and that was very smart of her, or so her mother found*

Whenever Dulcie does anything remotely clever, I feel like getting out the Yellow Pages and looking up Mensa, but I'm starting to suspect other people might not view this clip the same way I do.  I swear I thought my parents would be phoning up in floods of tears at their grandchild's sweet genius, but their reaction was somewhere between nil and understated, so most likely nobody else reading this will be that impressed either.  Ah well, I share it nonetheless because I think it is brilliant.  Behold Dulcie filling in the blanks in one of her favourite books, Julia Donaldson's Room On The Broom.  She does this for lots of her favourite books and songs these days and I'm always amazed at just how much she knows/remembers/can say.  I'm generally amazed at everything she does.  As she starts running around and chatting away and working out problems for herself and using her imagination, I keep looking back at how tiny and helpless she was as a wee babe on a ventilator in an incubator and in some ways it doesn't seem like that long ago, but what a way she's come!  And I enjoy being one of THOSE parents who thinks their child is a genius about ten (ten thousand?) times a day.  It's so satisfying :)

* That's one for the Miffy fans amongst you.

park life (I must have used that title before?)

Dulcie loves balls.  She carries them, she kicks them, she sits on them, she talks about them.

Dulcie loves nectarines.  She bites them, she sucks them, she carries them around, she cries when they are not ripe enough to eat, she calls them "neccies" or "neccues".

Dulcie loves hanging out in the park.  She's starting to look like a little girl.

I probably won't be posting quite so frequently now.  These are the last of my photos from my happy family weekend.  Those two days went a long way in the world of blogging!

blanket on the ground

Dulcie loves blankets.  Fortunately, we have a rather large collection of them.  The larger of them have come in very useful lately on trips to the park.  We usually have one under the pram somewhere...

...which is how Dulcie managed to make this bed for herself on the floor of Scotland Street School museum last weekend.  Making blanket beds is something Dulcie does a lot of when we're in the house.  The cats love it when she makes (and then abandons) a pile using every blanket we own.  I'm not sure where Dulcie got this idea from, she just seemed to invent this game out of the blue a few months ago and it stuck.  Blankets are not the worst kind of mess to clean up.  It's all good :)

me and my girl (again)

Taking "selfies" (as I believe the young folk call them) is an easy way to keep Dulcie entertained for a few minutes.  Here are some I took last week.  We kept having the same facial expression in them, but it wasn't planned.  Must have been some sort of mother-daughter ESP, right?  I seem to have no shame with regards to posting terrible photos of myself lately.  Feel free to look away!

You might notice Dulcie's hand is down my top in all these pictures.  She is boob obsessed these days.  BOOB OBSESSED!  Well, she always has been really, but I think she's getting worse rather than better, and she's still really reliant on breast-feeding for sleep.  She usually has me up every hour or two all through the night (after an initial spell of 2-6 hours in her cot - progress!) and has been particularly bad for it since the hot and clammy weather started.  I don't want to stop feeding her altogether yet (I was quite determined to let her keep doing it until the age of two if she was happy to) but I think it might be the only way to sort out her sleep problems.  It's just that feeling that there's no going back once I stop and it means those days are well and truly over :(  I'm so tired right now though, like literally falling asleep on my feet.  Something's got to give.  For now, I think I'm going to keep feeding her to see if things improve once the weather calms down a bit.  The long-term of breast-feeding is really not panning out how I'd imagined and most people I know with babies of a similar age gave it up ages ago (my weird shifts meant I had the luxury of being able to continue quite easily after returning to work) so I don't have anyone to compare stories with.  Has anyone reading this fed a baby to 18 months and beyond?  Can you tell me if this love for the boobs is normal?  And should I be discouraging it or going with the flow?  I'm fairly confident in my slapdash, haphazard parenting skills nowadays (the make-it-up-as-you-go approach hasn't failed me too badly yet) but I think perhaps I go with the flow a bit too often.  Maybe I should be laying down the law and drawing some lines now that Dulcie is getting a bit older.  Bah, I don't know.  Feel free to chime in :)

word of the week - manky

Dulcie's language skillz continue to come on apace.  One of the interesting things about her developing speech is that once she learns to say a word, she becomes much more interested in the thing the word represents.  For example, when she learned to say "apple", she suddenly wanted to eat apples all the time.  She's still busting out a fair few new words every day (so much fun!) but one of her more oft repeated words of late is "manky" and, since she learned to say it, all she wants to do is get, well, manky.

She's got to know all the best places with manky-making potential.  When we get near a place with mud or sand or soil or small stones, she will grab your hand and drag you towards the source, shouting, "Manky! Manky! Manky!" with an excited glint in her eye.  This is her in the Botanic Gardens one night last week.  I made sure to keep her away from the immaculate flowers, but nonetheless this behaviour attracted a few horrified looks from passers by.

She was having so much fun though and I think it's better for her to be a hands-on explorer of her surroundings than a clean freak.  There may be a more appropriate middle ground, however!  She was picking up handfuls of soil and literally rubbing them all over her face and clothes.  Thank goodness it was close to bath time.  She left a great tide line in the bath that night!

Here she is rolling around on the ground in protest once I did finally remove her - not the most flattering of photos!

I'm so glad these cute shorts came clean in the wash.

I'm trying to get some good video footage of Dulcie saying some of her (or some of my) favourite words.  I'm working on "manky monkey" as a phrase, but no joy yet. These two words are so cute when she says them, so as a combo should be mind-blowing.  I'll keep at it.

fluffball!

In the park one day last week, I spotted two baby moorhens.  Here's one of them accompanied by its mother who was hissing furiously at the paparazzi (me).  They were so fluffy!  And can you see how big its feet are?  Even the adult moorhens' feet look too big for their bodies, but the babies seem to be born with their feet in ready-made adult size.  I have looked for these little black fluffballs quite regularly since then and haven't managed to get so much as a peek, so I guess I was pretty lucky to spot them that day.

bathing belles

As well as hanging out in the park this weekend, we also managed a couple of outings, including this one to see the Bathing Belles exhibition at Scotland Street School Museum, all about the history of swimming in Glasgow and beyond.  It's a small exhibition, but really good, with lots of examples of old swimming suits and bikinis.  This one I'm wearing was definitely a reproduction and was probably intended for people smaller than I, but I can't resist trying on a historical outfit.

Graham kindly posed for the camera too... and did an annoyingly better job than me at it too.  Harumph.  Gosh, talk about stripe overload!

Scotland Street exhibitions always have plenty to keep the little ones entertained, but I think this is the first time we've been there with a little one of our own to take advantage.

This little house was a big hit, as were all the noisy seascape toys.

Toys and houses for Dulcie meant that Graham and I actually got to look at the exhibits and also managed to feel like we were really hanging out together rather than working opposing baby-wrangling shifts.

Interesting facts: water polo was invented in Glasgow (what?!) and the first commercial bikini was small enough to fit in a matchbox.  Wowsers.

I think the exhibition runs until just after new year, so plenty of time to catch it if you think you fancy it.