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"a portrait of my children, once a week, every week in 2015"

Stella: Finally learned to sleep in her big girl bed. All night. All alone. (Okay, with her brother. Until five am. At which point she wakes him up for company. But! Progress.)

Hugo: Started baby school, and so far he has mastered the slide. Although, he gets a D- in circle time.

Mr. Chef was away this week in China, and we all did remarkably well without him. So well, in fact, that I took it upon myself to help Stella learn how to sleep in her room alone. ALONE! (Okay, with her brother,  but without the help of a parent.) I suspect she's been able to do this for a good while now, but maybe, just maybe, we parents were not quite ready to let go of babyhood? That's the way these things go, isn't it? Somewhere deep in the reaches of our minds, we want her to be dependant on us as if creating these conditions mean that she'll never grow up and leave our nest? Or, say, move three continents and several thousand kilometers away from home?

Hugo went off to his very first week of baby school (which isn't so much a school thing as a baby-and-parent drop-in thing but don't tell him that because he's convinced that he's a big kid.) Hugo loved it. Like serious. But mostly he loved scaling climbing frame and then hurtling himself down slides of varying degrees of precarious steepness. He also scrambled up a veritable cliff the other day. He was in hot pursuit of his idol and spirit animal, eight year old Nate. Poor Hugo had a total breakdown when I had to bring him down to safer altitudes, preventing him from throwing himself in the water. A second emotional trauma happened later that day when Nate had to go home. Hugo was inconsolable and spent at least 45 minutes whimpering Naaaaaaeeeee to himself while gazing out the window. 

Anyway, these kids, I tell you. I do love being their Mummy.