Margot Brown

On Sunday we met up with Giles and Alena in the Botanical gardens to enjoy the sunshine, spring bulbs and bleary squirrels. I can feel the hills calling but I think it needs to get a little warmer.

Margot played with her ball and showed us some excellent jumping. She's mastered the knee bend and rapid rise, and leaving the ground is surely just around the corner!

Curiously, Margot also made friends with a giant steel ant.

Margot's favourite internet friends uncle Leo and auntie Lisa came to visit Margot this weekend. We had all sorts of fun, including going on a rickety Helter Skelter [Movie] on Fargate.

We also had lunch with Lisa's sister Bernie and her two kids Melba and Mabel, who are not too far from Margot's age, so they played together and Margot was on very good behaviour and shared her toys.

Lisa's Mum and Dad treated everyone to a very nice lunch at the new Wagamamas in Sheffield's Leopold Square.

Margot can count! Today she counted up to seven several times of her own accord; only problem : she starts at two - so remember to subtract one.

Right now it seems like Margot is learning several new words a day - it's always a lovely surprise when she says something new. It often seems that what Margot loves most is novelty - a new book, or a new toy excites and stimulates her. This would be an expensive process if it weren't for the Broomhill library, which is luckily only 5 minutes walk away.

Labels: First times

"Thank-you Papa" is pretty much all any Papa needs to hear, but Margot has been making other advances recently.

She has taken her first steps at independence, insisting on doing up her own coat, putting on her own tights, lacing her own shoes, with a firm and authoratative "No Maman, Dadot". Reassuringly she usually has to ask for "Hep" to finish off, and Papa can step in and put the laces back in the shoes, put each leg in its own hole, and well, coats are usually close enough to finish with just one or two extra arms in sleeves.

We went to Broomhill library today since it is Baby Time, and Margot greatly impressed Papa with two new skills.

Firstly she put the correctly coloured children in the right holes in a wooden puzzle. She's becoming pretty good at puzzles and jigsaws - both vital skills on the caravan holiday Grand-dad will inevitably want to take her on (to Wales).

Secondly, she identified some pictures of a cat and her two kittens as Tat ... Two Tats!. This isn't the first time she's used two, but usually it's used to pronounce "1-2-3-go!" as two, two, two, two. This is the first use of it to count things that I've heard of. Three is still pretty experimental and only used for numbers in lifts.

She also enjoyed the ballpond, but that's not really an achievement. Everyone likes ballponds.

After what was apparently the worst snow since King Wenceslas, Margot and Maman and Papa walked to nursery today, to avoid crashing the car.

Sadly most of the staff at the nursery hadn't even tried doing that, so it wasn't open. Papa was hoping for a nice day of working from home and trying out his new coffee machine, but instead had to:

* Struggle back uphill through ice and snow
* Go to the library with Margot to the Baby morning
* Get a haircut with Margot
* Go to get his filling done at the dentist in Crookes (might as well have been the Nth pole)
* Try out the tapas bar on the corner
* Have a 2 hour conference call to the US while entertaining Margot
* Survive

Papa is now knackered, despite Margot being mostly extremely good.

I really don't know how the staff at the nursery manage. I assume they turn them on each other - fighting fire with fire.