Making plans

I think we hit an important milestone with Aimee. Yesterday she went through a whole day without once leaking or missing her cue on the potty. Everytime she needed to go, without fuss or noise, she simply went over, pulled down her briefs and did the business. It helped that she spent all day indoors at home (she wears nappies when going out). The only bit need to do now is to teach her how to clean up afterwards, as her wiping technique is a tad sloppy. Now, we up the stakes and at some point we will venture to take her outdoors without wearing nappies, cue the inevitable whine of 'I need wee weee mummy...NOW!' that you hear up and down shopping centres and on streets everywhere - basically in places where there are no loos.

Dylan offers us new tricks to his repertoire of cheeky behaviour every day. His new one at the moment is to clamber up the entire flight of stairs all on his own. It is at once an amazing spectacle and at the same time, really scary as at any moment, he could slip and fall onto the unforgiving hard cold floor tiles below. Well, let me first explain that his stair climbing is strictly supervised and yes, we will have to buy a stair gate for the bottom as well as the top now.

Cat has confirmed her date to go back to work - late October. But already, difficulties to our carefully laid plans may arise with the juggling of who will drop off kids, who will pick-up and who will cover in emergencies. Her new bosses are not really sympathetic to her idea of taking off every Monday and not happy about her having to leave early enough to pick up the kids on days when I cannot. I'm sure things will work out in the end, but it would help if employers could be more flexible.

Before then though, and despite the trauma of our Wales holiday, we are considering another weekend family break. This one is only 3 hours drive away so I reckon we can just about handle that. More details later.