I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I’ve been blogging a little less than usual this year so I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes about what I have been up to. With pictures, obviously, as I’m never far from my camera or iPhone.

The theme, in case you missed, it is my son who grew from a tiny, sleeping-eating… thing to a walking, playing and noisy toddler.

This made January, our first month with the little chap, a bit of a blur. Sure, I was at work, but I don’t remember much of it. The California contingent were over and that helped enormously while we figured out what to do.

In February the pattern continued though with added snow and generally cold weather.

The main feature of March was work. With a major release going badly, I spent much of the week before Easter in the office. Even with fewer days in the week I still worked significantly more than a normal forty hour week and spent most of the holiday weekend recovering. Not a pattern I wanted to repeat through the rest of the year — and one that I managed to (mostly) avoid.

By April Junior was increasingly alert, figuring out how to manipulate his environment, playing with things and pushing anything not actually tied down straight into his mouth.

We’d spend the first few months of the year in London. Perhaps the longest time I’ve spent in one place for years! By May we decided to take a bit of a road trip up to see my family in Yorkshire and then on to the Lake District. Since we don’t own a car and Junior has only spent a few minutes at a time in various taxi’s, we were a little nervous how he would travel.

In the end he travelled like a champ. We had expected to have to stop every few minutes but on the way to Yorkshire. In fact we only stopped once and that was because we were tired. He slept pretty much the whole way. Once Up North we had a good, if somewhat damp, trip. By the time we were heading back to London he had started rolling over (a significant milestone).

A little later we decided to up the complexity and fly to Norway. This was harder both in the sense of distance and in the sense that he was now crawling.

Again, Junior was a star. He slept most of the flight and loved the large wooden floor in the apartment we stayed in — finally somewhere new to crawl around and explore. Oslo was, unfortunately, very wet and miserable but we still had a good week.

We had better luck the following month when I finally managed to redeem a Christmas present from the previous year: an afternoon driving sports cars. I picked a Ferrari, a Porsche and a Lamborghini. Everyone asks which was best and all I can say is that they were different. All fun but in different ways.

Juniors increased mobility meant that we had to childproof the flat much earlier than we’d planned. And that meant little things like eating dinner at the table rather than sat on the sofa. Little hands were increasingly quick… I’m not sure we should be feeding him chips, even though, by this point, he was eating solid food.

The next few months passed in a whirl. The Olympics. More crawling and exploration of dirt and every nook and cranny of our flat.

After warming up (metaphorically if not literally with the terrible weather) with trips to the Lakes and Norway, October was the Big Trip to California to see his cousin and parents and grandparents. Last time they’d met, Junior was only a few weeks old a his cousin just eight months.

This time there were both advanced enough to interact, though that was mostly limited to P offering things to Junior and Junior taking them, or Junior just taking P’s things anyway. I hope P becomes a little more assertive and Junior a little more willing to share next time they meet.

It was also on this trip that Junior started mimicking more effectively. P would scold him, “No, no, no, no,” while shaking his head. Junior quickly learned to copy that (though maybe not the context or why it was being said to him so often). He also took his first few steps; pretty good going for a ten month old.

December is birthdays and Christmas. This picture is of a cupcake taken using my iPhone 5 with an Olloclip. Christmas itself was quiet. We went up to Yorkshire but we were all ill at various points.

In most years travelling and work (and travelling with work) make a much more prominent showing, but this year it was all about the little guy. That’s no bad thing.