21/52 2018

Week 21
21 - 27 May



Jamie is good at climbing and is steadily gaining confidence. He's also good at recognising and testing his limits - going a little bit higher, then checking he can get back down, then a little higher again. Meanwhile I am getting better at a kind of meditation where I tell myself to give him space, and that if he does fall he will most likely just bruise and learn, and if he does need to go to hospital at any point, social services do not swoop down with child protection orders for parentally supervised kids falling off council-maintained play equipment.

There is a second picture for this week, because it was our wedding anniversary:



I am so happy that we have kept up with the anniversary picture-within-picture thing. We have prints of the current year plus the original wedding picture stuck to our fridge.

03/52 2018

Week 3
15 - 21 January



Another cold, wet, yet cheerful morning at a park. Steve took this photo; I'm the blue and grey blur in the background. Jamie was running back and forth between the two of us laughing his head off.

01/52 2018

After a lot of dithering I decided to do the 52 project again. Yes, it's February already, and a late start. Yes, my timekeeping was terrible last year. From a social media guru perspective I might as well not bother. But from a parent perspective, I really enjoy having a collection that is just one photo a week to enable me to watch him grow without a disproportionate focus on big events where dozens of pictures were taken.

If I ever *really* get my act together I might try and have each year printed up into an actual physical photo book to keep, but my imagination is tempered by low self esteem.

Week 1
01 - 07 January

As you can tell from the rain, the hood, and the colour of Jamie's nose, this was a cold wet morning at the playground. We needed it, though, and he wasn't the only one smiling.

35/52 2017

Week 35
28 August - 03 September



This isn't a great picture, but for me it captures what life with Jamie is like at the moment - happy and silly and affectionate, interested to know what you're doing, but a bit of a blur before he scampers off to the next thing he wants to investigate.

23/52 2017

Week 23
5 - 11 June



One of the last pictures of Jamie wearing a one-piece sleepsuit, as this summer we are shifting up to Actual Pyjamas. He's chewing on his hand because his teeth are bothering him at the moment (only four more molars to go!) but he's still cheerful.

19/52 2017

Before Jamie, and before me, the great love of Steve's life was his motorbike.



It no longer gets the TLC it should, but after a certain length of time in the garage it's a roadworthy vehicle once more and this weekend Steve got to do the last little bit of tinkering to get it ready to take him to and from work. Plus, he finally got to sit Jamie on it.

17/52 2017

This bunny was in the Easter box from my mum, and Jamie seems to have really taken to it.



He likes carrying it, cuddling it, feeding it (thankfully only the plastic play food) and periodically heaving it over the edge of the playpen with an air of "you can be free, my friend!"

14/52 2017

This week, we were on holiday in Cornwall, and Jamie had his first ever trip to the beach.



Warwickshire is landlocked and a beach day trip would be no small undertaking. Jamie's experience of sand so far has been small sandpits full of kids, and a sand/water play table in our yard. So having a large area of sand all to himself was a joy.

Not, however, a joy in which I participated. Steve took this picture. I was tucked up in a nearby spa, having three whole hours completely OFF. No household chores to get on with. No trying to get as much as possible done before putting the mummy hat back on. No attempting to relax while knowing that at any moment a plaintive "mama! mama!" will bring things to an abrupt halt. Just a chance to unwind in the knowledge that although I could be contacted via the spa in a "get your clothes on and rush to the hospital" way, I wouldn't be interrupted for feeds, nappies, grumps, teething, tiredness, or boredom. It was the first time in 18 months and it was lovely.

51/52

I spent all weekend wondering which of these pictures I wanted to be this week's 52 Project photo but I really couldn't decide, so now it's Monday morning and I'm posting both of them.

First up, we have Jamie's second trip to the German Christmas Market in Birmingham. The first time I took him, he was all of about 7 weeks old and spent almost the entire time we were there snuggled up asleep. This time, he's rather more active... we had christmassy songs in the car on the way there and then let him loose in the toddler section of Teenie Weenies soft play (level 2 of the Moor Street car park; totally recommend it). Gave him lunch there as well, and then set out into the Market - upon which he promptly fell asleep in the sling on my lap. But eventually he woke up and seemed to be very interested in all the lights and sounds and smells.



(Also, I love his reindeer boots. They're warm for him and soft for me.)

The second photo is of Jamie about to read The Shepherd's Crown, the last Discworld book by the late Terry Pratchett.



No, really. He likes me to read out loud. Usually this takes the form of him selecting one of his rather shorter and more age-appropriate books and holding it up to the nearest adult with an expectant look on his face, but now every so often he'll climb up on me and reach for my current book, pulling it off the shelf if I let him. And then I read out loud while he cuddles up and occasionally gives the book a respectful stroke.

48/52

Another indoor photo, this time with bubbles.



We have a book in which the main character is devastated by his balloon bursting, until his friend suggests blowing bubbles, which are supposed to float away and pop. It's often nice to follow it with bubbles of our own and Jamie loves them. I have to be outside the railing, otherwise he just wants to grab the bubble wand. It's much more successful than outdoor attempts - wrangling a powerchair and a just-walking child and a bottle of bubble mix and a wand and unpredictable wind currents was no small task!

44/52

Here is my happy autumn baby. For all that he might have been present for autumn last year, he was six days old the first time we took him to the park and I doubt he was able to make much sense of his surroundings.

This year, of course, was completely different. Over the last few months he has enjoyed any number of outings to any number of parks and nature reserves and arboretums, plus of course the Eden Project. The boy likes trees. And now, in the glorious part of autumn where it's not properly cold yet, and there's colours and crunchy leaves on the ground as well as on the trees, Jamie is also learning to walk, which means a look of utter delight as he gets set down on the ground and realises he can scamper wherever he wants and really investigate things.

Of course I never get to catch that look on camera because I need both hands to let him down and steady him for a moment while he remembers how to stand and walk in shoes, but then he's off, and even over lumpy terrain can manage a good few metres before stumbling.



So instead, I get this look, which I think is "mummy, look at these leaves!" He's learning about it being ok to hold and play with them but not to put them in his mouth, he's learning about crunching them in his hands, he's learning about falling over and leaves sticking to him (along with the mud, dirt, twigs, grass clippings etc, but this is why we have a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner) and he's basically having a whale of a time. Winter and even christmas will have a lot to live up to if they want to rate alongside a park in autumn.

43/52

I make no apologies for this week's post being late, because as some of you might already know, we celebrated Jamie's birthday with his first trip to the Eden Project. Organising our photos has been low on the priority list.




This was the furthest we've been from home and the first time we've been away more than a single night. It took a lot of planning and a lot of work before and during the trip but it was all worth it. Of course, at 1 Jamie isn't quite in a position to understand why it's amazing - for all he knows, massive bubbles full of plants is an entirely normal thing to do with a hole in the ground. But he was certainly in a position to understand that it is a precious space to his parents, and he's always loved trees. He wasn't completely sure to make of a story time with no book but he noticed that other bigger children were watching. This picture was taken in the Citrus Grove of the Mediterranean Biome, on the chair that the storytellers use.

42/52

This week was Jamie's first birthday and hopefully I will be sharing a picture heavy post about that soon.

For now, a pre-birthday picture of a happy upside down Jamie is, I think, a nice 52 Project portrait.

41/52

Another Mummy and Jamie week.



This was taken at one of the parks in town, next to the river at a spot where, so I'm told, the circus elephants used to be taken to be washed. The stone bench was very cold but the metal elephant statues were sun-warmed and wonderfully tactile.

21/52

Slightly late again, this time for reasons of choosing and cropping the favourite photo from a shoot which only took place on Saturday. Because Saturday was our fifth wedding anniversary, and one of the things we do on our anniversary is take a picture of ourselves holding the previous year's picture, which shows the picture from the year before that, and so on, all the way back to our wedding photograph.



This is Jamie's second year in the photograph; last year of course he was present in bump form, and then Steve printed out one of our scan pictures to "actual size" on an iron-on t-shirt transfer.

We wondered whether to have Jamie in the anniversary pictures as we're quite sure that, over the years, we will have anniversaries where he isn't present - perhaps with a babysitter, perhaps being a grumpy teenager who refuses to participate because he thinks his soppy parents are sooooo embarrassing, perhaps at university, or away with friends on holiday, or any number of other possibilities. All that is fair enough, time passes and things change. Right now, though, Jamie is at the absolute centre of our lives and our relationship, so to create an image featuring both of us and not him... it wouldn't be real.

17/52

This week's picture speaks for itself.



Jamie is generally speaking quite a happy child. We're getting a lot of these enormous gummy grins at the moment and we're loving each and every one.

15/52

On time this week!

Here's the picture...



It's remarkable that he's smiling so much, because this is the week that we saw a little white dot emerging.



Forgive the funny angle, it's more difficult than you might think to take a picture of a very tiny white dot inside the mouth of a baby who's very interested in holding all and any tech that gets near him! We're pretty certain that it'll develop into a full-blown tooth. At the moment it's just a hard, sharp little corner. I hope it stops hurting him quite so much soon.

13/52

Late again - I thought, oh, Steve will be here for the four day bank holiday weekend, and then Steve was here for the four day bank holiday weekend and we were Doing Things and I didn't get as far as posting.

But, I did decide when I took it what this weekend's photo would be.



One of the Things we Did was move Jamie up to his proper high chair. Up until now, he's had a reclined bouncy seat that clips onto the top and that allowed him to be up at table with us for mealtimes even though he couldn't yet sit up or eat. Which has been nice, it's got him into the rhythm of mealtimes as social occasions and also allowed me and Steve to eat with two hands. But now, he gets to sit up properly, and he gets his own spoon too. Occasionally it even has a smear of something on it. We couldn't call it eating, not yet, but as you can see he seems to like his high chair and that has to be a good thing.

12/52

This week's picture makes me smile every time I see it.



It's the wide eyes, the happy surprised mouth, the blur of hands, and above all else, the confidence with which Jamie now enjoys tummy time, pushing himself right up, total head control, using his hands and kicking his legs. I'm putting together a scrapbook of photos (currently only just past Steve's paternity leave, although in my defence there's pregnancy photos and scans in there too, and each picture has a handwritten caption) and among the 0-3 months photos yet to be placed is one of my tiny little scrap of a baby, flopped over a banana-shaped tummy time pillow, looking (a) unimpressed, and (b) unlike a being capable of independent movement. It still bewilders me to think that only a few months and my milk has turned that baby into this increasingly strong little boy.

6/52

For me, this week's picture perfectly encapsulates what Jamie is like at 3 - 4 months. Awake, alert, content, thumb in mouth, eyes wide open, and just a glint of amusement. I still can't say that he looks like Steve or that he looks like me, but I love that he looks like himself, like Jamie, a little person and a personality all of his own.