Happy Half-Birthday!

The Littl'un was 6 months old yesterday. Nope, I don't know where it went either.

We marked this momentous occasion in a number of ways. Actually, that's a total lie. Some things happened which happened to happen yesterday, but I'm trying to make this post have, like, a coherent theme or something, rather than just my usual random ramble.

Anyway, now that The Littl'un is officially at The Age At Which One May Wean, I decided that we could venture away from only the purest steamed vegetables, and gave her a piece of toast. She liked. She liked very much, and proved my "She can't make that much mess with toast" assertion ridiculous amounts of wrong. I think she even ate some. She's getting a bit better at that, starting to realise that the part where the bit of food goes down her throat is not only OK, but actually the point of the whole exercise, rather than a reason to make a startled face.

We also decided to put our Christmas tree up yesterday. Family tradition dictates that trees go up around about my mam's birthday on the 14th, so it didn't feel quite right putting it up so unprecedentedly early. But I made Husband go in the loft for something on Tuesday, and he grumbled that he was getting the tree down now because he couldn't be bothered to go up there again. Honestly, anybody would think it involved him balancing precariously on a wonky ladder and shining the light on his phone around a tiny space filled with seven hundred boxes of baby clothes or something.
Anyway, it was quite nice, making the living room all festive-like. I normally rely on going shopping to get me in the Christmas spirit (although God knows why, the Metro Centre in December is surely the closest thing to hell I will experience in my mortal days), but due to some kind of freakish turn of events, it's all been pretty much done in advance, and over the internet. So yesterday, we put some Christmas songs on, and allowed The Toddler to help decorate the tree. The bottom few branches ended up somewhat heavily baubled. And now I'm full of tidings of comfort and joy, and all that (except for when those sodding "carol singers" (annoying boys from across the road who know one verse of one song and wouldn't leave me alone once I gave them biscuits last year) come to call).

And something that actually was (kind of) to mark The Littl'un's half-birthday, we took them to see some culture. We went to Enchanted Parks in Saltwell Park, which I have wanted to go to for years, but have never got my lazy arse in gear enough to actually do. It was lovely. The Littl'un gazed around her in wonder at all the pretty lights, which was cute, and The Toddler occasionally stopped saying "I don't like it" to have a run around and a nosey at stuff. Why, though, we decided that on a cold, cold, cold night, when the girls would be out past their bedtime on a walk around a hilly park, a pushchair was somehow not an essential thing to take, is completely beyond me. Possibly because we are a little bit stupid.

The most momentous thing that I did yesterday was spend a WHOLE DAY away from ScaryParenting.com. And not just that, it was the first of hopefully many whole days. I have finally admitted the truth, that my addiction to arguing with strangers is slightly out of control, and if I want my children to recognise me without the glow of the laptop on my face, then a good dose of cold turkey is needed. I even clicked the "Forget this Site" option in Firefox, with some trepidation, as if it was about to erase something important from my brain in the manner of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It didn't. Just logged me out and took it out of the browser history. So now I feel liberated, and as if I have extraordinary amounts of time at my disposal. Which I'm sure I will use very wisely. (I'm already using it to update this, look at me go!)

We also did some ironing and watched Masterchef, but that really had nothing to do with the date, just that we have a backlog of both. Speaking of which, off I go....