Yum, nectarine. We've had a busy couple of weeks, more swimming lessons (with uncle AJ, who also took some great photos of M while he was here) and a visit from Sarah - we were planning a healthgiving country walk to see the Chagall windows at Tudeley followed by a pub lunch, but the weather was foul so we took a rain check and went shopping in Tunbridge Wells instead, which was great apart from discovering the nice cosy dim sum place I'd planned to have lunch had done a midnight flit. P and I also spent a couple of days in Swallowfield. He's made a couple of developmental leaps in the last few days, moving from commando-style crawling to proper up-on-his-knees cross-crawling, and from making just vowel sounds at varying pitches and volumes to babbling syllables /ja/ /wa/ /ra/ and /da/. Less delightfully, he seems to have another viral infection as well as probable teething, both of which are disrupting his meals and everyone's sleep, so to be honest M and I are pretty wiped out. He seemed better yesterday though, and we're off out, so things are looking up. Here's a video from a few days ago:

On Saturday we went to celebrate Gunny's sixtieth birthday with a lovely party including dinner for eighteen and the guitar stylings of M and Mr Jim, with Ellie on the bin-bongos. Then on Sunday we went for a walk, trying out John and Amanda's old baby backpack, which P seemed to like.

 

We thought it would be a bit longer before P started crawling...

Adventures with baby-led weaning - The Broccoli Files.

Don't worry, I will not subject you to an endless photographic catalogue of P digging into ricecakes, smearing porridge in his hair and squishing baked beans into his eyebrows - but will permit myself to feel proud that he joined in with our nepalese pork and peppers curry last night (and even consumed some of it - don't think too hard about how I can be sure about that if you're still having your breakfast).
M has started going back to work this week, so I'm spending days with P on my own - I'm very aware that most of my fellow new mothers have to do this when their babies are only a couple of weeks old, and am so grateful that we've been able to spend the last six months mostly together as a family, it's been good for all three of us.

Belated Christmas photos:

Well, we were all in bed long before midnight last night, but Peter was bouncing around playfully at half three (and had to be fed into submission). Happy new year... photos coming soon.