A Lia update

Seems my plan of keeping track of Lia's milestones has slipped a little...

Still we're currently in the middle of a couple - potty training and the final teeth appearing - so things are moving on.

She's back to her perky self after the chicken pox episode. In case you're in any doubt here's a pic of her testing out the new sofas:



As you can see she I finally achieved my goal of doing something 'girlie' with her hair. This was the first time she allowed me to put her in bunches and I've managed twice more since.



Potty training wise we've been doing a bit at home and she's quite adept now at stripping from the waist down and announcing 'Lia do wee wee'. Nursery and I had a chat yesterday and from today she's moved up to 'serious' mode which involves no nappies, training pants, etc, just several extra pairs of trousers, knickers and socks together with plastic shoes...

I'd forgotten all about teething so it took me a while to attribute the symptoms she's been displaying with the notion of teeth appearing but I finally checked at the weekend and it appears that the final top two are though and the final bottom two are just about visible under the gum. No wonder she's been grumpy and slightly off colour.

Her speech is coming along in leaps and bounds now and she chatters almost constantly. A lot of the words she got wrong or stumbled on are now coming out clearly and she's much more interactive in conversations now.

We've also (with the help of friends) cleared a lot of our back garden so she's able to get out more and explore a bit. She loves being outside and she also loved helping when we were doing some clearing up. I've probably mentioned before that the new garden was incredibly overgrown but in the course of six weeks we've gone from this:



to this:



to this:



with a bit of help from Lia and Neh-Naw



The front garden has had even more of a transformation going from this:



to this:



As you can see we still have a really long way to go but now we've made such a good start it's not quite as daunting. Even better we've got enough stuff to burn we can have a fantastic bonfire on November 5th.

We're heading down to Canterbury on Thursday as it's the second of my trio of Quilting Courses. My parents are away so my sister is babysitting for the day. I'm not quite sure how she'll cope or what kind of mood Lia will be in as she misses my parents (they've been on holiday for weeks!) and this will be the first time she's been to their house with them not there. Still, my sister has three dogs that Lia adores so I'm sure they'll be a good substitute. Plus it's only a few days after that we'll be back down there to see my parents on their return (and to collect the one or two bits of stash they picked up for me in the US!)

Talking of Stash, several of us went to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Ally Pally last Saturday and a fab day was had by all. I spent a fortune (I had been saving up) and bought way too much stash and found at least one more fantastic shop to lose money in - www.daisychaindesigns.co.uk. Here's some pics of my stash purchases: