It’s been a pretty good, if quiet, week again this week. Toby’s sleep hasn’t been too bad – apart from Tuesday night when we ended up bringing him in bed with us but he seemed to think it was time for a party at 3am! On Saturday night though he actually slept the entire night without us having to go into him. A good night usually still involves at least one wake up so to have none at all really is a treat.

I did have a bit of a meltdown at work on Thursday. I have a few classes where no matter what I do, and what tactics I try, behaviour is a real issue. After weeks and weeks of battling with one class I had finally had enough. It was at the end of a very busy two days, my colleague had been off meaning I had to sort out all the work for her classes as well as my own. I had a parents’ evening coming up that night so I knew I wasn’t going to get home to see Toby before he went to bed, and so, when 15 minutes into the lesson the kids were still shouting and interrupting and not listening to a single word I said, I walked out and called for support. I have been saying for weeks that I need help with this class so hopefully something will happen now. Having a pregnant teacher walking out of a class in tears isn’t really what the senior management team are aiming for!

That incident aside though it has been a pretty good week. Toby has been hilarious at times this week. He is learning more words every day – ‘oh dear’ is a new favourite as well as ‘gone’, usually when he has thrown something else behind the telly and he wants us to get it back! And then yesterday when he was throwing a ball around the living room he started staying ‘ready, steady, go’! It’s too cute!

Yesterday we took his SmarTrike to the big park in town. We bought the trike for Toby’s first birthday but unfortunately he’s not had much use out of it yet. Because all the pavements round our house slope down towards the pavement it makes it almost impossible to steer and stop it tipping over so we can only really use it if we take it somewhere flat in the car. The big park is perfect so hopefully we’ll take it up there a bit more as the weather gets better and he’ll get to use it a bit more. Toby also enjoyed a run around – I think having so much space was a bit of a novelty. My boy is definitely an adventurer though, it had no problems just running off and wasn’t bothered about where we were at all. Although I’m always saying how big he is (and he is!) I think he looks tiny off in the distance with the big trees in this picture.

He had lots of fun splashing in the puddles in his new wellies too!

It’s been another quiet week here – Toby has finally started sleeping a bit better on most nights so I’m starting to feel a bit more human. Work is still very busy and stressful though, I’m definitely counting down to the Easter holidays; only 4 weeks and a day to go as I type this!

This week’s Living Arrows picture was taken at the weekend. I was trying to take some product pictures for the blog (hence the blanket backdrop) but Toby had other ideas and decided he would just plonk himself in the middle and have a good suck on his thumb instead.

Another week of hit and miss sleep, work and another cold for Toby! We did manage to get out for a walk in some woods near where we live at the weekend though. We’ve never been there before so weren’t sure what to expect. The paths looked like they would be OK for the buggy but in hindsight we needed something a bit more suited to rugged terrain. Still we walked a bit and then got Toby out of the buggy so he could explore on foot and he seemed to have fun walking in the mud and finding pine cones to pick up.

Well, it’s only a couple of days since I posted our last Living Arrows post but I’m trying to get back on schedule! We’ve actually had a couple of nights of really good sleeping from Toby so for once I’m feeling slightly less like a zombie. I just hope it continues for many more nights to come!

Toby is finally starting to get a few more words now. He talks away to himself and to us all the time but doesn’t usually say anything intelligible. We have recently added to ‘shoe’ which he has been saying for quite a while now, with car, nanna (for banana) and now ‘at’ accompanied by a pat on the head so we know he’s talking about his hat. After having battles with him when he was younger trying to get him to keep a hat on he now loves them and will often wear his woolly hat around the house. I’m quite a hat lover too and so there’s usually at least a few hanging around the place. This weekend Toby found a new favourite in my trilby which I bought in LA, Venice Beach no less, from a man who claimed to have sold hundreds of hats to Beyonce! He’s still loving his ‘see-saw’ too, I’m really glad we bought it.

So, here’s hoping we’re actually on to something with this sleep thing and I can actually get back to blogging more regularly, and keep up with my blog reading and commenting too!

I’m so late with this week’s Living Arrows post that it’s almost time for next weeks! I’m not going to write much this week as I’m feeling like these posts are just turning into me having a moan every week. Suffice to say I’m still very busy at work, Toby’s sleep is still erratic at best and we’re all pretty knackered.

I did have a lovely weekend away in London last weekend though visiting my brother. Well, it was wonderful until I got to the airport to fly home on the Sunday only to find I had somehow managed to book my return flight for the day before and not notice! Luckily I managed to get on the right flight but I had to pay £145 for the privilege!

Anyway, when I got home Toby had lots of fun dragging and pushing my suitcase around the house, as you can see in this week’s picture.

It’s been another quiet week for us – Toby is relatively illness free for once, just his usual snotty nose and a cough but he doesn’t seem too bothered by them. Sleep has been OK and he even slept through again last night. Perhaps we might even dare hope we’re heading towards some more consistent better sleeping. The trouble we have though is trying to fill up our seemingly bottomless baby! When he wakes up in the night he still wants milk and will guzzle a full bottle so it’s not just like he wants the comfort. During the day he eats everything he is given at nursery, and often has seconds. He has a snack pot of Cheerios before nursery too, as well as his breakfast when he gets there… and he still comes home hungry. We’ve given him porridge when he’s got home the last few days and it does seem to be helping, so we’ll keep that up and see how it goes. Other than that if anyone has any good ideas then please do share them!

And so, to this week’s Living Arrows picture. I wouldn’t normally use such a blurry photo but Barry’s pained expression as Toby bounced up and down on his tummy did make me laugh and I just wanted to share it. I love watching these two playing together – Toby might want mummy cuddles when he wakes up in the middle of the night but daddy is definitely more fun for playing with!

This week didn’t start too well with a post-nursery dash to the doctor on Monday as Toby had had a temperature for three days which had been getting as high as 40°C and wasn’t coming back down to normal even with Calpol and Nurofen. Thankfully the doctor reassured us it was just a cold and so we could stop worrying too much and concentrate on making our little boy feel a bit less sorry for himself. By the middle of the week he was feeling much better and we had a lovely weekend with a cheery boy who was back to his usual cheeky self. And he even slept through the night on Thursday for the first time in months and months!

Last week I decided to order Toby a rocking horse. We didn’t get him a ‘big’ present at Christmas and I had £70 of unclaimed cashback sitting in my Quidco account so we splashed out a bit! There is a little wooden rocking horse at nursery and Toby loves it, he goes on it every day and sits saying ‘see saw, see saw’. It’s so cute! And I’m so glad that when he saw his new rocking horse he loved it straight away and couldn’t wait to get on and start see-sawing. It does have the added bonus of keeping him in one place for more than 30 seconds which is more than we can say for any of his other toys.

And just look at his face….

So here we are, second week of the year, Toby has been back at nursery a week….and he’s ill again! I feel so sorry for him but I just don’t know what we can do about it. He’s got another cold but he seems to really suffer for the first couple of days of every cold, on Saturday night I was up with him for an hour and a half waiting for his temperature to come down from 40.2 °C! We’ve had a pretty miserable weekend really, he’s not really been eating either but I think he is getting hungry so we’ve been trying to find something he fancies eating – grapes are the only thing he’ll seem to eat however he’s feeling.

Anyway, fingers crossed he perks up a bit today. I feel bad sending him to nursery when he’s not feeling well but if I kept him off every time he had a cold he’d never be there, and I’d never get to work!

This week’s Living Arrows photo was taken yesterday when Toby was feeling particularly sorry for himself. He’s still wearing his sleepsuit even though it was the middle of the afternoon but he insisted on wearing his hat in the house too!

So here we are – back to week 1 of the Living Arrows and I’m pleased to be joining in this linky again this year over on its new home at Shutterflies.

It’s been a quiet week for us this week. Toby was in nursery Tuesday and Wednesday so we made the most of our first child-free days together since he was born to go to the cinema and out for pizza, and then to take down the Christmas decorations and clean the house, which wasn’t quite so much fun! We had another walk in the park and a trip out for lunch this weekend too. Today Barry was back in work, Toby was back at nursery, and I’m enjoying another couple of days holiday before I have to face the reality of being back at school!