Child's Play: Another busy fortnight has passed, and Tim has become very mobile. He is now able to roll over on to his tummy.
However, he is thwarted from further movement by the bars of the play gym (a soft mat with two bars that criss-cross over the baby's head). Every so often, he gets caught with one leg on either side of one of the bars and can't free himself, much to his frustration. Helpless, he has to wait until he is set free, but within minutes he may well be back in the same predicament.
He has also found his toes and spends a lot of his time holding onto them and rolling around in circles. He is on target every time he reaches for something, whether it's my glasses, my nose or my ear. At the moment, he is partial to holding on to my ear when being carried around.
He is beginning to try to crawl, pushing one leg out behind him, and gets very irritated at making no progress, although it's surprising the distance he can cover just by rolling.
We were invited to a christening over the bank holiday weekend. Tim thoroughly enjoyed the day. He assumed all the people at it were there specially for him, and Fiona, the baby being christened, was just another of his many fans.
She is a month older and is already sporting two front teeth. Tim's canines are coming down first and are causing him a lot of stress. Four awakenings per night are commonplace, so the sooner his teeth arrive, the better. He is still getting two feeds a night, but the other two wakenings usually take longer as I have to rock him back to sleep, or dose him with Calpol, depending on the severity of the pain.
Michael took a fortnight's holidays and we spent the first week in Ballyconneely. Friends take an old Coastguard house beside the harbour there every year and we rented another one.
Everyone's social life incorporated children in some way or another, making the holiday easy.
The houses are in a terrace and the monitors work between them, which meant that our friends were able to come to us for dinner one night, and still be able to hear their children in their own beds.
During the day, the beach was full of families whose children all made friends with each other and whose parents shared the responsibility of keeping an eye on them.
Restaurants were friendly to babies - and the smoking ban made dinner in the local pub not only possible, but pleasant.
We went to a restaurant in Clifden for lunch one day and struck up a conversation with someone working there who, it emerged, had eight-month-old twins. Two days later, we went back for dinner and a very nice woman working there offered to take Tim for a walk, as he wouldn't settle. She turned out to be the twins' mother.
One of the biggest changes for new parents is talking to other people's children who come to look at "the baby"! The other thing I find difficult is letting other children hold Tim. He is very heavy and they are very small and it makes me nervous.
We took Tim to a beach one day and I wet his feet, which didn't impress him one way or another, but he didn't like the sand. Apparently, I was two before I would put my feet on sand, so hopefully he isn't going to take after me.
• Susan Hayden is an Irish Times staff member - her column appears fortnightly.