Such a little star.

We have just been round to take milk and bread to Emmas in readiness for the return of Emma and Poppy from Portugal tomorrow. I have really missed them, and will be glad to see them and have lots of cuddles.

The plane back is round about breakfast time, so Emma can give Poppy her breakfast before they set off for the airport, the flight is about 2 or 2 and a half hours, so by all accounts they should be back after lunch, maybe 2pm Emma seems to think, including the travel from the airport back to Perton. Hopefully they won`t have any delays, it must be a nightmare being stuck in an airport for hours with a baby. What to do with them?!

Emma is at work on Friday, teachers training day, so Poppy will be with me for the time she is at work then on Monday the children are back at school so Poppy will have her first day at the child minders. Emma did not want to take her to the child minder on Friday, being the day after her return for their holiday and I shall be very pleased to see Poppy anyway so I don`t mind, I have really missed her. She will be going to the childminders for the day on a Monday and a Friday, when they went to meet her and have a chat about Poppy going to her Emma put her on the floor and Poppy immediately crawled off in the direction of the toys, not a bit bothered about being in a strange place! Hopefully, she will be fine, it will be good for her to have other children to play with and the childminder will take her to playgroup which I would find hard to do, not being able to walk that far!

I don`t like to admit defeat and say I cannot cope, but looking after a one year old is very hard at any time, for anybody, but when you are 56 with arthritis it is harder than you can imagine! I shall still have her 3 days a week, luckily Grandad finishes at 2.30pm from work so I have help in the afternoons, and my friend Jill will, as usual, be round to help me in the mornings so we shall cope. I love looking after her and would miss the time we spend together if I was unable to do it. She is such a little star, she has brought joy into our lives.

Oh they do like to be beside the seaside!

Had a lovely text off Emma in Portugal last night, she said Poppy is loving her holiday, she loves going in the pool, is getting lots and lots of attention off everybody (I expect she is smiling at everyone as she usually does, who couldn`t love her) and she has been so worn out at the end of her busy day that she is in bed and fast asleep by 7pm! I am missing them so much, and cannot wait to see them on Thursday, I am so glad they are all having a good time though, after the time they have had lately with one thing and another they deserve to relax and enjoy themselves.

I wonder how near Poppy will be to walking when they return, her little legs just needed a bit more strength to keep her upright so maybe all the swimming will help! She is not short of confidence to give it a try, thats for sure!

A fab time in Portugal.

I could not sleep very well last night, Lee was taking Poppy on a plane for the first time to go to Portugal to join Emma where she has been on a hen party. The thought of him forgetting the tickets or passports, or of Poppy not settling and making the flight a difficult one kept running through my head. I need not have worried though, Emma rang to say they had arrived safely, Poppy had been very good having slept on the plane and in the car on the way there, she had breakfast and a nappy change as soon as she arrived, after Emma had burst into tears at the sight of her daughter, after all 3 days is a long time to go without seeing your baby. When I was speaking to Emma, Poppy was enjoying a splash around in the pool with Daddy, Lee had Poppy in one hand, a beer in the other!! Emma said it was really hot in Portugal so it was nice to cool down in the water, maybe Poppy with be swimming by the time she returns! We shall miss them, but hope they have a fab time in Portugal, and relax. After the year or more that they have had with all the problems with the pregnancy and loosing little Emily they deserve to have a good time and let some of the tension go.

Childminder.

Grandad is now Gangan and I was called Gamma yesterday! Bless, Poppy is learning to talk! So sweet, her words are getting more and more recognisable and she even tries to sing, "yeah, yeah, yeah!!"

We bought her a new toy, it has four small different coloured balls on the top and you bash them with a plastic blue hammer until they pop through the holes and slide out of the bottom ramp. Poppy likes to do it her way, you give her the hammer and she holds it in one hand while she pushes the balls through the holes with the other!! She then turns round and bangs anything else but the toy with the hammer! She certainly likes to make up her own mind!

A neighbour with her two children came over for a drink yesterday and Poppy had a lovely time playing with Harry and Georgia, aged 7 and 10 respectively. They were very good with her, building towers with her bricks for her to knock over and bouncing her ball for her, which she thinks is the funniest thing! Georgia even fed Poppy with her dinner, and she sat and ate it all up which Georgia thought was the best! She is starting with a child minder when her Mummy goes back to work the week after next, when they went to meet the childminder Poppy immediately crawled off to the explore the house and see what toys were available to play with, there are other children who she will be able to see, so I think she will have a lovely time. Her Mummy was a bit worried as to how she will settle in, especially after her recent spell in hospital when she could not bear to leave her, but after her visit she thinks it will be a good thing for Poppy to have other children to play with and to learn to share, she will also be taken on outings to playgroups and the like which will be to her benefit.

Poppy with Mommy and Daddy on her first birthday. Party in the garden. Daddy is holding her first birthday cake, unsurprisingly in the shape of a number one, made by myself!

Manic Poppy

I went round to Emmas yesterday morning to keep an eye on Poppy while she packed to go to Portugal but after lunch her friend turned up and announced they were all going to the park! I was asked but as I cannot walk that far it was not an option, I thought her friend rather rude, it was as though I was not in the room!When Gray arrived we dropped the house key off with Em, as she had not taken it thinking I would be there on her return, and popped to the shops for a few bits and pieces. On the way back to the car we picked up Poppy to take to our house so that Emma could get on with her packing in peace, she was in the pub garden with her friend, sitting in full sun with Poppy even though she has lupus and Poppy should not be subjected to full sun, and her friend, being rather selfish, was sitting happily in the shade! We had bought a couple of new toys for Poppy and she wasted no time in trying them out when we got to our house, she liked the balls which you knock through to the other side with a plastic hammer, though she did not always use the hammer, prefering to push them with her hand! She liked the pull along duck, though the music it plays is going to get very annoying, I can tell! Poppy liked it though, and was dancing away to it! She is funny, she kneels up, puts her hands out in front of her and sort of waves her whole body about, at the same time trying to sing along "yeah, yeah, yeah"!! She was very pleased to see her Daddy when he arrived to fit a new flushing mechanism in our toilet, which was very kind of him, saving us quite a lot of money. The part he fitted cost £25, and took him about an hour. A plumber quoted us £110!!! He reckoned the part would cost £60 and the labour would be £50!! Taking the mick or what? Aunty Rachel and Uncle Steven were babysitting last night while Emma and Lee went out for dinner for their 5th wedding anniversary, I wonder if they had manic Poppy to look after,as she had fallen asleep on me while watching Baby Jake on TV at 6pm, she had been too busy to have a nap earlier!! She only slept for about 20 minutes and then Daddy woke her to take her home, it was enough to recharge her batteries though! Bless. 

What a sweetheart.

Its been a busy weekend. On Saturday Emma and Lee were going to a wedding so we had been asked to look after Poppy. As I had been poorly at the start of the week and still felt quite weak Aunty Rachel and Uncle Steven offered to have her for the day if we took over for the evening as they were invited to a different wedding, which incidentally we were also invited to. Poppy had a lovely day with her Aunty and Uncle, she really took to Uncle Steven and cried each time he left the room! We reckoned that because she is such a Grandads girl she thought he looked like his Dad! We went to pick her up at 4 o`clock and she was fast asleep on the sofa and had been for two hours! Rachel is a natural Mum, she is so lovely with her. They had taken her out for a walk and Poppy had spent a happy time chattering away to herself in her own language while they walked round with the dog. When we got back to ours she had her tea, which as usual she ate without any problem, she has a good appetite which is great, its nice to see a little one eat well. Emma was also invited to the second wedding of the day, along with Lee, but Lee decided to stay at the wedding he had been at all day and Emma travelled back with Bev to attend the evening reception of Kelly and Jason who had married in Las Vegas. We headed off to the reception, Poppy in her party dress and the cutest of shoes and us in our posh clothes, just down the road in Newbridge at the tennis club which I was astounded to find, I did not even know it was there! Very nice place, there is a lot of land at the back with tennis courts and a huge hanger type place which may be indoor courts or something of that kind. Poppy was very good, we sat outside on the patio for a while but it began to get a little chilly so we moved inside where she enjoyed watching the disco lights! Emma arrived before 9 o`clock, a bit later than I expected, though she had no choice as to what time she arrived as she was not driving. We stopped will ten o`clock but Poppy was starting to get very tired and it was not fair to keep her awake any longer, she certainly could not sleep in the room, the music was much too loud! She stopped at our house overnight, Emma was looking forward to a lie in!

Yesterday was a nice day, Emma rang at about 10.15am to see if Poppy was okay and she borrowed the car to take Lee to finish a job he was doing in Telford for her friend so with having a cup of tea with her friend she did not arrive back here until around 2pm!

Poppy is starting to say a few words now and it seems she does something new every day! She will now say Ta, any animal is a dog dog, Grandad seems to be Ganga, when I picked her up from her cot and took her into our room, she saw Graham in bed and flung her arms out towards him saying Ganga! So we presume it means Grandad! Bless! She really is a Grandads girl!

She has just found out how to put the ring on to the toy with the post, you know the kind of thing I mean, four or five rings of different size and colour? She loves banging a saucepan with a wooden spoon so I am now looking for one of those peg boards with a hammer which you knock them through then turn over and start again! She tries to sing too, "yeah, yeah, yeah"!! She is still smiling away all the time, what a sweetheart.

Laughter, the best medicine!

Poppy has had us laughing, she is a little sweetheart, cute as they come!

We were watching Deal or no deal on tv, Poppy was sitting in her highchair having her meal when the audience started clapping on tv, she swivelled round with a surprised look on her face, then started to grin and clapped along with everybody on the television, looking around at us to see if we were clapping along too! Her face was a picture, we were in stitches!

Her speaking has suddenly started to take shape in the past few weeks, today she said "ta", she tries to sing "yeah yeah yeah" and then grins at you, any animal is "dog dog" and she loves to bang two bricks together while saying "bang, bang, bang"! Mummy and Daddy ofcourse are words she has been coming out with for a while, though she says mamma dadda, she also says babba, although these have been "babbling" words for quite sometime, she now seems to understand what mamma, dadda and babba mean. If you give her a doll she will say babba babba and will point to her Mummy or Daddy so she obviously knows what those words mean. It is amazing how she learns something new every day, humanity is a wonderful thing!

Feeding.

Poppy already has several teeth and by the look of her gums a few more are on the way. She certainly makes short work of food she likes, chocolate is soon gone, apart from the dribbles which land on her clothes and all around her mouth! A strawberry is no sooner in her hand than it has disappeared and she just loves to sample a drink in a glass for some reason, once you give her some you have a devil of a job to get her to let go of the glass! She loves to feed herself though cannot as yet manage to give herself a spoon full of food, though we shall have to soon get the plastic table cloth out to protect the floor and let her have a go! Luckily she likes her food and will eat almost anything, whether that continues ofcourse remains to be seen, we can only hope. After her recent spell in hospital, when she ate hardly anything for a few days, she needs to put on some more weight, so we are grateful for anything she eats, as long as it is not something she is not meant to ofcourse!!

Childminder.

In September Poppy will be going to a childminder for two days a week while her Mummy and Daddy are at work. Not that I wanted her to go to a childminder, but I am finding things hard looking after her full time, she is a good little girl, and she is one year old, and as anybody who has children knows, looking after a one year old is very tiring. It is especially tiring when you are 56 years old, and when you have arthritis it is doubly difficult. Just bending down to pick her up all the time or bending down to play with her, hurts. I will still look after her the other three days so will still see lots of her, and when she is with the child minder she will have other children to play with and will be taken on outings so that will be a benefit to her as taking her out, to playgroups for instance, is something I am not able to do, not being able to walk far enough to get there! I only wish I could.

Bless her, she is growing up too fast!!

It is nice to see Poppy looking so well, especially after the scare we had when she was in hospital a couple of weeks ago with a nasty viral chest infection, poor little soul was on oxygen, steroids, nebulisers, she was not well at all.

She is not walking yet but at 10 weeks early, even though she is over a year old, her age should only be 10 months, and she is doing all the things she should be doing for a 10 month old baby, and come to that the things she should be doing for a baby of a year old too, basically she is getting along well. Her crawling is very fast, especially if you say you are chasing her she speeds up quite a lot, then turns round to see if you are coming and laughs at you! Standing up while holding on to the furniture is a doddle for her now and she can stand without holding on for a little while, holding a toy, she sometimes forgets and falls over but thats life as a baby I suppose! She wants to feed herself, flapping her arms around to try and prevent Mummy from pushing a spoon full of food into her mouth when she has had enough, it may be time to give her a spoon soon to have a go, though I doubt she would manage to get much food into her mouth herself at the moment with a spoon, though hand her a biscuit and she has no problem at all! Faced with a bowl of ice cream funnily enough her mouth soon opens wide! And the mess she can make with some chocolate! Unbelievable!!

Nappy changing is no easy feat either any longer, she certainly does not like to lie still so you have to be lightening quick, or chase her around and hope she does not wee on the carpet! She thinks it is very funny to roll over quickly as soon as her nappy is removed and crawl away as fast as she can!

Bless her, she is growing up too fast!

Poppy has a bad week.

It was a horrible week last week. First of all Poppy was in hospital for three days with a viral chest infection, she was on oxygen, had to use a nebuliser and had steroids, everybody was very worried about her. Just to add to the difficulty she was not in a hospital near her home, but in Torquay as she was taken ill a couple of days after her birthday while visiting her Nanny with her Mummy and Daddy so she was unable to enjoy a little holiday by the seaside. Such a shame.

Just to make matters worse on their way home the day after Poppy`s release from hospital the car broke down on the M5 and the breakdown "service", if you could call it that, turned up 2 hours later. As it is not safe to sit in a car at the side of a motorway they had got out and sat on embankment with Poppy wrapped in blankets and coats to attempt to keep her warm as it was dark and damp, so ofcourse the exhaust fumes and the night air did not help her breathing one bit. A terrifying experience with lorries rushing past in the dark and a petrified dog who shook through the whole thing whilst Poppy cried because she had been woken up. Poppy had to have her inhaler in the way home and when she reached home as she was weazing quite a bit, thankfully she does not seem to have suffered any lasting effects from this, not that we can see at the moment anyway!

Poppy is a year old!

Poppy Hope, my beautiful granddaughter, was born on the 29th July 2010 at four o`clock in the afternoon by C section.  

Poppy was born at 30 weeks gestation, ten weeks early, and she weighed just 3 pounds 4 ounces. Her identical twin sister, Emily Faith, was born sleeping, she was too ill to make it. God bless you Emily, we all love you so much. x

Poppy had fought to be in this world, the doctors called her a miracle. She certainly is a miracle, she has brought joy into our lives, and she has just turned one year old.

The birthday party was a big one, lots of people turned out to celebrate the first birthday of Poppy in the garden, she thoroughly enjoyed herself, crawling round the lawn, getting dirty in the process! Just as well she loves her bath! Grandma made her a cake in the shape of a number one with her name iced in pink, she had some lovely presents and so many cards her Mummy and Daddy wondered where to put them! They will all go into a scrap book to keep for when she gets older so that she will be able to look back and see who wished her a happy first birthday.