still up there as well but swimming is probably his favourite thing to do.

Siahn's been threatening to crawl for a month now and still hasn't really gotten there. She's all over the place and so active when on the floor but isn't actually crawling, she's on her hands and knees and hands and feet all the time and goes forward a wee bit but it's not real crawling yet. She currently has 3 evil teeth and 1/2 on the way, can't quite work it out yet. Definitely one at the top that is the mongrel that's trying to kill her at the moment but I think there's another one at the bottom trying to get in the torture too. This morning at about 4:45am things were hideous, she was throwing herself around in pain and screaming while pulling at her ears and thrashing around. It was horrible and we couldn't do anything to settle her or even get a break in the screaming - these last 4 days have been unbelievably bad with this arsehole tooth. Chris even seriously considered cutting her gum to ease the pain because it's that bad. This morning we were thinking we might have to take her to A&E soon if she didn't start to calm, finally she stopped screaming and fell asleep out of exhaustion just before 7am. Our poor little girl. She also is on a breastfeeding strike - she hasn't fed since after her lunch on Friday in Whanganui just before we came home. I think it's because of the pain due to teething, her gums are swollen and she's in heaps of pain so I'm guessing that sucking makes the pain worse and she doesn't want to feed because of that. It sucks though, I keep trying to feed her and she screams and fights and pushes herself away from me. So I've been expressing a couple of times a day so my milk doesn't dry up. I hope she starts feeding soon. Luckily she's now drinking water out of a glass though so at least she's getting liquids. Gotta try to get her feeding again some how because she's got a cold as well I she'd feel better and get over it quicker if she was feeding. I even tried this evening by getting some food and trying to lie her down across me with a spoonful of food by my boob! But as so as she realised what I was doing the screaming and fighting and pushing started again. ARGH! I hate this and hope it ends soon. I'm not ready to give up breastfeeding yet and certainly don't want to move to formula so I hope it ends and we can carry on with the plan of feeding her to 12 months when she can go straight onto normal cows milk. Aside from the evil teething she's such a lovely happy girl. She loves people and is so sociable. I've taken her to one appointment with a great homeopath about the relflux and she's been on two remedies which have given pretty good results, we have a few more remedies to try this year before finding the perfect one. It'll be great when that's sorted totally - huge improvement though already which is fantastic.

Right - photo time. You'll have to excuse some of them - they're just taken on my phone so aren't the greatest!