One of Me, Three of You

We finally got round to adding a bit of colour back onto the seasons table last week. W and I knocked up the bees one Sunday morning with black pipe cleaners (requisitioned from a Halloween spider), some yellow wool and white felt. The bees were easier than finding a branch soft enough to turn into a ring to hang them from, it turns out most branches aren't as bendy as they look! I spotted the butterflies here on Red Ted Art and thought they would look good hung from a tree. The boys like collecting branches for the tree and W made a butterfly as well. The tissue paper flowers have stayed on from the Whitsun table and look really effective considering they took about five minutes to make and were simple enough for both W and T to do their own. And the wonky candles aren't supposed to be wonky but they got broken in my bag on the way home! One day I will get round to trying to melt them back to vertical.

On the eve of W's birthday I feel like I am approaching a bit of a milestone as I will no longer have three under-5s. I don't know why 5 seems like a notable age - he has already been at school for nearly a year and I am not expecting parenting to magically become easier from tomorrow. But I feel like I will be able to complain a little less about the trials of looking after the three of them as they get older. It is easy to forget how challenging it is having several children close together because it has very quickly become our normal.

I have been meaning to write something about potty training for a few weeks now but half term and then large amounts of life admin have got in the way. Although it turns out that the delay is no bad thing as I have avoided having to re-write what would have been an overly positive post now that it is going a lot less well! Child number two has been in pants since the Easter holidays. So far it is still proving less traumatic than potty training child number one but is no longer the plain sailing I thought it was going to be.

This post is entirely for my benefit as my memory is rubbish and I think about my children as they are now rather than how they used to be. At nearly 11 months old, there are two things about A that I would like to remember in future: 1. He likes putting toys behind his head which means that I keep finding unexpected things in his vest. I must have put him closer to the chalkboard than I intended the other day as when I went to change his nappy I found a couple of sticks of chalk down his back. And today his vest was full of clothes pegs as he had been sat out in the garden playing with them. 2. The rolling! I don't remember the other two rolling over so much and so quickly (although that may just be my memory). He's still determined not to stand but very quickly lies himself down when you sit him on the floor and starts rolling around, often onto some pretty knobbly toys. He's also pretty good at deliberately spinning on the spot when he's sat up now, I remember

T and I tried a counting activity this afternoon - he can count to ten out loud but isn't so good at recognising what the numbers look like (or at least pretends he isn't). We got out the Ikea numbers I painted a while ago and the threading beads and lined them up in order and with the right number of beads. Despite missing a few beads we had just the right number. (It slightly bothered me that the colours of the beads and the numbers didn't match up but you can't have everything!) After doing the beads, T got out the Paw Patrol pups and added them to the line-up - every activity benefits from a bit of Paw Patrol action!