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!

Well, it’s a little bit late as I’ve been having a bit of a blogging break over Christmas but we’ve finally made it to week 52 of The Living Arrows project. We spent Christmas visiting family. It was lovely to see everyone and I was really pleased that Toby seemed to remember his grandparents and uncle and auntie this time. We don’t get to see them very often so it’s nice that Toby is starting to remember them from one visit to the next. He still had no idea what Christmas was all about though but he seemed to enjoy tearing the wrapping paper off his presents, and then giving every tiny bit of paper he had torn off to my mum which was very cute! He got so many new toys that I’ve put some of them away to bring out later in the year – there’s no way he could play with everything all at once!

On Boxing Day we went out for a walk in the park, it was a bit cold and damp but Toby didn’t care! He was wrapped up nice and warm and had his first experience of splashing in puddles! He is so good at walking now and definitely has his own opinion of where he wants to go (hence the reins!).

I can’t believe how much my little boy has changed in the last twelve months. How can that toddler in the photo above have been this little baby just a year ago?

Lastly I just want to say a big thank you to all the lovely I Heart Snapping ladies for hosting The Living Arrows for the last year and I’m very much looking forward to continuing with my weekly photos in 2015 when The Living Arrows moves to its new home at Shutterflies.

Almost there! Week 51 of the I Heart Snapping Living Arrows project and I haven’t missed a single week! I was pleased to hear this week that The Living Arrows is going to carry on next year too so I can do it all again! This last week started off pretty horrendously with Toby still awake and screaming for hours every night, unless I was sat on his bedroom floor. He spent more than a few hours sleeping in our bed this week as it was the only way we could all get some sleep. Towards the end of the week though, his cold wasn’t clearing up and his cough seemed to be getting worse so I took him to the doctor on Friday….and it turns out he has an ear infection and a chest infection! No wonder the poor little bear was crying so much. So, he started antibiotics on Friday and we’ve had two much better nights, still a wake up or two, but straight back to sleep after some milk and a cuddle. So fingers crossed we get a third good night in a row and he’s as recovered as he can be for Christmas. It’s been lovely having our happy, playful little boy back this weekend, even if he is still dripping snot like he’s got a tap up his nose that someone forgot to turn off!

In this week’s photo Toby is having fun with his Christmas tree. We’ve got a big tree too but we’re trying to keep him away from that one. This little fibre optic tree is the only one I used to have when I lived in a flat on my own and now it only has a few cheap supermarket decorations on it so Toby can take them off and put them back on to his heart’s content. He especially likes taking the glittery star off the top and putting it back on – this little tree is the perfect height for him! And he even says something that sounds like it might be ‘star’ too.

Last week was a really hard week. I feel like I’m saying this a lot lately but last week really was one of the most difficult weeks we’ve had for a long time. Toby got another cold and had a temperature again for most of the week. His bottom canine teeth are still coming through and are really bothering him too…and the upshot of all this was that we all got very little sleep! On Wednesday night he was up pretty much every hour and a half and so on Thursday when he still had a temperature I decided we would both benefit from a day at home. I had to take the day off work to look after him (luckily I have an understanding boss) and he seemed much improved. But then on Thursday night he didn’t fall asleep until 9 pm (having been in bed since just after 6 pm), he then woke up at midnight and after lots of crying (from him and me) he finally went back to sleep at almost 3 am! The temperature had gone on Friday morning though so I took him to nursery and struggled through the day at work myself.

Friday night was much better but Saturday was rubbish again, and last night was OK, with him only awake once at about 11:30 pm (but for almost an hour) before sleeping for the rest of the night. But…hopefully the end of our awful nights is in sight – yesterday I finally felt the tiny point of the last canine poking through the gum, so fingers crossed in another day or two the worst will be over!

Anyway, this week’s Living Arrows photo was taken on the day we spent at home – you wouldn’t know Toby was ill and had spent half the night awake looking at this picture would you?!