If you are able to believe it, Isabel will be two in just under 2 weeks – if someone would be so kind as to tell me where the time has gone, I would be most grateful!

Admittedly, she does seem to grow, height wise, on an almost daily basis and we have just come into the “parrot” stage with her vocabulary – this is lovely and often hilariously funny (such as last night when having a snuggle with Daddy she said “Hello, Gorgeous” – he’s been called worse things, I’m sure!) though we are still trying to avoid the swearing……..the fact that she is currently unable to say “f” is a big help and it means that we get “suck” instead of something MUCH ruder and it is relatively acceptable in public – for the time being, we are the only people who know what it was meant to be!

Luckily for us, she still seems to be completely besotted with her Baby Sister – once released from her cot, she runs into our room to peer into the Moses basket and shouts “Hello Molly-MooMoo-alicious!” whilst performing some rather strange bottom wiggling dance, which is totally of her own creating! (and though very amusing, not always welcome given that Molly can often still be asleep at this point!) Whilst Molly is now getting to grips with the joy of the playmat, she can be sure of a helping….well, everything from Isabel who is more than happy (and sometimes a bit over keen) to lie on it with her and show her the ropes! (or arches in this case!)

She is also keen to lend a helping hand when Molly is in the “Jolly Jumper” (the thing that hangs from the door for bouncing!) – however, no amount of explaining from Mummy seems to have convinced her that it isn’t in fact a swing and that Molly doesn’t want to spin round rather quickly whilst Isabel says “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”……poor Molly is going to end up traumatised at this rate! (or very dizzy if nothing else!)

Yesterday we had our first real instance of Isabel being unwell which wasn’t very nice – the fact that I was meeting a new friend for the 1st time didn’t help much either but luckily she was very understanding when we had to cut short our coffee date so that I could whisk Isabel home, via Mothercare for some clean clothes that didn’t honk of sick, and tuck her up in front of Dora (which she was, although rather feebly, joining in with so she can’t have been THAT bad!)…… and by the time Daddy got home, she was running about like her usual lunatic self and complaining loudly about the fact that she had been given toast for dinner and not the Pizza that she bizarrely seemed to have been expecting! (even Mummy and Daddy didn’t have Pizza!) I’m glad that it was only a very mild bout of sickness and I’m even more grateful that, for the time being at least, Molly seems to be unaffected!

Molly is now 3 months old and, as you might have worked out, enjoying discovering the world outside the Moses basket – in fact, she is very quick to tell you when she is bored of something so we spend the day moving her from basket to playmat to bouncy chair to playmat to jolly jumper etc! She has also become very chatty and you will quite regularly find the pair of them having a conversation – it seems to make perfect sense to them (which is lucky!), and if Molly is getting a bit grumpy a quick chat with Isabel cheers her up a treat!

We have managed our 1st trip away without Molly going into meltdown mode on the 1st night which we were glad about as we were only there for the one night! I hope that this is a sign that we have turned a corner and that trips away from home will now be a lot less stressful and a lot more pleasurable for whomever we have gone to see!