Heidi, Diabetes, the Show, Fire and Stuff

Heidiho
Oh boy, guess who's hit the terrible twos? Heidi's had her first major tantrums this week. One of them went on for a full 10 minutes while she screamed at me for daring to take away her paste at the end of a craft session. It was really quite impressive, if deafening. She is also into everything - if I turn my back for 2 minutes she's up to mischief. She eats toothpaste, makes towers out of our (breakable) mugs in the cupboard, gets her fingers stuck trying to shove things into the VCR... you name it, she's done it or at least seriously considered it. She doesn't seem to have that inbuilt desire to please as much as Juliet did. If I tell her off she will just laugh or yell at me, then do it anyway. Hmmm.

Her language is coming along really well. She speaks in disjointed sentences now e.g. "Iet [Juliet] [n]aughty hurt Heidi arm". Unfortunately that's usually quite accurate for the subject matter too.

The girls are starting to play together properly at last which is lovely. At least it is while Heidi does what Juliet wants her to do! Things do often degenerate into senseless violence and screaming though. Last week Heidi had scars on her chest from where Juliet scratched her til she broke the skin, and Juliet had a bruised bite mark on her arm. Is this normal sibling behaviour for an almost 2 and 3 year old!?

Heidi's definitely starting to show an interest in toilet training. I'm going to wait til the weather is warmer before I do much about it though.

She loves to dance more than anything. Other passions are endlessly cleaning the walls with damp cloths, pasting, drawing, and playing with dolls. She also likes cars, just to even the gender balance up a bit.

All in all she's in a very cute phase, though we are fearful it's coming to an end and the next more, errr, "challenging" phase is about to begin...

Diabetes
I've been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Thankfully I'm borderline, so no need for horrible injections or even home blood tests (I'm a bit of a wimp, so quite grateful for small mercies!) I do have to follow a strict low GI diet for the next few months though. I'm struggling already. Why is it that as soon as you aren't allowed a certain food, it's all you can think about?

The Show
We took the girls to the Melbourne Show a couple of weeks ago. They had an absolute ball. Juliet had her face painted, they went on a few rides, patted many long-suffering baby animals and were generally very impressed with the whole thing. Juliet wanted to stay "all night"!

Fire! Fire!
In other exciting news, we went on a play date last week to a playground over by the Maribyrnong River. We played for ages, then decided to get a coffee from the café there. There was only us inside, plus one other small group outside. We'd been there for about 15 mins when suddenly the staff came sprinting in, yelling for us to run, grab the kids, get as far away as we could. There was a massive fire. I think it was the gas cylinders out the back of the place because there were a couple of loud explosions, and the fire was huge. 5 fire engines, 1 ambulance, 2 police cars. Especially scary as it was extremely windy, plus the cafe is pretty much in the the middle of park with big trees. For a minute there I thought the car would go up in smoke. (In fact given that we are about to buy a new car, I kind of hoped it would so we could get the insurance!) Even scarier, Juliet had asked me to go to the toilet and I'd told her to wait 5 minutes (she is going every 10 minutes as a bit of an attention ploy at the moment). I'm so glad I was a mean mummy - the toilets are RIGHT by the cylinders and I don't think anyone in there would have survived very happily.

Stuff
The plasterer is coming on Monday to renovate our front room into a (hopefully) lovely habitable place for the girls to share. I can't wait! I'm definitely entering the nesting stage of pregnancy, and it's very frustrating to have all our furniture in the wrong rooms and chaos everywhere. I'm really looking forward to putting things away and getting the place looking good (because of course a newborn baby greatly cares about how your bookshelves are organised...)

We're also in the extraordinarily painful process of selecting a new car, as our old one won't fit 3 child seats in the back row. I can't begin to count the hours of research that have gone into looking for the perfect car, and we STILL haven't decided. My head hurts at the thought! Still, we really need to buy one in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for the final decision.