Well, I’ve looked back and noticed that my last blog post was back in August, which I am both shocked and appalled about. Hey ho. I’ve been busy, but will try to fill in the blanks.

There’s been loads that has happened, but I’ll try to segregate them into various topics and blog them individually.

In short, Jack has grown. My god, he’s grown loads. He’s such a bright, intelligent little boy with a fantastic imagination. I think I’ll write about that individually.

What else?  Christmas – Jack’s first proper Christmas where he was not only aware of what Christmas is, but also who Santa Claus / Father Christmas is, and why you have to be good, etc.

Jack’s been helping the midwife check-over the lump (read: baby) in mummy’s tummy.

And something else… slipped my mind for the moment…  Oh yes, the baby was born today, and was named Oliver. More details in that blog post, methinks.

I’ll get writing these posts now, but this was just a quick summary of the things to come. I’ll even come back and and the links and whatever to this post. Maybe.  Maybe next August, who knows!

For the past couple of weekends, men in yellow ‘hi-vis’ jackets that appear from nowhere have been putting up bunting and signs around our village advertising the Carnival day. They pretty much shut the whole village down in terms of traffic, as the floats come all the way through from the middle, turn around and then go back to the furthest point from there, so everyone gets to see and hear it.

It’s always a really good carnival, lots of floats for a small village, Samba bands, bagpipes, dancers and so on.

Claire, Jack and I got all sun-creamed-up and set out literally at the top of our road to watch the carnival procession with a lot of our neighbours and friends from the village.

Part of the same day, is the Sports Day element, which we’ve never really attended as much, which is held on the big football field. As Claire’s not working Saturdays any more and Jack’s old enough, we’ve been asking him all week if he’d like to compete with our friend’s son, Kieran, in the running.

Now, I’ve not seen Kieran run until yesterday, but I have seen Jack run in short bursts, and thought it might have been an even contest, but Kieran (almost exactly the same age as Jack) is like a whippet in practise whilst we were waiting for the floats earlier in the day!

When it came to it, the Boys under 4 years event was filled with about 5 boys with a few mums/dads behind to make sure that they ran – myself and Adam (Kieran’s dad) included.

“Ready…”

By this point Jack’s got the idea on what to do, but wants to go now.

“Set..”

I’m having to hold him back at this point.

“GO!”

And they’re off. 5 flappy-paddle-feet kids are now running a short length of the field, and are probably doing so because their over-competitive parents are gunning heavily for them to win, without a clue as to why exactly they’re doing it.

Some of the older kids came in first, which was an obvious point. Whippet-Kieran was off and did well, I think. Jack would have been last if I weren’t behind him, but to be honest, I wasn’t racing, so yes, he was last, but he did really well!  I was really surprised that they both ran consistently for that length, keeping up the flat-out pace all the way, as normally, they’re running around the house to get something or someone, negotiating corners and toys that they’ve dumped there just moments ago.

And yes, I was both impressed and dead-proud at the same time. He got a medal for participating, which is good, but I’m sure that we’re now in training for next year’s event, so watch out Kieran!

If you’ve read some of my older blog posts, you’ll recall that, particularly during the first few weeks/months of us having Jack, I went through a phase of having a bad night’s sleep, due to wandering around the room/house because of Jack..!  Anyway, if you didn’t know, well, I did, and sort of grew-out of it, partly due to his track-record in sleeping, but also partly due to the baby-gate we put on his room, meaning that he’s confined to that room!!

So, with that in mind, imagine my horror when we (Claire, Jack and I) stayed in a hotel near Peppa Pig World in Southampton, to be woken up at midnight by Claire saying that she can’t hear Jacks’ snorting and breathing coming from his bed just feet away from ours.

At this point, I was shattered, and genuinely thought she was going mad, but, being married to her, I humoured her all the same and went over to his bed to check it out.

She was right, there was no sound, so I thought he must have slipped under the bed-sheets, and as kids can’t regulate their body temperature as yet, they sweat. Big time.

So, there’s me; in the nod, in the pitch black room, leaning over a double-bed with my little boy in it, pulled back the bedsheets to find…. he wasn’t there!

Seriously, I woke up within one of those heart-beats that I’m sure I skipped. It was like an absolute instant hang-over cure.

“How the… hell… do you lose a child in a one-room room!?!” was going through my head.

Logic set in - The hotel room door was heavy, even for an adult, but it was also double-bolted shut anyway, so he simply couldn’t have left the room not without making at least a little noise… yet that didn’t stop it being the first thing that came to Claire’s mind!

Turned out, Jack must have slipped out of the far-side of the bed, between the bed and the wall, and was curled up in a heap under the window! 

Panic over. Call in the search party, cancel the helicopters and give the dogs the rest of the night off.

He was a bit cold, but in a deep sleep somewhere in nod-land.

Incidentally, there wasn’t a thud, or noise, so we can only assume that he did it himself… although, thinking about it now, those floors are made of concrete, with only a bit of carpet on top for decoration, so maybe we wouldn’t have heard it. But then, surely, it would hurt, induced crying and maybe that would have woken him and us!?!

At that point, Claire and I actually debated – and this might make us sound like bad parents, but we’re not!! – about leaving him where he was…(Yeah! I know!! Crazy…) What we didn’t want to do, was to wake him and then struggle to get him back to sleep.

But I did. (Pick him up, that is!)

Partly to get him back to somewhere comfortable, loveable little chap.

Partly to feel a bit better about myself for not leaving a darling little two year old asleep, cold, on the floor.

And partly to see if he could be woken, by way of some sort of childish means of getting him back for the panic he caused us. (ECG results are fine, by the way!)

But no.

Little man just kept snoring, grunting and farting occasionally, indicating that normal service had resumed.

The sheets on the bed muted some of the somewhat-missed sounds, but not as well as the entire bed did when he was on the floor, preventing almost all sound from him! Could/should put him back on the floor but, I suppose, there’s always next time.

Jack was asking about twenty-thousand why/who/what questions the other day, about something or other to do with my work; when he asked where I was going today, rather flippantly, I said ‘Switzerland’. It wasn’t true, but it was somewhere that wasn’t where he’d know, but it (almost) had the desired effect, as he paused for thought about it.

“What’s that?” came the reply, in keeping with the rest of the conversation, and so it went on until  I asked Jack if he could say ‘Switzerland’. 

He tried a little and failed after a decent attempt, bearing in mind that he’s only two years old. And so, Claire stepped in to help him with his pronunciation.

“Swit. Zer. Land" – she said.

Quick as a flash, the little blue-eyed monster replied, “Well done, mummy!”, clapping his hands with a look of happiness across his face.

Made us both laugh, although Jack was looking at us in confusion, as mummy had, indeed, said it correctly.

Priceless.

This weekend, we went down to Bath for a 1 year old birthday party, for Claire’s friend’s daughter, Lara.

The whole day was great and Jack was being very well behaved for most of it, until the man with the bouncy-castle appeared…!  When they were first allowed onto it, all the children went into shy-mode, not wanting to be the first.  Except Jack.

Not bothered by things like shyness, Jack (with me shortly behind him) went bounding towards this inflatable land.  I didn’t know what he would make of it and so I climbed onto the bouncy castle too, just to help, of course.  We started to bounce around and then one tumble after another and suddenly, it was filled with children that arrived from nowhere.

To put things into a little context, Jack was certainly one of the smaller children there that day, and was easily knocked around by the bounces that the other kids were putting out. He spent most of the time on the floor, struggling to regain his footing, and this is where he decided that he needed a little help.

So, the most logical thing for a 19 month old child to do, is to hold something that might appear stable and secure. Namely, another child by the scruff of their neck! Needless to say that the other child, an older girl in the first instance, didn’t appreciate this and began crying by the time I made it over to them.

Jack didn’t see the problem in this, and although it did seem quite funny in a naughty sort of way, I knew the girl’s parents would be on-looking and so I had to do the ‘say sorry, Jack’ bit.  The girl looked at Jack as if to say that Justice had been done and that he really saw sorry for his actions, especially as Claire’s standing at the foot of the castle telling me to tell Jack to say ‘sorry’.

In reality, Jack is 19 months old and has no concept of ‘sorry’ or other people’s pain, as kids of that age don’t.  All the while that I am ‘telling him off’, he’s got a big cheesy grin plastered across his face, as throughout this little chat, he’s being bounced all over the place and is quite enjoying it.

Sadly, this wasn’t a one-off, and it soon evolved into Jack taking a dive into a little boy as a result of a bounce from another older boy, taking them both to the ground.  Once on the deck, Jack remained clinging to his new buddy, holding firm for whatever reason.  Again, I had to step in, but by this point, I had already retired to the sidelines because of the amount of kiddies throwing themselves around like loons on there. 

Again, I had to go through the motions of ‘telling Jack off’ for his actions, but he didn’t really get it, and wasn’t ‘sorry’.

I’d like to think that the other children got motion sickness, or simply bored, of the bouncy castle and retired one by one, but I think Jack’s assaults on them may have had an impact. But he was like a little hit-man, taking a different child down each time, so it wasn’t like he was bullying any one child in particular…

So, we’re in!

Jack was pretty much oblivious to the whole moving process as he stayed over at each of his Grandparents house the day before and after the move, which bought us enough time to get his bedroom furniture all assembled again.  

I think that the first day that he was here, he wasn’t aware that this would be where we’d be living, as he was throwing those sorts of tantrums that he would when he was tired and wanted to go home to bed. 

He’s got much more space to put his toys now – not that it mattered before, as Claire and I have become used to having a small bundle of his toys in each room of the house. Some were intentional, like the toy cars in our bedroom that he could play with whilst we got dressed, or made the bed, but others were of Jack’s doing; he’d slowly distribute stuff that would marked his territory.  Who knows where it would stop, maybe with the taking over of the world, one bedroom at a time.

We’re running on 10 year old internet connections at the moment (56k dial-up) and have only just got that, so the uploading of photos, videos and even blog posts have been heavily restricted.

Well, maybe not quite a new ‘world’, but we are on the cusp of moving house, at least.  We have a buyer for our house and have put our dibs on a new house and things are very close now to exchange/completion, etc.

The reason I mention this, is probably my reason for have not posted anything recently, as each night after work and weekend days have been spent packing another area of life in the Rigby household into boxes.

So – back to the topic of the overall blog, Mr Rigby Junior. Here’s a bit of an update. 

He’s changed so much recently. So much, that it’s only when looking at pictures and videos of him from just a few months ago, that to us, it’s really noticeable as we’re seeing him day by day, little by little growing up.

He’s running circles around (literally) as he’s totally mobile now, which is good,  although a probably to keep track of him each minute.  He’s also found that the world isn’t flat, and want to climb up on absolutely everything, from the stairs to boxes, shelves, sides, in the bath, out of the bath.  Things just don’t seem to appear to him as a problem – just things that are in the way and need climbing over.  He will even climb directly over the top of me, if I am laying on his playroom floor and there’s something that he ‘needs’ the other side of me, whereas a couple of months ago, although he could walk, he would have walked around me to get where he wanted.

Little things like that make you smile at the time.

Talking – well, he’s getting better at that! He’s able to repeat words when you fire them back to him, mostly 1 syllable words like mum, dad, Jack, dog, car, truck, train, shoes, and so on, occasionally daring to begin with the 2 syllable words, like tractor, as he does seem to like tractors.  

Years ago, when we used to go and baby-sit Claire’s god-daughter Bethany, she must have been at the slightly older age where she could (and would) repeat pretty much anything you liked. So, over the course of the evening that we were there, I got her to say words from a Chinese takeaway menu, such as ‘egg fried rice’ as at the time, I thought it was hilarious in a very sad way, simply for the reason that she had no idea what egg fried rice was.  Obviously, I wasn’t thinking very creatively at the time, so, bringing this idea to my own child, my plan is to get him to say something like ‘Intel Pentium 4 Quad-Core Processor’, simply for geek comedy value. Claire’s not so sure though.  But time will tell…!

He’s also been taught (we don’t know entirely by whom as yet!) to yell for the dog, which is actually really funny.  Here’s what I mean:

Jack will pick up one of the dog’s chewie bone-shaped thing and to start with, we thought that he wanted to eat it, or play with it, etc and stopped him.  When we stood back and watched, he picked up the toy and then wanted to give it to Alfie, our Westie dog. With Alfie just out of sight on the stairs, Jack stood there at the foot of the stairs and, in incrementing volumes, started to yell…

“Dog’

‘Doooog!’

‘Doooooooog!’

‘Doooooooooooooooog!’

Of course, Alfie was far to lazy clever for this nonsense and simply ignored him. When Jack found him laying on the stairs, he started to climb the stairs with this dog toy in hand and when he got to him, he offered it out to him, expecting Alfie to take it.  (The reason why this dog toy is still around, is probably because we bought it ages ago for Alfie and he’s not bothered with it, meaning he doesn’t like those sort, but we didn’t have the heart to tell Jack this.)

…because Jack put them there!

Of course, it makes perfect sense really. If in any doubt as to what happens to a Sky+ remote, simply check the fridge, as Jack is in the habit at the moment of storing random things in there.

I’ve got a little beer fridge in my office downstairs and some of the things I’ve found in there also extend to those little pinSentry devices used for internet banking, so it’s not just limited to infra-red-based devices.

It’s not a problem, and I don’t think that anything has been damaged a result of his storing them in the chiller, but I thought it was a funny/strange/odd thing to do, and worthy of being mentioned here!  Must be something from his mum’s side!

Yes. It’s happened again. And this time, it was all over me.

It was probably my fault for making fun of it happening to Claire, but this time, my little saved his entire stomach contents for his dad. Thanks son.

We’re trying a new approach in giving him his milk at 19:30 when he goes to bed, rather than to put him to bed without it, and then wake him up at 22:30 to feed him, change his nappy and put him in his little sleeping bag.

So, as I’ve been at work all day, I took Jack upstairs to get his pyjamas on, and Claire get his milk ready for me to give him. No problems. Yet.

He drank about half of it, which wasn’t surprising, as he’d not long had his food. And dessert. And fruit. With more fruit, with vegetables too in places.

Most of the time, he gnashes through the food with the only teeth he has so far, which are at the front of his mouth, and then spits out the skin from the grapes, or the blueberry ‘shells’ and so on, so I didn’t really think that he eats a great deal of them. Until now.

After his milk, he tried to get up and wander around, but a little half-heartedly, as he was shattered from going swimming earlier with his mum.

Before he got really sleepy, I took him into the en-suite in our bedroom to brush his teeth as normal, but just as we got there, the eruption was imminent!

Within seconds, we were re-creating the final scenes of Pompeii. Instead of hot black ash and lava, there was brightly coloured pieces of recognisable food that he’d eaten a couple of hours ago, all mixed together and decorating the floor, the walls, the toilet and the sink. And the door. And of course, Jack and I.  As I was holding him in my arms before the point of impact, it was all over me, neck downwards.  And it was obviously body temperature, which is very not-nice!

Luckily, we were in the en-suite which has tiled flooring, making the clearing-up a lot easier than if it had happened on the carpet!

I think I must have moved him before allowing the milk to settle, but I sort of had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that this might happen. If only I had paid more attention to said ‘niggling feelings’, I could have tried to get Attack Number Three over Claire instead of me - but hey, there’s anyways next time!!

(Seeing as this is the third time now, I’ve even added a new category to the blog-site about Mega-Yak.  Yes, I’m sad…)

The other morning before I left for work, Jack decided that he would show the world (or at least, his mum and I) that he could walk by himself!

I’m not saying that he’s stopped crawling in favour of walking now, especially not overnight, but he will now voluntarily walk across the room to another object… this is something that we’ve been trying to get him to do, but he just wouldn’t have any of it.  Although,  we did find that crawling between his mum and dad wasn’t enough of a prize, but walking for the Sky remote was!

He’s really funny in the actual walking-part of it all though, as he’s a bit gangly on his feet, wobbly about like a drunken zombie with his arm outstretched reaching for whatever he’s walking towards.  Also, he knows it’s something that he’ll get a lot of praise for, and will make sure that his mum is watching first and then go for broke.

Now that the weather has brighten up and reached t-shirt weather, we’re able to play outside a lot more now with him, walking him around the garden, chasing the dog, footballs and so on.  He quite likes it out there, as well as walking out towards the road, as there’s cars, vans and lorries out there that he obviously seems to like too.

Anyway, hopefully, now he’s walking around a lot more, he’ll realise that it’s much better than crawling, as that’s only for babies and Commandos or Marines that crawl under barbed wire, with live rounds being fired over their heads.  Jack will happily hold one of my fingers whilst walking too, so when he starts to doubt himself about this whole ‘walking’ thing, holding my hand sometimes helps to give him that little assurance that he needs.

I don’t know if it’s anything (food-wise) that I’ve given him in the past 2 days whilst he’s been in my care, but Jack managed to throw up the volume of three people’s stomachs last night, again, all over Claire!

A few months ago, Claire got back from work on a Saturday evening in time to get Jack to bed. Coincidentally, I was about to get ready to nip down to the local Chinese takeaway to collect our order. So, I handed Jack over to his mum and started getting my coat on to go – just as Claire got to the top of the stairs… Mega-Yak strikes! All over Claire, the carpet, everywhere. Nice.

Almost the same thing happened last night.

Claire got back from work and had bathed Jack and got him ready for bed around 19:30 as usual, when I was about to leave to get the Chinese takeaway.

This time, Claire had made it just inside the playroom when Mega-Yak II strikes! Claire just froze holding him, but managed to re-route all available energy to her voice-box in the form of calling me. Loud.

I made it from downstairs, up and into the playroom to see the last moments of Mega-Yak II making my wife’s white blouse… not white anymore. It was everywhere. Fair play to Jack, I don’t think he could have planned it better.  It was all over her hair, face, shirt, arms and certainly all over the floor in the playroom!

At the time, it was grim. Now, it’s quite funny thinking back, hence I thought I’d mention it here; as I’m sure that when Jack is old enough to find worms and mud funny, he’ll want to know about this!  :o)

The days are flying by, and the little lad is still crawling by.

Despite our best efforts, Jack is still crawling around the house and not showing a great interest in walking much.  Which is fine, as I’m sure that when he does walk, he’ll be a nightmare to keep in one place!

He will, however, climb up and over almost anything that will support his body weight, as well as hanging on things too.  These include things like radiators, speaker cabinets, or anything in sight that a 1yr old kid can grab enough of.  He’ll even lay facedown on top of one of the speakers next to the television, legs and feet up in the air, with his arms stretched out in front of him trying to reach the wires behind the telly!

He’s also getting a dab-hand at using the phone too.  Each time he picks up the phone, he looks at it, pointing and saying ‘Daaa’ at the same time expecting to see a photo of his pa. He even managed to get hold of the cordless house phone the other weekend and phone his grandparents down the road – Claire’s dad had to call my mobile to tell me that they could hear everything that we was saying, as the little monster had dialled and then wandered off to play with his tractor!  Good job it was someone we know, and local too!!

He’s getting better with his identifying of real-world objects, with some thanks to the flash cards that we’ve put around his room. I still like to test him regularly with where the Bus is, or where the Tank or Digger is. He’s getting much better and now when we look out the window and he see’s a car, it goes' something like this:

Daddy: Jack, what’s that?

Jack: Kaaaaaa

Daddy: Yes that’s right – what noise does a car make?

Jack: brum brum

It’s quite funny. Well, it makes me smile anyway!

Jack spent his second-ever night away from us the other night, staying with my folks and… it was great!  The dog was at Claire’s parents’ too meaning that we didn’t need to get up early or in the middle of the night or anything! It was absolutely fantastic! The house was silent!

My parents really enjoyed having him over to stay for the night too, which was good.  My mum said how surprised she was at how well behaved Jack was, even after we had tip-toed out of their house Friday evening! She said he almost cried a couple of times when he’d realised we had gone, but he soon got over it with the prospect of two old grandparents to run around after him! It probably didn’t help when she’s showing Jack photos of all of us, saying ‘who is that?’… doh!

On a serious note, it’s really good that we’re able to leave him like that, that both sets of our parents are willing to have him, and that he’s good in their company. We’re really lucky in that respect, as some folks don’t have their parents close-by, or some people’s parents aren’t willing to help as much as ours, and of course, some aren’t willing to help at all.

My folks had moved to Wales not long after I was born and so had neither sets of parents within at least 300miles of them, so I appreciate that it must have been difficult. But then, I suppose, it’s a case of just getting on and doing what’s best really.

Claire’s drafted her mum to help a couple of days a week with Jack, as Claire being back at work, too, makes the normality from before we had Jack, come back into our new normal life with Jack.  Claire has always really liked working but really likes being with Jack too, so working a few days a week is good all round. It also means that I get to spend loads of time with him too.  All good fun.

A little while ago, I blogged about the flash-cards (part 1 and part 2) that I had made using photos of vehicles from the internet, and stuck them around the playroom for Jack.

Well, I’ve added to them recently, to build up his collection of modes of transportation:

I think I picked the obvious ones last time, and now to make it a little more interesting, I thought I’d add a few non-standard modes of transportation. Such as a tank, or dumper truck.

He’s getting really good at the ones he has already – he’s only a year old and so can’t pronounce the words properly, but he’ll look around the room for the one you ask him for and point very definitely at it.  It’s practise really, that’s all.

He’s got toys that are trains, a digger, a dump truck (Tonka Truck) and I thought he might like them.

But what’s next? Do I try and find more obscure means of transportation? Or do I try to specialise in each category? i.e. Ferrari, Porsche, etc?

Hmm. I’ll have to think about that and see how he gets on with these.  But I’m starting to struggle with more types of vehicles I can get him – any suggestions?

Oh my word.

…

…

It’s finally here.

Jack is one year old tomorrow.  A whole year old, 365 days and all that.

I wanted to write something here about the fact that it’s his birthday, not because it’s his birthday, but the fact that it’s here, upon us.

He’s grown so much in the past few months, its unreal.  He now stands up taller than the side of his cot in the mornings when we go to get him up. He can even reach the drawers on the unit beside the cot and bang it shut when he’s bored! Little monster.

Some of his clothes seem to have shrunk too.  The older stuff I mean.  The clothes that he had several months ago, seem to be a bit tight, especially the baby-grow/jumpsuit type of clothes that go over his head and get his feet in too, stitching together between his legs.  However, the alternative is the newer clothes that are still too big for him that make him look like Maggie from The Simpsons, where her blue clothing drags behind her and trips her up every other minute – Jack’s just the same, as it’s his ‘feet’ in his new baby-grow/jumpsuit thing that are too long and drag behind him.

Claire and I were just talking about this being a weird year, and that it feels like a really long year in one respect, as we’ve had almost zero sleep, but then on the other hand, it seems like the days/weeks/months this year have literally flown by – once we’ve got home from work, had food, sorted out Jack and got him to bed, there’s a bit of time left to clean up, or in some cases, make his food, and then it’s midnight. Kapow.

But, as I might have mentioned earlier, tomorrow is indeed Jack’s birthday.  I have the day off work and we’re off to Rhyme Time in the morning and then off to see how much the little fattie weighs.

We’ve noticed that there’s a few photos missing from the SkyDrive photo collection and we’re in the process of uploading them.  Same, too, for the video clips on Jack’s website: my mum constantly has her digital camera set to video mode, and has helped in almost doubling the video clips that we have of him to process, and upload to YouTube, and then linking to the website.  I have days occasionally where by it’s great to do something like that, but at the moment, finding the several hours to sit there and vet them isn’t possible!

Oh, one other really important fact for me to record here, is that we have officially taken… 4806 photos of Jack in his first year, which averages out at about 13 photos per day!!  That’s quite worrying really..!!  But we’d rather have them and look at the occasionally, than to have not taken them at all and wish that we had.

So – tomorrow, Jack stops begin none-years old! Wahey!

He’s getting more and more entertaining to be around recently.  He’s always been a bit of an attention-magnet, but he’s starting to do things, as well as trying to say things, that really make us smile!

Like today for example:

I’ve had a bit of a pants day at work, staying late to get some stuff done, which means getting stuck in lots of traffic on the way home.  When I got there, Claire and Jack turned up just minutes after I did, as they had been at a  swimming lesson.  From what Claire’s said, he should have been absolutely knackered tonight, as he hadn’t slept a great deal and had been splashing around in the pool. 

I went out to the car to help bring him in and he’s smiling away and jabbering away as is becoming normal, except he had no trousers on, as once Claire had dressed him, he crawled through a puddle in the changing room and got soaked! When I opened the car door, it was absolutely baking in there, as Claire was trying to make sure he didn’t get cold! She had put a dry pair of backup-socks on him, and wrapped a blanket over him, but he’s a dab-hand at getting socks off, and does so with a devilish look about him too, so he’s sitting there in just a jumper, coat and his nappy!

I brought him in and took him straight upstairs to get some trousers and socks on him and, standing him on the changing unit, he’s raised both hands and landed them on both of my ears, and then comes at me with his mouth wide open, trying to bite my nose off!

Luckily, I survived this time, but he’s getting quicker and quicker each time.  Apart from dribbling right down the front of my t-shirt, he didn’t cause any damage, but  I don’t think he’s doing it to hurt, but think maybe this is some sort of baby-affection?  Who knows.

Or maybe:

At the dinner table, he’ll be chewing away on some strange-looking carrot-based crispy thing, and he’ll offer it to you as innocently as anything and allow you to take hold of it, and then not let go as though he’s changed his mind, again with the devilish look.

It’s not necessarily that because he’s ours that I find some of the little things he does funny, but for a baby, he’s not half bad.

A year ago, things were starting to seem a little more… ‘real’, with regards to this whole baby-lark.

Claire was, by then, heavily pregnant and carrying the warning label that she could plop-out a baby anytime.

As daft as it sounds now, for someone like me that has had absolutely nothing to do with babies (ever), this was a shock waiting to happen.

Blissfully unaware of what would be happening from one day to the next, little did I know how things worked, when they would happen and the consequences of them happening.

I know that we had been to the antenatal classes and all that, but that was the driving *theory* lesson that I took before I started to learn to drive.  Knowledge? Out.  Learn by experience? Most definitely, in.

Everything turned out well though.  A year on, Jack’s doing great. He’s keeping us on our toes and although he does like a routine, nothing ever seems to be set in stone with him. Some mornings he wakes up early, around 5:30-6:00am, and then some mornings, like the other morning, he was still fast asleep at 7am, and had to wake him up so that we could take him to his Grandparents house whilst we went to work!

It’s good fun being a dad though. I can’t speak for Claire being his mum, obviously, but I enjoy it. Poo-y bums, I don’t. Playing with the toys and teaching him things, yep.

My folks still have our Scalextric set from when we were 7 or 8 years old (blimey, 22/23 years ago!!) but I’m not allowed to have it until our Jack (and any others we may have) are old enough to play with it.  Same for the train-set, but I wasn’t as keen on that as I was Scalextric. (I had a red Ferrari, similar to the one in Jack’s photo flashcard – coincidence? no.)

I remember when we were kids, my dad was always playing with our toys too. I’d build the Lego Forklift Truck that I had for Christmas or my Birthday, to wake up the following morning to find that my dad had “did an A-Team job” on it, making it an armoured forklift truck that was then 4x wheel steered instead of 2x.  I didn’t mind too much afterwards, but seeing the thing you’d spend hours building be ‘pimped’ like that wasn’t funny.  But it is now, and I' can’t guarantee that I won’t do the same to Jack’s Lego-equivalent!

It’s true what they say, though, in terms of your body gets used to a change in sleep patterns, and surprisingly, you can function on 4 to 5 hours sleep if you need to. That’s not to say that you’re not useless at work the next day, but hey.

It sounds strange to say, but it really doesn’t feel like it should be December already.  The weeks and months have disappeared; Jack is now 10 months old and his first Christmas is literally just around the corner, adding weight to they “they grow up fast” argument.

So, what’s happened in the past month since I last blogged? Lots, but where to start.

Jack is doing really well.  He’s growing taller and filling out a lot more now, as he’s doing much better with his eating.  He’s still eating the food that Claire’s been making for him, which is great.  Despite all the work that making the food for him is, I think we’re both really pleased not only that we're able to do that for him, but also what he’s actually getting is exactly what Claire puts in the pan; no extra salt, preservatives, etc.

As he is relatively tall for his age, I think at one point we were a *little* concerned that he was a slightly under the weight-line on the graphs, but when comparing your little baby against a line on a graph, working in percentiles of the countries’ babies, it’s a little easy to get tied up in it all. Stats are just that, in my opinion and as long he’s not off at an extreme, he’s doing ok.

There are some areas of baby-life like this that make me wonder: Just how did people survive years ago without charts and averages etc? People seem to have managed without know what percentile their little bundle of joy is in, and they’ve obviously grown up just fine.

As I said in the last blog post, we all had a helping of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease, which was nice.  We’re all good now and to be honest, I’m glad to see the back of it.  I hate feeling ill – it seems so… unproductive!! It’s not that we’re *blaming* Jack for us getting it, but he did have it first and managed to get rid of it quickly too…!

He’s not far from walking now, we think.  We keep sitting opposite each other on the floor in his playroom, and encouraging him to take a few steps towards one of us, and he’s getting there. He does try, but gravity is a constant force, and one that Jack hasn’t quite come to grips with yet!!  He’ll gladly scale the stairs if you let him. And fairly quick too, seeing as each step is chest-height and there’s loads of them, he doesn’t do too badly.

His crawling has improved also.  He’s been commando-crawling for as long as he could crawl, but the past week maybe, he’s been crawling ‘properly’, as one would imagine a baby to crawl.

What else can I think has happened?  Brain-mush.  I might have to post this blog item and get another one posted when I remember what else has happened, as otherwise, this will never get uploaded!!

I have been re-reading some of the very first blog posts that I had written to get the ball rolling on this whole ‘blogging’ thing, such as What’s the story so far? or some of the posts leading up to the FINALLY – He’s been born! post, and ultimately, The ‘Package’ has arrived..!, which I’m really glad I wrote about as now I’d struggled to remember that day in such detail!!

It all seems like such a long time ago since The First Night, and even though it’s only 7 or so months ago, it is if you consider what’s happened in the mean-time.  Jack has not only been born, but has learnt an awful lot about the world already, including that gravity exists each time he tried to move and that crying usually results in a mummy or a daddy to come running in.

As I said all that time ago, I wanted to start a blog to '”take note on the joys of becoming a father for the first time…” and all that, and I’d like to think that I have in some ways done exactly that. 

I have just looked on the bottom right, beneath my mug-shot to see that this will be blog post 101, which I’m also surprised about, as I didn’t think I’d get much time to do this, but also I didn’t think I’d have the patience and concentration to do this, as I tend to get caught up in the new and interesting stuff to do, and sometimes let the stuff I’m meant to be doing drag on a little. Something Claire and my folks might express an opinion on!

People have read some of the posts on here and commented about how nice an idea it is, to record some of the details that might have been forgotten.  Admittedly, I haven’t blogged about every little detail about what’s happened, but I’ve tried my best so far, and it is tough to do this.  I’m slightly worried that Jack will not like this in the future; I don’t know how I’d feel about it if my folks had recorded a public diary like this.  So if you’re reading this in 10 or 15 years Jack, the blog wasn’t actually for you, it was for me, you just happened to be the topic of conversation!!

As most of you might know, ages ago, I created a parallel site to this blog, which is full of almost all of the photos and videos that we have of Jack to date, give or taken the odd day recently.  Having a public site (this one) and a private site (that one) has made it easier really to divide the world; I wanted friends and family to see our little man growing up and how much he had changed without making our photos public to the world. Although, admittedly, I didn’t envisage having quite as many photos of him, as we now have 2998 photos in our Juniper folder, now consuming 7.5GB of disk space.  Yes, we still make the occasional reference to the codename! But thinking about it, if we’ve taken that many photos in just 7 months, that’s an average of 428 per month.  So by the time he’s a year old, we’ll have over 5,000 photos, and by the time he’s ten years old, we’ll have 50,000 photos! I just wonder if Microsoft’s SkyDrive will allow me to hold that many photos online!!

If you get bored at work or even at home, have a look at some of the earlier posts – yes, some of the things I have written make me cringe a bit and others make me look like a spoon, but you’re still reading it so it can’t be that bad!

Here’s the sort of tosh that the internet is great for…

Glad we cleared that up then.  In the UK, when I was at school, I was the only Brett for miles around… Not many ‘Brett’ per square mile. (probably a good job too!)

So, yesterday, we had a few friends and family over to my parent’s house for a little barbeque.

Quite surprisingly, two of our friends said that they had already read the blog post that I had written earlier yesterday morning whilst waiting for my dad to pick me up and not only that, but one had even signed up to Twitter to read my tweets throughout the day…! The only problem, was that my mobile phone gets absolutely no mobile phone reception at my parent's house (thanks Orange!), so it put an instant stop to that, so I couldn’t send any Twitter updates, or even send SMS (text) messages to Twitter that way either! Doh!  (Sorry Phil!)

Anyway, the day itself went really well – It wasn’t long before people started to appear, the food cooking and the beers flowing. The weather had been a bit pants in the morning whilst we were setting tables and chairs out, but gradually throughout the day, the clouds turned from dark grey to white fluffy clouds and the sun shone through. There was a bit a bit of a wind throughout the day, which probably helped to mask the heat from the sun, as I did manage to get burnt!

We hired a bouncy castle for the day, for the kids of course, but Jack even made an appearance on there – one of the girls was holding him and bouncing on it and he really seemed to like it… and then threw his lunch up later! Maybe too much physical movement after having food! Doh!  The kids of all ages seemed to enjoy themselves – I went on there a couple of times, and was attacked by a load of the kids and wrestled to the floor. Nightmare.

I managed to take about 250 photos on my camera throughout the day, and we’re going to go through them before uploading to Jack’s website  (If you have any, however many or however good, send me an email and we’ll talk about how the best way to get the photos from you and onto the web too.)

Claire and I would like to thank everybody for coming, as well as say a big thank you for the gifts that we really weren’t expecting; so thank you very much indeed.

Jack has been a bit out of routine the last few days, as we’ve been over to my parents a bit in the last few days trying to get organised and everything, and he really did manage to get upset at times.  It wasn’t necessarily anything that anyone was doing particularly at the time, he just didn’t sleep when he normally did, or didn’t have as much food, etc etc.  So, if you were one of them, don’t take it personally!

I still keep getting up in the night and doing weird stuff before waking and realising that I’m being daft again, and get back into bed.

It’s bad enough that I’m doing this, but I’m getting more and more shattered each time, as I’m having broken sleep each night.

At work, I feel like I’ve done a whole day’s work and the time is only 10am!

Claire’s sure that I’ve got some underlying ‘issue’ that is causing all of this – maybe I do, but I’m not worried about anything nor panicking about Jack’s welfare.  As I said before, if I really thought there was something wrong, then Claire would be a little more concerned than she appears in the night; as in, she’s not!

And what is it about Jack and these chuffin’ pillow cases then, eh?  I keep dreaming that Jack is not only asleep in our bed, but inside a pillow case too… For a start, Jack has never slept in our bed, with or without us.  And for why he’d be inside a pillow case, I have no idea.  I even woke myself up when I was ripping the pillow case to get to him. Absolutely no idea.

I’m not overly bothered by the fact that I am having these dreams, but feel bad for disturbing Claire in the night.

So, it turns out that Jack is much more like his mum than we thought!

Jack went into his usual 7pm crying session and continued to cry and cry, despite us both trying to calm him down.  We tried all of our normal tricks, but he wasn’t having any of it.   Bathing him used to be a good ‘un, but he’s become immune to that recently.

By chance, we found something that he finds… soothing!?!

Claire needed to do some hoovering around upstairs and as soon as Claire came anywhere near Jack’s room, he stopped crying and started to look at me through his teary eyes, as I was hanging over the edge of the cot trying to calm him down.

To test the theory again (in the name of science), we brought the vacuum cleaner into Jack’s room and he simply stopped – switched it off again, and he started to cry. Back on, and he stopped. Strange.

Claire wanted to get some music to play for Jack, to help soothe him and calm him down and all that. So, the obvious place to look was the internet, namely iTunes, as she can then buy and download any music to her iPod.

She has managed to download a heap of nursery rhymes and singable children’s songs, including several from Disney’s albums.

These are then played on a loop through the speaker set for her iPod, to the point that I probably know all of the words myself!! But Jack doesn’t seem to have any obvious objections to them. We keep looking for patterns in his crying, such as if a particular song is playing at the time, but nothing.

To be fair, the tracks that she has bought (yes, legally!) are a little random but they are very child-like and will probably get played lots more over the coming years, so on one hand, we’ll get our money’s worth from them, but on the other hand, I’m going to hear these things forever... Argh!!

We signed up for Sky+ during Claire’s pregnancy. This wasn’t a plan to help her through the long days of being at home whilst pregnant, or for after the birth, but it has certainly turned into the best thing in the world for Claire.

Prior to having Sky or any of its variations, we have had FreeView for years and liked the extra channels that it brought with it. We had been thinking about getting Sky for a long time, but was put off by the price and the associated set-up fees, etc. When we have been away on holiday particularly in the States or in Canada, we had Sky access and was able to watch channels like Discovery Channel, which had shows on like American Chopper, Myth Busters and many more. My sister and her boyfriend have been watching all these for years, but I was a Discovery-newbie, so to speak.

We bit the bullet when our friends Phil and Lucy mentioned that both them and us would get £50’s worth of vouchers if they ‘recommended’ us to get a Sky package. We had a chat about it and decided to get it, thinking that we might be wasting our money if only to watch the occasional Sky-based channel. How wrong we were!

When I signed up, I signed up for Sky+, which means that we got a fancier box, which is able to record TV programmes even easier than an old skool video recorder... and it can record a series of a programme using its Series Link feature. (Instead of getting the £50 vouchers, I opted to swap these for a free box and free fitting, which was great!)

Anyway, why all this is important, is because the Series Link feature has meant that Claire has been able to record her favourite TV programmes and watch them at very random times of the day, fitting in around Jack’s sleeping times. This means that when I look down our 'planner' of programmes we have recorded, I am slightly embarrassed/ashamed to admit that there has been recording after recording of naff programmes like Holyoaks, Eastenders, Doctors... basically, if its rubbish, we have it. These would all build up, especially when Claire was in hospital having Jack, and then Claire would watch them all back-to-back, and have like 4 or 5 hours straight of Eastenders. Me, on the other hand, I’d be in the kitchen sticking sharp implements into my eyes.