One year old already! Well actually it was Gabe’s birthday a week and a half ago but you know, life. Seriously though, I don’t know where the time goes. It doesn’t seem two minutes since I was high on gas and air, laughing because the midwife could see my bum, while Barry fed me jelly babies…and then Gabriel was born on our living room floor looking the absolute image of Toby when he was born.

And yet here we are, one year later. In a different house, a long way from the living room where that home birth happened.

I’m not going to pretend it’s been an easy year. With reflux, endless coughs and colds, chicken pox and the inevitable teething, Gabe has not had the easiest first year. There hasn’t been a huge amount of sleep for any one and I reckon I must have spent at least 50% of the last year rocking, pacing, pushing, driving, singing… doing anything I could to get Gabe to go to sleep and stay asleep. Things are slowly improving but he has still only ever slept through the night twice, and one of those was when he was about four months old. I know things will get better eventually – Toby didn’t really sleep well until he was two and a half and now he sleeps from 8 pm until 8 am nearly every night with the odd wake up every couple of weeks for a bad dream.

Apart from the sleep thing though (oh, and the not eating, but we’ll get to that later) Gabe is doing great. He’s developing a proper little personality now, he loves playing peekaboo and has just discovered the hilarious game of hiding under one of Toby’s muslins. He’s not walking or standing unaided yet, but he can crawl super fast, pulls himself up on everything and is cruising like a demon. He’s just like Toby though and won’t walk, or even stay standing if you hold his hands. He wants to do it by himself, his way.

He’s started being much more independent with his play too, and will happily go and get a toy (or all the toys!) out of one of the boxes and sit and play by himself. We’ve even started to get a few moments of Toby and Gabe actually playing together, or at least playing side by side without trying to grab things off each other so that’s a start!

Gabe loves babbling away to himself too, and anyone who is listening – favourite words are still hiya and dada but just this week he has started saying mama too which is very cute. He still has a dummy for sleeping but he’s not that fussed for it the rest of the time and will usually take it out himself if we forget.

Weaning though, is slow going and we seem to have really regressed in the last few weeks. Gabe has always been quite fussy about food, which I think is probably related to his reflux. After seeing the consultant before we left Scotland though his reflux seems to be pretty much under control but still Gabe hardly eats any solid food. He was doing really well with eating for a while – I’ll admit he was mostly eating shop bought pouches, but he would eat some finger foods too. In the last month or so though he has decided he doesn’t really like being spoon fed so I have been giving him bits of what we are eating but he hardly touches that either. He still likes fruit pouches and he sucks it straight from the pouch himself. He’ll usually eat banana, and rice cakes, and bizarrely Linda McCartney sausages, but that’s about the only things he’s guaranteed to eat. He still has three bottles during the day and usually one in the night. I did try reducing his milk a bit but all that seemed to do was make him constipated and grumpy. He’s still growing and putting on weight fine so I guess I just need to keep offering him different things and hope that one day he gets an appetite. He’s just so different to Toby who has always had a massive appetite and when he was one he ate almost anything you put in front of him. I know I shouldn’t really compare them anyway. Gabe is nowhere near as big as Toby was at this age so maybe he just doesn’t need as much food as he did.

We didn’t really have any celebrations for Gabe’s birthday – in fact he went to nursery on his birthday so we just did some present opening when Barry got home from work. My mum and dad are on holiday at the moment and Barry’s mum has just had an operation on her back so we’re planning on having a bit of a house warming/ birthday party for both boys when everybody will be able to come.

Of course Gabe thought the wrapping paper was way more interesting than the presents, and Toby did plenty of helping with the unwrapping too!

So there we are  – my baby boy is one. We definitely aren’t planning on any more babies so this will be the last time I write a one year update. I know lots of people feel sad when they realise there aren’t going to be any more babies but I can only be happy we’ve got through the last year and look forward to all the adventures that are still to come. And sleep. I’m looking forward to one day, hopefully one day soon, actually getting a full night’s sleep again.