Oh, my little girls. You are fifteen months old.
You are sunshine and moonlight, brilliant in your own beautiful, individual ways – but so different. You, my Embla, firstborn daughter, you are capricious and mercurial, serious and contemplative. You make us work for your amusement but when laughter breaks through it is a geyser, and you are captivating. You have recently found your feet and in the space of days, evolved from crawling to running, hands held in front of you like a little squirrel.
Sometimes you stalk your brothers around the room, pressing kisses on them whenever they pause. And nobody dare hurl themselves to the floor to cry lest they find themselves smothered in baby. You love your ‘row, row, row your boat’ song and will clamber onto a lap and take our hands to request that we swing you and sing to you, only your mouth gets carried away and what comes out sounds more like ‘rororobobo’. But it’s ok, baby, we know what you mean! Communication is suddenly of great interest to you and you have started to greet people with ‘hi’ and wish them ‘bye’ with a little wave, and you love to pop out suddenly from behind curtains and boxes with a merry ‘boo!’. You are a fat little chipmunk and we love you so much.
Olympia, you are the little girl I always knew I would have, and yet you still astonish me. I thought that your babyhood would last longer; when you were small, I luxuriated in the wide expanse of it ahead of me. And yet somehow you grew so rapidly, and when I look at you now there is barely a trace of that infant with the blue eyes and that steely set to her chin. You have the sweetest little voice when you sing, and you chatter like a little magpie – words have, of late, become sentences and you are surprisingly eloquent for one so small. At bedtime, sometimes we hear you enticing your sister to wake: “Emmy, Emmy cuddle! Hewwo Emmy! Boo?”. And in the morning you are the first out of bed, a hideous, howling alarm call that morphs into soft snuffling noises, your arms wrapped around my neck and your face smushed into my chest and I carry you down the stairs. All dolls to you are ‘bad baby’, which is what we jokingly call you, and you love to carry them about with you until you tire of them and then, with a careless ‘uh oh, bye bye!’ you hurl them away from yourself. You are my sweetest fluffy duckling and we love you so much.
Back in the day, Little Green Radicals sent my sons their first snowsuits (you can see the boys in theirs at about the same age on this post) so it was so lovely when their new marketing manager got in touch to offer to kit the girls out for winter too.
Embla is wearing Paradise Birds, which is strikingly gorgeous – the colours are so vibrant and that splash of pink just elevates the design to a whole new level for me. And Olympia is wearing the beautifully rich Midnight Peacocks. They retail at £48 each but are well worth it as a winter staple; ours have always had so much use out of them, they are so versatile and are a perfect blend of aesthetically pleasing and comfortable. Ours wear theirs most days as our default snuggly outerlayer, they are the perfect all-body alternative to a coat. They also sent a darling hat (£17) and mittens (£18) to set off the outfit, which you can see in the photo below.
I think their outfits are truly stunning. What do you think?
