Bridget's stuttering and slewing commando crawl gets her where she wants to go. Her world is no longer made up simply of 'here' and 'elsewhere', the boundary between the two marked by the reach of her arms, and permeable only by propitiating a parent. Now her world is full of 'places I can get to' too - and it may be a small domain as yet, but it is growing like crazy. I find myself wondering whether cognitive developments to do with the perception of the world as a three-dimensional continuum are related to this shift. And I find myself wondering whether anything in our house will be safe ever again.

A very small event: Bridget reaching to knock over a tower of coloured cups, and closing her eyes just as she reaches it - rather than in startled response to the clatter as it falls. I couldn't tell you when she started doing this. And I don't think it is a major cognitive advance. It's simply another bit of evidence that, slowly but surely, she's learning how the world works.

The various book proofs and indexes which have swamped the last few weeks are all done, and all sent back to the publishers - and I feel like I have some time to start writing blog entries again. First off, I've been meaning for a while to report on the day two Saturdays ago when Hester went to another of her London rehearsals, and I had my third day alone with Bridget. You may remember that shortly before the first such day, Bridget started refusing bottles of expressed milk, and that she drank only 7oz for the 13hours she was alone with me - most of it in desperation towards the end. By the second time she was on solids and so had slightly more nutrition, even though the still-dominant milk part of her daily diet was a nightmare. This time was bliss: Hester fed just before leaving at 6am, and on her return at 8pm, and we had a wonderful milk-free time in between. (The timings may have been odd, but Bridget only has milk at the very start and end of the day now anyway.) It was very, very nice simply to have a day looking after Bridget without the feeling that I was simply the wrong parent - a tasteless ersatz substitute for the real thing.

Our new computer is now up and running*, and we can do photo uploads again. First of all, in very belated response to a request from Claire, we have some pictures of Bridget's bedroom. Then there are general pictures from May, pictures of our holiday in Wales, and pictures from June. A few of these are scans from prints taken with our non-digital camera, and you'll probably see that our scanner needs cleaning.

*The old computer went through three repair people, none of whom had met a problem anything like it, and none of whom could identify what was wrong more closely than 'something up with the motherboard or processor'. We eventually decided to cut our losses and sell the old computer to one of these guys for salvage, and splash out on a new one. These words come to you from a nice new G5 - as if you cared.

Bridget's having a bit of trouble adapting to summer food. She really likes fruit (it's hard to get her to eat anything else in the morning), but the down side is that she's getting very diarrhoetic, with five or six nappies filled yesterday. It makes her irritable, and she doesn't sleep as well during the day. However, she has slept the last two nights without waking at all, and this despite producing the worst nappies we've changed since she started on solids. Needless to say, nappy-changing is not a particularly happy time right now, and it's even harder to keep her still and lying on her back.

I'm trying to stick to a regime of lots of starch today, to see if we can get her insides back on an even keel. It remains to be seen whether Bridget will be compliant with this plan.

I have now witnessed Bridget's method of sitting up. When she's lying on her back, she gets her top half onto her side and then pushes herself up from the side. If she's lucky, she manages not to overbalance the far side. If she's not, she topples down, bangs her head and wails. It's very hard leaving her to hurt herself in the course of learning, but I grit my teeth and try to bear it. Once she's got to grips with sitting up a bit more quickly, we'll try and capture a video of it.

We've just returned from our third weekend trip to Cambridge. After a smooth day last Saturday when I went to London and Mike had a much better time than before (it helps that Bridget is only having milk morning and evening now) we set off on what we expected to be our normal six-hour (including stops) trip to Cambridge. Eight hours later we crawled into Chesterton, thanks to multiple sets of roadworks and the normal Friday-afternoon plethora of traffic. Bridget was amazingly good for the whole of the journey, in spite of this. Daddy sat in the back for the last couple of hours and amused her with silly noises and attempts to feed her couscous.

We had a lovely weekend with our friends Jonathan and Victoria, Mike's goddaughter Mahoney (pronounced Marnie) and Edmund. Bridget slept without any problems, even through a few shouting spells from the other two, and so we allowed ourselves to leave her for a couple of hours on Sunday evening so that Mike could actually come to the concert.

Then yesterday we dropped in at St Albans to meet Claire, Jack and our other goddaughter, Katy, who are back in England for a few weeks. We had a great morning introducing Bridget to them all; it was just a shame that John wasn't there as well. Some lovely pictures to come of this when the new computer finally arrives...

Then a fairly uneventful trip home. Once again, Bridget was wonderful, even coping with having her evening meal an hour and a half later than normal, and going to sleep in her usual cot without much of a protest, and sleeping through the night as normal.

The highlight of the weekend, however, is that Bridget appears to have learnt to sit herself up. There were a couple of times when we put her down for a nap, when she decided that she really didn't want one. Returning to find the source of the anguished screams, Mike discovered her sitting up in the travel cot, when I know that I left her lying down. She has yet to repeat this feat when either of us can see it, but it's fairly clear that mobility is rapidly improving, and we really should get down to some child-proofing of the house.