On Sunday Nathan had his birthday party.  We had a nice, shady spot at Sydney Park which was nice and breezy and not too hot.  The forecast maximum was 34 degrees, and it was quite warm but I don’t know what the temperature actually got to.

We started setting up at 9 am.  We had hoped to set up under a different bunch of trees, but we were pipped at the post by some other people who were just behind Andrew as he drove into the carpark.  Still, it didn’t matter and the place we found for ourselves was just perfect.  After setting up, Andrew went shopping for the last few items (5 roast chickens, bread and ice) while Nathan and I amused ourselves.  I blew up a few balloons and put them in his portacot, and Nathan had a lot of fun trying to hold them, blow them up and basically just play with them.

Nathan refused to sleep all morning, so he must have been pretty tired when the first people started arriving at around 11 am.  Still, he was happy and played nicely during the entire lunch.  He was quite happy to interact with other people and didn’t need to be near me all the time, which was really great!  A few people from the mothers’ group came (Mel, Andrew and Sarah; Robin, Josh and Jade; Katrina and Kyle; Danii and Hannah), Karen and Shanti whom I met on the Births forum were there, as well as Gabe, Julie, Matthew and Angela; Glen, Donna, Mikayla, Ben and Glen’s nephew; Brett, Natalie and Daniel; Aurelie and Nico, and Kate, Greg and Leo who I know from work.

The birthday cake was made by Kate and Greg, and it was fantastic!  It was a very delicious carrot cake with a soft icing and honeycomb that made it look a bit moon-surface-like.  They put a space shuttle on the side, and two space-men on top with the Australian flag.  It was a bit windy, though, and the candle just didn’t want to stay alight.  We gave up after many attempts to get the candle lit for more than a few seconds.  Nathan loved the cake, and also loved feeding it to mummy.

Nathan finally drifted off to sleep in my arms at 1:30 pm, and slept until 3 pm by which time we had nearly finished packing up.  For our first effort at holding a child’s birthday party, I think it went quite well really!  Mind you, Nathan didn’t understand what we were all there for, so I guess the 1st birthday party is really for the parents.  😀

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.

Seriously, where has the time gone??  Our baby has turned into a toddler!  We have written up our first birthday invitations (a simple lunch in a nearby park with his toddler friends) but I am yet to send them out.  I’ve been reading the Mighty Toddler by Robin Barker, and she’s scaring me with what toddlers get up to.  I hope I have enough patience to get through!  He is such a serious child though, we have to work hard to get him to smile…though he will happily smile at strangers after first giving them his serious stare!

In the last couple of weeks Nathan has been working on his walking.  He does a lot of standing for long periods of time now, he happily walks while hanging onto one or two of our hands, and regularly takes several steps on his own. I’m sure it won’t be long before he starts walking places instead of crawling.

Nathan is very helpful when we ask him to help.  He will help pack up his toys, help put carrot sticks into the steamer, and help put pegs away when I take washing off the line.  He just loves being around the action, and always has, but nowdays I stand him on a chair when I am working in the kitchen so he can see what is going on and be involved.  Don’t worry, I am very careful and position the chair and myself so that he can’t fall off and knives are kept far away from his reach.

The falls and bumps and bruises have started, and currently Nathan has a nice little bruise and lump on his forehead after bumping his head a couple of nights ago on our bed head.

He is also starting to sleep longer than 40 minutes during the day, though it is not yet a daily occurance.  Usually when he has a long sleep (up to 2.5 hours!) is in the afternoon, but he has occasionally had a long sleep in the morning.  I just hope it becomes more common, I”ve been waiting a long time for Nathan to sleep a decent amount of time during the day on a regular basis!!  Maybe he just loves sleeping on his gorgeous new space sheets that he got for Christmas!  Mind you, night sleeps have been a bit erratic lately and I am starting to wonder if he is no longer comfortable in the hammock.

Breastfeeding is a changing experience.  Nathan still loves to breastfeed, and he practically pants in excitement when I ask him if he wants any milk.  He doesn’t necessarily lie down to feed now, though I usually make him lie down.  I don’t have too many problems with his teeth, but occasionally they graze me and they are sharp little things!  Ouch!  His pinching during feeding has become worse lately and I resort to using my breastfeeding necklace on a regular basis now.

There is a great playground near us at Sydney Park (would be even better if there was shade there) that has an elevated sand pit.  Nathan has had his first experience at playing in sand at this park and after trying to eat it a couple of times I think he finally got the hang of keeping it out of his mouth.  It was very cute watching his fascination with this stuff that stuck to his hands.  We have since been to the beach for Nathan’s first experience in the ocean, and he seemed to enjoy playing in the sand on the beach too.

We bought a plastic shell during a hot spell last week and put it on the balcony with a couple of buckets worth of water in it for Nathan to cool down in.  Nathan thought it was pretty good, though the water was a little cold for him at first.  We just added a bucket of warm water and he had his bath in it one warm evening.  I’m looking forward to using it more this week when the warm weather returns.

Toy planes get waved around Nathan’s head, cars are driven on the ground, and we think he is saying banana, or at least the ‘nana’ part of the word.  He adores bananas and recently has started saying ‘nana’ when he has a banana.

I use a footrest when I’m breastfeeding, and Nathan loves to stand on it.  About a week ago he realised he could get onto the couch using it as a step up.  We got some video footage of him climbing onto the couch tonight.  I now have to remember to move the footrest away from the couch when I finish feeding.  🙂

We also took some footage of his speedy crawling.

The kitchen cupboards at ground level now all have magnetic locks on them.  They require a magnet, as a kind of key, to be in the right place before the cupboard doors can be opened.  The kitchen drawers still need something to keep them shut because they are just so much fun to open but not so much fun when little fingers get caught in the closing drawer.  We have also rearranged the bedroom so that the bed is now against two walls and I no longer worry about Nathan falling out of bed when Andrew isn’t there.  Yes, well, Nathan fell out of bed about a week ago because I had fed him back to sleep in bed and fallen asleep myself, but Andrew hadn’t gone to bed yet.  A loud thud woke me up, and it was quickly followed by screaming.  So we are slowly making the flat a safer place for an active baby to be in.  Our next job is to relocate the computer and its attached items (which has mostly been done tonight).

Nathan is getting better and better at standing unaided.  I don’t think he is ready for walking because his feet don’t look like they are ready, they are still sort of angled wrong and he still tries to grip the ground with his toes.  🙂  He looks for aeroplanes when he hears them going past our loungeroom window, he looks intently at birds, and Alice is sure that he is trying to say ‘dog’ when he sees dogs.

The elimination communication is going quite well.  When I am at home I generally only miss 1 or 2 wees a day, and some days I don’t miss any (the rest are caught in an appropriate receptacle).  Alice was excited yesterday to report that she had caught another poo….I think she could be a convert to infant pottying!  Nathan is still doing all his poos in the toilet, which I think is wonderful.  We went to the Parents’ room at Westfield on the weekend and a lady commented to me on how much the room smelt.  Not surprising when the bins are filled with wet and pooey nappies!  At least I knew that my son wasn’t contributing to the stench!  I’m even getting used to the weird looks I get when I take Nathan into the toilet.  I definately think that he is learning to hold on until he is offered the toilet (within reason) and I am wondering whether Nathan does occasionally try to let me know that he needs a wee.  We have been hitting the potty whenever I sit Nathan on it, and twice in the last few days he has patted the potty where I thought it might be communication rather than simply playing with the potty.  Both times he did a wee as soon as I put him on it.   And there have been occasions during the night when he is really grizzly and just won’t go back to sleep, but wees when I offer the potty and then basically just rolls over and goes to sleep when I put him back on the bed.

He also loves reaching up as high as he can, and loves turning dials and pushing buttons….

Climbing so he can reach higher, and playing with balls….

being pushed around on his tiger, and stealing stuff out of the shopping bags (I think he’s looking for mushrooms!).

Nathan went through a really bad patch of night sleeps that had me exhausted.  He would wake around midnight and then not go back to sleep for the next 2 – 4.5 hours.  I was getting very frustrated, but finally discovered that bouncing him in the hammock was the only way to get him to sleep in this situation.  Since that find I’ve had much better sleeps and am feeling much better….still tired, but not dead tired.  😀

And I nearly forgot to mention that Nathan now has 6 teeth!  The 2 bottom and 4 top teeth.