Here you’ll find all the posts that have anything to do with family life – from swimming and reading to days out and cloth nappies.
Toby and Gabe love dinosaurs at the moment so on Saturday we decided to go up to Rheged in the Lake District to catch the last weekend of their Dinosaur Encounter exhibition. The exhibition has been brought to Rheged by the Natural History Museum and features ten animatronic dinosaurs plus a few other activities. Read more
We’ve been counting down the days for weeks and now we are finally here – the first day at primary school. My little boy, who turned four less than two months ago, is heading off into the big adventure that is the world of education. Read more
I’m not quite sure how it’s happened but my little baby, Gabey-goo is two years old! In a lot of ways the time has flown since he was born but at the same time we seem to have been waiting for a long time to well and truly put the baby days behind us. I love both my boys to pieces but it is safe to say I am not a big fan of little babies. Give me a walking, talking toddler any day! Read more
I’ve not done a kids’ style post for ages – mostly because the boys hadn’t really had any new clothes for a while. They are both moving up into the next sizes at the moment which has given me a great excuse to do some shopping! Read more
Schools have now broken up for the summer holidays and that means it’s only six weeks until Toby will be starting in Reception. And that means just six weeks to get Toby ready to start primary school. I know lots of children are super excited about starting school – they can’t wait to get their uniform on and go off every day to learn and play and make new friends. Toby though is going to take a little more convincing!
Although he says he is looking forward to starting school, and will be joined by a few of his friends from nursery, he is still quite apprehensive about the whole thing. This seems to be manifesting itself in some pretty out of character behaviour, and this week a couple of bed-wetting incidents too. He was only four a couple of weeks ago so he’s still quite young really and I think it’s going to take quite a lot of adjusting to get ready for school. Read more
Four years old! How on earth did the tiny squishy baby that we brought home from the hospital turn into a four year old who is going to be starting school in a couple of months?!
I last wrote an update when Toby was three and a half and in some ways he’s changed so much since then, and in others he’s exactly the same! He is now 110 cm tall, which means he’s grown another 4 cm in the last six months and he is still on the 91st centile. He weighs about 2 stone 10 lb (17.2kg) so is still super skinny even though he eats really well. He is mostly wearing age 5-6 clothes now, although some of his pants are 18-24 months because his bum is tiny! Oh and he’s got size 10 ½ feet. Read more
Like most things parenting related potty training was something I had no idea about. I’d heard of kids being out of nappies before their second birthdays and others being closer to four before they potty trained. As with most other things we took a fairly relaxed approach to getting Toby out of nappies, and let him take the lead.
He had no interest in the potty for a long time. We had one in the house from him being about two I think and he would occasionally sit on it fully clothed but wouldn’t entertain the idea of sitting on it with a bare bottom. I wrote back in October about our reluctant potty trainer – at that point he was three and three months and although we had finally got him weeing on the potty at home he was still insisting on wearing nappies.
I realised I have never written an update about what happened next…so here it is. A week or two after I wrote the last post Toby decided he would wear pants instead of his nappy and once he had made the decision that was that really.
For the first five months or so we hardly had any accidents. He was still wearing a nappy at night at first, and it was often wet when I took it off in the morning. But I realised if I took it off as soon as he woke up it was actually dry, and he was doing a wee in it once he was already up. Read more
This week’s What Toby & Gabe wore features two awesome tees from The Bunting Tree. The boys have had these since Christmas but I’ve only just got round to taking some pictures of them both in them. In fact they did appear in a Siblings post back in January but only in one picture (and how much have the boys grown in the last six months?!)
The Bunting Tree is owned and run by Emma, a mum of two who started making organic clothing to help her son’s eczema. When she first started Emma made the clothes herself, Toby actually had some of her leggings a few years ago (which Gabe is now wearing). She has now moved on to designing fabric and out sourcing the manufacturing but the clothes are still made from organic fabric and ethically produced in India.
We had a quiet day at home yesterday but after Gabe woke up from his nap I decided we could probably do with burning off some energy. So we put some music on my phone Read more
Maxomorra is a Swedish brand and I’ve featured it before in my What Toby & Gabe wore posts. They release new prints several times a year and to be honest I’m not that big a fan of a lot of them, which my bank balance is pleased about at least!
But at least a few times a year there’s a print that I absolutely love. Luckily Maxomorra produce so many different styles of clothes in each design that it’s easy to match the boys too. One of the recent prints that I loved was these robots – Toby and Gabe love them too but they weren’t so keen on posing for a photo!
I didn’t come here to write about robots though, I came to write about pineapples… Read more
I’m back with another What Toby Wore post today. When Toby was about 10 months old I came across a whole world of fabulous kids clothes beyond the high street and the supermarket, where most of his clothes came from up to that point. I can’t really remember how I discovered them but suddenly I fell down the rabbit hole of independent retailers and boys clothes that weren’t all blue and grey!
One of the first things I bought from an independent retailer was these Indikidual banana leggings from the lovely Jenny at KyNa Boutique. And the fab thing about buying from independent retailers is that you get a really personal service. The clothes always arrive beautifully packaged, super quickly, and postage and packing is usually free!
So anyway, it was a sad day when Toby grew out of these leggings Read more