Wowser! What adventures we have been having! Last weekend Elsie took her first trip abroad and her first trip on an aeroplane – over to Norway to visit Maria and Roger. She was an angel for the whole trip, including both the coach to and from Heathrow and the plane, charming everyone between here and Oslo! It went really well and we had such a nice time – I was quite overwhelmed with pride and love for her and her chilled out ways.

We then had a week of visitors, with Granny Fi then Lisa to stay – so much yomping around different bits of Bristol, including some al fresco dining in the newly arrived sunshine, lovely. Elsie was extremely annoyed for the whole duration of a trip up to Clifton with Lisa last Thursday and screamed unremittingly unless being fed, which meant that Lisa mostly saw the inside of Clifton cafes rather than the usual sights! Really, it shows how lucky I am most of the time to be able to do pretty much what I like, with such a good natured baby – if she was like that all the time then my life would be seriously curtailed.

Then this weekend just gone we took a trip down to Lyme Regis with Rob, and Aaron and Zelia – for Elsie’s first visit to the English seaside. It has been glorious sunshine all weekend and we have done some lovely walking – around Cerne Abbas and Charmouth, as well as Lyme Regis itself. We went out for dinner to a brilliant seafood restaurant on Saturday night, and the waitresses even held Elsie when she woke up so we could all eat at the same time, what service! It was her first bit of work experience, helping them clear tables and add up bills!

The only problem with all this excitement is that she now seems very restless today – she has grown accustomed to life on the road!

She has been doing a lot more growing up to – she now reaches out to grab things and play with them, although ‘playing’ does mostly involve trying to put them in her mouth and chew frantically. She still likes to smile and laugh at her reflection in the mirror, although now she is starting to reach out to try and touch that pretty girl, and gets a little confused when she just hits a cold flat surface. It’s wonderful to see these stages by which she figures out the world around her.

Her skin is still pretty bad – we are now using three types of cream plus olive oil on her flaky scalp, to try and keep it under control. I don’t think it’s getting any worse, but she is starting to scratch it, particularly on her tummy – so I think we are going to have to invest in some more scratch mittens to stop her lacerating herself.

Elsie has discovered the keyboard!! Over to her…

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What a clever girl!

This is another picture of Elsie looking very jolly, plus some black and whites taken by Rob, going back to when she was only a couple of months old.