My sister gave birth this morning to Alfred John, probably to be known as Alfie. He was 8lb 15oz, and delivered by C-section due to him being face first and therefore very unlikely to make it out in to the world on his own. I’ve been to see him, and although he has my sisters nose, he is every bit the same as his dad.

Congratulations guys, Alfie’s cousins can’t wait to meet him.

I’m going to be an Aunt very soon. My sister is going in to hospital to be induced due to problems with her pregnancy today. There shouldn’t be any issues regarding the baby, she is term, well 39 weeks on Friday. So soon we will have another family member. It will be nice to hold a little baby again, especially one I can give back when it cries!

We have new babies. As much as I like the rabbits, they weren’t my first choice of child’s pet, I’d much rather have had guinea pigs. I’ve been workin on Chris for a while, and have finally worn him down, so today I went and collected two tiny little guinea pig babies, only 5 weeks old. They are so cute. I kept it a total surprise from Ellie, so she had no idea they were coming at all. Despite us telling her time and time again that the rabbits were ours and they would not be going away, one of the first things she said was “Have we still got the rabbits?”. We’ve tried to explain again tonight that just because you get something new, you don’t get rid of your old pets. Hopefully she is reassured.

I’ve added photos of our new babies here. Chris is holding them. You can see how tiny they are. When we’ve settled on names for them, I’ll let you know.

Yesterday we had a consultation meeting with Ellie’s teacher to review how she is doing at school. I am very pleased to report that I came away with a lump in my throat. Ellie is, in the words of her teacher, “the highest scoring Reception year child”. She has been moved into a group of children one year older than her for some aspects of learning, and her teacher predicted that if she stays with them, she may well be top of their group in ability by the end of the year.

 We have a very clever little girl on our hands. One that makes us very proud.

Over the last couple of days, Tabitha has started briefly letting go or furniture and experimenting with standing on her own. When I say briefly, I am talking about maybe a second or two at a time, but she is doing it, which is an achievement.

Ellie gets to stay at school for lunch this week, and we have a meeting with the teacher on Tuesday to discuss how many hours she starts after half term. I was thinking about just doing 3 full days a week and 2 half days, but somehow I don’t think Ellie is going to go along with that plan. She keeps talking about when she can stay all day like the big children. I can see she isn’t going to want to leave half way through the day.

Do you hate any adverts around at the minute? The ones that really wind me up are the Cillit Bang advert with the woman who says, “Look, it even works on this soap scum”, and then wipes clean a bath that she hasn’t bothered to even look at, let alone use for the last year or two, and the one with the dishwasher tablet that “helps your dishes dry”. I mean I know I “just hate it when I have to wipe my plastics dry out of the dishwasher”, but if it costs a huge amount more to buy a different product, I’ll stick to the old one and a cloth thanks.

The girls are going to bed nice and early each week night. Consequently, they are getting up pretty early each morning…..not so nice. Tonight they are both going down very late. It’s part of the plan to try and get a lie in tomorrow. Even just an hour (so up at 7 rather than 6) would be great. Fingers crossed.