It's a little while since I blogged about Alec, so I think that means I'm allowed to give a few updates. In case you were wondering, yes he is still very cute. Here's proof:
Alec is 5 months old this week, and lots seems to be changing at the moment. He's just moved into his own room and has decided that he's now happy to sleep through the night, 8pm-8am, which is good news for those of us who haven't slept for a solid 8 hours in a long time. Although, it seems when you are a new parent, you are programmed to wake up every few hours wondering if the silence on the other end of the baby monitor is a good or a bad thing - meaning that a solid 8 hours sleep still evades you. At least, that's the case for me. Andy sleeps on happily and wakes in the morning to ask, 'How was the night?' He's done this since Alec was a few weeks old.
As well as stocking up on sleep, Alec is also stocking up on food. Real food. After many, many conversations about weaning with just about everyone I came into contact with, I can now report: Yes. Alec is eating solids. Sweet potato, carrot, cauliflower, green beans, banana, pear, apple, apricot. You name it, he eats it. I am doing the usual mummsy thing of making up batches of puree and putting them in ice cube trays in the freezer. Although it turns out we only have novelty ice cube trays, so his sweet potato portions look like this:
Real Food also means Lots of Mess, so a highchair has become the latest addition to the growing mountain of Alec's stuff, which is slowly but surely starting to take over the house.
He has also become lots more mobile in the last few weeks, and wriggles and rolls all over the place given half a chance. This isn't great news for us, as we now have to keep a beady eye on him at all times. Or something like this tends to happen:
We had our first family holiday last week - to Talloires, halfway along Lake Annecy. Those of you thinking -'Annecy sounds familiar' - that's probably because it was in the news a lot last year, after a cyclist and a family were shot there in quite mysterious circumstances. There were lots of cyclists while we were there, but thankfully no shootings. We were staying in a little cabin which the French call a mobilehome (ah, the French and their Franglais), although there was nothing mobile about it. A tiny bedroom, living area and bathroom, all squeezed into 15m2, and a large deck out the front nearly the size of the cabin itself. But as fate would have it, it turned out to be the same campsite where my brother-in-law has been staying with his family since he was a wee lad. Perched up on the (very steep) hillside, the view over the lake was stunning, even in the mostly cloudy weather.
The paragliders you can see floating around are the real reason we were in Talloires. After we did a paragliding course a few years ago, Andy decided he wanted to learn more so he did a week's course, and Alec and I tagged along for the holiday. Andy is now the proud owner of his first autonomous paragliding pilot's licence, which allows him to fly in calm conditions in places that he knows. I won't be letting him jump off the Jura just yet.
The next couple of months have lots in store: lots more visitors, moving house, a trip to the UK and then a big trip to Arizona for most of August. At this rate, expect another update somewhere around Christmas.
