Today is our last day at Pat and Richard’s house: tomorrow, Pat, Hattie, Joe and I start driving north to cross the Channel by way of the Chunnel – we’ll stay en-route tomorrow night, and arrive in England on Sunday. And then Tristan is back with is on Monday! Yay!

My plan of sleeping in the living room last night went reasonably well: I was still up with the babies several times in the night, but I did leave them to self-settle a lot more, and they were only fed every three hours (which sounds like a lot, but not when compared with our recent nocturnal snacking activities). I’m confident that tonight should be much better – they’ve both been easy to settle all day, and when Hattie woke up this evening after being asleep for 90 minutes it only took a minute of cuddling and 30 seconds of grizzling in her cot before she was asleep again.

Pat and Richard had some friends round this morning and, as usual, Hattie held court:

The visitors had last seen Hattie and Joe just over a fortnight ago, and they couldn’t get over how much the two of them have grown since then! Tristan is in for such a lovely surprise when he joins us next week and gets to spend time with his clever little babies.

Joe tackled a chunk of bread for lunch, and thoroughly enjoyed himself in the process:

Later in the day he was similarly enthusiastic about spinach:

Nanna decided to give him a spinach beard and moustache, but his reaction made it clear that he regards it a sin to waste food – he insisted that she stop clowning around and keep feeding him.

Meanwhile, Hattie wasn’t a spinach fan – she tried a couple of spoonfuls, lost interest when I wouldn’t relinquish the spoon, and then sat around and looked cute.