A life in lists

Portrait

For context, this was presented to me yesterday with a cheerful, "I did a drawing of Mummy." I nearly fainted - the closest Teddy has come to drawing (as opposed to scribbling randomly) before now is to hand me a pen/pencil/crayon and announce, "Mummy draw Daddy/a boat/a train/Mummy/a straight line" (yes, really. He is fascinated by rulers).

I manfully resisted the urge to leap about the room with excitement (he drew! And it was a drawing of me!) and asked him whether he was pleased with it. "Yup," he replied a tone of deep underwhelm-ment, before returning to random scrawlings. Oh, and then he drew "snow, Mummy," (lots of dots) and, "a blanket, Mummy," (big black scribble).

I think you'll all agree he'll be at the Royal College of Art within the year.

Edited to add: Later in the day a drawing of daddy was produced. I am slightly jealous because it has two eyes (and several noses).

Bake day

 

This baking project was as solo as I could make it for Teddy. His (no pressure, but he attempted them all, I think) tasks included:

1. Spooning out the ingredients into the weighing scales
2. Mixing them (with maybe a little help from the Kenwood Chef)
3. Rolling the dough (I had to do most of this to prevent inch thick biscuits)
4. Cutting shapes
5. Mixing icing
6. Decorating!

I've started really trying to make a conscious effort to leave Teddy to it a bit more when we're baking/crafting etc. The control freak in me wants to leap in every five seconds and do it my way (I had to really restrain myself when the sprinkles and silver balls were all mixed in one cup after carefully laying them out separately), but Teddy is so much happier if I just show him which step comes next, then only assist if necessary (like rolling out the biscuit dough so the cutter would actually go through it). The same seems to apply to things like painting and playdough, where I am trying to move on from him watching me play (something he did a lot as a smaller baby) to actually getting involved himself.

I have to say, I'm loving it. I feel I'm really growing into this mothering thing now Teddy is getting a bit older and more involved in everything we do (as I may have mentioned a few thousand times before, the whole helpless-baby-sleep-deprived-mother is all a little lost on me). I'm kind of hoping that I'll cope a little better (ahem) with number two baby as I'll be too busy trying to keep two small people alive and entertained throughout the day to break down in non-coping-hysterics too often.

Incidentally, it's taken me the best part of a day to produce this blog post. Our lovely shiny iMac is at the computer doctor's having a faulty card reader fixed, so I'm limited to my decade old (I do not exaggerate here. Macs go on for a long time) laptop, which is, admittedly, a teeny weeny bit slow. Ho hum.