Best men, babbling and blogging

Remember Wednesday Witter? Well it's The Monday Club now. Same format, different day. And name. Every Monday, bloggers like yours truly will be musing away and linking them up to Sarah at Hello Wall... whose idea it was. So here we go with my first one...

Apparently, I need to organise one of these... ?

I've got plenty to muse about this week. It's all good stuff too, which is nice. The big news is that, thanks to my best mate, Rob, finally popping the question to his good lady, Helen, I'm going to fulfill the life-long ambition of being his best man. I'm so happy for them both and am really chuffed to be trusted not to lose him on the stag do, the rings on the big day or to not say anything inappropriate in front of their families and friends during the speech. I've not been secretly composing the latter in my head for the past few years though... only a crazy person would do something like that. Cough. Rob was my best man and has set me a tough act to follow. He was also kind enough not to strip me down to my pants, draw a knob on my head and leave me chained to a lamp post, so I'll return the compliment. Probably.

Back at home, Xander has been changing a lot of late and, in the last week, has started crawling backwards – as they do before realising that forward is, well, the way forward – and also babbling. Whereas Dylan started off with 'dadada', his little brother seems to favour 'mamama'. I know, of course, that this doesn't actually mean anything, but it's nice, especially for Kate, that his noise of choice sounds specific to her. As is often the case with second children, he seems to be reaching these milestones earlier than Dylan did. The monkey see, monkey do principle definitely applies here, but I think the movement side of things is further helped by the fact that he's so big and strong for his age. He's still topping the percentile charts in every category and also seems to do baby workouts – we often catch him trying to do sit ups, complete with hilarious facial expression. Funny boy!

The other news to share is that, thanks to work, I'll be off to the Mumsnet BlogFest in November. This will be the second time a job has sent me to a blogging conference; I'm not sure what I'm doing right, but I'll take that! If you're going along too, I'll see you there!