Precious moments

Yesterday, Caleb, Seth and I all had dinner together. We don't really get to do this at any time other than Sundays so it is always such a novelty to be able to sit around the table and eat together!

Caleb isn't the greatest eater in the world and never has been. He would quite happily just live on milk if we let him, he's really not that bothered about food. Even up to just a couple of weeks ago, we had to use all manner of distractions to try and get him to eat his food. It got to the point where it was getting a bit crazy though so we stopped with all of the distractions and just gave him dinner. The first couple of times was pretty difficult but he is so much better now than he was. There are still times when he needs a little distraction to encourage him to eat dinner though!

Seth and I had finished our dinner and as Caleb was still eating, we pulled up the youtube video, "Let it go" from the new disney film, Frozen and he watched that while he ate. My hand was resting on his highchair tray as he was watching it. Then, he picked up my hand, put it in his own little hand and held it, looked at me and gave me the most beautiful smile and carried on watching the video and eating. My heart melted a little and I got slightly misty eyed, I must say! It was one of those moments where I just felt so much love for him and really felt how much he loved me too. I love being a mother to that beautiful little boy.

Shoooooes

I can't believe that I have not blogged about this yet, especially given that it happened in the summer! I am such a slacker but alas I am blogging about it now so all is well.

When I got pregnant with Caleb, Laura (my sister) said that she wanted to buy the baby some Toms, Cons or Vans. The little baby ones look so adorable! We are also both fans of all of the aforementioned makes and we have at least one of each ourselves so it's like carrying on the tradition with the next generation! However we decided that it made more sense to wait until Caleb was actually walking or fairly close to it before we got them.

Before I continue, there is something that I must explain. Laura is a trainers fanatic! She's sporty so she has always been into her tennis trainers and running shoes but she also skateboards hence her love of Vans, etc. When we were younger, she used to have a file filled with pictures of trainers and to this day she still knows the particular make, style and design of pretty much any tennis or running shoe in any sports shop! Before I got married, Laura and I shared a bedroom and she had loads of shoe boxes everywhere, I think she owned around 30 pairs at one point! So, Laura buying Caleb his first pair of shoes was a big deal :).

One day in the summer Laura was visiting us and we went shopping in Bluewater. It was so much fun going around the shops with Caleb and trying on the various shoes. He wasn't all that interested in the Toms or the Cons but, I kid you not, his face lit up when we went into the Vans store and he (I) put the bright red Vans on his feet. He kept looking at his feet and grinning.

Needless to say, those were the shoes that were purchased. For the rest of that day he was walking around (holding our hands as he couldn't walk on his own at that point), smiling proudly and every so often, looking at his feet to admire his new shoes.

Even though he has had his shoes for a while now (and they still fit!), he still loves them and he will often be wandering around the house, holding them in his hand saying "shoooooooee". I think they were a successful present!

It's the most wonderful time of the year....

 December has been a great month for me! I always love the big build up to Christmas, and of course, Christmas itself. It's always pretty busy, but I love that!

It was my Mum's Birthday at the beginning of December. Seth was studying for exams so Caleb and I thought that we would get out of his hair to let him study in peace and went up to Norwich to spend some time with Mum. Laura came down from Liverpool and was also there. It's great when the three of us together under the one roof as that's how it's been for 18 years (Dad died when I was 12 so it's just been us girls at home since then). Mum and Laura come down to see me quite often but it's so nice when we are all at home. With one difference of course, my little Caleb tagging along and gatecrashing! He loved having the run of Mum's house and was desperately trying to figure out how to open the stairgate so that he could get up those stairs!

On one of the Saturdays before Christmas, Seth had to study. I hate it when he has to study on Saturday as that is the day when we should get to play but needs must! He went into university to study as it's always more productive than when he studies at home (not that Caleb and I are a distraction or anything!!!), so Caleb and I got the train in to South Kensington and met him for lunch. We then wandered around South Kensington and Knightsbridge and soaked up the Christmassy atmosphere. It was RAMMED with people. I can't believe that I actually even attempted going into Harrods with Caleb in a stroller but it had to be done. There was a woman who kept stepping right in front of the stroller and it kept clipping her heels. Each time she turned and glared at Caleb like it was his fault, which I thought was pretty funny. It was even funnier that, each time she turned, Caleb smiled sweetly, waved and said "bye". I love that monkey!

Caleb is riding the tube like a natural!

 Ahhh, Harrods, how I love thee!

Seth, Caleb and I headed up to Mum's for Christmas. It was lovely being there and especially watching Caleb open his presents. You know how people say that babies love the wrapping more than the presents? Caleb didn't really have that much interest in either, he was having more fun opening and closing the door of Mum's cabinet and trying to hide in the under stairs cupboard (I think he wants to be Harry Potter).

He ended up playing with his presents loads later on in the day though. We headed outside to try and get a little family picture. We took one last year and I thought it would be nice to take one every year but it came out really pixelated and didn't look that great! Behold the bad photo.

Christmas dinner was delicious, as always! Mum always cooks an amazing dinner and I overindulged. (I think I put on around 4 pounds over Christmas so I will need to try and shift that!). That evening, my sister Deb and niece Tor came over and we played games until the wee small hours. Deb and I were on a team together for Trivial Pursuit and we were so bad! It was a lot of fun though!

The day after Boxing Day we went over to see Lin and Steve (sister and brother in law) and my nephew and niece, Sam and Caitlin. We were meant to see them on Christmas Day but Caitlin had a stomach bug so we stayed away. I am so glad we still got to see them before we headed home.

Caleb playing with the ginger monkeys

 

My attempt at a panoramic shot

Lau and Cait chatting and the boys hanging out

 

Sisters! There was one with Lin too but that wasn't taken on my phone.

 

 We also got to see Seth's family over Christmas. It is the first time all of the children have been together in ages as his brother James and his wife Natalie and their boys were over from California. Seth's parents weren't there as they are serving a mission for our church in Greece but we got to skype them instead.

Seth and I had a pretty low key New Years Eve and when I say low key, I mean we did nothing. We were both ill (still are), so we spent our New Years Eve on the sofa rang in the new year with Shloer and watching the fireworks in London. We laughed that we weren't able to celebrate it properly and do anything special but we actually quite enjoyed it!

This is what we look like when we're ill. Aren't we gorgeous?! Seth would kill me if he knew this was up here for all to see, ha ha!


I hope you all had a great Christmas and a happy 2014 to you!

Is it really THAT DIFFICULT?!

Names can sometimes be a bit of a problem, can't they? Some people don't like their names, some have random spellings of their names, etc. Sometimes people tell you their name and you instantly forget it, then you spend the next hour waiting for someone else to address that person by name so that you don't have to ask them a second time what their name is (yes, I did that. More than once. I am hanging my head in shame). When I was at university, I told someone that my name is Kirsty and she called me Tracy. I corrected her once but I was too much of a wimp to correct her again and for the next three years of my degree, I was known to her as Tracy.

I have always liked the name Caleb and so when we had our little baby boy, we obviously decided to name him Caleb. I have to say that the first time I heard it was through watching "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and not from reading the Old Testament, but in my defence, I was also five or something, so reading the Old Testament wasn't exactly at the top of my five year old priority list! But I like the name for these reasons:

1. It means whole hearted and faithful. I also read somewhere that it means dog, but we'll ignore that meaning!
2. It's not a really popular name but it's not so unusual that people would think it was weird or anything.
3. It's biblical and I quite like biblical names.
4. It's a "say it as you see it" kind of a name. Or is it just me who thinks that? Because I'm not too sure.....

For the last 16 months, I have heard his name pronounced Challeb, Chayleb, Kaleeb, Celeb, Calleb. Kolob. Yep. It's usually at the doctors surgery or hospitals when the poor boy gets these mispronunciations of his name. In all fairness to them, I've no doubt that they see all manner of patients with weird and wonderful names, many of which are probably made up, but I really didn't think that the name Caleb would be too hard. I remember when we were sitting in the waiting room at the doctors surgery and the nurse came out and called, "Celeb?". Was she asking if there was a celebrity in the room?  I had a little chuckle to myself that one of these poor people sitting in the waiting room had been named Celeb by their parents and wondered who in the world would do that to their poor child. Didn't they realise the grief the child would get their whole life because their name was Celeb?! It was at around this point that I realised that no one else was standing up...... when I realised that she meant my son, I actually said, "oh.....Caleb!". I felt a bit bad because I probably sounded really rude in correcting her, but I was amazed that she would somehow think that his name was pronounced Celeb. I let it slide though because in all honesty, how easy is it to just not look properly at the name and mistake the A for an E? But then, in the appointment when she was asking me about him, I kept saying his name so she would realise that his name was Caleb. She still called him Celeb and looked at me like I was the one saying it incorrectly!

I spoke to a friend of mine about it recently and she said that even though it's not the most common name in the world, it's still not so unusual that people wouldn't have heard of it, which is pretty much what I thought. I'm wondering if when he goes to school, he will constantly have to correct people on how his name is pronounced. I'm no stranger to this, my maiden name is Samaroo and people often had difficulty in pronouncing it and spelling it (although ironically, since being married and changing my name, more people have asked me how "Manning" is spelt than have ever asked me how "Samaroo" was spelt!) but I didn't think that in naming my son Caleb, he would potentially be faced with this too. I suppose that time will tell!

The Father Christmas Debate

I grew up believing in Father Christmas. I'm not quite sure at what age I realised he wasn't real but I was definitely a believer when I was younger. Father Christmas was never the one that actually bought our presents, that was Mum and Dad, but Father Christmas came at night when we were asleep and filled our stockings. I always remember Christmas Eve - before we went to bed we would do the thing that all believers would do and write our letters to Father Christmas then leave him a mince pie and a glass of milk along with some smarties for Rudolf. Yeah, we didn't believe in helping reindeers to be healthy in our house, no carrots, it was all about the smarties! Laura would sleep in my room on Christmas Eve and we would wake early in the morning to look through our stockings and see what Father Christmas had left us.

Seth's childhood was very different. He didn't believe in Father Christmas. I think one of the reasons was that his family didn't want to detract from the real meaning of Christmas (I can kind of understand that) and they wanted to keep it Christ-centred. Ours was also very much Christ-centred, we just believed in Father Christmas.

So now, we have Caleb. Before he was born, Seth and I both knew we had different opinions on whether we would want our children to believe in Father Christmas, but now we're getting to the point where we need to make a decision. I think we might be safe for another year, as Caleb will only be 17 months old in December so he's probably too young to remember much either way, but I really want Caleb to believe in Father Christmas! It was such a fun part of childhood for me, writing the letters to him and trying to stay awake to see him, but Seth doesn't want him to believe in Father Christmas. Seth is really straight down the line when it comes to lying and he says that encouraging Caleb to believe in Father Christmas is basically lying to him. And then there's the issue of how the children will then react when they realise that he's not real. I don't remember when I figured it out (Laura probably told me!) but I don't ever feel like I was lied to and I never thought it was a particularly big deal. However, I have a couple of friends who, when they were younger believed in Father Christmas and it got to the stage where their parents had to tell them that he wasn't real.They were getting to a stage where they were a bit too old to be going to school and talking to their friends about Father Christmas when a lot of their friends knew he wasn't real. One of my friends burst into tears and wouldn't talk to her parents because they had been lying to her about him and the other person was just completely shocked by it.

So therein lies the debate. We've not come to a decision either way. The thing is, I agree with a lot of Seth's argument on why he wouldn't want Caleb to believe in Father Christmas but I still want him to! To misquote Shakespeare, to believe or not to believe? That is the question! If anyone has an opinion on this, please feel free to share!

Shameless plug...

I love Christmas. I have always loved it and when I was 12 to when I was about 18, I loved it even more for a particular reason - Christmas concerts at church. My sister, Lindsay was in charge of running a youth choir and every Christmas we would put on a concert. They were always so well attended, the church building was full to capacity over the two nights of the concerts and it was always the highlight of my year. Rehearsals would start in October, once every couple of weeks. It was sometimes hardgoing as Lins is a perfectionist and knew how things should sound and how she wanted it to sound and so when it came to the performances, they were always amazing. Everyone who performed forgot all about how hard some of the rehearsals were (and how much of a taskmaster Lins was! :) I know that she will read this and I don't mind saying it because she knows it's true!!) and just loved being able to be part of such a great musical event. Even now, every Christmas I reminisce about those times and I can remember every song that was sung and the alto part to all of them! I composed a couple of pieces which were performed at the concerts. It was so special for me to hear what was an idea in my head being performed by a choir and hearing people walking around and humming the music that I had composed.

During mine and Seth's time in Lancaster, I met Sue Kureczko. Sue also loves music and when I heard that she wrote music, I was very eager to speak to her. We have worked together on many songs, about 17 I think, most of which are Christmas songs. Sue would give me the lyrics and the melody and I would come up with an accompaniment and the parts (soprano, alto, etc) to them. I had so much fun doing it and could literally spend hours working on the songs, without even realising that the time was passing! Seth always made sure that I stopped working on them at least an hour before bed because otherwise I couldn't sleep. I would have tunes just going through my head and it would keep me awake for hours. When Seth and I moved to London, life got busier and I haven't had the chance to work on any music with Sue for a while, but I am going to be getting back into it very soon, which I can't wait for!

So, as I said, shameless plug.... if any of you out there are choir directors, sing in choirs, are looking for music to perform in any Christmas concerts or any church event, check out Sue's website. All of the music on there can be performed as solos, by groups or by a choir. If you decide to use any of the music, let me know as we would love to hear your feedback and any suggestions that you might have! Enjoy!

My confession

So in the last post, I confessed that I am a lover of watches, but now I have another confession to make..... I love wedding dresses. Now if I were single, I'm pretty sure that a statement like that would scare away any potential suitors so it's a good job I am wed! Before I got married I would always look in the windows of bridal shops and admire the dresses. It wasn't that I was really eager to get married because I really wasn't, even the thought of dating freaked me out! (Poor Seth had his work cut out for him when he started dating me, I have no idea how he persisted!). I just really loved looking at the dresses and seeing what kind of styles I liked and didn't like.

When I got engaged, I couldn't wait to go and try on wedding dresses. I went with my Mum and sisters and I had a great time! I only really ended up trying on the styles that I already knew that I liked, which in hindsight I regret. Being as though this would be the only time in my life to try on wedding dresses, I wish that I'd have tried on loads of different styles, just because I could! I was never really one for the ballerina, full-skirted style dresses - being as though I'm only 5 ft 2 and a half (that half is very important, so I'm claiming it!) I would never have been able to carry it off! I went for a lace, mermaid style dress and I tried on A LOT of them, all of which were pretty similar in design. You know, just to be sure.

As it happened, for someone who loves wedding dresses so much, I didn't end up loving mine. I had ordered it online and when it arrived it was a different kind of lace to the one that was advertised. Of course, no one else would have known that, or even cared but I was a little disappointed. The company apologised profusely and refunded some of the money and to be honest, by the time the day rolled around I really didn't care, I was just looking forward to being married to Seth and to starting our lives together.

I thought that once I was married, I wouldn't really care about looking at wedding dresses again, it would be a case of been there, done that. Kind of like me not wanting to watch "one born every minute" again after having Caleb! But I must confess, even now when I walk past a bridal boutique, I still can't help but look at all of the lovely dresses in the window. I love going to weddings and seeing what the bride's dress will be like. I hope that at some point in the future I end up having a daughter so that one day I will be able to go wedding dress shopping with her, but if not then my nieces will just have to suffer me tagging along with them!