I seem to remember saying that age-old thing about time flying past in another post, but this is different. But the same. Sort of.

Anyway, I swear, I have blinked, and Oliver is already nearly ten weeks old. It’s strange, as although he’s only been born this relatively short period, our lives have changed so much all over again, and yet it seems like this is our new ‘normal’.

Just before Oli had arrived, it seemed like we had ‘settled’ into a routine, with ourselves, with Jack, with everything. Straight after Oli came, the regular pattern of getting up, getting ready to go out, and so forth was blown to smithereens. I’m not blaming him directly here (much), but it did seem like we were on  top of things. 

Oli came, and as Claire’s expressing milk, it pretty much pins her to a chair for the duration.  Oli, being a baby, cries and she’s able to manage ok, providing Jack isn’t kicking off, or demanding attention. Not that he would. Much.

Jack is all over Oli.  It’s funny, as we really worried about it going the other way, thinking that Jack would resent Oli for stealing his mum away from him and so on. But he loves him. Maybe a little too much!! He always wants to be involved if Oli’s about, kissing him constantly and very nicely too.  He tells visitors that Oli is his baby brother and that he loves him.  Trying to remember the age that I understood that word, I’m guessing Jack is repeating what we’re telling him about ‘love’ but maybe he does ‘get it’ too. Who knows.  Either way, Jack likes Oliver. And, Oli likes Jack too. He smiles when Jack’s there, or when he kisses him, even if Jack unintentionally gets a little heavy-handed, as three year olds do.  But in all, Jack is sharing his mum with Oliver really well. He’s not too fussed about his dad, but hey-ho.  Although, Claire did say that Jack is getting a little funny about sharing his grandparents (on my side) with his first set of to-be cousins…! All good fun, I’m sure.

It’s nice that they’re like this, and hopefully they’ll learn to play games and toys together, despite the age gap. But when they’re older, brothers will be brothers and pick the occasional fights too, as we all have done, so that should be interesting to see, possibly.

Literally, this morning before leaving for work, I had about 30 minutes with Oliver, where he has been quite the happy chappie; it seems that he’s been quite uncomfortable with wind for the past couple of weeks and, hence, has been a right grump.  But today, he must have had a decent night’s sleep, and was all “coo’s” and smiles for me, which was nice.

He’s still sleeping in the crib next to our bed at night times, despite that I’m not in there myself in the week! His grunting and snoring is nowhere near as bad as I remember Jack being at nights, but Oli is not yet sleeping through the night, so Claire’s been doing a top-job of bottle-feeding him in the nights.  Only fairly recently has this been extended to the first wake/feed of the night coming in at 03:00 – previously, it was every couple of hours.  Weekends, I try my best to help. I have been trying,where possible, to let Claire get away from it all, and sleep in the spare room (aka my office) where I’ve been hiding/sleeping, and trying to keep Oli happy with the milk too.  Problem is, I don’t seem to be able to cope on as little sleep at the moment that Claire is getting; the next day I’m a right old misery. Hey, perhaps me and the new nipper, Oli, are a right old pair together already, him being grumpy and me being miserable.

I seem to remember that Jack was sleeping through the night from about eight weeks old, and was in his own room by eleven weeks. Oli may be a little behind on that yet, but a week appears to be a long time for these babies!! Lots of things could change in that time yet..!  We shall have to wait and see.

But for those that haven’t had (yet or otherwise) children, here’s a summary of what a baby of Oli’s age does, in no particular order:

• Cries.
• Smiles, occasionally, between cries. (Maybe wind?)
• Drinks only milk at this stage. Then burps. Smiles. Then cries for more milk.
• Generate copious quantities of poo. Then cries, to make a point that they want it changed.
• Wait until you’re at the exposed, critical mid-point of changing a nappy, before successfully recreating the Bellagio fountains with a range only a fireman would appreciate, followed by a suspiciously evil-looking smile. Then cries as his ‘nads are getting cold because the second half of the nappy-change is now taking considerably longer.
• Sleeps. Lots in the day time, random/patchy hours in the night time. Waking to cries. Gets milk. Snores, grunts and farts until in R.E.M. sleep mode.
• Makes the occasional ‘coo’ noise for everyone else, even less for daddies.

All. Good. Fun.

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!

Lots of changes have happened in the past month or two, in relation to Jack and us as a family, in a positive way.  Hopefully!!

The big thing (previously unmentioned on this blog) is that Claire is expecting our second child in January..!  

Yes, yes… I know exactly what you’re thinking. “What is this going to do to the title of the blog..!”

The same thought had crossed my mind, and so I’m going to be adjusting the overall theme of the site to cater for both kidders. And Jack’s website, which is *way* out of date. And the photos website on SkyDrive.  (Just realised that I’m going to have to rename my folders of the 6000+ photos of Jack that we have. Nightmare!!)

Anyway, so yes, another child and it’s another boy! This is great news, as we don’t have to go and buy loads of new girly-looking clothes, as being a boy, he’s inevitably going to get the ol’ hand-me-down-clothes treatment..! To be honest, the relatively little amount of time that Jack has spent in any of his clothes mean that they may have been washed lots, but worn very little, so they’re still very good. And to be even more honest-er about it all, it doesn’t matter if they were thread-bare, he’s going to have them!! (evil laugh…)

Jack is really not how I expected him to be about all of this baby-lark.  Being aged 2 (ish) I was expecting him to be all mardy about sharing stuff with a new baby, such as his toys, books and even his mum. (Didn’t expect him to be bothered about me!) But, on the contrary, he’s being fantastic about it all. He keeps talking to mummy’s tummy, saying hello to the as-yet-unnamed baby and kissing it before speaking. Really funny to watch.

More stuff to follow shortly, I hope.

Yes, t’is that time of the year again, where Christmas is but a few days away.  This year, by way of comparison to last year, should be totally different, as Jack is now running around a lot more, and certainly playing with toys a lot more too.

I don’t mean that in the sense that he didn’t play with toys previously, but rather than just knocking down the Lego buildings that I put together, or throwing the train-track sections, he’s actually playing with them.  He’ll get Lego blocks from the bucket and stack them up higher and higher, or he’ll push the trains around the track after attaching carriages, and so on.

He’s a lot more fun to be around, and again don’t read that as that he wasn’t before, but I think as he’s saying more and more things, as he’s slowly learning about the world, he’s doing more things that kids do, rather than babies.

Maybe I’m not wording this properly, or laying this down on paper screen as it is in my head, but I’ll carry on and see if this makes some sort of sense.

His talking is getting much better as the weeks go by.  I went away from work a few weeks ago, for a week, but when I came back, I noticed how much more words he was able to say, or see how pronunciation had improved of words he could say before I left.  I’m sure that before I went away, he was able to say/repeats words that were of three syllables; now, he’s onto four syllables, or say short sentences of around that length.  At home, we’re trying to talk to him properly, as we’re away of the words and phrases that we use, as he repeats them back like a parrot in seconds.  Because we knew this was going to be like this, we wanted to make others around him aware that he could repeat ‘stuff’, and something that we wanted to make sure he didn’t start repeating, was swear words. So much so, we’re quick to jump on someone that uses any form of profanity in his presence, threatening that they’d owe him a £5 for each curse uttered.  It’s not that people wanted particularly to swear in front of him, it’s just that I think sometimes they simply aren’t aware they’re doing it.  I know that the day will come when he mutters his first, but I’ll get the bar of soap ready for him to wash his mouth out. Or something.

Last year at Christmas, we didn’t really make too big a thing out of it for him, as he was, to be honest, totally unaware that anything was going on, except seeing more of our family members within a short space of time.  Presents weren’t really anything to him, except that he liked getting into the empty cardboard boxes.

This year, however, he’s a bit more aware of things going on, and it’s an opportunity to get him to do more things – Claire has been teaching him to sing Jingle Bells, which… is…. getting there…! Maybe next year, we’ll be teaching him to hush it up a bit, after the fifthteenth time!  Claire has also been telling him who Father Christmas is, and he’s getting much better at saying it too!  He’s had the occasional present to unwrap already (naughty, I know) but he now knows that if you rip off the paper behind a big box, there’s a gift inside just for him.  Call it ‘preparation work’ for Christmas day!!

He’s also getting much better at telling us what the problem is, which is something that I think we, as grown-ups take for granted.  For instance, if he falls over in the other room and bangs his knee, by telling mummy where it hurts means that she can kiss it better quicker and the tears (and screaming) stop sooner.  Or if he’s getting tired, he’ll actually say ‘Tired.’ – short and sweet maybe, and admittedly we’re probably aware of this before he was anyway, but his own internal diagnostics have told him that, rather than us trying to tell him he’s tired and that he needs to go to bed!

There is one slight downside recently, in that we struggle to get him to clean his teeth.  So much so, it’s my job (bad cop) to pin him down on our bed using both arms and legs to do so, and then somehow manage to get a toothbrush in his mouth to give them a twice-a-day scrub.  He screamed originally because of the teeth coming through, but more nowadays because he’s being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do, but simply will not do it himself.  Both Claire and I are conscious that we want him to look after his teeth and if he gets used to cleaning them regularly, then maybe he will, but if we don’t make the effort ourselves to do so, then how can we expect him to when he’s older?  He’s got lovely little teeth and I’d hate for him to not look after them and for them to go bad and horrible.  My teeth aren’t so pretty to look at like Claire’s are, as mine are a bit twisty and irregular, but neither of us have any fillings or fake teeth, etc.  (Hell, I still have a baby-tooth!) But my point is that, independently of each other and with help (and/or restraining!!) from our respective parents,  we’ve both made an effort when we were young to look after them, and so far so good.

Anyway - All good fun. And I am looking forward to Christmas this year, in seeing his little face when he opens the mountain of presents that we’ve bought him.  Failing that, the look on our faces should be a picture when he goes for the boxes again this year.