About 4 months ago I was listening to a podcast on which the presenters said something along the lines of "getting to 18 weeks of parenting makes you feel brilliant but you've not seen anything yet". I like to think I took notice.

Leo's now getting on for 8.5 months and he's going through some changes as usual, but this time we are at a loss to explain exactly what is happening. It's tough work through the night as he's not sleeping in any consistent blocks and waking up quite distressed. As ever, Sarah is being utterly brilliant and guiding him along his way, and hopefully I'm making enough of a difference where I can to allow everyone to be happy as possible.

We're still far away from my idea of Leo being a little man, which I defined to myself a while back as being able to walk and talk in some manner. But it's wonderful seeing his progress. He's climbing up us much more effectively and regularly, and much more stable in his ability to handle hunger, being tired and tolerance of frustrations. He's chatting to us with lots of different sounds too, moving toward to high pitched squeals that I know Sarah loves so much in other babies. I look forward to seeing how she copes with his calls to the wild.

This week we're picking up the new car. For the last 6 months we've been counting down the days to get rid of the Clio as it's not big enough to travel safely in with all of us alongside the luggage we need for a weekend away. The deadline is basically now for getting rid of it, although we may be a little early, but it is good to know we're moving on. Next up is saving for the house, and that'll be a fair way off still.

Researching cars is hard work. There's no site that's actually that useful for comparing reviews. Parkers is excellent in terms of details (although the new mobile friendly version seems mostly intent on hiding the previously well ordered information all over the place). Autotrader and others are mostly only useful for new cars. So it'd be nice to get a comparison site of all the stats in one place and actually group the cars effectively. Parkers for example tells you 3 alternatives to consider, but they're inconsistent so 1 car leads to 3 others but they may or may not link back and it's not possible to see the whole web.

In the end we went for the car that's best rated, cheapest to run and most spacious. So it seems odd everyone in the world isn't driving them. But more fool them. Bring on Wednesday and all our new estate entails.