By the time you’re at your fourth pregnancy, everything’s starting to seem a little old hat. So I’m delighted – for Buzz’s sake – to say that I have a symptom this pregnancy that I’ve never had before: nosebleeds.

They’re very light – almost elegant – and only seem to strike in the evenings or once I’m in bed (even in the middle of the night).

Today Ada turned four, but it’s felt like her birthday for a couple of weeks.

Fluffy

Nana and Aunty C bought animal-loving Ada a pet for her birthday: a budgie that she has named “Fluffy”. Because of the timing of getting the young bird, Ada actually received him a couple of weeks ago.

It was a rough first week for Fluffy: he limped, stayed on the bottom of the cage, and seemed very depressed. Happily time, a vet visit, and some TLC brought him around and he now seems to be a normal, happy budgie.

Party

Yesterday Ada had a birthday party with her friends. The plan was to have a trip with family and Ada’s five best friends to the Salt Water Pool. A broken arm dropped the number of friends to four, and the weather shifted our venue to the indoor Moana Pool, but the party turned out to be great fun. After an exhausting hour in the water, the kids put on towels and sat pool-side for “Happy Birthday”, cupcakes, juice boxes, and present opening.

Other Celebrations

• A round of “Happy Birthday” at Playcentre on Thursday (shared with three other children who were also due to have birthdays over the summer break).
• Shopping with Nana and Aunty C yesterday morning to get some toys and other extras for Fluffy.
• Dinner, cake and candles with my family yesterday evening.
• Presents and love from Bob’s family, Mummy and Daddy on her actual birthday (which was combined with Christmas celebrations, since we won’t all be together on Christmas Day).

Presents

Of course I’ve probably missed some, so I’ll update the list as they spring to mind!

• IG and AG: soft toy cat (probably named “Aurora”, but names are often subject to change)
• EM and OM: gorgeous hand-made dress; chocolate gold coins;
• CB: tiny dinosaurs in a plastic egg; fabric paint-pens
• Granny and Pop-pop: princess sleeping bag in its own carry-bag
• Aunty A and Uncle M: mini back-pack with cologne, nail-polish, bubble bath, and lip gloss; Paddle Pop DVD
• Nana and Aunty C: Budgie and a billion accessories
• Linus: Schleich model dragon
• Mummy and Daddy: kitten nighty; socks

Tonight Linda went out for the evening and I stayed in. I put the kids to bed and from 8pm onwards everything was quiet. At 9pm I went through to turn their lights out, expecting them both to be sound asleep as I hadn’t heard a peep and I found Linus and Ada  in the hallway dressed like this.

Zoe was fast asleep so probably only dreaming of having underpants on her head – or more recently dreaming that Linus bit her foot (she has woken up a couple of times crying this).

We did all watch The Incredibles today, so maybe they were quietly re-enacting the movie? Regardless, they shuffled into bed with no trouble and fell asleep with underpants on their heads.

• Zoe no longer wears nappies at night.
• Zoe has used the toilet quite independently for a while, but the new development is that she now closes the lid when she’s finished and climbs up on it to flush the toilet.
• Buzz (18wks) has been kicking me merrily and frequently for the past couple of weeks, but not yet strongly enough for anyone to feel the movements from outside.
• We will have our 19wk scan this week. We won’t be finding out Buzz’s sex.
• Second trimester is feeling infinitely better than my shocking first trimester… it’s quite easy to forget I’m pregnant and just live a “normal” life. Although some of my trousers are starting to get a bit tight!
• All three kids are little FISH! I swear it was getting them goggles that did it… Linus and Ada love being in the pool and under the water now, and I’m sure Zoe isn’t too far behind.
• Zoe stopped breastfeeding a couple of months ago. She wasn’t feeding often, and after I gently discouraged her when she asked each morning a few times, she happily stopped. I’m fairly sure there’s absolutely no milk there now. While I was happy to dry-feed Linus through pregnancy, my life’s a lot busier and there are a lot more demands on my time, mind and body these days, so unless she was desperate to continue I wasn’t keen on encouraging it. And guess what? She STILL loves me!!

Perhaps as a follow-on from his interests in knock-knock jokes and reading voraciously, Linus is now very keen on homophones. Daddy has explained to him that homophones sound the same but have different meanings and spellings, so at random times Linus will burst out excitedly with “I’ve just found another homophone!” and tell us what it is. And he’s almost always right! *

Just as with the knock-knock jokes, Ada is keen to keep up, and has been surprisingly good at thinking up homophones with no help from us

Here’s a site with a small-but-useful diagram to explain what a homophones, homonyms, synonyms, homographs, heterographs, and heteronyms are. Long names for some very simple concepts!

* About the only exception I can think of is when told us that “train” and “chain” were homophones. It’s fascinating that – even though he can read and hear well – he thinks of these two words as sounding identical because HE can’t yet make the initial sounds different.