In the last few weeks...

Making us pretend sandwiches. And making us pretend to eat them. He runs a nice cafe actually. It is rather telling of how we spend a lot of our time that his cafe is in fact called "the mark and pencers cafe". I would feel slightly guilty about that except that M&S have a jolly nice cafe and their kids lunch comes with organic juice, so it's ok. I think. Bizarrely Linus's cafe has yoghurt pots in it made from little tubes out of his marble run. I have never seen such things in the real cafe.....

Which leads us to:

Linus's bottle monster Ally. Here he is having a picnic lovingly put together by Linus, which includes tea, biscuits, chocolate milk, a carrot and the rubber bits off my ironing board. Apparently he likes them. Ally was made after viewing Mister Maker on CBeebies (see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/mistermaker ).

Linus has also been talking pretty much non-stop to anyone who will listen. We were shopping at the end of November when we noticed that Santa's grotto was open in the local shopping mall. Now, aside from being stupidly early, it was free entry and had a free gift! Not being someone who passes up a free rubbish gift we duly queued up (yes, there was a queue as well!). Linus got jolly excited, though I suspected he would be a bit afraid once he actually got to see Santa. But no, he sat up beside him in his "magic room in a tower" and chatted and chatted and chatted. I left them to it and cooed at Gabriel for a while before eventually turning round to see Linus with his present and Santa seemingly trying to end the "conner-ation" they were having. HA. I do love it when someone else has to hear about "blumps" and "oogadoogas" and "blumpergunks" instead of me. Bless him.

Lastly Linus has been experimenting with sleeping naked:

Not the greatest picture in the world, but he did insist on Daddy taking photos of him going to bed with nothing on. And we do have to include some embarrassing pictures on here sometimes instead of just the unbearably cute ones. Otherwise you'd all get a cute overload. He slept rather well actually, and I had a good old laugh in the morning when he came in to do his usual jumping all over Daddy's head.

Introducing

Despite looking remarkably pleased with himself Linus has in fact been rather ambivalent about the whole "new brother" affair. Of course he was chuffed to bits with the till that Gabriel bought for him, but aside from that the exciting new arrival has held little (or no) interest for him!

Still, he has allowed him a teeny tiny bit of webspace, which is jolly nice of him as Gabriel doesn't yet have a website of his own. He may have one soon. We may update it as frequently as Linus's as well. HA

Far too long

But DA NAAAAA Linus is back!

For anyone who is wondering, yes, we do know about the board problems and we are trying to sort it. I won't bore you with details, but it's very frustrating for all concerned. Mostly for Bob who gets nagged about it a LOT.

Anyway, in the last few months we've been extremely lazy in not updating the site. Linus has been doing tons of amazing things which I have completely forgotten about. Mostly he talks. And talks. And he talks some more. He makes up the most amazing lies/stories/games which are very cute/strange/disturbing but on the whole he is quite lovely and makes me laugh and laugh.

He has decided what he wants to be when he grows up, and I, for one, wholeheartedly approve.

The hairiest baby in town

Linus is being rather lovely at the moment. Which is nice- it makes us all like him more and want to give him chocolate. Not that we use chocolate to bribe him constantly or anything like that, oh no. Our big news is really that Big Boy Baby Linus is now Big Boy Pants-wearing Baby Linus! Hurrah! Despite a good start on the weeing in the toilet front things did go downhill for a while, and the sofa has suffered the most from it, however the stickers and chocolate bribes we use are doing the trick and we've had NO accidents all of this week. Being the charming little boy he is, Linus's favourite activity now is doing a pooh on the toilet. I have to sit with him and we usually have a conversation that goes something like this:

L: POO!!!

Me: Yes, that's lovely

L: a BIG one

Me: oh jolly good

L: PLASH!!! More! 2 poohs!

This carries on on indefinitely until he decides he is bored of doing a pooh and wants to wipe his bottom with the "pig wipes". Yes.

Linus is also getting very good at imaginative play. He is absolutely hilarious playing with his baby Annie (named by Linus). Annie mostly cries and has to have a dummy and a kiss and cuddle. We also have 2 toy pikachus, a big soft one that is the mummy, and a small plastic keyring one that is the baby. Linus sat for ages playing with them the other day while I made dinner and I could hear him pretending that the baby was crying and having to have a kiss and some lip balm (?) from the mummy. He then got his tea set out and when I went in he had them sat on the sofa together and was feeding them tea out of a cup! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh He isn't just a vicious thug after all :)

Strangely, for a very non-huggy baby the crying scenario in his games is the most common. Daddy and I also have to play when pikachu and Annie aren't around. This morning lying in bed he told me I had to cry, which I did and he gave me a big kiss and demanded I cry some more at which point I was allowed a hug. Quite liking my hug I decided to carry on crying, when he turned round and put his hand over my mouth! Silly baby, we all know gaffer tape is best.

This picture is Linus's totally mad hair when he was on the bouncy castle at Grandma and Grandpa's house. It really isn't very fair, I never had a bouncy castle of my own! though, I may have had mad hair.

First paddle of the year

Not wishing to regale all you Linus fans with news of his rather nasty sickness bug, we've decided instead to show you some pictures of his first paddle of the year. I wasn't sure he'd be too impressed with the pool despite loving it last year, but he proved me wrong and adored having a good old splash about. He wouldn't take his t-shirt off until it was absolutely sodden- see the tide-mark on the second picture!

Apparently the sunshine makes Daddy feel ill, so we left him indoors doing some ironing while we had a jolly lovely time in the garden. We have planted some strawberry plants and got in a big composty mess, started setting up the tomatoes and done some falling over and cutting of knees (mostly Linus, not me).

Anyway, what you've all been waiting for:

Bouncing

Ok, so this is a bit of an old(ish) picture, taken before Linus's birthday, but as we're very, very lazy and haven't taken any more recent ones I thought I'd put it on. And it's more recent than the snow one I was considering!

We got the bouncy chair out of the cupboard in case either of the babies coming to Linus's party wanted to use it. Tough luck really because Linus decided it was his new favourite chair for sitting and watching Beebies in. With toys to play with too! What more could a boy ask for? He was rather chuffed with it and keeps pulling it out of the cupboard even now. I'm not sure the chair enjoys it quite as much as he does!

Mmmmm Moofff

Mmmm lovely baby big boy Linus all snuggled up with his Mooffs (mooff is snoopy, for those of you that don't already know). Freshly bathed, milked and soon to be pyjama'd.

The biggest mooff sometimes sleeps in Linus's bed with him. It doesn't leave much room for Linus though, and the other night when I went in all I could see were two legs sticking out from under Snoopy. Poor thing.

Can't be very comfortable trying to sleep on Linus.

Birthday

I'm not sure if baby Linus is still baby Linus, or if he is big boy Linus now. He seems pretty ambivalent about it. So from now on he shall be referred to as baby big boy Linus- or BBBLinus for short.

So he is now 2, and we're not entirely sure where the last year has gone. I suspect we may have ben caught in some kind of time-warp. But as we're here now we may as well have some cake. Linus didn't want a party, he told me he was going to stay upstairs. He did deign to come down and open some presents though- with persuasion and once down it all seemed ok. Most situations are ok when you have presents.

I was slightly more prepared than last year. Most of the party food was done the night before and all that was left on the big day was putting balloons out, making sandwiches and babyproofing the house. The guests started to arrive at 11, with the party due to continue until 2. We had 3 babies and 5 toddlers to contend with which was fun! In fact they all played rather nicely together for the most part and enjoyed the craft table I had set up. Linus mostly enjoyed the glitter which got emptied by the potfull over his work of art, and also over Saskia who was sitting next to him.

Some rather incessant whingeing and leg grabbing around 12ish alerted me to the fact that it was lunch time and so we laid out the food and tucked in. All except Linus who demanded "clocklack" and "caaaake". After much tantrumming, tears and throwing of food the cake duly appeared and Linus did an awfully good job of blowing his candles out, which is odd because he's never blown candles out before!

And that was about it. He is now the proud owner of a teaset, sticklebricks, a train set, some lovely books, bath toys, a space hopper, some new clothes, noddy toys and plenty of money. All in all a great day.

Christmas Baby Linus

So, after much preparation, present buying, pie making and frenzied excitement (on my part) Christmas finally arrived. I was half expecting Linus to be over-awed by it all as he was last year, and we were also expecting the worst after his complete freak-out on seeing a snowman at a nearby shopping centre. Christmas isn't much fun when you're scared of snowmen.

Anyway, luckily I had removed all giant, automated snowmen from the house, and instead we stuck to the traditional huge-pile-of-presents. We weren't brave (or stupid?) enough to put any presents under the tree before Christmas Eve because the temptation would just have been too much- probably for all of us. We had dinner with Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Adam on Christmas Eve and while Linus was in the bath (after dinner) Father Christmas came and left him some presents under the tree!!! I had Linus's pyjamas but when he opened his gifts LO! it was Christmas pyjamas. What luck!

We were woken at around 9am Christmas morning by an "uuurrnnghghhhgh" noise coming from Linus's room. I thought perhaps he'd caught one of Father Christmas's reindeer and was eating it alive, but it turned out it was just Linus himself, cross to have woken up to another day. He hadn't spotted his stocking hanging right by his face, but was rightly excited whenI showed him that it contained presents. We decided to go and wake Daddy up and open the presents in bed.

Mmmmm presents.

Once emptied of its bounty the stocking was discarded with cries of "MORE! MORE!". Not that he is materialistic or anything like that. No, he just likes to have loads and loads of presents that's all. So we went downstairs to see if Father Christmas had made it that far. Linus's face was an absolute picture when he walked in the room and found that he had a big, red tricycle. He walked towards it wide-eyed, climbed on and refused point blank to get off or to open any other presents. So I guess that was a hit then! Unfortunately he can't quite reach the pedals, but hopefully he'll be tall enough by summer. Well done Father Christmas for thinking ahead :)

As for the rest of Christmas Day- well, it was as to be expected really. Linus refused to eat anything other than sprouts for his dinner, we made a giant mess in the kitchen, spent the afternoon playing with toys and got told off by Grandma, when she arrived, for having pyjamas on the floor!- It's CHRISTMAS!!!

Linus did a good job of handing round more presents to everyone (Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Adam) who came for tea. We all ate too much and then had a rather lovely time playing bingo.

Yes, we know how to enjoy Christmas!