Well, a lot of them were really late and a couple I doubled up two weeks in one, but I’ve made it to the final week of Living Arrows for this year. Apart from a distinct lack of sleep for Barry and I we enjoyed a lovely Christmas visiting both mine and Barry’s parents. Toby still hasn’t entirely got what Christmas is all about but he definitely enjoyed opening all his presents this year, and he got plenty of them!

Both of this week’s photos were taken on Christmas morning. Toby loved this shopping basket of plastic food that he got off my mum…

And I think it was all a bit much for Gabe…

As it’s the end of the year I always think it’s nice to look back and see what the first picture of the year was. I’m so glad I’ve been taking part in Living Arrows over the last two years and I have such a fantastic record of how Toby has changed. Of course at the start of this year there was no Gabe, other than as a tiny something in my tummy, but it’s going to be so lovely looking back of all the pictures of him too. Children change so much in the first few years of their lives and it’s fantastic to have these weekly pictures to remind us of just how much.

This is the first ever Living Arrows photo I took, back in January 2014. Toby was almost six months old here and although you can clearly tell they are brothers if you compare photos of him and Gabe they don’t look any where near as similar as they did when they were born.

And then this is the first Living Arrows picture of 2015 – Toby really did love that hat!

I’ve not quite decided if I’m going to carry on with the Living Arrows in 2016 (or indeed if it is continuing). My Living Arrows posts had veered away from the photography posts they were supposed to be and instead had become more of a weekly round up post of what we had been up to so I think that is how I am going to carry on with them. I just need to think of a name for them….any ideas?

It’s only been a few days since my last Living Arrows post so I’m not going to say much this time! We are all slowly recovering from our various coughs and colds, and the boys are sleeping a little better for now too. I’m hoping we are all fully better for Christmas and our visits to all the grandparents.

Toby is going through another phase of mummy having to do everything which is frustrating for both me and Barry. He’s been quite clingy this week too, with lots of ‘my cuddle mummy’, ‘my sit on mummy’, ‘mummy do it’… which is lovely at times but quite annoying when I have Gabe to look after too and other things that need doing, and especially because Barry is now at home for the Christmas holidays and he is perfectly capable and willing to provide cuddles and a knee to sit on!

On the whole though Toby is really lovely to be around and he’s very funny these days. He had us all giggling the other day when he proclaimed ‘just a minute daddy, I have an idea!’ We never did find out what his idea was though… Or yesterday, he was playing with his flashcards and we had them all on the floor asking him to find different things. He found loads of them with no trouble; a fish, a dragon, cheese, an apple, bread, jam….and then I said ‘now can you find the milk’, at which he immediately got up, walked into the kitchen and produced the bottle of milk from the fridge! Well, you can’t fault his logic.

This week’s photo tickled me – I love how toddlers see absolutely nothing wrong with sitting eating their lunch whilst wearing a bobble hat.

Gabe is still being a little superstar really. Apart from a few early mornings (which luckily for me Barry got up for), and a bit of shouting around bedtime on a couple of nights, he’s pretty chilled out most of the time. He’s been loving his play mat this week and has gone from seemingly not being able to reach the toys to grabbing on for dear life and not letting go! He’s getting really close to rolling over too – another couple of inches and he’ll be there.

Thanks to Donna at What the Redhead Said for hosting Living Arrows this week, and for featuring one of my pictures.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything for ten days now, missing two Living Arrows posts in the process. This has been because the last two weeks have been clouded in a fog of illness in the Toby Goes Bananas house.

Toby was first to succumb; he had an awful cough, a snotty nose, temperatures of nearly 40° and pretty much stopped eating for three days. He was also waking up a lot in the night leading to lots of broken sleep for me too. I was, perhaps inevitably, the next to fall and although I avoided the temperatures I still felt rotten. We were really hoping Gabe had managed to avoid it as he seemed to still be well after a week but no such luck, and then finally Barry also lost his fight against the germs.

On top of that we’ve had to deal with the Forth Road Bridge being shut which has added an extra two hours to Barry’s working day. With that and looking after poorly boys, while trying to look after myself there hasn’t been a lot of time for blogging, hence this double Living Arrows post.

This photo of Gabe was just taken at home last week. It’s terrible trying to take pictures inside at the moment, it’s just so dark all the time, and what with all the illness we’ve not really been out of the house much. Gabe is four months old today (update post on the way when I get a chance!) and he’s really turning into a proper little boy now, there’s nothing of the newborn left in him. He’s so interested in everything that’s going on and sits watching his brother with fascination every day. I can’t wait for the next few months for him to start sitting up and hopefully then he’ll be able to interact with Toby a bit more too.

Toby’s picture was taken in the garden at the weekend. We actually had what felt like a proper winter’s day; cold and frosty, rather than the miserable wetness we’ve had almost every other day for the last few months. Barry took the chance to do a little bit of tidying up in the garden and Toby wanted to go out an join him. I think he looks ridiculously cute in his big bobble hat!

And lastly I wanted to include this picture of me with the boys, even though it’s not that clear. We only managed to get the Christmas decorations down out of the loft this weekend, and we decided this year not to put our big tree up, mostly due to lack of space but also so we wouldn’t have to spend a month telling Toby to leave it alone! Instead we’ve just got this little fibre optic tree. Both boys love the lights and for this year it’s good enough…

We are all now on the mend but none of us are entirely well yet. I’m just hoping we’re fully recovered for Christmas and that we’ve seen the last of the germs for this year!

I’m back to my old habits of being super-late with my Living Arrows post again – I’m just going to sneak this one in before the next one is due tomorrow!

There has been a general lack of blogging this week; at first it was because I was giving the blog a bit of a design overhaul (What do you think by the way? I really love it!), and then my computer decided it was going to have a go slow for the rest of the week. It’s been having trouble since I upgraded to Windows 10 last month, Barry did his best to try and sort it out last night but it’s still not working brilliantly. I might just have to ask Father Christmas for a new one!

I’ve been up a lot with both boys too – lots of early starts and not a huge amount of sleep have made for rather a lack of blogging motivation.

Anyway, here’s a couple of pictures of the boys this week and hopefully next week I’ll be back on my blogging game!

This picture of Toby is just a quick snap I took the other day when we were having a Teddy Bears’ picnic for lunch. Toby has been getting a bit fussy about his food recently so I thought I’d try something to make lunch time a bit more fun. Toby certainly enjoyed it but I think he ate even less than he usually does!

I can’t believe Gabe is heading towards four months now – he’s at that great age where they really start paying attention to everything that is going on around them, you can really see his personality starting to come out now and I love his expression in this picture, looking right into the camera.

And lastly I have to include this Instagram picture – Toby hasn’t really been too bothered about Gabe so far. He mostly tolerates him but he generally doesn’t seem that impressed by him. This week though I think he has started to realise that his little brother might actually be quite interesting, and he asked if Gabe could sit on his knee. I’m not sure that Gabe was convinced but it was too cute not to take a picture!

Last week, and over the weekend, we have been visiting my parents down in Blackpool. This was mostly in order to try and further our relocation plans and hopefully there might be some exciting news to share with you on that front soon.

It was lovely to see Toby with his Grandma and Granddad though – as I’ve mentioned before he doesn’t see any of his grandparents very often but at least now he remember them and we don’t have to go through the ‘settling in’ period every time we do see them. Toby doesn’t always cope well with being out of his routine but he was great while we were away (and so was Gabe actually) – he even slept in a ‘big boy’ bed for the first time without any issues which has made us realise we really should get round to moving him out of his cot at home soon too.

We’ve all had horrible colds and coughs over the last few weeks too, apart from Gabe who miraculously seems to have escaped with little more than a slightly snotty nose. Barry and I are still struggling with coughs but it’s Toby who seems to be suffering the most; he’s still coughing and hasn’t been eating very well either, which isn’t like him at all. In fact, it has just occurred to me that the cold might be causing a reflux flare which could explain why he hasn’t been eating very much.

Anyway, here’s hoping we are all fully recovered by next week. With Christmas not very far away now the last thing we need is everyone being ill!

With being away I didn’t have much chance to get the big camera out so this week’s photo of Toby is a slight cheat in that it was actually taken the weekend before when we were baking. I love how serious he looks here; baking obviously takes a lot of concentration!

This photo of Gabe I just took today – Toby was at nursery so I actually got a chance to just spend a bit of time playing with Gabe, and taking photos! This one just made me smile because even at three months he looks like he’s already perfected his ‘enough with the camera in my face mum’ expression.

And lastly just a quick thank you to Donna at What the Redhead Said for hosting Living Arrows this week, and for featuring one of my pictures too.

Another quiet week here. We’ve been recovering from our colds, the weather has been pretty miserable so we haven’t been out much, and generally it’s just been another uneventful week.

Gabe is now 13 weeks old and has slept through the night for the last few nights. I don’t want to jinx things but I’m hoping this is the start of things to come! I’ll be doing a full update for him as he reaches three months old tomorrow! I can’t believe how fast he’s growing…

Toby is still just our wonderful, slightly bonkers toddler. His speech continues to develop every day and he’s turned into a real parrot – he copies everything we say so we really have to be careful these days! I attempted baking with him again on Saturday – we made some fairy cakes and it was a lot less stressful than when we made biscuits a few weeks ago. Toby really seemed to enjoy it (and we all enjoyed eating them!) so I’m going to try and keep it up and bake or cook with him every week. His imagination is really developing now too – you can see it in his play, it’s so fun watching him come up with his own little worlds.

It’s been a bit of a wet and miserable week since my last post. We’ve all got colds and everyone is generally feeling a bit grotty. Gabe in particular is suffering with the snot and isn’t sleeping very well as a result, so neither am I….basically we’re all just feeling a bit sorry for ourselves. I just hope we all recover in time for our trip to England next week.

On Sunday we decided we just needed to get out of the house and took advantage of a brief break in the rain to head to our local loch. Toby was in a grump about going but when we got there and he had his wellies and his ‘pompom hat’ on he was loving running off and exploring. I always think he’s so big (and he is for a two year old) but when he’s off in the distance like that he still looks so tiny…

And as for Gabe, he turned 12 weeks old this week and is starting to show a bit more personality now. He has also found his hand and is starting to favour sucking it over a dummy. I’m quite happy about it to be honest – I’m not the biggest fan of dummies but they definitely serve a purpose. Toby did the same thing at about the same age – he’d had a dummy but then found his thumb and that was that. He still sucks his thumb now and arguably it will be harder to stop him that it would be a dummy – you can’t take a thumb away after all, but I’m still glad we don’t have to go through the process of trying to take a dummy off him. It looks like Gabe might be heading the same way…

The last week was fairly quiet (once again), Toby goes to nursery on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons and most of our mornings were spent at home as I continue trying to encourage Gabe to nap in his crib for longer than twenty minutes! I have found a way to get him to have a longer nap, without having to put him in the sling, and that is just to take a nap with him, so we managed a few of those this week too!

On Tuesday afternoon I walked up to our new drive through Starbucks, which does also have an actual inside bit too before you have visions of me pushing the pram through the drive through! It’s the first time Gabe has really slept in the carry cot of the pram too, so that’s progress too.

On Thursday afternoon I met up with some of the other mums from the pregnancy yoga class I went to before the summer. Our babies are all roughly the same age so it’s nice to meet up and compare notes, and just to have a bit of adult conversation! We’ve been trying to meet every week and it means we’re finding some new places for coffee and cake too, although as we discovered a few weeks ago, it’s not always easy to find somewhere that can accommodate eight buggies!

On Wednesday took both kids round to my friend Claire’s house in the morning – it was lovely to see Toby actually starting to play with her twins (they have loads of cool car toys so Toby loves playing at their house). They all go to the same nursery now and the twins are just about to move up into the toddler room where Toby is so it will be interesting to see if they start to really remember one another outside of nursery too. In the afternoon Toby and I made chocolate biscuits. Toby enjoyed himself I think but I found the whole experience very stressful! It didn’t help that Gabe woke up half way through and I had to do it with him in the sling, but I think I’m just a bit too controlling! Toby was cutting out the biscuits after I’d helped him roll out the dough but he was just putting the cutter willy nilly all over the dough so we had to keep re-rolling it – perfectly normal behaviour for a two year old but it was driving me bonkers! It was lovely to do something with him that wasn’t watching CBeebies though so we’ll definitely try again soon.

When I write it all down, perhaps the week wasn’t so quiet after all!

The weekend started with Claire coming round to our house for Chinese take away and a much needed catch up. We see each other most weeks but we’re usually trying to manage toddlers at the same so it was nice to have time for a proper chat. I had about half a bottle of wine, which is probably more than I’ve drunk for a year, although still not exactly a huge amount. I got a pretty decent night’s sleep as Barry got up with Gabe in the night but I spent all of Saturday feeling terrible, I don’t know if it was the wine or the Chinese but I felt sick all day. Barry’s parents were up visiting this weekend too, which was actually great because it meant on Saturday they were here to entertain Toby while I had a couple of naps with Gabe. Saturday night wasn’t great though, Gabe was up twice but unsettled for a lot of the night, Toby woke up crying (I think he was feeling a bit poorly after having his flu vaccination) so I ended up sleeping on his floor for an hour before dealing with Gabe’s second wake up… it was a long night!

On Sunday we’d planned a nice morning out at Deep Sea World – an aquarium near to where we live. I was feeling much better at least but Toby still seemed a bit under the weather and then he did something to his foot running about in the living room so was limping as well. When we got there he perked up a bit and so he went to have a look around with Barry and his grandparents while I fed Gabe in the cafe. Five minutes later Barry and Toby appeared again – Barry had put his back out and could barely walk! He’d done the same thing earlier in the year and had had a few twinges since but it had gone completely again. He spent the next hour or so sitting in the cafe trying to get comfortable while we had a look around but I think Toby just wasn’t really feeling up for it which was a bit of a shame. Barry was really suffering in the afternoon so I had to put both kids to bed and we got a relatively early night.

Gabe woke up about 2:30 and I got up to feed him. I’ve been bringing him downstairs in the night so we don’t disturb anyone and I could hear Barry moving about in bed upstairs. I then got a text from me saying his painkillers had worn off, he couldn’t get out of bed and he needed a wee! I got him some more painkillers but he could barely move and still couldn’t get out of bed. We managed something so he could relieve himself (I leave that one to your imagination!) but it wasn’t getting any better. We were just about to try and get some more sleep when his back went in to total spasm, it was really scary, he was shaking with the pain and could barely catch his breath. We didn’t really know what to do and ended up calling 999 as it seemed like an ambulance to hospital was going to be our only option. Apparently though it wasn’t enough of an emergency so we had to wait for a call back from NHS 24, and then nearly another hour for a call from one of the nurses. Thankfully the spasm did ease off after a while but it was really horrible to see him suffering so much and not being to do anything to help. Gabe had woken up as well so I was trying to keep him quiet and make sure he didn’t wake Toby too.

His back has been a little bit better today, as long has he stays dosed up on painkillers and he’s got an appointment with a physio tomorrow so hopefully they’ll be able to help too. I hope for everyone’s sake it does. Of course it’s horrible for Barry to be in pain, but also Toby doesn’t really understand why daddy can’t play with him or cuddle him like he usually does, he can’t really help with Gabe, I’ve had to do bedtime for both boys again… it really makes me realise how much I rely on his help normally.

Anyway, this has turned into a bit of an epic mind dump about what’s been going on this week when really I’m supposed to be sharing photos of the boys…. Here’s one more though – Toby has shown a bit more interest in Gabe this week and I even managed to get him to give him a cuddle. He wasn’t that convinced though and just after I took this photo he moved his arm away and said ‘I don’t like it’. I’m sure he’ll get to like it one day though!

We’ve not been up to much the last week…I’m trying not to do anything to out of the ordinary so that Toby has a chance to get used to his new routine with his new nursery and his new little brother. We try to get out most mornings, even if it’s only to the shop, and then he has nursery four afternoons a week. We’re still having lots of tears on drop off but he does seem to be having fun while he’s there so hopefully things will keep improving.

This week has also seen Gabe turn two months old and we’ve had the joy of his first proper smiles too. I know I am very biased but I reckon we do make very pretty children! He still looks like Toby did as a baby but he’s really starting to get his own personality now too.

On Saturday it was such a lovely sunny day that we decided to head to some woods near where we live for a walk, and to give Toby a chance to have a run about. I’m going to share some more of the photos in a separate post but I love this one of Toby having a rest and concentrating on his raisins. I can’t take credit for this picture though – Barry was in charge of the camera for this one…