Holy moly: Hattie and Joe are eight months old! And as you can see from this month’s official photo, they’re significantly wrigglier than in previous months…

And man, they’ve suddenly turned into big babies! Check it out: they can now do their monthly photo sitting up unsupported!

They’re fascinated by everything:

They’re extremely jolly most of the time:

They’ve started interacting with each other:

And they’re endlessly sweet and endearing:

It’s fantastic to be home again after such a disrupted few weeks. I gave them a few days to get over the journey, and now I’m working to a decent routine in place – for all our sakes! This is a time of real development and change for the two of them: they’re due to move from three daytime sleeps to two sleeps, and to increase their food consumption to three meals a day. Today was the first day that I incorporated both of these things, and they’ve handled it incredibly well (touch wood). I expect that we’ll still have days where they need three naps, but it will be wonderful when two naps is the norm and we can plan our days accordingly.

The other issue to be ironed out after the trip is the seemingly endless overnight wake-ups and feeds. Yet again, I’ve had to revisit the self-settling principles with them and – yet again – my younger sister Vickie has been the voice of reason, helping me to figure out what to do. When I was talking to her over the weekend she made two excellent points: that I was treating them like newborns (frequent night feeds, endless resettling, etc), even though they’re big babies now; and that I was prioritising their short term happiness (at being picked up when they don’t want to be in their cots, and cry to tell me that) above everything else – my physical and emotional health, my happiness, my relationship with Tristan… Vickie pointed out that Hattie and Joe will quickly adjust if they have to stay in their cots and get over it, but that they’d suffer in the long run if their mother was sick or miserable, or their parents weren’t happy. I know that she’s right.

Sure enough, after hardening up and leaving the babies to cry for a few minutes, we’ve gone from them sleeping for two hour stretches and wanting several feeds a night to sleeping for anything from four to seven hours at a time, and having only one of two feeds. And they’re certainly not traumatised by it all – they see me in the morning and absolutely beam at me. Maybe, one of these days, I won’t sabotage things by changing what clearly works!