baby wayne

otis and kimberley recently took a trip to visit family on the golden gold coast and coffs harbour where the bananas are only six dollars a kilo. otis enjoyed spending time with his paw paw and his tai tai, and meeting his great uncle harry and great aunt kathy for the first time.

otis has recently become a tornado of destruction - he crawls around to cupboards and baskets and anywhere there is stuff and distributes it as widely across the floor as possible. folded washing is of particular interest and cannot be left unattended for more than a couple of seconds at a time. otis' trail of mayhem continued to sydney where our little family was reunited.

we stayed with nanna christine and grandpop ross and and otis had quite the time.

he enjoyed his bath times.

otis continued a new adventure in standing up that began in coffs harbour. curiously, this activity appears to only be possible in front of an appreciative audience and often concludes with otis giving himself a healthy round of applause.

up ...

and look at me ...

and down.

this appears to be in keeping with what appears to be a tendency to ham it up for a crowd - common crowd-pleasing attempts include big smiles, fake laughing and coughing and repeition of a greeting that is an amalgam of "hey" and "hi."

otis has a funny vocabulary that consists of some part words and some sounds that have variable meaning. bye bye and nai nai are occassionally used out of context and ya ya is yoghurt, ma is milk and ba referred originally to banana but now means any solid food.

otis' eating continues to amaze - one day at child care otis reputedly scarfed four bowls of lunch, he has been to yum cha a couple of times, ate a big chunk of cheese at the market on saturday and he has penchant for pears and strawberries.

since returning home otis has been enthusiastically reacquainted with his toys, his dog and his books. there is a firmly established pre-sleep routine that involves reading several books. attempts to go to bed without this routine are not received favourably.

when we were in sydney otis visited with his cousin olivia. alexandra and dave came and had lunch with us and it was great to finally meet little olivia.

hello olivia

grandpop and olivia

genevieve and annie also came to see us and we were lucky enough to meet olive who, like olivia, is about seven weeks old. it's strange to see little babies again because it seems like so long ago that otis was that small - in some ways it feels like he might never have actually been that small although we are pretty sure he must have been.

Since Otis turned one the question we are most commonly asked is 'Is he walking yet?'.

Grandma often regales us with the story of how Justin was a late walker. At 16 months Justin had yet to walk. This was a source of great embarrassment to Grandma, whose friends' children were all walking. She decided he needed some encouragement, and so sent him off to childcare in shorts, where the concrete floors were a strong disincentive to crawling.

Until recently Otis had shown little interest in joining the rest of us on two feet. Enter the trolley. We bought him a little wooden trolley, and now he loves nothing better than to motor up and down the hall or backyard, looking up at us occasionally to say 'look what I can do'. He trundles along happily until he hits something, then calls out to us 'urggh, urggh, urggh' until we dutifully arrive to turn the trolley around so he can trundle off once more.

A while ago at the playground we met a little girl who just couldn't understand why Otis wasn't walking. She bent down to talk to him, 'Come on, up you get. Stand up, come on, walk'.