The dismount

Poor Baby B was still suffering from last week's vile cold today, but he did his best to be charming, bless him, and for quite a lot of the time he succeeded, though it didn't take very much to upset his equilibrium. Luckily he does seem to recover from a mood plunge pretty quickly, particularly if you feed him carbs (much like his mother and maternal grandmother, if I'm honest). The most upsetting thing for him is the fact that he's not allowed to play with people's phones, which are of course the most fascinating thing in the world, but in partial compensation he did get to spend a while pushing various buttons on my camera. Right up to the point at which he accidentally learned the file deletion sequence....

And - breathe...

Anyway, plenty of other toys and games are available to entertain, educate, and distract him, and here we have the Boy Wonder casually demonstrating his near-mastery of the rocking whale he received from R and me at Christmas. He can get off it equally well on either side now, but in getting on he always starts on his left foot and swings his right leg over, which is only 100% successful if he approaches it from this side - when he gets on from the other side he ends up facing backwards, and having to hold on to its tail. Given its "distressed" state, I should probably explain that the whale is a kind of family heirloom: it originally belonged to his mother (who probably did most of the damage), and then to his uncle H, and spent the last quarter of a century in storage before being regifted to B. We do give him new stuff too, by the way, rather than just the detritus of his mother's childhood - but there is something special about seeing a toy that was one of L's favourite things at B's age now being enjoyed by her son.