The end of 2011, beginning of 2012 has marked the start of a few changes in our household. Sophie turned 6 months at Christmas so has now started weaning! Eeek, I'm now prepared for lots of mess, sticky fingers and probably numerous amount of purees I've spent ages making being thrown or knocked onto the floor!!
I have now come to the decision to wean her off breastfeeding too. I've not started yet but maybe next week I'll take the plunge and buy some formula and dig out the steam steriliser! This is the only thing that I'm not looking forward to. Breastfeeding is much easier as the milk is just there, ready for when baby needs it, the perfect temperature and you don't have to faff around with bottles etc! I do feel though it may make day-to-day life a little easier. I'm constantly planning the day and what we do around feeds...don't get me wrong I'm not too bothered about feeding in public but sometimes it's just not possible!! I will be sad to stop but I've been breastfeeding for over 6 months now which I'm really proud about. I'm so pleased I was able to do it again :)
Another couple of changes are Joshua getting rid of his dummy and starting potty training!! Joshua has always had a dummy for night-time and nap times. He's never been dependant on having one during the day but always wanted it, along with 'Teddy' for sleepy times. We felt however that by the age of 3 we really wanted to say goodbye to it. Sooo...my fabulous idea was to, on Christmas Eve, let Joshua put his dummy on the tree for Father Christmas to take away and leave lots of presents in return! We built him up to doing it a few weeks leading up to Christmas and he seemed fine about the whole idea. So Christmas Eve Daddy lifted Joshua up for him to hang his dummy on the very top of the tree! He went to bed fine with just Teddy...amazing! He's mentioned it maybe just twice since but it's not bothered him one bit. Woo hoo!
So with this being so so easy we then thought we would try something else whilst the Christmas tree was up. "Joshua, shall we ring the Christmas elves to come back to collect your nappies then you can start to use your potty?"..."Yes!" was the reply. So that's what we did and now, just over a week later, Joshua is happily in pants making regular trips to the potty! We've had our fair share of accidents and we still need to master getting out and about without nappies and also night-times without nappies. It's still all early days though and we don't want to push him and end up going backwards.
Along with all that we are seeing lots of different personal developments too. Being able to have proper little conversations with Joshua now is fantastic and some of the things he says are so funny!! Sophie starting to giggle is lovely along with interacting with Joshua and a few weeks ago she discovered she has feet!! That was funny to watch!
2012 is going to bring about so many other changes and developments too. I'm really excited to see them all but just don't want it to go too quickly! They're growing up too quick!!
