(Inspired by a thread on the BLW forum.)

Now it may make sense to organised people to take one room at a time, but I am not organised. So far today I’ve started cleaning the kitchen but got carried away by descaling (we have very hard water in this area) so I dashed upstairs to tackle the bathroom (cleaning and tidying involves a lot of dashing for me – don’t want to spend any longer doing it than I have to!). I’ve put descaling tablets down the toilet (last resort – I don’t like using harsh cleaners but nothing else will do – I’ve tried! – and yeah, you’re supposed to leave these overnight but I swear I pee just as much at night as in the day – TMI? sorry!), I’ve started washing Snarfy’s bath toys, I’ve rinsed the shower curtain and started to sort out the bottles under the sink. You may notice I’ve used the word ‘started’ a lot in the last sentence. I tend to flit from task to task – I need a cloth to dry Snarfy’s bath toys so I’ve come downstairs only to be distracted by my half-cleaned kitchen but then the laundry finished so I’m debating whether to bother hanging it outside. So here I am at the laptop ostensibly checking the forecast but actually distracted by blogging. This is how I expect today will continue and then, an hour before my boys get home, I’ll freak out and dash round finishing it all off. That’s the plan anyway. I’ll let you know how it goes… Right now I could really do with a cuppa but the kettle is full of descaler – now that’s something that it would have made sense to leave overnight!

Therefore, best Boo-moment goes to this:

He was soooo excited that we figured out he wanted honey-oat cereal instead of healthy, homemade apple and raspberry flapjack for his afternoon snack.

Image found through google image search. It comes from this blog: colunas.epoca.globo.com/animal/2008/05/ and I really hope it's OK to use it - it's hard for me to tell as the original blog is in Spanish.

Cute, eh? It’s lucky Thomas is just as cute – gazing into his eyes just about keeps me going at 3am.

Well I’m determined that this blog will not wither and die. I still poke my nose around in blog land so I’d still like to keep contributing to it myself. I’m not going to commit to any grand plans but I do have a little idea that might help me keep going. Every evening I ask my husband “What’s been your favourite Boo-moment today?” (Aside: Boo is what we usually call Thomas. It’s a shortening of Snarfaboo which itself is a shortening of Snarfaboo-Snarfabum, an affectionate lengthening of Snarfy, the informal form of King Snarfalot, so named because he’s King of the household and he made lots of snuffly-snarfy noises in his moses basket next to our bed at night. And to think that before he was born I was worried we wouldn’t be able to come up with any nicknames for him!) Anyway, I thought I could share our favourite Boo-moments on this blog – partly as a record for myself and partly because they’re cute and funny. I also aim to take more pictures and share them here.

Today’s favourite Boo-moment: watching him play with a muslin. It’s amazing how much fun one small boy can have with a piece of cloth. Usually he throws it over his head and dramatically boos me milliseconds later. This evening he was playing boo with his own feet. Strange child. And as a bonus I’ll share yesterday’s best Boo-moment: as we were making breakfast… well, I was making breakfast and Boo was in his funpod throwing empty yoghurt pots on the floor and eating cereal but anyway… I was nattering away about what I was doing. ‘There’s your milk and now mummy’s making her coffee’. Cue a fake coughing fit from Boo. Now at breakfast he points to my coffee mug, coughs and giggles. I think that’s as close as you can get to making a pun when you can’t yet talk. Oh dear, the boy certainly has his Daddy’s sense of humour.

Me1: Ooh, first waking at 3am? Excellent! Looks like we’ll only be up once tonight.

Me2: Shut up you idiot! You’ve totally jinxed that now. Quick! Think something negative.

Me1: Er, um, I bet we’re up again at 5.

5am:

Me1: Did I make this happen?

Me2: Yes. You didn’t really believe it, did you?

Me1: <hangs head>

Thursday night, 3.45am

Me1: Ooh, waking even later.

Me2: <glares>

Me1: Er, I bet we’re still getting up again at 5 though.

5.15am

Me1: Hang on. I never said we’d still be up at 5. I envisioned making it back to bed for at least half an hour.

Me2: That’s your problem: you’re not pessimistic enough.

Friday night, 1am

Me (just 1 me now, I had a lie in on Thursday so I’m not yet sleep deprived enough to start talking to myself.): WTF?!

4am

Me: bleugh

Saturday morning, 6am

Me: You’re not going back to sleep, are you?

Thomas: <grins>

Me: OK, fine. It’s lucky you’re cute.

6.30am

Thomas: <yawns, rubs eyes, starts grizzling>

Me: Oh you’re tired. Any idea why that might be? Personally, I feel full of the joys of Spring <rolls eyes>.

12.30pm

It’s lunchtime. I’m starving. His lordship is still asleep after nearly 3hrs of napping.

All week I’ve been intending to (ah he’s awake… wonder how long he’ll patiently babble to himself for…) do some baking to stock the freezer up with tasty things for Thomas’s lunch. A while ago I spotted some nice recipes at My Name Is Beth http://mynameis-beth.blogspot.com/search/label/Recipes and yesterday I finally got round to buying the ingredients for them. I’ve copied and pasted some of Beth’s post (the blue writing) and added my comments (the black writing). So here goes, this how I spent Thomas’s now-finished nap:

Sweet Potato Muffins (from Sensational Vegetable Recipes):
1 cup (175g) sweet potato
2 cups self-raising flour
1 cup finely grated tasty cheese90g butter, melted and cooled
1 egg, lightly beaten
3/4 cup buttermilk (that’s three-quarters, not 3 or 4)
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Curse self for not getting ingredients and equipment ready before putting Thomas down for a nap.
Tiptoe around kitchen, quietly opening and closing cupboards.
Curse self for buying more sweet potatoes when we already had loads.
Decide to make double the quantity.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Brush melted butter or oil into 12 deep muffin cups (or use silicone bakeware – no need for oiling etc, it rocks!).
Silicone bakeware does indeed rock.

Finely grate sweet potato and cheese.
Realise grater is turning potato into mush.
Curse grater for being rubbish.
Coarsely grate potato and cheese.

Sift flour into a large mixing bowl.
Remember we threw rubbish sieve away.
Reach for tea strainer.
Decide against sifting.
Realise there’s only 1 cup of flour in the pack.
Rummage (quietly) around baking cupboard.
Curse self for being so short.
Find flour and thank husband (silently – he’s upstairs sleeping after a night shift) for being so good at keeping the cupboards stocked up.
Curse fancy flour pack for being impossible to open.
Curse husband for hiding scissors.

Add sweet potato and cheese, stir to combine. Make a well in the centre.
Add butter, egg and buttermilk all at once to dry ingredients.
Use natural yoghurt and mascapone cheese instead of buttermilk as 1) my favourite shop-cum-cafe sells yoghurt but not buttermilk and 2) we have some mascapone to use up.

Using a wooden spoon, stir until just combined; do not overbeat.
Realise that overbeating is why my muffins sometimes have a weird texture.
Try desperately not to overbeat.

Spoon mixture into prepared tins.
Discover large pocket of unmixed flour hidden in the middle of the bowl.
Add a splash of milk to help get rid of the flour and mix while trying not to mix IYSWIM.

Bake for 25 minutes, until puffed and lightly golden.
Remember that my original intention was to make the cous cous cakes.

Turn onto a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes, before serving with warm butter.
These better be good…

(Just finished typing up this post – the boy wouldn’t wait earlier – so thought I’d add: They are.)

I am talking, of course, of the cardinal rules of baby sleep. After a long (and wonderful!) year I have painstakingly compiled a list of rules that Must Not Be Broken if you want your baby to sleep. Being the kind person that I am, I am going to share these rules with you. Please note that although breaking just one rule will almost certainly guarantee no sleep, slavishly following all the rules does not actually guarantee any sleep. It’s just not that straightforward.

1. Do not make any plans for what you are going to do whilst Baby is sleeping. This is particularly the case with daytime naps but also applies to the early morning hours when the mind is prone to making frantic calculations of just how many more hours/mins of sleep you will get when Baby succumbs to your finely honed feeding/rocking/singing routine. For daytime naps particularly fatal thoughts include a) fantasising about sitting down with a hot drink and/or an illicit snack that you wouldn’t want to share with Baby, b) looking forward to finding out what happens next in that wonderful book you’re currently reading, and c) compiling a list of people who’s emails you really must reply to before they think you’ve ditched them as friends – although frankly even anticipating the joy of doing the washing up followed by a trip to the loo alone will ruin your chances.
2. Do not plan the following morning based on when Baby has been waking up for the last n nights. It doesn’t matter how big n is, as soon as you set your alarm for half-an-hour-before-Baby’s-wake-up-time (so you can shower and dress without continually calling out “Mummy’s coming sweetheart, she just needs to wash her hair/clean her teeth/fully wake up first!”)  you have ensured that Baby will wake up at least 31mins earlier than usual.
3. Do not tell anyone if Baby starts sleeping well. Especially your parents. You’ll only have to let them down again the following day.

Thomas has been sleeping through (8pm-8am, none of this 12am-5am rubbish – that’s not a full night’s sleep!) fairly reliably for the last 3 weeks – in fact, since I last blogged (about his bad sleeping funnily enough). Last night I chatted to my parents and some friends, updating them on his wonderful new sleep habits. I then went to bed late (around midnight) and set my alarm for 7.30am. We got up this morning at 5.30. Bleugh.

I think of my boy as a good sleeper. He’s nearly always breastfed to a nicely drowsy state and then popped in his cot where he rolls over, chomps on his muslin and promptly falls asleep. Although he has only slept through the whole night 4 times since he was born (all in the same week when I, unfortunately, had the cold from hell so I couldn’t sleep myself) I have noticed that he has very slowly reduced his wakings from three times to a blissful once a night. I can deal with that. Even though I’m going back to work (part-time) in a couple of weeks, I can easily deal with waking once a night for a brief 15min cuddle and feed with my adorable sleepy baby. Trouble is, it only takes the slightest thing to disrupt this natural pattern. The tiniest hint of teething pain, the merest snuffle of a cold, and my sleeping boy is a nightmare to settle and takes to waking at 2 hourly intervals from around 2am. This I cannot deal with. Even without going back to work I can’t take it for long. Thankfully Daddy has the day off today so was able to get up with the boy and give me a much-needed lie in. Hence the almost-coherentness of this post – anything else I’ve tried writing in the past week has been a sad and sorry mess. This last week has been particularly bad as the merest snuffle of a cold swiftly developed into full-blown bronchiolitis, bad enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. The boy is bouncing back rapidly and was back to being his cheeky, cheerful self within 24hrs but, as usual, his sleep pattern is taking much longer to return to what I think of as normal, although when I look back the worrying thought does occur to me that we experience his ‘normal’ pattern much less frequently than his ‘disturbed’ pattern… Well, that’s not a thought to dwell on because if his normal pattern isn’t the good one, we’re getting to the stage where we’ll have to Do Something About It and I have no clue what – that boy is used to having his own sweet way with everything and I’d very much like that to continue for as long as possible.

Anyway, what I really logged on to share was my new baby giggle inducing theory. First a bit of background. Beth recently shared a gorgeous video of her Jacob, who is 5 days younger than Thomas, giggling madly at her as she repeatedly spat out a ball while exclaiming “Pop!”. I tried this on Thomas and he found it fairly amusing but not quite as fall-over-funny as Jacob. Oh well, I thought, fair enough as it was only a pale imitation of someone else’s material. Last night however, I came up with my own. Thomas has been channeling his inner cat recently and he often comes and rubs his head on me. As I sat cross legged on the floor, he came at me a bit more enthusiastically than usual. “Are you headbutting Mummy?!” I asked, “Bonk!”. That was pretty funny so he headbutted me again. “Bonk!” I exclaimed. Soon he was laughing so much he couldn’t headbutt me himself so I resorted to headbutting myself on the knee, exclaiming “Bonk!”, each time to peals of laughter from the little guy. So here’s my theory: ridiculous action coupled with enthusiastic exclamation of onomatopoeic noise should induce giggling from baby. So excuse me while I go and poke myself in the eye while shouting “squish!”.