2014 is still racing towards its end and a remarkable pace. I now only have two full weeks at school (and two days, but we’ll just ignore those for now!) before the holidays and I am counting down the days, the hours even! Not only am I looking forward to a break from school but I’m also looking forward to spending Christmas with my family and getting to have Toby at home too.

This week has been fairly uneventful really. We are all, for the first time in what feels like months, actually well. Apart from a few lingering snotty noses at least! We had a lovely weekend filled with garden centres, dancing Santas, coffee, cake and meeting friends and Toby has caught up on some much needed sleep.

This week’s Living Arrows photo shows Toby in what is a pretty common pose for him. He is definitely a thumb sucker – mostly only when he is tired though. However, he sleeps with a muslin (when he was little he seemed to like them and because I was keen that he not get attached to one particular comforter I was happy to encourage it) and so now the association between muslin and sleep is so strong that whenever he gets his hands on a muslin his thumb goes straight in his mouth too. So even though he was having fun bouncing on his Happy Hopperz cow he still picked up a muslin and started sucking his thumb too!

I’ve not got too much to say this week really. We’ve all been ill but are just about getting better. Toby is still quite hard work a lot of the time (especially now he wails every time he can’t have something or do something he wants) but is also still our adorable cheeky little monkey a lot of the time. I’m so happy his foot seems fully recovered though, I’m loving him walking and watching him exploring everything in the house all over again now he’s on his feet.

I’ve got two pictures for this week’s Living Arrows post the first taken in the garden, on our very soggy, mossy lawn. Toby didn’t care though, he was happy just walking about with his ball.

The second photo Barry took when we were playing about the other day – I just love Toby’s expression in this one!

I can’t believe we’re on week 47 of the year! Only another five weeks to go until the end of 2014 (and that means only five more Monday’s at school too!). We’ve had another tiring week here… Toby’s foot/leg seems to have recovered from whatever was wrong with it. I suppose we’ll never find out what the matter was but I’m glad it’s improved, which also means we have a walking toddler again! Of course life is never plain sailing though so although his foot has recovered Toby has now caught the cough and cold that I had last week and has been really suffering the last few days. He’s had a high temperature (up to 39.5° a few times) for three days now so I had him at the out of hours GP yesterday just to make sure it wasn’t something I should be worrying about. They reckon it’s just viral and as he seems OK in himself just to keep giving Calpol and cuddles. And as if that wasn’t enough his teeth seem to be really bothering him again the last few days! The top canines have finally broken the gum but the bottom ones are still coming. Fingers crossed they come quick and hopefully we all might get a break for Christmas.

So to this week’s Living Arrows photo. With his cold and teeth Toby hasn’t been eating too well the last few days but he seemed to be enjoying his bagel at lunchtime yesterday, and I love how he’s decided he’d rather wear a cape than a bib!

We’ve had a better week this week, kind of! Toby still won’t put his heel down although he is managing to walk a bit now. We’ve still got no idea what’s wrong with him and it’s showing no sign of improvement so it looks like we’ll be back to the hospital some time next week. Having said that, Toby has been a bit cheerier and we haven’t really had any tantrums this week. His sleep has still been disturbed with at least a couple of wake-ups most nights. He did manage to sleep from 7:30 pm to 6 am on Saturday night though which is the first time he’s made it through the night without waking up in weeks and weeks!

I mentioned last week about Toby wanting to feed himself all the time now and so this week we’ve been giving him a spoon or a fork and just letting him get on with it. And he’s doing a great job! Admittedly he’s still using his fingers more than any cutlery but he’s having a go and is even managing to get food from the plate to his mouth occasionally. He’s certainly much happier feeding himself and he seems to be eating more too (which will hopefully help with the sleeping).

Anyway, to this week’s Living Arrows pictures… Yesterday Santa (why is he Santa everywhere now by the way? What happened to Father Christmas?) arrived at our local garden centre. I won’t be taking Toby to see him this year, call me mean but I don’t see the point in spending money on it when he would have no clue what was going on! However, we were due our monthly visit for our free coffees and the theatre group I’m in were entertaining the crowds with some Christmas songs so we went along to have a look. I joined in with the singing for 10 minutes but I don’t think Toby was quite ready to make his stage debut yet (even if I had put him in his elf Slugs & Snails tights and Frugi Christmas top especially!)…

After our coffee and cake we had a wander round and I took a few photos of Toby in front of Santa’s grotto. It seems Frozen has taken over Christmas everywhere this year. Toby wasn’t that impressed with Olaf at first though.

He was more interested in reading his buggy book I think!

Week 45 of the Living Arrows project and I can’t believe we are only seven weeks from the end of the year.

It’s been a mixed week this week. It started off with daily tantrums from Toby, mostly for no apparent reason, and a few nights of broken sleep for all of us. On Thursday he fell at nursery and banged his ear of the edge of a table causing a bit of a cut and a nasty bruise and then on Friday he crawled forehead first in to a door stop! More worrying though is that I noticed on Friday he wasn’t putting the heel of his right foot down and has stopped walking altogether. He’s still standing and walking when he’s holding on to something but seems to have completely lost his balance when trying to stand unaided. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t broken anything when he fell so we spent Saturday afternoon at our local Minor Injuries department. They did an x-ray but nothing showed up so we’ve been told just to give him painkillers and take him to our GP if it doesn’t improve in a couple of days. He was doing so well with his walking too – I really hope whatever it is clears up soon. There’s a chance he’s sprained or strained something or it could be ‘irritable hip’ which is inflammation of the fluid and membranes around the hip which can follow a virus. There’s also the possibility that he has sustained a ‘toddler fracture’ which hasn’t shown up on the x-ray. However, all these things usually get better without treatment so keeping an eye on it is really the only thing we can do at the moment.

Of course this all had to happen while Barry was away for the weekend so I had to deal with it all myself. Toby’s been brilliant all weekend though. No sign of a tantrum and he’s even slept pretty well too. I think part of his tantruming is frustration at not being able to talk and tell us what he wants. He really wants his independence now more than ever as well. This is particularly evident in his eating – he’s been perfectly happy for us to feed him anything that needs a spoon up until recently. Now he wants to do it all himself so it’s time for him to start learning to use a spoon and fork himself. My plan is just to give him things that he can pick up with his hands without making too much mess but give him a spoon or fork too and see how he gets on. We started with porridge this morning and he did actually manage to get some on the spoon and into his mouth, which as you can see in this week’s photo he was enormously pleased about!

I know it seems to be the refrain of bloggers all over, but I really can’t believe how quickly time passes. I’m sure it was only a day or two ago that I was writing last week’s Living Arrows post! It’s been another fairly normal week, nothing much to report. I’m back at school after half term, which means Toby is back at nursery. I think he’s teeth are still bothering him – his canines are so close to coming through but still haven’t cut his gums yet. It has meant a few disturbed nights for us and on Wednesday I had to leave him crying when I dropped him off at nursery, for the first time since just after he started. He also had a complete meltdown on Saturday evening (which I think was a combination of teeth and no afternoon nap), which led to him refusing to eat his tea or have any milk before bed and then waking up several times in the night. He woke up for I think the third time at 4am and refused to go back to sleep. Luckily for me my wonderful husband sat in his room for two hours before getting him up for breakfast at 6am. Thankfully he went back to bed at 7:30am and we all slept until 11am – I’m so glad it wasn’t a weekday otherwise we would all have been very tired!

This week’s big news of course is that Toby is now properly walking – I posted a video the other day of him looking very pleased with himself about it. He’s so big now too – he’s wearing all 18-24 month clothes now and is nearly growing out of some of those, and he’s not even 16 months yet! It means we barely have any surfaces high enough to put things out of his reach, he can reach all the door handles…and he loves having a nosy out of the front window.

I love how much Toby is learning and changing every day – he’s such a little adventurer! I bought him this play tunnel from IKEA a couple of months ago but when we first got it he had no interest in crawling through it all. I got it out again last week though and he absolutely loved it! Crawling backwards and forwards, chasing his ball through it, crawling through one way then round the outside and back through the same way – he was just having so much fun and that’s what I have hopefully captured in this week’s Living Arrows pictures.

I’m a bit late with this week’s Living Arrows post as we’re on holiday – we left home on Saturday and spent two nights in a wooden lodge in Yorkshire before driving down to Butlins in Skegness. Typically for us, just as we’re about to go on holiday Toby has been teething again – canines this time. And teething makes for a grumpy Toby who doesn’t sleep very well and who turns into a right fusspot over his food. It doesn’t always make him the most pleasant of travelling companions! Added to which he is just starting to walk and so wants to explore everywhere, especially if it’s somewhere you don’t want him to be or something he shouldn’t be playing with.

On top of that he’s really not been sleeping well at all. He sleeps OK until about 1am but then wakes up and screams every time we try and put him back in his cot. The only thing that has worked has been him sleeping with me, which means Barry has been kicked out of the big bed to go and sleep in one of the singles. I don’t really mind too much but I just hope Toby realises this is a special holiday arrangement not to be continued once we get home!

Anyway, it sounds like we’re having a terrible time but there have been some lovely moments too. When Toby is in a good mood he’s hilarious and we’re enjoying spending some time together as a family. This week’s Living Arrows photo was taken while we had our tea tonight in one of the Butlins restaurants. Toby loves to point at the moment and there’s nothing he likes more than pointing at the camera while he has his photo taken…