Eggshell Green

Quote of the Day

“It’s ‘poo’. There’s no ‘p’ at the end.”

“There is at the end of ‘poop’.”

- Two dads having an indepth conversation (my brother-in-law and his brother, my hubby)

Tags: baby

Mmm, cake

I’ve been up to my eyes in cake this last week!

First was an entry into the Threadcakes competition. I’ve been wanting to make this baby Godzilla cake, based on a Threadless shirt design, for a while and finally found the motivation (and time) to do it.

Cute and delicious

I baked a couple of test cakes and found a delicious madeira recipe (which I tweaked to make it an orange madeira cake) that was perfect – delicious, moist and something I could carve into. It was a lot of work, but I think I did well for my first sculpted cake. More details and photos can be found on my Threadcakes entry.

The other cake was for a friend’s grandaughter’s third birthday party. The wee girl wanted a yellow castle cake and I decided to add Rapunzel into the mix.

Yellow castle cake

Waiting for her prince

The main cake was a dense banana cake (I think I’ll use another recipe next time), and the skinny tower was a chocolate roll. Both are filled with a delicious butter cream. The skinny tower gave me troubles as it started leaning and sagging a bit – oh dear. The top tower was also a challenge to cover.

Just a bit of practice to better my cake decorating skills. I have lots to learn still!

Tags: baking, cake, decorating

Abby Update at 32 Weeks

Abby is now seven months old! Wow, has time flown. I’m due back at work in three months – eek!!

At 30 weeks

• Went on her first plane trip to Auckland. Not so fun when she got tired and had her usual bedtime cry!
• Moves around in her walker in all directions. She only used to be able to roll backwards but she’s all go now.
• Moving onto lumpier solids – gradually.
• Sits up well and can rebalance herself most of the time.
• Can hold her water bottle by the handles and drink by herself in short bursts. She likes to chew on the teat and fling the bottle around though.
• Plays in the bath.
• Shakes her toys.
• Plays with Fez.

Abby's first plane ride

Mmmm tasty dog-chewed rag...

At 31 weeks

• Caught a cold – boo.
• Likes dropping things to watch them fall.
• Bangs her toys to make noise.
• Can “give you five”, but only down low.
• Noms on rusks.
• Sits and happily plays with the toys in her toy box. Still needs cushions around her because she likes to jerk backwards without warning and she has a flat-enough head as it is.
• “Chews” food with her gums.
• Has breakfast and lunch with mum at the table. Her dinner is earlier than ours though so she ends up watching us gobble our food while she has to make do with a rusk.
• First tooth requires brushing. Ridiculous task – how do you make a baby spit out toothpaste? She just eats it. I put water on the brush, lean Abby over the sink and hope gravity does most of the work.

It's all smiles with her rusk

Bouncing in her slippers

At 32 weeks

• Over the worst of her cold, and just needs to blow her nose if only she knew how…
• Might be teething again as the red cheeks have reappeared.
• Has outgrown her 3-6 month clothes and mummy is sad to be putting them away.
• Zooms around in her walker – mind the Fez! (Sorry about the cellphone quality of the video.)

Tags: baby, fez

Blog, nap, or bake?

These have been my leisure time choices as of late (isn’t that lucky of me?)

Obviously I haven’t chosen the “blog” option because I’ve not posted in nearly two weeks – yikes. I’m at the “just need some photos” stage and haven’t been bothered with trawling through my mass of photos to edit some yet. Also, I’ve been sick and my head hurt too much to think.

Taking that into account, the “nap” option has taken precedence since the weekend, where I came down with a cold and a horrible tummy bug. Abby’s been kind enough to give me some two hour naps in the last couple of days, and lucky Fez got to join me on the bed for some comfy snoozing. It’s tiring being sick and looking after a baby.

The “bake” option was favoured last week, before I got sick. I’ve been commissioned to make birthday cakes for two lovely littlies – one being a castle cake, and the other I shall tell you about at a later stage… I’ve been busy experimenting with different cake recipes, and trying to find a perfect recipe for making a Swiss roll type cake (for the castle towers). The castle cake isn’t needed until next weekend so I have a week to get better and stop coughing over things so I can do some real baking again.

And this is another post that won’t have any photos. I should’ve taken some of the cakes I’ve baked but didn’t think of that before we ate them. That always seems to be the way with me and food.

Stuff I Luff

• My crockpot. And the stews that come out of it.
• Heat pumps. I can’t say I love (or even like) winter but at least we have heat pumps.
• Knowing I am just tall enough to avoid having to use a booster seat in a car! Lol. (And at least I’m taller than the average 11 year old…)
• Trifle made from left over cupcakes. Did I mention they were chocolate cupcakes and I used orange jelly, so it was like having Jaffas :D
• Naps. Actually, sleep, in general.
• Bassetts licorice, still.
• Catching up with friends and family, with a bouncing baby to show off. Abby got so many cuddles in the last few days.
• Grandparents. So my parents drive me crazy but they’re really good with Abby – feeding her, playing with her and making her laugh – giving me as much time to myself as I want!

Abby Update at 28 Weeks

Actually Abby is 29 weeks tomorrow because I’d been too busy to post this earlier :)

29 weeks – that’s 6 and a half months old – that’s more than half a year!

She now can sit quite well, as long as she’s not trying to do anything… otherwise she starts a slow descent into a face plant, so you have to always be there just in case.

Abby sitting/falling over

She’s also good at standing, with some help to balance. We put her in her walker and she chooses to stand most of the time in it.

Abby will need her first hair cut soon – another person’s hair I’ll be cutting forever… well until she’s old enough to pay for her own haircuts I suppose (and by then she’ll probably want a fancy style cut). The other week I tied her hair in pigtails just because I could.

Pigtails!

Ok, so they’re a bit crooked but you try tying pigtails on a 6 month old who won’t sit still.

Abby loves to play, both with her toys and with other people. She’s a very grabby baby, always reaching out and trying to grab things whether it’s a toy, the dog, or other babies unfortunately. (And what’s with always going for the face?)

I love my toys, especially my blocks. See my block?

Oh, her first tooth finally came through today! We’ll have to start brushing her teeth (tooth) from now –*sigh*.

She also babbles a lot, mostly “da-da” sounds but no “ma-ma” yet.

Drooling

And I still need to enrol her in a daycare, yikes! Everyone keeps telling me about the long waiting lists and I know I should’ve looked into this months ago but that’s me, the procrastinator. Reminds me I still need to finish off some work I’m doing for my “old” work – hmmm, I can never phrase that right. It’s work I’m doing for the company that I’m currently taking maternity leave from… does that make sense? Anyway, I’ll need to finish it tonight so I can go in and test things before Friday. Fun times with MS Word and VBA.

Tags: baby

Back to virtual reality

After five days, our telco finally fixed the problem with our phone and Internet, hurray.

Apparently the bad weather had caused some major problems with our area and our phone line died on Saturday; but that wasn’t so bad because we still had Internet. Then on Monday a service guy did some tinkering outside, and for some reason we lost Internet too (hmmmmm).

What’s worse than no Internet? Dealing with the call centre – on hold… Home Calling: “You have no dial tone, and now no Internet? I’ll pass you to Broadband” on hold… Broadband: “You have no dial tone at all? I’ll pass you to Home Calling”… We were told it was going to be fixed in a day, but that ETA changed several times, and then we were supposed to be contacted as soon as things were back online but that didn’t happen either *sigh*.

The Internet is definitely one of those things you take for granted. Luckily (or unluckily as it may be) I have a thriving baby who keeps me busy for all but about four hours a day, so I wasn’t suffering as much withdrawal as I might have been. I don’t seem to have the time to be bored these days!

But I’m still glad I can be my online self again.