PLEASE we need your advice!!

Well another week has gone by and apart from some hearty colds my family has been fantastic, we celebrated my Nephew Alex’s first birthday with an awesome sunny family BBQ with all of my Hubby’s family. I made a giant teddy bears picnic cupcake for him.

And I was thrown back to my own childhood when all four cousins ranging from 4 to 1 year were popped in the bath together to save time and water, they all enjoyed it splashing and playing. They had all been playing barefoot in garden so you can imagine how dirty the water was at the end, as all adults in the bathroom showed their shock at how dirty their kids had been, the kids just did not seem to care!

Well this week ladies and gents I really need you to post your helpful tips and advice, my hubby are desperately trying to find a way to prize C away from her much loved Babies bottles at bed time. She is not a big eater and struggles to put on weight so she still has a bed time bottle (this I have to say is in no way helping getting her dry at night!). C turns 3 in October and we really feel it is time for the bottle and milk to go BUT she has become so dependent on the bed time milk to help her get to sleep I feel it is going to be a hard battle.

We have tried a lot of things like telling that only babies have milk and she is not a baby like her cousins she is a super big girl. We have offered her the milk in a variation of cups but they are just rejected and she cries for her bottle. We have tried just not giving her the milk at all and not mentioning it at bed time, but normally after half an hour she is crying for it and we are so tired that we give in, on the rare occasion she does fall asleep without it she wakes in the night crying for it, and to me this is worse as I hate interrupted sleep when we have only just got her sleeping through the night.
I know she is only 2 and half so maybe asking a bit much of her, but we have got her toilet trained and we would love to get rid of the night time nappy to but the milk at night is stopping us doing that and we really would like to have her totally dry by the time she is 3.

So please post your comments as we really do need some help with this one, any titbit of advice would be very welcome, and I will do a follow up blog letting you all know how we got on and what advice we found useful.
Thank you in advance
H,R & C

Easter Eggs, and a really lovely week

Well this week has been a much improved week, My health has really picked up and C is back to her normal cheeky self. We had an awesome Easter with C getting to enjoy a day with her cousins Emma and Alex.

We had a delicious BBQ followed by a mini egg hunt for the girls. I took quite a lot of the eggs from C’s egg hunt over to her cousins to get rid of them as we had way too many, only to receive half of them back and another 4 from family members and they were way bigger!!! We now have a fridge that resembles a chocolate shop, good job every now and then Daddy enjoys a good gorge on choccy and can put away quite a bit (and he remains skinny so not fair!!)

C adored getting her new scooter but goes at a snails pace on it and has to stop and get off every 2 minutes to put it straight and inspect any bug that deems to walk by, it is delightful to see her engaging with nature but seriously 15 minutes to get to the bottom of our road is a little extreme and really quite frustrating

My daughter is a very caring sharing little girl she has the biggest heart and insisted that we make Easter bunny cards for all her friends and teachers at nursery. I spent a good 2 hours cutting out bunny silhouettes with her scribbling on them and scrunching up tissue paper for their tails. When we were getting ready for nursery the day after making them she announced that we had forgotten four people so I had to rush and make some more for her decorate. Bless her the look on her face when she was giving them out at nursery was one of pure joy she so enjoys giving.

We have recently had a parents meeting and been told that we have a very bright toddler on our hands, she is already trying to spell her name, can do at least half of hr alphabet and is very popular with both children and staff I cannot tell you how proud I was I left the nursery positively brimming. I was so proud that I bought C her much wanted Cinderella DVD as a reward. We have now watched said DVD a good 3 times a day since purchasing it, she worked out how to control the DVD player so we will not be getting a break.

We also attended my nephews 4^th Birthday C was so excited as it was a fancy dress costume and she chose to be a bunny, we had a battle to get her in the costume when we arrived, but after 2 hours off an entertainer and running around with her cousins we had an even harder battle to get her out of it. We have had a really lovely couple of weeks and it is really refreshing long may it last!!!