Archive for March, 2009

Eeeee-awww-eeee-awwww


31 Mar

Andrew and Nathan went to the city on Sunday to give me time alone at home to work on my report (that is due to be submitted to our client today).  While they were out they saw a fire engine with its siren going, and ever since Nathan keeps saying eeee-awwwww-eeeee-awwww over and over and over again.

A is for anarchy…


20 Mar

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that the child eats peppercorns.  We keep a 500 g bag of peppercorns in the second bottom drawer in the kitchen, and Nathan pulls out all the other packets of things in the drawer so he can find the loose peppercorns that have fallen out of the peppercorn bag.  He even shakes the bag sometimes to try to get them out of the bag.  Today he shook one of the other open packets around with great force…it was a packet of alphabet noodles that became spread far and wide.  Nathan sat down in the middle of the chaos he produced and started eating the alphabet noodles.  So now we can add uncooked alphabet noodles to the growing list of weird (or at least slightly abnormal) things Nathan eats.

Goodbye Oma


19 Mar

Oma passed away at around 5:55 am yesterday morning.  I will miss her.

I don’t have very many photos of Oma, but below are some favourites of mine from those that I do have.  The first is Oma as a teenager, the second was taken at our wedding in March 2007, the third was taken in March last year when we asked Oma to show Andrew how to make Apple Strudel, the fourth is four generations (Oma, my dad, me and Nathan) also taken in March last year, and the last was taken in November.

Oma always saw me as her only hope for producing her a great grandchild.  Unfortunately it took me a lot longer than she had hoped, and she didn’t get to see Nathan much because we live so far away now.  But you can see from the photos how happy she was with him.

Oma


16 Mar

I wrote a post in November about Oma.  She had cancer and I had been told it was unlikely she’d see Christmas.  She turned 95 years old on Christmas eve, though Andrew and I couldn’t make it down to see her.  She seemed to linger on and we had plans to see her the first weekend in April when we went to Melbourne to celebrate Andrew’s dad’s 60th birthday.

Oma had gone to hospital a while ago now to learn how to use some equipment (oxygen etc) before being back at home with it, but she deteriorated and wasn’t able to go home.  There was some talk about where she should go, because she couldn’t stay indefiniately at the hospital she was in.  My parents went to visit her on the weekend, and Sunday night I got a call from mum telling me that Oma had really deteriorated even between when they saw her on Saturday and again on Sunday.  It sounded like it wasn’t certain she would survive the night, but Andrew and I decided that Nathan and I should fly to Melbourne to go and see her, hoping she would be still with us and lucid today.

Nathan was dragged from his cot at 9:15 pm and Andrew took us to the airport to catch our 10:20 pm flight.  We took the carseat with us so that mum and dad could collect us from the airport at midnight.  Nathan had a fantastic flight…he didn’t manage to go back to sleep after he woke (at the airport), and spent the flight smiling at everyone around him and playing peek-a-boo with the people in the seat behind us.

Nathan finally fell asleep in the car on the way to Oma’s house where I was going to stay with mum and dad, and woke up 8 hours later.  We went to visit Oma in the morning but didn’t manage to spend much time with her as she was seeing doctors and was also being moved to her own room.  Oma was pretty surprised to see us, though!

We went back after lunch, and Nathan was reasonably happy even though he’d had practically no sleep all morning.  We read a book to him (Horns to Toes and inbetween) and got Nathan to show Oma his hands, feet, nose, ears, how he was able to shut his eyes, and where his belly button is.  Oma said that Nathan was “a cutie”.  I’m sure she was happy to see him.  He went to sleep pretty soon afterwards and slept for an hour and a half.  By the time he woke up, Oma was dozing and very difficult to rouse, a fact that we put down to the morphine she was getting.

We went home, got some dinner from a local Thai restaurant, and I had just managed to get Nathan to sleep soon after 9 pm after a marathon effort to get him to sleep when Bruno rang the doorbell.  He told Dad that the hospital had rung and said that they didn’t think that Oma would survive the night.  Mum and Dad went to the hospital, while I decided to stay so that Nathan could have a decent sleep.

So while I was sitting here on my own I looked back to read the last blog entry I wrote about Oma.  The photos show her so much healthier looking than she was today, even though she was quite sick with cancer.  I’m so pleased that we have those photos, and I’m pleased that we have photos of Oma and Nathan when he was only a couple of months old.  I’m almost glad I don’t have any photos from today, since it’s not how I want to remember Oma.

There’s absolutely no point to this entry, just wanted to write it down.

The Nathan photo-a-day project


15 Mar


Andrew had a project to take a photograph of Nathan every day for the first year of his life.  It took weeks of looking through some 30,000 photos, but he has now finally finished choosing and editing the photos.  There are a couple of days where he chose more than 1 photo, and there is a day 0 photo (taken just hours before Nathan was born), so instead of 366 photos (it was a leap year) he’s ended up with 374 photos.  Most photos were taken by Andrew, several were taken by me, and at least one was taken by our friend Stephanie.  The last thing to do now is to make a photo book and get it printed.

Andrew had uploaded the photos and has used some kind of programme that orders them randomly and you can click to zoom into a photo and then use arrows to scroll through.  He had to split the photos into two lots, the first half and the second half.  Beware though, before clicking on the links, that there is some nudity and each one is about a 15 MB download.

What the Duck


13 Mar

I don’t find them all funny (they are all about photography), but I thought this WTD comic strip was quite appropriate!

13 Months Old


12 Mar

Nathan is just a wonderful little kid nowdays.  In some ways he has become so much easier than he was….he is sleeping better, generally wakes up happy and smiley, and smiles and even laughs fairly easily now.  He tries to be helpful by helping me carry the laundry basket full of washed clothes to the clothes line, put pegs in the peg basket, helps carry bags when we are out, likes to try to help me cook, tries to vacuum and has an interest in absolutely everything.

Nathan is still a very good eater, but nowdays he is trying to learn how to use the fork.  We have put thick plastic on the table now to try to protect it, since it was getting dented by the tines of the fork as they hit the table with some force!  He isn’t very good at picking food up with it yet, but as with everything else he manages with some effort, when he does pick up some food he lets out a little noise showing his delight that he achieved it.  It is so very cute.

Other things that Nathan is getting better at is riding his tiger (though his feet only barely touch both sides of the floor at once now), shape puzzles (he recognises the circle and finds it easy to put into puzzles, but other shapes are still a bit difficult)….

and just generally going through Mummy’s handbag.

In fact, he loves looking in my purse, getting the coins out and then running to his bedroom to put the coins into his moneybox.  Andrew gives Nathan his silver coins every Friday night to put into his moneybox, but he’s doing a very good business by stealing other coins from my purse during the rest of the week!  I stopped putting coins into my purse and just threw them into my bag, but Nathan is also very good at finding them there too!

It is interesting that Nathan still adores the car key (far far FAR better than any other key) and we have overcome the screaming that used to erupt every time we tried to take the key away from him.  Now when we are going somewhere in the car, I tell him and he immediately rushes over to stand near the bowl we keep the keys in, reaching up towards the bowl (that he can’t reach yet).  I give him the key and he rushes off to the front door, key tightly held in his hand.  I open the door and he walks out to the lift, we get into the lift, out at the carpark level and he walks around to the car, constantly pressing the buttons on the key.  I do confiscate the key when he gets into a button-pushing frenzy, but usually he’s ok.  So he unlocks the car, and then goes to stand at the driver’s door.  I let him in and he tries to put the key into the ignition (I help) and then he stands on the seat and plays with the steering wheel and anything else that takes his fancy.  Then he goes into the car seat without too much of a fuss.  When we get home he wants the car key as soon as I turn the car off, then he holds it all the way back to the flat and goes to the bowl and waits for me to lower it for him to put the car key into.  He isn’t always happy to give it up, but since it’s where it belongs we don’t get much noise about it at all, in contrast to the days when I used to just take it (after telling him why) and he would just scream!  So I think that if Nathan feels that he’s being useful and putting things where they belong, he’s happy!

Reading….


02 Mar

…on the toilet, just like Daddy!

Finger painting and more…


01 Mar

I have a little project going…taking prints of Nathan’s hands and feet at various times…usually when I think of it or get around to it, so they have been a bit haphazard over the past 12 months.  I have prints from just a few days old and wanted to get his prints at 12 months old as well.  Funnily enough, over time his handprints have become easier to get, but his footprints harder!  Anyway, down to business…..

…and now that business is over it’s time for a bit of fun with a birthday present!

Roseola


01 Mar

Now that Nathan is a year old, I’ve decided to only do blogs about his development once a month instead of twice, but it seems like such a long time since I did his 12 month post!  The boy obviously has so much more confidence about his walking ability these days that he isn’t taking as much care and is consequently doing a lot of falling over.  That, combined with the fact that he has been sick for at least a week and not sleeping well, means that we’ve had more crying and screaming in the last couple of weeks than I think we had in his entire first year!

Nathan had his 12 month vaccinations on February 11, and about 4 days later he started to get a bit snuffly.  I tend to think it’s a total coincidence, but back then I wasn’t sure if the two were related.  He gradually got more and more snuffly until he had quite a runny and snotty nose.  I couldn’t work out what he had because he didn’t really sneeze or cough, so wasn’t sure if he had a cold or not.  He was really REALLY unhappy being left at Ebony’s house last Tuesday while I went to work, and that night I thought vaguely that he seemed a bit hot.  It wasn’t until Wednesday last week that I took his temperature and it was 39.5 degrees.  The next two days the poor tyke had a high temperature, and I dosed him with Panandol when it went above 39 degrees.  I made an appointment to take him to the GP on Friday, but of course his fever had improved and so I decided to cancel the appointment (only to find that he didn’t really have one booked!?).  Yesterday he came out in spots all over his head, tummy (chest wasn’t so bad) and back.  They were not bright red spots, just pale pinkish but quite obvious.  Why is it that we all get sick on weekends when there are no GP’s working?  I rang Health Direct Australia and spoke to a nurse who thought that he had a Roseola rash, which is caused by a virus but doesn’t really cause any real problems.  I was advised, as a precaution, to keep him away from other children until the spots disappeared, which should be gone within 3 days.

So hopefully Nathan will start sleeping better again soon so that he’s not tired and grumpy, that he will feel better soon, and stop falling down and bumping his head (possibly due to tiredness?).  I really want my happy baby/toddler back, this tired, constantly grizzly and crying one is really really draining for Andrew and I!

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