In just a couple of weeks Nathan will be one year old!! First birthday invitations have been sent out and a few people have even said they are coming. I just hope the day isn’t too hot because there isn’t much shade at Sydney Park. We went to Nathan’s friend’s (Kyle) first birthday on Saturday and it was so very hot (41 degrees) which made it a very difficult day both for Kyle’s parents and those with little ones.
In the last two weeks Nathan has improved his walking to the stage that he is now more often standing and walking than crawling when at home. When we are out he tends to still mostly crawl until he feels confident of his surroundings. He does still prefer to hold one of my hands when walking, but I think it is because he is more stable and therefore quicker that way, and of course he has less falls too.
Nathan is also getting better at indicating that he needs the toilet. His signing is still hard to interpret (or non-existant at times), but when he takes my hand and walks to the bathroom. or bangs and makes a noise outside the shut, bathroom door, he is clearly telling me he needs to wee. Although we have a potty in the loungeroom, he seems to prefer the one in the bathroom. I don’t know if that’s because Mummy and Daddy use the toilet in the bathroom and so that’s where you should go, or if it is because he often gets a piece of toilet paper after he uses the potty. He loves to wipe himself with the toilet paper, which cracked Andrew and I up the first time he did it. Anyway, I’m very impressed with how he’s going.
Nathan is so obviously trying to work out how the world and everything in it works. He tries to put things together that go together…for example, he is more interested in putting the top on a water bottle these days than drinking out of it. He isn’t happy until the cap of the sunscreen is back on after I take it off! And it still amazes me when he does what I ask him to do….yes, they are simple requests but he will bring me a specific toy I ask for (eg. horse, aeroplane, helicopter, cow, duck, etc.) but he hasn’t worked out colours yet (so asking for the red tug boat doesn’t mean I’ll get the red one, but I’ll get a tugboat!). He says ‘neigh neigh’ for a horse, ‘doh’ for dog, ‘du’ for duck, and ‘nana’ for banana. The boy is obsessed with bananas, he just loves them. Not necessarily to eat them, he just likes to hold them!
Another thing that he has started doing lately is wearing my breastfeeding necklace. He spent about 20 minutes one day just putting it on and taking it off continuously, but he does love to wear it as well.
Nathan is a lot of fun at the moment, though pretty tiring as well. His sleeps are all over the place at the moment…he’s sleeping longer at night and also during the day, but I’m finding it hard to work out when he needs to sleep now and still be able to keep to some sort of reasonable ‘schedule’. I want to see how he goes sleeping in the cot at night (instead of the hammock) but I find it very difficult to get him to go to sleep these days and often end up resorting to bouncing the hammock to get him to nod off, which then means he’s in the hammock for the night! Eh, we’ll work it out eventually.
Oh, and nearly forgot to mention that tooth number 7 has made an appearance… on the bottom right.
