Christmas and Growing Children

My posts have been even more irregular than usual over the last three months, which is a crying shame because a lot has actually been happening in our lives. Between the sapping responsibilities of being a parent and trying to launch a fledgeling business, I haven't been able to find the energy to sit down and chronicle our recent activities. Heck, it's now four months into self employment and I haven't even done a blog post on how Socket Software is going... mental note, do blog post on how things are going.

This post isn't going to be a status update on the business (which I promise to save for another time) though if anyone is interested I did write a blog post on the company site about our latest foray into mobile applications. Instead I'll just keep to the handful of milestones that we've enjoyed over the last couple of months, of which there have been quite a few firsts.

In the lead up to Christmas we've been struggling with keeping Nelly's hair looking neat as it grew longer and unmanageable. Anticipating a few photos to be taken over the holidays and armed with the knowledge that we would have a professional photographer over to take some family photographs, we decided to take Eleanor out for her inaugural hair cut. Given how fidgety she usually is we were quite pleased with how well Nelly sat still. Perhaps the car seat along with Tom & Jerry on TV helped keep her occupied.

It was nice to have a week off from "work" to spend more time with the family. Ironically Alison had picked up a couple more shifts over Christmas so we still had to bounce back and forth between Brisbane and Toowoomba. Still we had a great time being looked after by the grandparents so that we could just focus on being together.

Another big first was John entrusting yours truly to cook the Christmas ham. Hams in the Liley household have traditionally been unglazed and lightly cooked if at all. I think the scrumptious results we achieved on Eleanor's first birthday may have helped convince him that glazes aren't really all that bad. Thankfully I don't think I screwed it up this time either.

Nelly wasn't particularly interested in unwrapping presents last year, so she seemed quite keen on make up for it this Christmas. In fact she was happy to help everyone else to open their presents too. One of the more popular acquisitions were two tea sets, one from Grandma and another from Auntie Dora. A day hasn't gone by since where she hasn't offered us a cup of tea which is just adorable.

Cousin Thomas was surprisingly interested in the tea set too and it was really cute to see the two kids play together over the holidays. I can only imagine how amazing it's going to be next Christmas now that we are expecting another niece/nephew in June. Such happy news and we just can't wait!

Nelly has been growing up so quickly. She seems to be understanding more and more each day and is becoming a very confident young lady. I'm sure the teachers at day care say this to all the parents, but it's nice to hear how well she is doing in class for her age. Even so, we're tiger parents and expect that she will have to start counting past her current numeric plateau of "two" as well as give this whole toilet training caper a red hot go before her upcoming birthday. No rest for the wicked!