Tess is amazingly mobile these days. One minute she’s in the living room playing with some blocks, the next minute she’s in the hallway pulling all the shoes out of the shoe rack. It’s certainly had an impact in our household, we’re suddenly having to revist “baby-proofing” the house (Rose is a bit older now and understands when something is dangerous. We haven’t had to use baby gates or anything for a long time). Along with such mobility is a shift in personality. No longer is she content to sit in one spot. She wants to go where she wants to go. For example, she’s always making a break for the bathroom, probably the most dangerous room in the house. You pick her up and bring her back the living room, and she’s right back in the bathroom again before you can count to ten. The girl is quite stubborn.

One thing that remains is that she’s still very independant. Is it the fact that she’s the second child? All I know is that she is quite happy crawling around amusing herself with bits of stray paper or a plastic bottle or a DVD case. Rose still gets most of our attention, apart for key moments when Tess lets you know she needs you.

She’s also so happy. Most of the time you can hear her coming from a mile away. She does this crawl-and-happy grunt thing at the same time. So break-my-heart-and-put-it-back-together-again happy. We’ve noticed that she can conventionally crawl, she just prefers to shimmy along the ground. I’m wondering if her sense of balance is a bit squew-wiff because of her eyesight?

The other exciting thing is that she’s started eating more and more family and finger foods. Last week we even had several meals where we all ate the same thing. So exciting to think about the end of the pureed stuff!

One of Rose’s best friends, Oliver, had a birthday on Saturday. We had such a lovely afternoon! There was face painting, a bounteous feast and lots of good conversation (for the adults) and running around (for the kids). Rose was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t her birthday. In fact, Oliver’s mum even re-lit his birthday cake so she could blow out the candle too. But to be fair she was a very good sport about it being his birthday.  When she handed him his present she said, “Happy Birthday Oliver! I hope you have a nice day.” (However, we did practice this speech at home first!) I took some photos at the party, here are two of my favourites:

You see so much of Rose's personality in this photo. She loves to have fun!

I love my beautiful happy family!

So Rose has been enjoying all the birthday parties that have been happening lately, but she was really excited to discover that there was another celebration coming up involving presents: Christmas. We’ve been talking about Santa coming down the fireplace (we have three fireplaces in our house!) and leaving presents for everyone. I went to the library last week and got a whole bunch of books about Christmas out. She knows that Granny Jo is coming over from New Zealand especially for Christmas. And on Sunday Rose and I went into the city to go see the David Jones’s Christmas display, and buy an ornament for the Christmas tree. It’s true that at moments of excitement she gets a bit muddled about the details (“Look! There’s Santa Christmas and his cow!”) and when I asked her the other day who was going to come down the chimney on Christmas Eve she said, “Granny Jo!”

The other interesting thing is that even though she loves opening presents, she doesn’t seem all that interested in the presents themselves. When I asked her the other day what she wanted Santa to bring her she said, “chocolate crackles.” Heh, heh, a girl after my own heart.

How is it that Rose has gone from single words to running linguistic rings around us?

This evening when I got home from work Rose met me at the door. She said, “Hello Mummy! That is a beautiful skirt.”

Also this evening I found a set of keys in the back door. This is strange only because they were the fake set of keys that grandad had made her for her first birthday. She’s been working her way around all of the locks in the house, trying each key. Chris told me that after she got a chair over to reach the back door lock. Then she asked for tape. He gave her some, and she said, “Thank you Daddy. That so kind of you.”

After dinner Rose and I were sitting in the living room eating iceblocks. They were the home-made kind with frozen juice and water. She leaned over and looked at mine. “Can I have some of yours?” she asked. I said, “No! You have your own. This is mine.”

Then she said, “What about teamwork?”

When Rose wants to tell you something she prefers to do it in the context of a question and answer. She’s developed this complicated way of asking you a question that she actually wants you to ask her. It goes something like this:

Rose: Is it yummy?

Me: Is it yummy?

Rose: Yes!

She also uses it to indicate what she wants to do. Such as:

Rose, obviously bored: What park do you want to go to Rosie?

[Pause]

Rose: ROSE! What park do you want to go to!

Me, sighing: Rose, what park do you want to go to?

Rose, grabbing her things: Camperdown Park!

It’s kinda cute. Very smart. And a little odd.

And speaking of cute, smart and odd, I got her all dressed up for her day care photo today. Here she is wearing the party dress I made her. Damn it if you don’t just want to reach out and grab her little cheeks.

The last thing I feel like doing is uploading pictures from Tess’s party right now. Not that it wasn’t a fun party, or a really happy day for our little family, or a nice time with our friends, because it was all of those things. It’s just that my Nana is not well right now and I’m feeling very sad about it. However, I know that she’d also love to see some pictures, so I’m really doing this for her.

Tess blowing out the candle on her cupcake!

Rose had a ball at the party. Every time I looked for her she was dancing in the middle of the room. Or opening one of Tess's presents.

Party food! I also made cupcakes for the birthday cake.

How many family portraits of us are there? Hardly any. Still couldn't get the kids to look at the camera, though!

Cleaning up after Tess's party was like cleaning up after a keg party. Toddler's can party like teenagers!

I just uploaded some new photos to our online album. Here’s a few of my favourites:

Rose in her bumblebee costume for Halloween (I made the tutu). How funny that her friend Percy came dressed as the same thing!

We visited our friends Paul and Petra the other week in their new house. Rose found her way in to Percy's bed. You can see from their expressions what fun they were having!

Isn't she the most adorable baby EVER?

Beau, Julia and I working our way through an incredible spread in the Megalong Valley tea rooms

We just got back from a delicious meal of fish and chips down at Glebe Point, watching the boats go by and the sun set over the Anzac Bridge. On the way back Chris and I fell into a trans-fat related stupor but both revived when we both heard Rose say, “I make the car better!” We turned around at exactly the same time and saw Rose pulling a huge chunk out of the car. She appeared to be pulling some large plastic moulding holding the door in the door frame. Chris said firmly, “Rose, NO! Don’t pull bits off the car. We need the car to go places.” (What is it about Toddlers that make you strangely specific in the way you talk about things.)

Further on down the road we heard Rose saying to herself, “I put it away for later.”

Little Rose doesn’t want it to be Tess’s birthday. Well, she does and she doesn’t. She wants the chocolate crackles I’ve been promising. And the cupcakes, and the chips, and the balloons. But she doesn’t like the small mound of gifts that we’ve been describing as “Tess’s presents”. She’s finding it hard to understand that it was Mama’s birthday a few weeks ago, and now it’s Tess’s and when the heck is hers? Last night she even went as far as saying that she was turning one soon, when she knows full well that she’s two.

Truth be told she’s been going through a lot. She moved up to the giraffe room last week (the mostly 2-3 year old room). There are some things she loves about the new room, such as being able to help herself to water from a water cooler (my thoughts: are they insane?), and having free access to her school bag all day so that she can get her beloved rabbit Patch out whenever she wants it. But there are also some new things about the giraffe room to adjust to, such as the fact that they don’t have a dedicated sleeping room, they just pull the toddler beds out when it’s nap time. And she no longer has Ryoko her favorite carer with her. Also, one big change is that they’re toilet training her. After months of toilet refusal at home when Chris picked her up from day care last week she was actually sitting on the toilet peeing by herself. Woah. All this change has made her pretty temperamental and clingy at home. It probably hasn’t helped that we’ve had a lot of visitors lately. While we’ve had a lot of fun it must seem somewhat like a revolving door to her.

And of course there’s another big change next week: I go back to work. Yikes!

We’ve been super busy lately. A few weeks ago my mum came to stay for a week, and then at the tail end of that visit Chris’s parents were here. They left a few days ago. Tonight my Canadian friends Beau and Julia arrive for 10 days. Rose is moving up a room at her day care tomorrow. Then there’s a Halloween party I’m making costumes for, Tess’s first birthday party on the 7th and my return to work on the 9th. We’re all exhausted. Happily exhausted.

So yeah, don’t expect any blog updates soon. I haven’t even been taking any photos lately. It’s actually been really nice to take a break from the chronicaling.

One thing to share is the invite I made for Tess’s birthday party. Super cute, eh!

Leaving Tess for five days was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. Every night we were in Melbourne I would go to sleep with her face in my thoughts. Her big beautiful smile, her fluffly [sic] hair, her soft clean smell. My hip ached where she should be.  My face felt less smiley because I didn’t have her beautiful smile to return. Her small rosebud lips were burned into my retina so that when I closed my eyes they were all I could see. Tess belongs with me.

Anyway, seeing her again at the airport was one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. Even though she had her patch on she could see it was me (or maybe she could also hear is was me!), her face cracked open like the sun coming out from behind a rain cloud, and all was right.

But she’d also changed. How could she change while I was gone? It was only 5 days! She had changed in the best possible way: she was moving. Tess started “commando” crawling while I was away. She uses her elbows and knees to push herself along. It’s not the classic crawling that Rose did, but it’s definitely locomotion. She can get across the room pretty quickly now, especially if she spies some white paper. (White paper is her most desired object of affection! Mmmm, yummy, white paper.) But I’ve been around enough babies to know that not all kids do classic crawling. Bum shuffling, crab calling, babies do all kinds of crazy stuff.