Sunday Sleep In

Tabitha has another molar coming through at the moment - her fourth - and it is giving her, and consequently me, a little grief.  She has a runny nose, and so with that and the tooth pain, she was up looking for milk and cuddles for most of last night.  I think I managed to snatch a few hours of sleep in there, albeit broken into 20-minute blocks!

So when I woke up very tired this morning, The Daddy kindly took Tabitha out for a two-hour walk around the neighbourhood, by the river, parks, to get a coffee and home again, which allowed me to snatch another two hours of uninterrupted sleep.  I felt much better by the time I woke at 10am!

When I awoke, they had returned and were making me pancakes and bacon, so I got to eat breakfast in bed, with a nice cup of tea, in peace while they had their breakfast in the living room.  It was a lovely start to a Sunday.

The Daddy is the pancake chef in our house, and he uses a Nigella Lawson recipe, which makes deliciously fluffy, American-style pancakes.  I had five, that's right, five, each as large as a plate, with a pile of free range bacon and plenty of maple syrup.

The Nigella recipe uses a blender, so it's very easy to whip up a batch and start pouring:

The syrup was a real treat - our good friend Sarah recently visited from Canada, and brought us some Canadian maple syrup in a pretty tin:

Speaking of lovely gifts - I went out to dinner last night with a couple of girlfriends, and my friend Shalini brought over a birthday gift for Tabitha.  It is something I had mentioned to her ages ago, that I had heard about and wanted, and she tracked this down.  It is a traditional babies' anklet with little bells!  So you can hear where they are in the house, as they crawl and walk around!  So cute.  The sound the bells make is exquisite, a delicate little tinkling noise.  This one is Cambodian.  As she gets older, it will fit her to wear as a bracelet:

Tabitha has quite a bit of hair now!  I managed to scrape some into a cute little fountain ponytail:

Her spooning skills are increasing rapidly. One of the frequent concerns I hear from people about trying Baby Led Weaning is the fear that 'they will never learn to use cutlery if they eat with their hands'.  It's nonsense, I assure you.  We have practiced BLW since day one, and at 12 months, she is quite a proficient spooner - more so than many non-BLW babies I know.  I think that BLW gives them a good awareness of the textures and feel of food, and it also increases their fine motor skills, as they have to maneuver their own food from 6 months of age.  She can happily spoon a whole bowl of yoghurt, rice pudding or porridge, if I help her a little with loading the spoon.

In fact, the messiest food she eats seems to be cream cheese on corn thins - she likes to lick all the cream cheese off, discarding the 'empty' cracker part.  This results in a fair amount of cream cheese on the face:

When she eats she plays a game where she lays her head down on the table, then I do the same, then we both jerk them upright at the same time and laugh:

Remember my pretty tulip gift from last weekend?  The tulips are still looking so stunning and cheery on my kitchen windowsill: