A MonkeyFish and his Greyhound (aka the idiot in a dog suit)

As you know, we have a lovely black Greyhound named Izzy. She is a real sweetheart and very patient with the MonkeyFish who, unintentionally, makes her life a misery.

The other day I was sitting outside with a cup of tea and the MonkeyFish was relocating all the lovely white river stones which surround the base of my dwarf lime and lemon trees. He generally carts them all over the garden and I find them stuffed behind the hot water system, the air conditioning unit, under the dogs bed, in the sand pit, in the dogs water bowl, under the door mat etc.

On this occasion he was sitting on the concrete putting the stones in and out of a little bucket from the sandpit using a little spade. Izzy wanders past and flops down beside him. The MonkeyFish starts chatting away to her about what he is doing and I think, awww, how sweet, they are playing together.

I go inside for something and when I come back, I find the MonkeyFish carefully putting the white river stones in her mouth. Izzy takes the stones gently, then rolls her head to the otherside, drops the stones on the concrete and rolls her head back towards the MonkeyFish for the next stone. There are about eight stones piled near her neck so they been doing this for a bit.

It was very sweet. She is such a lovely dog. Even though I often refer to her as the idiot in the dog suit because she usually jumps about like a damn antelope and slides all over the floor.

Haven't gone insane yet

Ponyboy is now seven weeks old and getting huge - he is about 1.5kg heavier than when he was born - and is officially 'thriving'.

He's also started smiling which is very endearing and quite adorable. I'm sure smiling is actually a biological imperative - if they didn't start smiling early, all the screaming and not sleeping would probably lead to most babies being raised by gypsies or exposed on hillsides.

The only negative is that he is not meeting the correct developmental guidelines. We took him for his six week check up with the paediatrician and he rolled over on the examination table to the great surprise of the doctor. The MonkeyFish rolled over when he was about four months old which is perfectly correct. While I am impressed that Ponyboy is strong enough to roll over, I'm praying that it doesn't mean he will be an early crawler/walker.

He's a pretty good baby though and is a good sleeper at night. Those of you without children probably wouldn't appreciate the amazing-ness of this. I give him his last feed at about 9.30pm (which takes about 45 minutes) then put him in his bed for the night. He then wakes up between 2.30 and 3am and then sleeps until about 6am-ish.

The MonkeyFish is having some weird growth/developmental spurt and is not sleeping very well - 4.35am is a stupid time to wake up. He's very restless and is woken up by the damn Kookaburras (which start up at about 3.30am). I'll leave my rant about the lack of daylight savings in Queensland for another time (it's a conspiracy to oppress those with young children, so they are too sleep deprived to defend their rights to whatever takes your fancy etc).



As you can see, the MonkeyFish has grown nearly 6cms in last six months - no wonder he is a bit out of sorts.

All-in-all, we are good. And still here. Just busy (I swear I do at least 2 loads of washing every day).