Saturday morning

It's Saturday and we don't have a wedding to go to. I'm tired and the babies have a cold and turning six months seems to have marked some sort of transition from exhausting into BLOODY exhausting. Ammie has discovered rolling. And it sucks. After thirty seconds of being held or of sitting in the swing or the pushchair she starts squirming to be put down. Five seconds after she is put down on her back she has rolled over onto her face. Ten seconds after that she screams and screams and screams until we turn her back over. And then we repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. At first I thought she was pissed off to be on her stomach but she's perfectly capable of turning herself back over. I think she's just pissed off not to be crawling.

That kid is so physical, so desperate to be on the move, so bored to be sitting still. And so. damn. strong. Dressing her is not unlike trying to put clothes on a springer spaniel (there's a reason you see very few springer spaniels in clothes) and has started to involve the use of elbows to pin her down. I don't really understand it. I'm not physical. At all. I like to look and touch and taste and smell but physical activity? Nuh huh. In my head is where it's at. Which isn't to suggest that I'm thinking anything very clever: often I will disappear mentally, I will be at the table or sitting by Nye in the car and I will be staring into the middle distance and it's been 5 minutes since I've said anything. Nye looks concerned,

'what are you thinking about?'

'Tomatoes.'

'really? You've been quiet for a long time. It looked like you were having a difficult thought.'




'I wasn't.'

I think Ella might be kind of similar. She lives in her head. She will happily spend 20 minutes examining her toes or a wooden spoon or the pattern on her sleeve before she looks up as if just remembering that there are other things in the world than her toes or her spoon and gives the biggest, happiest grin ever. She's not interested in rolling over. It's not that she can't, she can, we've seen her. One day, while Ammie was determinedly trying to move from back to front as she had been for a week, Ella just did it. Just rolled over, no practising. She lifted her head up, looked around, smiled then rolled back over. And that was that. A week later Amelia managed it too and she's been doing it every 30 seconds ever since.

*photo of Brighton, just because.