Happy First Birthday

This time last year I had a 4 day old baby, now I have a one year old. It all seems a little crazy to be honest – time has never gone so fast as it has the past couple of years. R didn’t stay a baby for long enough at all, he seemed in a hurry to grow up and be like his brother. Army crawling at six months and walking a week before he turned ten months.

He should have been called daredevil, he has no fear at all and seems to cause injury to himself regularly. Usually his face and as you will see from his birthday photos he managed to graze his face. Does it make me a bad Mummy if I say I have no idea at all how he did it? There was no tears, and one minute it wasn’t there and the next it was.

As you can see from this photo he was a poorly little boy on his birthday :(


His actually birthday morning was quiet and like any other morning, I was desperate for it to be 10:30 and for husband to get up so we could open his presents. 10:30 arrived and R was fast asleep, so I set up his presents, banners and balloons much to J’s excitement. Once R woke up we gave him a snack and then encouraged him to get stuck into his presents. He didn’t care at all and didn’t open a single present – he snuck off to steal his brothers kinder egg while J got stuck into ripping open the presents. He got some lovely bits and we had a little play with his toys, he likes to use his activity cube to climb on – I should have foreseen that really since he climbs on everything. It was then time for lunch.

After lunch we took the boys to soft play, where we were meeting three friends and their children. J’s best friend and then two children similar in age to R. Of course R being R he wanted to play with the 2 years olds and was off with his daddy on the big slide. It was a lot of fun playing with the children and catching up with some friends I don’t get to see very often. An added bonus was that soft play was really quiet, so our children had almost free range of the place.  R had a brilliant time and was fast asleep in the two minute drive home. He had a sleep and then my parents and sister came over with more presents for him, just something small as we’d asked for money for his savings account – we just have too many toys already. He played with them before we did the cake – J was incredible impressed with it. Even more impressed with the sweets that were on it and both of them were stealing the sweets before the candle had even been blown out.

It  was a fairly quiet day but lovely none the less, we don’t do parties for the boys because we think it would be completely overwhelming for them and stressful for us. So the next day we took the boys to the sea life centre in Birmingham – R loved it. Pressing his face up against the fish tanks and grinning at them. We let the two of them lose and they loved it, running around and peering into the tanks. It’s so not worth £18 and adult ( I don’t think so anyway) Thankfully we had a two for one voucher. We then went for a wander through the German Christmas markets –R zonked out in the buggy at this point.

We had a lovely couple of family days, I’m still struggling to get my head around the fact that my baby is one and getting less and less baby like every day. He’s definitely a toddler but I am struggling to let go of him being my baby. It's been an incredible year and my love for him grows more each day! 

Teaching a toddler to share

Facing another parenting difficulty these days and its driving me slightly mad. I have absolutely no idea how to deal with it, or fix the situation. As far as I can see it’s purely a case of riding it out.

It sharing – toddlers don’t understand the concept of sharing and obviously anything anyone else has is the best thing ever and they have to have it right that second.  In that case I usually remove the item and give it back to whoever had it first and explain they need to share and take turns. They look at me like I am insane and continue to fight usually with the offending item being removed. It’s difficult because R is really too young to understand.

The hardest situation is when J is sitting nicely playing with ‘HIS’ toys and R decides that he wants to join in. Resulting in J getting very defensive and upset at R taking his toys. I completely understand J’s frustration they are his toys and at that moment he doesn’t want to share and I feel that he shouldn’t have to. As well as learning to share they need to learn a sense of self of worth too, and that something’s are theirs. How do you deal with it though? R is at that age where he is getting difficult to distract and he just wants to play with his brother. There is nowhere for J to go that is safe, he used to be able to play on the sofa but not since R can now climb up there to.

Has anyone got any advice on how to deal with this?