Daisy Suzanne Allen - 7 and a half to 8 years

Daisy Suzanne Allen

Born Sunday 6th March 2011

7½ to 8 years old

Her life: 4 to 4¼ years ♥ 4¼ to 4½ years ♥ 4½ to 4¾ years ♥ 4¾ to 5 years ♥ 5th birthday ♥ 5 to 5½ years ♥ 5½ to 6 years ♥ 6th birthday ♥ 6 to 6½ years ♥ 6½ to 7 years ♥ 7th birthday ♥ 7 to 7½ years ♥ 7½ to 8 years ♥ 8th birthday ♥ 8 to 8½ years ♥ 8½ to 9 years ♥ 9th birthday

In summary: Index ♥ From birth to four years old ♥ Four years old to nine years old ♥ Nine years old onwards

Special features: Golden Bear (reprise) ♥ More cookery

An early Saturday in September and we headed over to Matt and Nic's, evidently to witness an apple-peeling machine. They are both wearing identical-looking white T-shirt. This wasn't my lack of imagination in dressing them as we will shall see shortly...

There we go. While we were at Matt's, we utilised his printing services to produce customised T-shirts, Gregory with his default nickname, G-man, and Daisy reflecting her obsession, at that time, with unicorns.

On the Sunday morning, we considered going for a debut parkrun at Platt Fields, but decided to ease into it by having a trial, er, run at the nearby Cringle Park. This is our warm-up.

I don't think that we ran very far before they were drawn by the attracting of the playground.

After taking them swimming, we decided to make our own pizza in the afternoon. There is not much more of a wondrous sight than dough rising.

And now we're ready to roll, with the acceptable mess of flour on the table. I still need more than one rolling pin.

It was Daisy's turn with the rolling pin, and it seems that she really got stuck in.

After the hard work comes the fun bit - topping the pizza.

And here is Daisy's pizza - a fairly minimalist mixture of ham, salami and sweetcorn, with the sweetcorn forming a line through the middle.

After our trial run, the next weekend we went for it and headed over to Platt Fields for our debut junior parkrun. Daisy hated it...

Daisy had started getting creative with PowerPoint recently, which merged here with her love of dogs. Digging out the slide deck now, it had six pages in total: the title page that we can see, then successive slides about Pugs, Cavapoos, emoji poos (nice segue) and monsters, before finishing with a waving hand on a slide titled "BYE BYE!". Not an epic presentation but a sign of how her mind works, perhaps.

This signifies, I think, star of the week. You tend to stand out when everyone is dressed in navy blue and you are covered in golden yellow.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on here, other t han she was in some party gear to go to Harriet's birthday party later that afternoon.

Sometimes, when life gets on top of you, there's not much else you can do but climb into your soft toy bag.

With Lynne disappearing to Tenerife for 6 days, I was in charge of all things children-related, including (gulp) getting Daisy's hair ready for school. This was my attempt (pretty much my first ever, I think) at tying back her hair and clipping it back. It's done strange things to Daisy's mind: "I've got six days of this", she is probably thinking.

A few minutes later and we are off to school, using scooters to speed up our progress. Not sure we have paused here particularly, but the scooters don't look like they're going anywhere.

The next day and it must be International Day (if that's a thing). If you're going to decorate a white T-shirt to look like a flag, Japan is the nation to go for every time. I don't think I had been part of the actual production of this: it must have been done by Lynne and/or Daisy a few days prior.

With Lynne still in Tenerife, I took them both to Alexander's birthday party. Not exactly sure of the venue, but it had a big slide, which they both loved going down...

...and a chance to hang out with Marshall from Paw Patrol.

Later that day, to ease the strain of 24-hour daddy day care, I popped over to Nana Sue's, where they seemed to be performing in a yellow/beige/soft focus zone.

A week later, with Avis and Graham down, we sent for a Sunday lunch at Tusk in Heaton Moor (which had been Kro Bar and more recently is an Italian called Leoni's). Daisy's fashion sense meant she sought an onion ring extension to her glasses. Will it catch on?

Daisy was in the running for the school council (can't recall if she actually got in this year!), so she wrote her speech as preparation. Realistically not promising liquid chocolate, instead focusing on the cleanliness and odour of school sports bibs. Truly hard hitting stuff.

Some of Daisy's craftwork.

Daisy evidently wanted to keep some sort of fitness thing going, here partaking in the Wii Fit jogging game. Either Daisy, Gregory or both found it difficult to jog on the spot and would end up gravitating towards the TV, necessitating my verbal intervention to prevent them getting too close. The jogging sometimes featured a dog and quiz questions. Rather distractingly, I have piled CDs everywhere, evidently doing an audit.

Back when they occasionally did chores, here they are helping me out with those pesky leaves. There are times of the year where they just won't give it a rest.

My regular cycling, whether to work, on weekend rides or cycling holidays, influenced Daisy's image of me, such that my (rather uncomfortable looking) bike became my trademark.

Daisy's enthusiasm for science (and space in particular) was never more evident here.

The weather must have been passably pleasant in mid-October, as they are outside sipping cold drinks in T-shirts.

The next day, we went to Dylan's birthday party at the Brownies' hut (Dylan is one of Gregory's best friends), where they had put up a bouncy castle inside. Daisy makes full use of it, with Jessica, Dylan's sister, looking on.

For the half-term, Lynne took them to Filey while I worked. They visited a farm on one day, with Daisy holding a chick. Inspired by this photo, and raiding the office plastic duck collection (yes, there is actually one of these), I replicated the image as best I could.

They evidently did face painting at the farm, which Daisy showed off while possibly enjoying an evening meal (based on the background ketchup and plates).

With Daisy learning how to play guitar, Gregory was always keen to listen and watch, with slightly crazy hair.

It's that time of the year again. Yes, you guessed it... pumpkin season! Not exactly sure which one is Daisy's and which one is Gregory's, not least because Lynne probably helped Gregory out.

Things had certainly got a little creepy round our house, with Mystic Maeve and Horrible Harriet joining Deadly Daisy. Time to make a sharp exit.

And, of course, after pumpkin season, it is sparkler season. Gregory, you can see, is still indoors (well, sort of), as he was not keen on coming outside and being subjected to the noise of fireworks from other back gardens (this is the day itself).

Like this! Daisy was happy to watch, though.

The above was just the prelim to the big show at the local pub, the Hinds Head, which they laid on for free (although as I write this, in early 2023, they did not put on the last one as it is no longer financially viable for them to do so (you could attend for free as there was no way of controlling the space around the pub). There was always a long wait for them to get going. It is around 8pm here, which is quite late for the kids to be up but we'd committed. It's a long way from basically carrying Daisy for the duration waiting patiently for them to begin then having to walk back home with her as they started as she wanted to go home.

As a self-proclaimed maths enthusiast, it is entirely unsurprising that I had taught her how to do long subtraction. And Daisy was always quick to catch on with such things.

Not only a keen mathematician, Daisy could also turn her hand to song writing (in conjunction with learning to play the guitar, as seen in the photo earlier). The urgency and ambition of the chorus ("If you try you can do anything so try today") is compelling.

We skip forward a week or so, and it's Daisy's Brownies promise ceremony, which involved walking under some sort of held archway...

...before (probably) reciting the Brownie promise (which I don't have to hand, sorry).

A trip to the Woodside for Aunty Katie's birthday meal followed a return to her house, where Matt bear hugged the pair of them.

Another weekend and another trip to Manchester Road park, my default option when they needed some fresh air. Gigantic swings are handy in that there is room for both of them, so only one thing to push (inevitably I would still have been on pushing duty at that point, albeit they would struggle to generate their own momentum on this swing anyway).