The bouncing game

Rowan is a very active baby, and especially enjoys physical games.  His particular favourite is being bounced and he will try to encourage you to continue the game by continuously bending his knees.  The bouncing game was perfectly fine when he was smaller.  Now he's nearly one stone in weight it's not quite so easy but it's a brilliant workout!

I apologise for the orientation of the video below.  I need to download some software so I can edit it, but that sounded suspiciously like work so you'll have to content yourself with either tilting your head or laptop.

If you turn on your speakers, you can hear Rowan's squeal of delight!

Weaning

We've started to wean Rowan as he was giving several cues that he was ready for 'real food.'  He was getting angry after finishing a milk feed, suggesting he wasn't getting enough; he went back to demanding feeds every 2 hours and watched us with intense fascination whenever we ate in front of him (he nearly swiped a chicken goujon from Gareth's hand, such was his determination to eat. Although babies grab anything and everything at this age, so not really a testament to his readiness for weaning).

So far he has tried carrot; parsnip; banana; peas; pear; porridge and baby rice and he hasn't refused anything so far.  We seem to have the opposite problem and run out before he's had his fill.  We're not sure if we should stick to the recommended portion size, or just give him more.  He does get topped up with milk, so he's not exactly starving.

It's great fun watching him explore new tastes and textures.  We've learnt to have a damp cloth on standby to mop him down, and to use two spoons so he can hold one to avoid situations like this:

A downside to weaning is that the contents of his nappy are no longer the inoffensive deposits of a breastfed baby.  Hopefully this will calm down once his digestive system has got used to these new foods.  I'm not sure I can cope with 3 years of handling toxic waste that smells like it could be used to strip paint.  Actually, that would be useful considering the amount of decorating we still have to do.

First family meal

Happiness is a pureed carrot

Making sure the spoon doesn't go anywhere but

his face 

Food coma

Mother's Day

A belated post on the Mother's Day gifts I made for my Mum and Mother-in-law this year. I wanted to make a 'gift in a jar' and finally settled on making a cookie mix.  This consists of layering the dry ingredients of a cookie mix in a decorated jar, and including a recipe card for the recipient to complete them. I took inspiration from www.bakerella.com and used her Cowgirl Cookie recipe (which can be found here).  As the recipe was in American cups, I had to convert the butter amount on the recipe card to metric (250 grams, if you were wondering).

Considering I was attempting to make them in the brief times when Rowan was napping, or whilst trying to simultaneously entertain him, I was quite happy with the outcome. Although I would have liked to spend a tad more time on them to make them look professional instead of something I brought home from school (i.e. printing out the recipe/'how to' label instead of handwriting it, and co-ordinating the themes better - I was stashbusting and nothing in my stash quite worked together).  Anyway, for your viewing pleasure, here are the results:

If I did them again I would use chocolate chips as the original recipe suggested, rather than chop up a bar of chocolate. Small bits of chocolate fell through to the layer beneath, so it lost the crisp contrast of layers.
The cookies are delicious, and you can freeze up the cookie balls to bake when you fancy some warm cookie goodness!