The pleasant ease of the trip was all the more remarkable as it was January, and so remarkably cold, and you will note from Orry's fac and knees that he fell in mud (early on down the path on the way out) - hence my continued amazement about the success of the outing.
This is in contrast to Cori's experience at home, as her plan of hanging out with Oshin, taking a breath and perhaps getting some stuff done was rather thrown off course by most of her time being eaten up by dealing with this:
Inevitably, that would have meant bathing him - there's no way around it when its up his back, and so smeared all over him in trying to get the clothes off him etc.
Baths, these days, look like this, with the boys taking it in turns holding Oshin as Cori bathes him:
After Oshin is done, he will sit happily for a while wrapped in towels, with the little heater in the room, as Orry and Finn get a quick wash, before they all get out. This has now begun being followed by tooth brushing, even for Oshin - the boys were very excited!
Only a week or two into January, we were delighted to have a visit from Grandad & Gran. Of course, their time was divided between us and the cousins on the other end of the Island, but it was great to spend some fun time with them, such as eating nice food...
(Well, actually we ate nice food - Orry ate the sandwiches we made for him at home in order to avoid his fussiness, evidenced in his not eating the crusts!)
... and having fun in Castletown...
We were in Castletown as they were off to watch the cousins sporting, and so it was the last we were to see of them, but, whilst there, Finn and I put a sight on Hango Hill, treating such hallowed spaces of Manx national history is true reverence, but clambering on them:
I had my first time looking after Oshin (and the boys) on my own in January. Cori, as a freelance at the museum here, had to go on a day's training on something terribly dull, so I was left as the solo-parent for the day.
Knowing that it was a safe thing to do with Oshin, we did a lot of walking - straight from the car park having dropped off Orry at nursery, around Braddan, which was very nice:
I had been furnished with a milk in bottle for him, but he wasn't interested. We had a drawn out argument about it at Braddan Old Church (which looks like this), when I followed his schedule and offered it to him, but I gave up eventually and he had a nice sleep without it until Orry got out.
Then we were off to swimming, which I was very impressed with myself for getting Orry in and out of:
This was then followed by me getting Finn in and out of swimming also - I felt like a real parent! Though, I was very happy for Cori's being home when we got there, and there was no keeping Oshin away from her by that time!
The big thing in January was that Oshin properly started on food:
He had desperate for it for a while, reaching for and trying to get food from the table or us, so he was delighted to be allowed to get stuck in.
As you will see from the pictures, there were a lot of vegetables going in him, along with rice cakes. There are not many teeth at him, so it's still very experimental, sometimes with him seemingly just rubbing the food on his gums more than anything else, which is a bit odd:
January brought the unusual event that we could not get around the castle as the storms were too bad to even try it. So we hid in by the wall and admired the fury of it all - very impressive:
It is times like this that it's good to have book-loving boys, who can quite happily sit in reading books. We are big fans of the library these days, going there each Saturday morning to get a new hoard of books. This makes for very quite and peaceful Saturday mornings once we're back and they sit down to quietly read for a while:
(This is Orry enjoying a read-along audio book or Katie Morag - a series of which a friend lent us and which Orry went through on repeat for a week and more - a lovely thing but we were very glad when he moved on to do other things!)
With audio listening, Cori found a great book & CD in the tip which we've been really enjoying in the car:
It might sound rather pompous, but it's a fantastic book which Finn (especially) and Orry have great fun reading and then listening to the CD for, track-by-track, answering the little questions they have. We're reading it in the car on the long journeys to granny's and the like, and we're all learning new things about music. Great fun!
Another great find in the tip were some cassette tapes. We often find things of interest to me at work, but this time we discovered that some were nothing of interest - just recordings off the radio or the like. So they were given to the boys, who had great fun unravelling them and running them around the house:
All great 80s fun, until Orry goes off and finds my other tape - the one with potentially interesting Manx things on - and then snips it to pieces!
I try not to think about what was on it...
The end of January brings Oie'll Vreeshey, but before that (almost) close to the month, here's one final video of Oshin, enjoying his toes and bouncing:
Oie'll Vreeshey is when St. Bridget ('Breeshey' in Manx) is supposed to visit your house. So you should leave out food for her and call to her with a song before retiring to bed.
Other children in Finn's class learn the song at school, obviously in the classroom, and sang it beautifully at their homes (and on their parents' Facebook pages etc.). We asked Finn if he knew the song, but he got the first two words only, which are 'Breeshey, Breeshey'...! - Finn's not got much music in him.
But it's probably his father's fault, who would be sufficiently half-arsed about the tradition to leave this meal for the saint:
That brings us to the end of January, but instead of leaving you with a rubbish dinner for a saint, here are the nice pictures we took on a day when we spotted the nice light and got the nice camera out especially:
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