Little Miss Independant...

For a while now, Zara has been feeding herself...

She will have no help from any of us until the very last mouthful that is virtually impossible for her to get onto her spoon.

It started off as quite a messy affair but she has made such good progress and her "hand to mouth" co-ordination improves with every mouthful (every now and again when she is really hungry and cant quite get the food in fast enough she holds her bowl out saying"help you")

Kindermusik

Zara and I started Kindermusik at the beginning of February. The Kindermusik programme is based on the belief that "Music nurtures a child's cognitive, emotional, social, language and physical development". Even though Zara was only 16 mths old, the teacher, Estelle, advised us to rather put her in the older group, this means she is the "baby" of the class. The other toddlers are closer to 2 and 3 years old... I was a little concerned by the age gap but she has really thrived and has surprised me at how well she responds and how quickly she learns from seeing the bigger kids doing the activities. These photos were taken by another photographer at the "Valentines" class...

no alien abductions...

Just a quick note to let you know that you have not been abducted by aliens and suddenly returned to earth again having missed out on our exciting family adventures...

Its a little less boring than that - I had kept some of these posts as "drafts" as a month ago our laptop died. I have been waiting in anticipation to be able to post the videos of Zara walking which I could only do on the laptop. Today we heard that our insurance claim has been approved and we should have our new laptop by the weekend - HOORAY!!!

I will endeavour to download the videos again and get the last two drafts posted ASAP.
(and keep a little more up to date) ;~)

Love my Dolly

I took these photos a couple of weeks ago and had almost forgotten about them until on our way out the other day, Zara insisted on taking her "dolly" with her. For the past few weeks have not been able to go anywhere without a supply of books for her to "read" in the car so I was very surprised at the announcement that "dolly" had to come too...

Money makes the world go round

Zara is certainly her father's child. Having been encouraged to walk with money (and peas) we were assured of her love for coins - so last night she got stuck into helping Dad transfer our old coins from the broken glass jar into the old milk-can which we found in Rosendal over the weekend. She took great delight in grabbing coins by the handful, chanting "money money money" and then putting them into the milk-can...