18 months of PJ

Today marks a year and a half since a tiny person came out of me. That tiny baby is now a real person who thinks and talks and walks. I'll demonstrate his growth by using a toy dinosaur.

I heard a few different opinions on what 18 months would be like, some people said it was awful because they start having tantrums and some people say it's brilliant because they can do a few things for themselves and they are learning a new thing every day. So far in general I am really enjoying this stage. Percy is now normally sleeping 7 or 7:30pm till 6 or 6:30AM. He's totally off breast feeding and if I need to do something like shower he is capable of watching a 20 minute tv program on the laptop without smashing the keys or diving head first off the sofa.

Here are 18 facts about Percy Jones:

1) He is named after his great great great uncle Percival Drury who died in World War 1.

2) He was filmed for TV twice in his first 2 weeks of life, once for One Born every minute (but they did't use it) and once for northwest tonight.

3) His first 3 words were "quack" "bath" and "Lola" (the rabbit's name)

4) He learnt baby sign language which has helped him learn to speak and also to communicate before he could speak. The first word he signed was "home".

5) The first food we tried him on was broccoli he was not a fan. He loves "babalas" (bananas)

6) He spent his first birthday in hospital with pneumonia.

7) When we go to the park it's all about the slides, swings are for losers.

8) He likes to paint, and if you ask him what colour something is he'll always say "blue" regardless of what colour it is.

9) When you say "jump" he bends his knees up and down but his feet don't leave the floor. Last week he learnt to jump in a swimming pool... well kind of walk off the edge, he will do that whether you're ready to catch him or not.

10) He loves animals, he is very good with Lola and he really likes dogs which is odd because I'm slightly fearful of dogs, once he got licked in the face by a dog and he wasn't that bothered.

11) Two word sentences he has recently said are "bye bye Daddy" "where teddy" "baby sheep" and "silly mummy"

12) He likes to play pretend cooking and make tea for people with his little tea set.

13) The only T.V programme he will watch is Mr tumble, nothing else keeps his attention.

14) He has almost grasped the concept of hide and seek, except sometimes he'll start playing without informing us first and he kind of wants to watch you hide.

15) He loves music and often demands it.

16) When he says "cuddles" it means "pick me up mummy I want to get what you are holding"

17) Yesterday we went to the farm at Croxteth hall with his buddy Mazen.

18) Today he went on the train for the first time. We're gonna make good use of our free train bus and ferry pass: tomorrow we're going on the ferry.

We love you so much PJ. xx

Our Tropical House

We are in the long and annoying process of buying a house... Not helped by Move Residential's least helpful mortgage advisor ever...

January 2016
Me "so I'm a bit worried about the time pressure with the new tax laws coming in in April, we need to get a move on with buying the house." (There are new stricter tax laws for landlords and as we have not been able to sell our current house this makes us landlords.)

Morgage man: "Don't worry about that you are buying a property to live in so those laws won't apply to you, so there is no time pressure"

We decide to re-mortgage our current house first which takes a while.

March 2016
Solicitors: so you'll be eligible for the new Landlord stamp duty, it's an extra 5k.

Me: what?!

mortgage man: yeah you'll have to pay it.

Me: you said it didn't apply to us?

Mortgage man: I don't remember that, of course you'll have to pay.

My parents bail us out -if we sell our current house within 3 years we can claim the money back. The fact that they can give us money is the one good thing about the generation who got on the property ladder aged 21 on minimum wage.  I feel like we're on a property snake. Anyway thanks Mum and Dad.

One day we will get our house and make it into a tropical paradise.  We've been toying with the idea of moving abroad for years and we've gone round in circles a lot. In the winter of 2011/ 2012 we nearly moved to Tunisia on a whim because we were cold. Then we fairly seriously though about moving to Lebanon in 2013. Then after 2 months of cycling from Liverpool to Kuwait we missed our friends and decided to stay here more long term. But then Dan quite recently saw a job in the Cook Islands and we weighed up the pros and cons of that and then my sister and her husband, who are currently in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, are trying to persuade us that New Zealand is the place to be.  Anyway this was all a tangent, what I am trying to say is that we are moving to an area of Liverpool called Speke. People ask us "why have you chosen to move to Speke?" This handy diagram explains:

If your budget is about £150,000 feel free to use our diagram.


Speke is not a tropical paradise, but to compensate we are going to have a tropical themed living area.

I've been making some things:

 Tropical cushions.

What everyone needs: a tropical ping pong bat.... it's going to be a clock, this is the 12, can you see it?

This is half a coconut shell sprayed gold with added glitter. Imagine 20 of these with a fairy light in each one wrapped around something to make a free standing lamp. If anyone wants the insides of the coconuts let me know. I'm making coconut ice cream and stuff but theres only so much coconut one family can eat. I had to borrow a vice off my Dad for coconut chopping coz Dan refuses to hold things I'm sawing. He is so unreasonable!

And imagine some cool wall paper like this.

When we finally get in we'll have a house warming party, there will be lots of coconut ice cream.