Big kids

Caelan's nearly three and Siahn's nearly one!!!! WOW!!!! I look at old photos of Caelan and get sad cause he's such a big boy now, I don't know where it all went and how it went so fast. And how the hell did a year go by since Siahn was born?!?!

We went to The Wiggles on Sunday and it was soooo good :) Caelan was a little overawed and starstruck but loved it and Siahn the little party girl sat on Chris' lap dancing and clapping the entire time. hehe It was so cute - they both loved it and so did we. Gone are the days of getting excited to see pumping DJs at dance parties! We now get excited and boogy down at The Wiggles concerts. My how things have changed in the last three years. haha

Caelan's great and talks like an adult, is amazingly clever and learns things so quickly. He's so precise and makes sure to get things exactly right. He counts well, knows 1+1, 2+2, 3+3 all the way up to 12+12, he can recognise letters and knows how to spell his name. He makes us sooo proud. He's also driving us crazy with naughtiness at the moment! So things aren't all great, hopefully this "phase" ends soon, we're hoping like hell it is a phase and not just him.

Siahn's standing from sitting without holding onto things, walking around furniture all the time and stand unaided much more. Though no attempts to take unaided steps yet. She says hello and tata while waving, knows I'm Mama and Chris is Dada and nods yes and jabbers all the time. She's also very whingy, like all the time! Hopefully this just isn't her as well!! She's also a snot machine - it honestly seems like she's always got snot dripping from her head which is bloody annoying.

And she's off!

She's a real crawler now. It all started properly (i.e. long distance hehe) yesterday, not just the little bits she'd been doing and then decided she just didn't want to do that, it's real crawling all over the place. Though she's still more keen on wanting to be upright and walking round like the big people. She's constantly pulling herself up against anything and everything now and letting go. Crazy girl. Which of course ends up with her falling, but she'll learn soon. She's really controlled though and doesn't hurt herself that much with her falls which is good. We don't catch her or stop her from falling cause that's how she's gonna learn, but it's great she's not hurting herself too much with it. She'd been getting wherever she wanted to go for quite a while now by doing the short burst of crawling, combined with standing on her feet and then twisting around, sitting down and then doing it all again. Now she's just crawling for longer burst. Soooo we have a crawler at 8 months, not quite as early as Caelan (though he was only just before he was 8 months) but pretty much the same time. So much for our last bubba being a bubba for longer! It looks like she wants to be walking really soon too, hopefully the urgency for that within her will diminish a little now that she's crawling.

Photos

I'm gonna make up for not posting many pics now! hehe

Caelan's been swimming every day here which he's LOVING, it's awesome to have the pool. I swam with him today but Siahn hasn't been swimming cause she's got a cold. Poor wee girl - she's been waking 12 million times a night lately. Actually I should say: she's been sleeping a few times each night lately. Cause she's awake a whole lot more than she's asleep dammit. Anyway soon the evil teething and cold will be gone! Caelan's also not doing the best on the sleeping front (LOL that's a bloody understatement!) but that's our own fault for getting him so far off his routine while we were down in Whanganui. Hopefully we fix it soon cause it's maddening.

Siahn's standing heaps now and really active on the floor but looking like she wants to go straight to walking rather than focusing on the crawling thing. She's always just getting up, she crawled today but really it's just not for her, she'd much rather be on her feet. Crickey I hope she holds back a bit before fully getting there. She's standing up against anything and everything and taking a few steps while doing this. Slow down Siahn!

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!

Guy Fawkes

I forgot to post these ages ago! We didn't get to go to the Clevedon fireworks show this year because Boo at the Zoo was on the same night, which is a shame because it was such a cool night and Caelan loved it last year. He still remembers it and talks about it. Though Boo at the Zoo was also damned cool so we're really glad we got to go to that, and Caelan loved being a penguin. He was the cutest penguin ever! I think I've got a pic of him on my phone so I'll post that as well soon.

On Guy Fawkes night we had some fireworks here after Siahn went to bed and Caelan really loved it. It was so much fun! Just Chris, Caelan and I, we all had heaps of fun.

Fuckin' reflux may be the death of me yet

Argh!!!! We've just gone downhill after a pretty good patch and I swear I might die. Second time round sucks big time, everyone kept saying it would be easier as we'd been through it before. But really it's harder, with a demanding 2 year old to look after, no chance of rest, constant wake-ups throughout the night and no breaks. Combine that with the screaming of a 6 month old with reflux that's just gone belly up again and you have one very, very stressed out Mama struggling to cope.

So now it seems there was no supply problem at all, it was just the start of reflux rearing it's ugly arsehole of a head again. She's outgrown her current dose and we need to up it, until then things are gonna be fun, fun, fun. haha NOT! Though my Plunket nurse must have felt my desperate vibes because she called to see how things were, didn't go into detail just told her that we'd hit a bad patch again and things were pretty hard. She is great and remembered things we'd discussed in the past and said "That must be really hard not having family around and not getting the regular breaks you need when you have a baby with reflux, they're really difficult and it's vital", I nearly cried. She said she'd call some family support company to get them to contact me and see what they can help with. They called a wee while ago and will contact me next week to discuss what I'd need and how they can help, even if they just come over to help with housework and watch kids so I can sleep. Yay! Cause bloody hell I'm exhausted! I've had the same damned sore throat for over a month now, I have constant headaches and after the cold that I had and getting mastitis 3 or so weeks ago I just don't want it again. I know it's all because I'm rundown, stressed and tired but mastitis is horrible and evil and I thought I was gonna die having it and looking after these two! I sooooo don't want it again please. And this life I live is a welcoming invitation for it. Ek.

She talks

Well not in words words but she thinks she is. As of this afternoon she's been jabbering away in la la la la la and ya ya ya ya ya and da da da da words and getting very shitty at me for my boobs not supplying enough milk. She was growling at me and really telling me off. Poor funny girl! Hopefully I can sort this supply issue out soon. For the last two days she's been feeding really badly, obviously hungry, getting on and then pulling off and arching and crying and being pretty damned pissed off about it all. Obviously the first thing I thought of was reflux but I don't think so because she seems ok otherwise, still pretty happy and smiley, so I think it could be supply. Will check it all out and sort it for her.

Sick, sick, sick

Come on summer! We've all been sick for ever it feels like - but thankfully everyone is getting better (apart from me) now. The sickness for the last over a month has made their sleeping really shitty. We've had them both waking a million times a night and not settling for way too long. Caelan's getting sorted now (only woke once last night and settled quickly) but Siahn is really broke! She wakes a kabillion times and screams for ever. We're totally over it. It's hard, hard work being sick for ever, never getting more than 5 hours sleep and working constantly and never having a break. Does not make for very happy parents! Ah well - that's all part of being a parent huh? Still it makes me want to kick those people that have lots of support and regular breaks but still moan, hehe, the green eyed monster certain takes over us. Just as well Caelan and Siahn are damned cute though, just as bloody well.

Caelan's good - totally crazy and driving us to distraction just about all the time! haha He now has his big boy bike which is super duper cute to watch him riding around on. He sings constantly. Shouts and screams at the top of his lungs sporadically for no apparent reason. Gets super excited and spazzes out nearly hitting Siahn in a fit of I don't know what. Is super duper sweet and adorable to Siahn - this morning while I was making his daycare lunch she woke up and started crying, he went running in there and said in a really cute happy voice "Good morning Siahn! Did you have a good sleep pretty girl?". I just about cried! He then went to get a car and put it in her cot for her to look at saying "Here little girl, you can play with this car. Good girl!". I then went rushing in having visions of him beating her over the face with the car and said that it's really lovely he's sharing his toys with her but she shouldn't really have toys in her cot. So he got it out, I went back to rushing to get the lunch done, she cried as he walked away from her and he called back "It's ok Siahn, I'm just putting my car away and then I'll come back and Mama will be here soon, she's just making my lunch" and then "See I'm back now, it's ok little girl". He is sooooooo adorable! Though he is also a monster - he whacked her over the head with a big rattle really hard last week. Oh dear. He's growing up soooo fast - it's sad and great all at once.

Siahn's good too - sleeping really really badly and driving us insane though! Lordy, lordy for a baby that doesn't have reflux, screaming marathons and sleep issues. But then that baby wouldn't be ours! Damn my family and our crappy reflux, intolerances and stomach issues - damn us. It sucks that I gave our children this evil, evil, evil maggoty thing. Ah well - they're damned cute though :) She's a constant spew machine and I'm sick of all the washing, cleaning spew off the couches and smelling revolting. Oh for a baby that isn't constantly leaking as well. She's really not interested in rolling has done it less than five times I think. But she's sitting up all the time and loves doing this to play. Perhaps she'll be slower at doing things and we'll feel like we've got a baby for longer - that would be great. Because she's our last one, it would be really nice to have a baby for a bit longer - it's always felt like Caelan's growing up too fast and doing things too soon.

She's not that interested in solids, actually she's getting there now but it definitely took longer for her to get into it than Caelan. She has 3 meals a day and is getting more into it. She had sushi for the first time last weekend and loved it - just like Caelan did at 5 months too! She has rice bubbles for breakfast in the morning at the table with Caelan, it's so cute. She drinks water well from a little cup and enjoys it. Though drinking milk from a bottle - NO WAY! Same dramas we had with Caelan from not doing it regularly enough - pain in the bum. She's such a smiley happy wee girl though really, she just doesn't like to sleep and protests loudly about it a lot of the time.

I need to make sure I video them more! Haven't done it for ages and we just need to. Here are the latest photos.