Kate and Andrew Scott

Harriet the Happy

Well our gorgeous girl just keeps getting cuter and dare we say smarter. Here’s a list of things which Harriet has been up to in November:

• Learnt to smile – see photographic evidence opposite
• Has learnt to make noises, sometimes she surprises herself with the pitch and volume!
• Has head control that other 8 week old babies can only dream of! :)
• Is now an at-home cloth nappy wearing bub, in an effort to save money and the environment (yes, we know of all the arguments about water usage!)
• Loves to bat her favourite hanging bird toy on her play mat
• Enjoys listening to her favourite rabbit toy play his (now slightly annoying) song
• Still has basically no hair (compared to the other babies in mothers group) and is at the small but gorgeous end of the growth scale
• Has a large fan club of enamoured followers :)
• Backed a winner at her first Melbourne Cup BBQ

Kate has been getting use to the stay-at-home-mum lifestyle and after a slow start is really started to enjoy being at home. The rhythm of motherhood is certainly very different to that of a full time job, but is great once you get into the swing of it! There’s been a lot of lunches with friends, quiet afternoons at home, walks around the neighbourhood and trips to Highpoint. Mothers Group has also started up so Kate’s slowly starting to get to know some other mothers in Kensington. She’s certainly not alone in staying at home with her bub, on one sunny daywalk around Kensington she passed at least 10 other prams!

Other highlights of November have included:

• Andrew’s graduation ceremony where he collected his Graduate Certificate in Applied Finance and Investment. Harriet and Kate attended and we celebrated Andrew’s achievement with our first family meal out, at the Nando’s up the road. We have since been out several Friday nights to a reasonable cafe in Nth Melbourne that has big comfortable chairs, lots of pasta & rice dishes and dim lights so feeding Harriet and eating one handed doesn’t disturb other diners!
• 50 million visits by the Department of Primary Industries (slight exaggeration but still close to the number of times they’ve rung the doorbell in the last month). There’s an outbreak of fruit fly in the area and as we’re so close to the Vic Markets they’re very concerned about the problem spreading. As the guy this morning said, Kate is probably seeing the ‘blue smurfs’ more often than her family and friends at the moment. But on the plus side it’s apparently been a number of weeks since a fly was reported, although apricot and nectarine flowering is about to commence, and that’s like waving a red flag to a fruit flies. (Kate really feels she’s starting to know to much about all of this!).
• Harriet attended her first Parsons’ family celebration, Tim’s birthday. She kinda stole the show from the birthday boy (photos on Kate’s flickr page) looking very cute in her pink party dress, but Tim bore it with good grace, even having a dance with his granddaughter at the lunch table.
• We headed off to the Victorian Parliament House Open Day and had a good sticky nose around where our state’s law makers get down to business. The scones in the members dinning room were fantastic, better than the CWA ladies at the Royal Melbourne Show (the very highest of praise) and we also got to have a look in the two houses (green and red) as well as the gardens, the library and even the basements.
• Kate went to see Wicked the musical, enjoyed it and brought a fridge magnet to commerate her first extended stay away from Harriet :)
• In a first for us we’ve already started the Christmas shopping!