Author: lolabump

Take one tiny onion, a small carrot, and half a medium-sized red pepper and dice finely. Gently fry the onion and carrot in some olive oil, adding the pepper after a minute or two. When softened, add about half a pint of fresh stock and a handful of sweetcorn (I used frozen); simmer gently for 15 mins or so. Add about half a boiled chicken breast (eg, the chicken from the stock pot), finely diced, and about half a teaspoon of ground cumin. Bring back to a simmer then remove from the heat and add a big pinch of chopped corriander. Allow to cool a little before liquidising and passing through a sieve (to remove corn husk).

Lola’s verdict: yum.

Lovely springlike weekend. Buds pushing through on the trees; new growth breaking out in the garden. Lola in excellent humour, spending more time on two legs than all fours, though no independent steps.

Computer seems to be staying up. I should not be staying up, having done that all weekend and suffering now.

Suddenly, I’ve forgotten everything I was going to say, anyway. Did I mention Lola is really into pointing at the moment, as evidenced here. She also likes to point up at the flowers round the mirror in the sitting room and suck in air through her teeth in an excited manner.

You can still catch her saying “brava” (or “bava”, “bwava”), and she’s very close to a ‘mama’. And she has a fantastic repetoire of “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa”s.

Sta arrivando oggi.

This morning, Lola would pull into a sitting position without her head dragging behind her. And when I lifted her to splosh her bum in the bowl of warm water she was more interested in a spot of assisted walking than in bending her legs to sit in the water.

Lola, I realised last night, has stopped making the odd, high-pitched, back-of-the-throat, inhalation-based noise that she used to make a lot while sleeping and, somewhat less, while awake. It was a very distinctive and amusing little call which I would wander around emulating. I wonder will it pass from memory — I don’t think I have a recording of it.

Her vocalisations have changed so much already since her birth. Her crying is different as are her various sighs and moans. And she has a whole new vocabulary; she’s not quite bablling yet, but she has a whole range of vowel sounds and is starting to get the hang of a few consonants (‘g’, ‘m’, ‘n’). When she gets excited she invariably will start chatting away.

Happy Tuesday,

this is a quick blog entry by email.

Perhaps.

Hm. Having told Stephanie about Lola’s early sleep-spasms (for which she had a name which now escapes me) and how they’d gone after the first two or three days, they have now made a re-appearance tonight.

I wonder if that’s anything to do with the sacro-cranial session.

Lola is now 53cm long — that’s 4cm longer than at birth. Cripes.

I think it was down to an initial mis-hearing, but the act of wrapping Lola up in her blanket or simillar is now known as swandling. Which is a nice mix of swaddle and bundle. Little Lola-bundle.

Anyway, we’re off down to the Haelan Centre to see Stephanie who is going to give Lola a spot of cranial osteopathy.

It dropped off today.

I resisted the urge to preserve it in a block of resin.

I wish I’d taken a video of Lola sleeping during her first two or three days of life: she used to do these incredible Bruce-Lee-style kung-fu spasms in her sleep.

She’d be lying there, peaceful and motionless, and suddenly her arms would shoot out to the sides above shoulder height. A really rapid, violent but graceful kind of motion suggestive of someone striking an initial fighting stance. Then immediately she would relax and be back in placid dreamland.

It was a bit scary at first but it’s not unusual, aparently.

We’re off to a local kids-stuff jumble sale type thing. Isa’s shattered as Lola, having slept and fed peacefully all day, kept Mum up a lot of the night. Hopefully, an outing will tire her out a bit and she and Isa can spend the rest of the day crashed out on the sofa while we watch the Wimbledon finals.

On a different tack, I must get into the habbit of making little blog postings — I’ve not written any this week; I think because I’m thi nking I have to sit down and write it all at once. Silly boy.