Stuff

Here's Harriet playing with Poe at his house as we were about to leave. When we were getting ready to go there Harriet and I were in her bedroom, mucking around on her bed. She stopped suddenly, looked at me and gave a shy smile, then said "I think I love Poe". Then she went straight back to jumping. Nawww...

Ted's been sick the past few days, with a cough that sounds as though he's underwater. Those lungs just sound WET. But he braved our trip to Sculpture by the Sea valiantly and, as you can see, even enjoyed himself. It took the rest of us a while to work up to having a good time though. For one, we forgot about why we hate the eastern suburbs so much and why we moved away. Oh my god the TRAFFIC! No carparks anywhere, no trains, no access, just an interminable, stationary line of shiny metal trawling back streets searching for a place to park with an increasingly frantic feel.

So we gave up on our plan and drove to Clovelly instead since we know there's a carpark there at least. We got to Bronte before the sads hit Harriet. She writhed and screamed from Bronte to Tamarama and no, I'm not exaggerating. Once there she continued to scream until we walked to the front of the beach and then she decided, miraculously, to be happy. Just like that. It's almost as though she has to have a little safe place to explode and then all is calm again. In fact we haven't really had any outbursts since.

And here's some video proof of the outburst on the walk (in case you find it hard to visualise):

She is so going to hate me when she's older for this blog.


Teddy loved the sculptures, he kept pointing at the big wire chicken in the middle of the beach and saying "bock, bock, bock", much to the amusement of all around us. He's so chilled out and can nearly always be roused to a smile or laugh with a bit of silliness. He's definitely not the talker Harriet was(is), but he does communicate a lot and does have words (more, up, down, button, bath, vroom, ball, hot, on, off, wall, ball, guitar and lots of others - the usual stuff). It's just that Ted is motivated much more by music. He now sings out "low" when he plays the low string on the guitar. And tonight when I was singing "ABC" with him he stopped, looked at me with surprise, made the star sign from the song and said "Dar!" (translation: star). For those that don't know, Twinkle, Twinkle and ABC are the same tune. I mean seriously, how cool is it that he recognised that?

He also does other things to surprise us all. He knows the letters 's', 'o', 'm', 'r' and a couple of others but I can't remember them right now. He loves the fridge phonics thing that Harry had when she was little, it's such a great toy for teaching letters. We don't really do much with him along those lines but he does enjoy having alphabet books read to him. He also made the connection with numbers and gave a great cry of excitement when he was in my arms watching the numbers flip by on the stereo as the cd played. It's right next to a large numbers poster and he kept pointing to the moving numbers and pointing to the poster. Then today, when he had his little phone that shows a digital display of the number you press, he made me smile by insisting that 3 was an 'm'. Oh yes. And don't try to tell him otherwise!

He also loves to show you his belly button and loves to see where yours is. Ab training coming up for that little gem in public.


Just for fun, here's a little game. Pick out Harriet from this fancy dress line-up. The theme was super heroes. Harriet was so unimpressed with the theme that she could barely be cajoled into a costume. Luckily we already had a cape. I love how independently she thinks.