More Christmas photos...

Santa was very good to me this year....


It's Lucy's first Christmas - according to my PJs (little do they know...)

It looks like my bib was similarly misinformed:

Do you like my wetsuit? Another Christmas gift, this time from Uncle Michael.

And Santa gave me a pool toy to swim about in!

I hope my next Christmas is in another three weeks!

By the mantle with care...

I arrived safe and sound at my Great-Granparents house for Christmas. Here I am with my mum, my grandma Sherry and Great Grandma Fern:


I was very excited about helping decorate the Christmas tree:

But I got tired and had a rest on Uncle Christopher:

This jet lag is tough.

Crawling

Now I'm crawling, mum says I'm much more of a handful...



We fly out to Miami tomorrow to see Grandma Fern and Grandpa Bob - I'm very excited! I'll post some pictures when I get there.

Finger Food

I have been learning to use my finger s to eat - here I am enjoying a chunk of banana:



Mmmm delicious!

Baby it's cold outside...

The garden looks kind of different these days...

Only once a year?

I had my first Christmas today. Gran and Granda were down from Glasgow and cooked a huge big meal for me and mum and dad. I even got to wear a party hat!


Gran and granda had been looking after me all weekend, while mum and dad went to Paris. Mum and dad said they had lots of fun seeing Francine, Andre and Eric - but we had even more fun in London without them!

And when they came back there was dinner and cards and presents - presents are my favourite bit!

One of my favourite presents was a xylophone, which I will play for my parents (whether they like it or not!)

This is great - only a few weeks more till my next Christmas!

Come here....

.... and give me a big kiss!

Two Front Teeth

I now have two teeth on the bottom gum. They are quite shy though, and don't like to be seen out and about too much. Dad got me to show them eventually.

Jailbird Joey

Mum and Dad have got me a play pen so that I don't wander all over the place eating everything.



It's not so bad I suppose. Plenty of room inside.



I know why the caged bird sings, man

Braw

Dad says I'm braw. I think that's Scottish for something.


Looking bright eyed and bushy tailed:



After I've had some lunch, I like to relax and put my feet up:

Hundred Aker Wood

Today mum and dad took me deep in the Hundred Aker Wood, where Christopher Robin plays.
We found an enchanted neighbourhood of Christopher's childhood days.

A donkey named Eyore is his friend, and Kanga and little Roo:



There's Rabbit and Piglet:



And there's Owl, but most of all Winnie the Pooh:

Learning to walk

Dad has been helping me practise my walking. We now go for a stroll every morning after breakfast.

Catherine the Great

Occasionally I like to get wheeled around in my pram, to take in the fresh air. Now that the weather is getting cold, of course, I need to wraqp up nice and warm. I like to think this is the kind of thing a Russian queen would have worn:




Uncle Fintan visited from Ireland. He made Mum and Dad sit up all night drinking wine and they had sore heads in the morning. Clearly he's a danger to himself and those around him.

Autumn Fashions

Hi there. I'm so glad you could join me.

Let's take a moment to have a quick look at some of the highlights of my latest wardrobe.

At this time of year, the theme of course is autumn - rich colours and warm tones are complemented by chunky knits and fun accessories to complete the look.

Let's take a look at my first ensemble:


I know what you're thinking - the hat, right? I know! C'est so mignonne!
The cardigan can come off and on to keep me warm outdoors and cool indoors, while the embroidery detail on the jeans is just great for bringing out that bourgeois-boheme theme.

It's warm, it's stylish, it's individual - it's me.




As for colours, I'm really feeling red this is season, aren't you?
My Gran picked out this zip-up fleece for me - I think the colour is so vibrant. It just sets off that dress-down-to-dress-up / smart-causal look perfectly.

Wear it everywhere, wear it anywhere, that's what I say.

As for sleepwear, it's al about classic pinks and whites, no fuss, no patterns.

Gundy's even got himself a new sweater - working that Halloween theme, there Gundy!

It just goes to show, you're never too small to accessorize!

Anyway, that's all I got time for - let's do coffee soon though, yeah?

Mwah Mwah - Ciao!

Nearly crawling...

Not quite got the hang of it yet, but I'm up on my hands and knees:

Bhagavad Gita

Sorry for being away from the internet for a few days. I'm now fully recovered from my sickness(es!) and this weekend mum got some new videos of me.

I am now comfortably sitting up on my own, which is a new deevlopment. Here I am taking a magazine to pieces



"For I am become death, destroyer of worlds..."

Also I have had practice standing (and balancing) using my baby einstein:



Looks like I was about to topple backwards there...

And mum has been making me laugh, by pretending to be a dog. This cracks me up:

Sick again...

I've caught another cold ... and another ear infection. This one's really gross, with all this brown stuff coming out my ear. Check it out:

I am half!

I am half a year old today.

Today is my halfth birthday!

Like all birthdays - but perhaps more than most - the halfth birthday has traditionally been seen as a propitious occassion. It's an opportunity to take stock, to look back at what has been achieved, as well as to consider - or day I say re-assess - one's aspirations and objectives for the future.

A milestone, if you like, on the road of life.

With this in mind I have spent the day in a contemplative mood. Absent-mindedly chewing the beak of my rubber duck, I began to daydream about what things might have been; and what they turned out to be.

• Does being half mean a new lease of life - or is it simply marking time, treading temporal water towards some as-yet indeterminate end-point?

• Half means a new set of challenges - and of responsibilities.

• Am I all I dreamed I'd be at the age of half?
  

Well, for all that thinking (not to mention the chewing), I didn't get very far in my search for answers. I suppose that, despite all the burden of anticipation, turning half does not guarantee an epiphany of insight into the human condition.

All I can say for sure is - with a mum and dad who adore me, a roof over my head and plenty of bananas to eat - back where I started isn't such a bad place to be.

Oh well - here's to the next half year!

This is a pcture of me with my friend Anna, taken at grandma Sherry's house in America.

Happy Birthday Gran

Tomorrow is my Gran's 60th birthday. This is a big family photo that we took at the party last Saturday. We girls had gone to bed by that time.


For the record, comparatively few of the empty beer cans on the table are actually mine.

Earlier in the day, Nicholas and Alexis had tried to look after Sylvie and me. We saw our chance to raise merry hell!

And here I am biting mum's nose, which is my latest way of showing I care:


Happy Birthday Gran - and a big bite on the nose from everyone in London!

More America pictures

I've been meaning to post some more pictures of my visit to the USA. Mum took me for a swim in Grandma's pool:



I can wriggle my legs and make my feet like flippers:


After swimming practice at Grandma Sherry's, I had standing practice at Grandpa Bruce's:

The flight home was tiring, but at least I had my own luxury bed.

I've been sick

I've not been online for a few days because I've been sick. I've had a bad cold that started in my chest and then went up to my throat and then my nose and is now in my ears. Where next - my feet?

I saw a doctor in America who was very nice and let us fly back to the UK today. But he said I had to take some medicine and I hate that stuff. Mum and Dad tried to trick me into liking it by tasting it themselves and saying "Yum" very loudly, but I'm not fooled. I wasn't born yesterday, you know.

It was in March.

Flew in from Miami Beach, BOAC

Arrived in the USA for the first time yesterday. The flight was pretty good - Mum had me listening to some Beatles on the headphones:



And I finally got to meet my great grandparents - they had flown up from Florida just to see me! This is me with Grandpa Bob:

And I had a nap on Grandma Fern:

Baby Einstein

Little is known about the early life of Albert Einstein, other than that he was born in Ulm and moved to Munich at an early age. It is reputed that his parents fostered in the young Albert a love of classical music.

Some have postulated that this early tutoring may have had a formative effect on the young Einstein's impressionable mind, being one causative factor of his singular genius. The irony in this theory is that, from an early age, Einstein himself was familiar with the precepts of Kantian philosophy and the methodology of deductive reasoning - therefore, he would have laughed at the simplistic assumptions and myriad non-sequitirs which are required to sustain this theory of cause (childhood exposure to classical music) and effect (the phenomenon of "genius", however defined).

Nonetheless, this theory is the central conceit of the Baby Einstein Company (slogan: "Where discovery begins"). The Company was founded by Julie Ainger-Clark a decade ago as a start-up toy manufacturer and it has since mushroomed into a fully-fledged cultural meme in its own right. It was recently sold by its founders to the Walt Disney Company for a sum reputed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly this is a venture which makes sense on a business level, if not on a philosophical one.

Indeed, President Bush is a big fan of Baby Einstein - and he's the president, so he must be intelligent, right?

Anyway, all of this is a prelude to telling you that, despite my misgivings regarding the misappropriation of the name of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers as a marketing tool for chew toys, I myself am a patron of the Baby Einstein Company and a dedicated user of their products.

In the video below, you can see me enjoying their latest invention, the pithily titled Discover & Play (TM) Activity Center (sic), which happens to be one of my favourites. As you can see, it is an object I am able to appreciate with discernment, on an intellectual as well as a cultural level.

Happy Birthday Granda!

Today is my Granda's birthday 60th birthday - Happy Birthday Granda!

Messy Eater

So I went back to the lady at the doctor's office - I'm now 6.5 kg, which means I've added a kilo in the space of three weeks!

As you can see, I've been enjoying my food much more recently...

Sitting pretty

Yesterday I learned to swim. Today, I sat up for the first time.


I'll be flying by the end of the week!

I do like to be beside the seaside

Yesterday was a bank holiday, which means we get to go to the seaside. Dad took us all to Leigh on Sea:



Dad took me for a paddle in the water...

And Mum and I both enjoyed a dairy snack:

I love Bank Holidays!

When is the next one?

Christmas?

Can we go the beach then too Dad?

Can we? Can we? Can we?

What's Up Doc?

Now that my teeth are coming in, my mum likes to give me frozen carrots to gnaw


I don't so much eat them as chew them...


They say carrots help your eyes. My eyes are big enough as it is!

Blog is back!

Thanks to a little help from the good people at Blogger, I am back in business! Yay!

Standing up for myself

These days i just love to stand up on my own two feet:



Of course, mum has been giving me a little help with balancing:

And then I can go to bed, tired but happy: