Our little monkey child is now very mobile and into everything, which is quite remarkable given that she's not actually crawling yet. No one told me that the little monkeys can roll, shuffle, wriggle, shimmy, twist, bend, lean and slide their way to whatever it is that has caught their attention!

She is also trying to pull herself up to stand holding onto everything and anything within reach. Nap times during the day are now a comedy routine of Sophia pulling herself up and me going in and lying her down and trying not to smile or laugh when she cracks me her 'hehehe look what I can do' grin. I know when she's either sitting or standing as it's heralded over the intercom by either her 'I'm really pleased with myself' little growl or whinging followed far too quickly by silence - the silence is always the most worrying, that's when I know she's trying to engineer an escape from the cot. We're thinking about securing a bungy cord to her every nap time.

So, our kitchen is a concrete shell; concrete floor exposed, concrete walls exposed, and Stu and I have just about had enough of our kitchen contents being in our living room. But the good news is the floor is now officially dry, and once we can get through to the insurers who never seem to answer their phone, we can arrange to have our kitchen reinstated hopefully some time next week.

If only I could find my sanity...I know I've seen it lying around somewhere...

My beautiful growing girl, love and light of my life.

Spring is on the way...

We woke this morning to several inches of snow on the ground and thick fat flakes wafting from above like feathers tumbling and drifting down from a ripped pillow. It was extraordinary, especially given that yesterday I was out in a t-shirt and my lightest weight jumper, and today we hauled out all the heaviest warmest winter woollies we own! Sophia had her first 'toboggan' ride (on cardboard packaging from Amazon.com!) and the park was full of people building snowmen, having snowball fights and generally taking in the magnificence of the landscape. Snow magically transforms everything into an object of beauty! It had all melted by mid afternoon, which made it all the more incredible.

When we moved in we both said we were looking forward to seeing the park covered in snow. Neither of us quite expected to see it snow-laden and magnificent in April though!

Who you gonna call.....

We had the ghostbusters in our kitchen last week. Washing machine leak blah blah kitchen floor needs replacing yadda yadda builder started pulling up flooring and discovered the original tiling which has asbestos in the backing blah blah which is where the ghostbusters, aka the asbestos removal men come in to the picture, decked out in white suits with spray equipment to damp everything down as they removed flooring. They sealed our kitchen (which we emptied out - our living room now has all our kitchen stuff in it and we have about 1 metre of floor space not covered) and left us with a scraped down floor. Next we get to have drying equipment put in the kitchen, and then god knows when we'll eventually get the floor replaced and tiling put down. What fun.