Happy Birthday Missy Woo.

Today, my little girl turns 4. I can't believe it; half of me feels like it's flown, the other half feels like she's been around forever.

In order to celebrate her birthday on my blog, I thought I'd share with you four photos depicting her life so far, one from each year.

In this picture, she's 8 days old. As you can see, she was a big baby. 59cm long, and 9lbs 3oz. After her birth, the delivery suite went mental and I ended up on two drips with a whole team of midwives trying to stop the bleeding that ensued. I actually lost 2 litres - 4 pints - of blood, but it was a minor miracle that I didn't need a blood transfusion. However, I was made to stay lying down for 14 hours afterwards which made for a long day, and Missy almost got forgotten in the melee. Luckily, like here, she slept. And for the first 3 weeks of her life, she rarely wore more than just a nappy, as it was that hot.

Moving on, this is the second picture I have chosen and it's still one of my favourites of her. It was taken on Christmas Day 2007 and she's holding onto her Iggle Piggle that I had the forethought to buy in October before it sold out everywhere and became the toy to have that year. She's 18 months old here and you can already see the mischief in her eyes. By this time, she was already using lots of words but could she walk? No! She was nearly 2 by the time she started walking. I didn't panic because I know I was a late walker too and her brother wasn't especially early but man, what a pain! Carrying a large baby around was blooming hard.

And so to the photo of her third year. This is another Christmas time photo, taken by my Mum (which is amazing as she normally cuts heads off). By this time, Missy Woo really could talk the hind legs off a donkey; in fact, speech was the one thing she seemed to work on when she could have been walking. She was still not particularly confident physically by this stage but apart from that, she was great. And she liked to pose, as you can tell.

And so to the last picture. It's one I took yesterday, at her party. If you don't follow me on Twitter, you won't know that she fell off a slide in someone's garden on Father's Day and has a fractured humerus so the pink thing on her arm is actually a cast.

I can't believe how grown up she looks now, especially compared to the last picture. The uniform I'm buying her for school is in 5-6 and although some of it is not that big on her, the rest is big, but not massively so; just a bit of growing room. She's bigger than some of the children in Monkey's class; when I took him into school for his settling in sessions last year, the teacher thought she'd gained a new pupil! I think, in part, it's because she acts older than her age and her speech is so advanced. She still makes me hoot with random sayings - she asked me if she could listen to music on my "peapod" and later, she suddenly asked me if Baby Jesus only had one hand!

So, there she is. Missy Woo is 4 today. Happy Birthday, darling - I hope you have the best birthday and we love you loads.

My little girl is all growed up, but she'll always be my baby.

Edit - I've come back to this post to find Blogger has listed its publication date as Sat 3rd July. Which is interesting as Missy Woo's birthday is the 5th! I cannot have written this post on the 3rd because I didn't even have the last picture until Sunday 4th. Go figure. 

The Gallery - Motherhood, then and now.

Yes, yes, I know - I've not been posting again. A lot has been going on and I had a job interview today which I'm waiting to hear about. So I thought I'd get back on the horse as it were and do another entry into the Gallery at Sticky Fingers. This week's prompt is Motherhood. I haven't had time to come up with a fantastic new photo  - and to be honest, I am not a great photographer - so I've got two photos which kind of depict the then and now of my journey into motherhood - well, actually, the start of life as a mother of two children.

Here's the "then" photo: (it's a bit blurry, but not my photography!)

This is me with my two, literally minutes after I'd got home from hospital. I actually spent a few days in our marvellous midwife led unit that is just down the road here, after transferring from the big bad maternity unit in Preston. It was bliss and I could have stayed there for weeks, but come home I had to do. Missy Woo was 5 days old in that pic, Monkey 16 months old. I look happy, but I think I was terrified at the prospect of two of them, particularly as Monkey had not been a good sleeper as a tiny baby. Thankfully, Missy Woo was brilliant - so much so I used to have to wake her up to feed her before she got too hungry! Monkey was overjoyed with his new friend, so much so that his first word was "sister". And looking at that photo, I think that is about the most Missy Woo wore in the first 3 weeks of her life as it was so hot then. 

Before I post the "now" photo, I must make an apology. A lot of you who follow me on Twitter have already seen this pic before because it was, for a while, my profile pic (and it was on here too, which I've now changed.) It is, however, one of my favourite pictures of me with my two. It's getting on for a year old actually, but it depicts how they have changed since the first photo. 

Here goes:

This picture was taken in Pizza Express as you can see. I met up with some mummies that I have known online for some time. They were meeting up in Manchester and I took the chance to tag along with mine to put a few faces to names (hence the sticky label attached to my boob). 

Now, personally, I love this photo. It is similar in pose to the "then" picture in that I have got my arms around both of them so we are all cuddled together as a unit. I'm happy and relaxed, largely because my children are behaving, albeit for a few minutes. Both of them are extremely photogenic as you can see. They are the same, but different. You can see that Missy Woo has dark eyes in this picture whereas Monkey has, like me, pale green eyes. Their hair colour looks the same but Missy Woo's is darker, more golden, blonde whereas Monkey has a whiter blonde. (Sadly, like me, they are both likely to end up brunettes.) What they both share is that mischievous glint in their eyes - nothing particularly evil (most of the time!) but you know anything is possible.

This is my brood. They make me laugh, they make me cry, they frustrate me, anger me but they also love me, as I love them, to bits. It was a long road from that first morning at home but here we are. Two beautiful, funny, smart children. Oh, and one frazzled mummy. ;) 

The Gallery - Friendship

I've decided to have a go at this this week. This is for week 13 of the Gallery at Sticky Fingers and the theme is Friendship.

I've chosen a picture of my two children for this post.

This picture was taken just over a year ago. It was the morning of Monkey's 4th birthday party, which he shared with another child from nursery. The party was fancy dress optional and I decided to take some pictures of them in their finery. I have several standard poses of them stood up and smiling at the camera, but after a couple, they insisted, almost as a unit, that I take a picture of them like this.

This sums up my children. They were born around 16 months apart. It had to be that way because I was past 40 when I had Monkey and although I didn't adjust well to new motherhood with a baby that rarely slept, I knew by the time he was about 4 months old that I wanted him to have a sibling and therefore as time was not on our side, we'd have to start trying again fairly soon. Thankfully and rather scarily, it happened quite quickly and I found out that I was pregnant when he was 7.5 months old.

People thought I was mad, but the fact is that a 16 month old can't really be jealous of another baby as well as having similarish needs and Monkey soon forgot that there was ever life as the single most important person in the house. Yes, it was hard but not impossible, particularly as the second one was a girl and she was a dream to look after. Now that they are older (Monkey is 5 and Missy Woo will be 4 in July), it's like having twins although now, the gender gap is beginning to widen slightly and they're getting different interests.

Monkey started talking around the time that Missy Woo came along. His first word was "sister". (His second was "digger" - I think we know where his priorities lie.) They have always been exceptionally close. They have that close kind of friendship that only siblings close in age can really have -people often ask me if they ARE twins, which seems apt. They love each other but they hate each other too at times. They both instantly covet what the other has got. They fight over who gets prime spot in the car (oh, for them being in different stage car seats) and then, when it's most convenient for me to have them choose the same thing, they want different. It's frustrating but fun at the same time.

When they were at nursery together, Missy Woo got a bit unsettled when she moved rooms on reaching 2.  Whenever she cried, the staff just took her into Monkey, who gave her a big hug and she would cheer up. She got unsettled again when he started at school but it was more serious this time because Monkey was not there to give her a hug. It took longer to get over but we got there. She can't wait to go to school like her "big" brother. Hopefully, they won't need Monkey to provide hugs in class this time.

I chose this photo because I think it sums up their friendship. They are beautiful children, but full of mischief too. Missy Woo is the brains of the operation and Monkey is the brawn. They both blame each other when they are caught having done something naughty or destructive. Maddening but I wouldn't have it any other way.