Another month down and it’s hard to specify what Nathan is up to at the moment….he’s just getting better at everything. He is now confidently going up and down steps without hanging on or crawling (depending on step size, of course), his speech contains more words and he is putting groups of words together to portray a meaning. Some groups are repeated over and over, others I recognise as short phrases that I say myself, and on yet other occasions Nathan just comes out with his own selection of words. It’s all pretty cute really.
Swimming is also coming along well. He has a vest with floats built into it that he wears when we are in the pool in our residential complex as it helps to keep him warm as well as give him some buoyancy. The last few days we have taken out the floats at the front and given him a pool noodle and he happily kicks all around the pool, going where ever he wants to.
The biting has stepped up a notch, though. Nathan has been biting off and on for a few months now. I don’t know if it’s a reflection of him being bitten on a pretty regular basis by Solly, Ebony’s son, two days every week, or if it would have just happened anyway (which is probably the case). He doesn’t just bite when he’s upset that we’re stopping him from doing something he wants to do, he also bites when he’s having fun. My arms are covered in bruises from his biting, and Andrew copped a good one on his face tonight! So far it’s only Andrew and myself that he’s bitten, and I hope it stays that way.
What we’ve been doing this month….
Painting
Visited Toronga Zoo with some friends from NZ who came to visit for a couple of days with their 16-month-old son
James and Nathan at Toronga Zoo
And saw real elephants and even a 7 week old baby elephant!
Mummy and Nathan set up the worm farm
More watering of the garden (we now have 2 tomato plants, a chilli plant, bay tree, oregano, thyme, parsley, chives, rosemary, garlic, beans, carrots and lettuce planted. Nathan knows what all the plants are too.
Helping Mummy cook dinner (peeling a carrot….well, attempting to peel a carrot if you want to be accurate)
Playing dress-ups
He looks really confident in the water, although I guess he has had plenty of exposure to that environment.
Hope the biting problem resolves itself over time. Like most things “kid”, 10 differnt people will tell you its caused by 10 different things.
Auntie Silver says have you bitten him back??
Auntie Silver…..I’ve heard of this suggestion as a way of dealing with biting. But Nathan knows what it feels like to be bitten, he’s been bitten regularly over the last 8 months or so by the son of the nanny we use. He even bites himself, though probably not as hard as he bites us. We want to teach him that biting is unacceptable, and to my way of thinking….having mummy or daddy bite him back (ie do exactly what we tell him not to do) isn’t going to do that.