Nathan and Ebony

Only two more months until his second birthday….I just can’t work out where all the time has gone! It’s been a busy month too, trying to get ready for the new baby, trying to get organised for Christmas, trying to tidy the flat so I don’t have to look at all the mess while sitting down feeding the new baby but that’s an almost impossible task when you live with a little hurricane who can create havoc so much faster than I can tidy it up.

Nathan’s speech has improved dramatically this month, though his pronunciation is still difficult to understand, particularly if you are not familiar with Nathanese. He’s also started reciting nursery rhymes/songs and is very pleased with himself when he gets to the end of them so that the end of the songs are always rushed and loud! He misses some of the small words, but gets most in his recitation. He loves ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, ‘Row Row Row Your Boa’t, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and ‘Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and recites them all in a monotone. When we get in the car now he demands his nursery rhyme CD by saying “Baa Baa Black Sheep” which is the first song on the CD.

I think Nathan is at the stage where he has really strong emotions, but just doesn’t know how to control them yet. The smallest thing can set him off crying in such a distressed manner, and yet if I manage to distract him onto something else he’ll be happy again within seconds. Mostly he cries because he wants to do something himself….the biggest culprit at the moment is driving the car. He always wants to jump into the driver’s seat and ‘drive’ which involved fiddling with all the buttons and things in the car, sitting on the seat and pretending to steer and pulling on the seatbelt. When I need him to go into his seat after ‘driving’, he gets very very upset. Also other things like closing the back door when we go out, or turning off the radio, he sees as his jobs and he gets upset when I do them automatically.

Nathan is also an independent little soul. He will go to the fridge and get out what he wants rather than ask me for it in the first place. He does point to the freezer and ask for “cold peas” which are, of course, frozen peas which he loves. He has also discovered a love of ice, probably my fault because I love cold water on these warm, muggy days so I stick bottles of water in the freezer and drink them when they’re half frozen. When the ice is all chunky and I can shake some out of the bottle, I shake some into a little bowl for him and he is delighted and plays/eats it until it’s all gone.

Number and letter recognition has improved, and he is starting to understand the o’clocks thanks to a little Thomas the Tank Engine book that he has and loves. There is a clock that you change the time on as you read through it, with various things happening to Thomas or his friends from 7 am to 6 pm. He still loves his books and pesters us to read to him, though many he knows so well he can almost recite them. He will take my hand and tell me “mummy, out of kitchen” (or wherever I am) just because he wants a book read, or something else he wants me to do with him.

The things we’ve been doing this month include:

Trying to listen to baby’s heartbeat at home.

Putting up the Christmas tree…which he’s taller than this year. 😀

Eating pizza and finishing off with gelato.

Playing ‘chase me’ at the playground.

We went to Solly’s second birthday party.

Driving…with Mummy as passenger (he opens the door for me and asks me to sit down and shut the door).

Went to Sculpture by the Sea.

Spent some time with Shirley.

Wow, 21 months old!  Nathan is growing into quite the little independent boy, wanting to do everything himself and gets very grumpy/upset if he’s not allowed to.  He wants to drive the car, walk by himself, push the pram if I have it out rather than get in it, do the housework (I won’t discourage that one!), etc.  He also has a terrible fascination of running tap water, and constantly wants to wash his hands or one of his toys.  I have a hard time getting him to stay away from the taps, and have tried to explain that we don’t want to waste water, but it’s a hard concept to grasp.

Nathan is getting his numbers all worked out.  He can count to 13 without any problems, then gets a little mixed up but knows that after 19 is 20, and from there he can get to 39 (after which he generally jumps to 100).  He recognises the numbers up to 10 and points them out everywhere we go.  He’s also going great guns on his letters.  There are many letters that he can recognise, and he can say most of the alphabet, though he gets a little mixed up towards the end.  Today in the car he was pointing and saying “em, em, em”.  It took me a while to realise he was pointing to the Macdonalds big yellow ‘M’!!  Hmmm…..

Nathan’s language skills are also getting better, though he is still a bit hard to understand at times.  He is almost saying sentences, though he misses out the little words like ‘in’ and ‘the’ etc.  Yesterday while we were in the pool he wanted me to go under water like Daddy does, so he said to me “Mummy under, like Daddy do”.  🙂  Talking about swimming, he’s also doing really well and is now able to swim by himself if he has a back float with 3 pieces of foam in it.  It is such hard work for him, so if we plan to be in the pool for a while I give him his pool noodle as well and he can kick and paddle laps of the pool with the back float and the noodle.

And, of course to finish off, here are some photos of things we’ve been doing this month.

Nathan is starting to enjoy the swing!!  Helping to keep him swinging (instead of sitting there for 10 seconds and then asking to get off) is counting the number of swings.  We now often swing to the count of 100!

Picking and then eating all our cherry tomatoes.

Going on 2 trains, 2 buses and 2 ferries within the space of 3 hours (and not achieving anything because it was heavily raining when we got where we were going).

Painting, drawing and playing with playdough.

Enjoying his first Sushi Train experience.

Sleeping in his new bed.

Waiting in the lobby for Daddy to come home.  When I tell him that Daddy is nearly home he gets very excited, demands me to help him put clothes on (if he’s running around without or only half dressed), gets a cushion to sit on because the floor is very cold, and then waits, watching and waiting for the lift to open.  When I tell him that Daddy is nearly home it goes something like this:

Nathan: pants, pants, pants on, pants on, pants on!
Me: help Nathan to put pants on
Nathan: get cushion, get cushion!
Me: watch Nathan run to the couch and grab a cushion, then run to the front door saying…
Nathan: wait Daddy!  wait Daddy!!!

And I can’t forget the biggest excitement of the month…hearing the baby’s heartbeat!

We have always had sleep issues with Nathan, whether it be that he doesn’t get enough sleep, catnaps, or is just plain difficult to get to sleep.  That’s where we are at at the moment, he’s difficult to get to sleep.  I have a few strategies that I can use during the day, but at night it generally comes down to a breastfeed.  The breastfeed starts off with wriggling, leg waving, kicking and generally trying to do acrobatic tricks (actually, I sometimes wonder if I’d still be breastfeeding if it wasn’t such a useful sleep tool, I’m seriously not enjoying it at the moment) and gradually Nathan relaxes until he’s asleep.  The whole thing takes about half an hour.  If he doesn’t breastfeed to sleep then I’m stuck with the ‘lie on the bed and tell Nathan to lie down and put his head on the pillow for an hour and a half’ method.  This usually involves me getting annoyed with Nathan for wanting to stand up, get out of bed, talk, etc and I try to make him lie still by holding him, but that results in lots of crying, so I let him go and we’re back to where we were.  I sing, I breastfeed, I talk to him, cuddle him, pat him on the back….anything that might help him to relax for a few minutes.  I hate this method of getting him to sleep, it takes so very long to achieve the desired outcome and there are usually many tears along the way.

Both of these methods took place in our bed, and once Nathan is asleep I would transfer him to his cot/toddlers bed (we took the side off his cot ages ago in the hopes he’d like being in it more if he could get in and out).  When he woke in the night I’d quickly transfer him back to our bed, and most of the time he would crawl up onto my pillow and go back to sleep within minutes.   If the transfer to our bed took a bit longer, or I tried to settle him in his bed first, then it would be at least an hour and a half before he would go back to sleep.  We went through a lovely period when Nathan would sleep the entire night in his bed about 50% of the time without waking, but the last few months we’ve been lucky if he slept in his bed all night once a fortnight.

To be honest, most of the time I love having the little munchkin in our bed.  Obviously he feels safe being so close to Mummy and Daddy, and he has always slept so much better there than on his own.  However, sometimes he pushes against me so hard that he literally pushes me out of bed, at other times it’s Andrew who ends up at weird angles on the bed because Nathan is taking his space.  Other times he sleeps perpendicular to Andrew and I, and takes up more than half the bed.  We have also been wondering what’s going to happen when the baby is born, because I’m planning on feeding him/her in bed during the night rather than doing the silly ‘fall asleep on the couch while feeding in the night’ approach that I started doing with Nathan until I realised that feeding in bed meant I got heaps more sleep!  There is no way that a baby would fit in bed with Andrew, Nathan and I!  So we decided to take some steps to get Nathan out of our bed….not out of our room, just out of our bed!

Last weekend we bought Nathan a single mattress, and this weekend we found a bed frame for him.  We brought it home, put it together (with Nathan’s help), put new sheets, doona and doona cover on his bed and told him that it’s his big bed and we hope he likes sleeping in it.  Last night was his first night in his bed.  We read books in his bed, said goodnight, turned out the light and I fed him to sleep in his own bed.  He woke up once in the night, I jumped in bed with him and within minutes he was asleep again.  I consider this to be a success…a whole night in my bed without a little wriggly worm kicking me.  🙂

Operation goodnight sleeptight continues….I have hopes that Nathan will be sleeping through the night again soon, and in his own bed, but only time will tell.

Testing out his new bed when we finished putting it together

Reading a book in his new bed

We had just finished reading a book and it was time for Nathan to go to sleep.  He climbed into his bed, lay down and pulled his blanket up to his chin.  Every time he does this I have this wild hope that he will actually relax and go to sleep in his bed.  As usual, though, it lasted all of 5 seconds before he stood up and came into our bed where I generally breastfeed him to sleep.  I always know he’s tired when he asks for “m’l”, his way of saying milk. Andrew said goodnight to Nathan but doesn’t usually call him a prince…..

Nathan: m’l, m’l, m’l
Andrew: Goodnight my little prince.  Are you a prince?
Nathan: [Nod]
Nathan: m’l, m’l, m’l
Andrew: What are you the prince of?
Nathan: [pause] Boobie!!

😀

Nathan is now 20 months old, and wanting to do just about everything himself.  He can get his pants off if they’re a stretchy sort of fabric, but can’t manage jeans yet.  He likes to try to put socks, shoes, undies, pants and tops on and is slowly getting the hang of some of them though he still needs help with them all.   Words are coming thick and fast, he’s a real little chatterbox most of the time.  He repeats and repeats his phrases until I say what he’s saying, I guess because then he knows that I understand him.  Sometimes I can’t work it out and he just keeps at it, hoping I get it.

Nathan just loves counting things now, though he often counts faster than he points to things, so if there’s (for example) 5 things he’s counting, by the time he points to the last one he might be up to 7.  Sometimes he counts something more than once too.  He counts to 13 without any errors, and then he wants to jump to 16.  We can prompt/tell him what comes next up to 19, he knows 20 comes next, can get to 29 and then we prompt him for 30, and on it goes.  He seems to want to understand letters, but is only recognising a select few so far.

Nathan loves to paint, play with play dough, draw with crayons or chalk, play with his wooden fruit and vegetables, cars, balls and, of course, vacuuming!  He also loves to water the ‘garden’ which is essentially a few pots of herbs or veggies on the balcony, and feed the worms.

Nathan is also a climber.  He will climb just about anything, and today he learned a bit of a lesson.  He was climbing on some outdoor furniture when we were visiting some friends of Andrew’s, and the chair fell over while he was on it.  He bumped his nose pretty hard on balcony floor and I think he’s going to have a pretty big bruise and a sore nose for a while.  Still, he didn’t seem to learn his lesson and continued to climb on the furniture!!

Nathan also often does what we call his ‘funny walks’ where he will walk with his knees together, or bob up and down and he walks, etc.  He’s been doing this for a while now, but recently he’s started walking on his tippy toes as well.

What Nathan has been up to this month:

Talking to people on his mobile phone (no batteries installed)

Reading with Grandpa

Making his masterpieces

Playing blocks with Grandma and drawing with Daddy

Making his turtle stacks (inspired by Yertle the Turtle, Dr. Seuss)

Showers with Mummy…and blurting the shower door

Sofa testing at Baby Kingdom

Everyone says it and it drives me NUTS!! Nathan loves to hand money over when we buy things from a shop….the shop person receiving the money will say it. Close family or friends might say it in response to him doing something they wanted him to do. I’m sure Ebony (his nanny) says it. People we don’t know will say it if they happen to chat to us in the supermarket or on the beach. However, it’s a phrase I try very hard not to say (took a while to get the hang of it but the words rarely pass my lips these days) and something Andrew tries hard with (and is succeeding) as well.

The idea behind it (for those of you who read here and don’t know) is that you want your child to do things because they want to do them, and not because it pleases his parents or others. The idea is that this can set up the trap that the child needs to keep performing to feel accepted and loved, and by not telling him that he is a good boy after he puts in some effort can make him feel rejected (and I know someone who has real…and sad…experience with this and their child). It potentially raises a child that is dependent upon praise for the approval of others, and can make him scared to try new things. There is a lot of information about this philosophy to be found in books and on the internet. The thing is, it makes sense to me. I can’t see the point of saying “good boy” if Nathan eats his meal or gets me the whisk from the drawer in the kitchen. What makes more sense to me is to comment on the fact that he finished his meal, and simply say “thank you” for getting the whisk. Of course there can be more words put in there to help clarify why you’re saying and why you’re saying it which also helps. And the praise isn’t restricted to the ‘good boy’ phrase. It certainly goes further, so we deliberately find other ways of recognising effort rather than using an easy praise phrase. Examples might be: for doing a painting (“great painting” vs a discussion of what was painted and the colours used) or kicking in the pool (“great kicking” vs “you’re kicking is improving with all the practice you’ve been doing”).

I love it when I see Nathan rejoice in what he has managed to achieve. No praise is required…you can simply see the joy in his face and in the delighted way he claps his hands. It’s wonderful, and so easy to join in on without using a praise phrase. So it almost broke my heart yesterday when Nathan was ‘helping’ to vacuum the floor, and repeating over and over and over “good boy, good boy, good boy”. He wouldn’t let me take the vacuum cleaner from him even after he’d spent ages vacuuming, and he repeated his little mantra much of the time. It seemed to me that he was doing it just so he would get the praise that he wanted, even though I know that he does like playing with the vacuum cleaner. I eventually had a discussion with him about how he is a good boy but not because he was vacuuming, and how Daddy and I love him no matter what he does. He was happy to stop vacuuming soon afterwards, so I’m not sure if it’s because I told him he was good or if he would have done it anyway. Either way, it’s made me determined that I ask people who regularly spend time with him to try not to use such phrases.

I had decided to make a list of all the words that Nathan was saying and using spontaneously at 18 months of age.  I’m not talking about the words that he says when he copies what someone says, but words he comes out with by himself.  Naturally, since he still can’t make all the sounds yet, many probably don’t sound like the actual word to the casual observer, but to Nathan they are words and Andrew and I know what he’s saying (helped along sometimes by some Nathan-styled sign language).  For example, he says  something that sounds a bit like “Ne-ne” which I suddenly realised a few weeks ago is Nathan’s way of saying ‘Nathan’ because he points to himself every time he says it!  It doesn’t sound anything like ‘Nathan’ but it’s a word that Andrew and now I recognise….should that word be added to the list?  Most words do sound like what they’re supposed to, but then there are words that sound pretty much identical and it’s only really the context that helps us to distinguish them.  For example, ‘money’ and ‘Mummy’ sound pretty much the same, but it’s obvious that Nathan is saying ‘money’ when he’s holding out a 20 cent piece.  Similarly, the words ‘hockey’ and ‘horsey’ sound the same, but when Nathan is holding his hockey stick or cantering around like a horse it’s obvious which of the two he’s saying.  So, after debating with myself about this, I finally decided to make a list of words that Nathan used of his own accord and are recognisable by Andrew and myself, regardless of how they sound to others.  There are some 130 words on my list, and I’m sure I have forgotten some…even now I can think of one or two I’ve fogotten to include.  We also hear new words every day, so it’s a bit hard to keep up!  Anyway, here it is (you can click on the image to make it bigger).

Word map made using www.wordle.net/

EC is still going well. Nathan is now starting to get the hang of telling me (in particular, and Andrew sometimes) when he needs the toilet, with some time to get there as well.  His bladder is obviously able to hold more now, since he only wees about every hour and a half during the morning and about every hour in the afternoons now.  In fact, Nathan is getting so reliable about holding his wee and/or telling us he needs to wee that I am starting to not watch the clock so closely. When we are at home and he has a bare bum, he is starting to just run to the potty of his own accord and sit on it to wee. Yes, we still have days when he has two or three wee misses, but in general he’s staying dry all day. The training pants that I made him are getting really tight on him, so I’m looking forward to when I’m no longer working and I can have him in undies full time.  The only time he wears them is when Ebony looks after him, so I haven’t been feeling inclined to make any more because I don’t need them!

It is really amazing the amount of development that has occurred since Nathan turned one year old. His speech is coming along in leaps and bounds, his motor skills are improving to the point that he can gently put a block on top of a tower that he’s building with blocks, he’s enjoying drawing and can sit for quite a long time looking through his books by himself! He still loves Mummy or Daddy to draw things for him, to build him towers he can knock down, and to read him loads of books, but he is starting to be a little less dependent on us for all his entertainment.

Nathan had his 18-month vaccination and check up last week.  He’s gone up to the 10th percentile for height (78 cm) and is somewhere between the 75th and 90th percentile for weight (13 kg).  Andrew distracted him with his Iphone as he got his vaccination, and so he didn’t make a sound!  So much better than the extended screaming we experienced at the 12-month vaccinations.

We also took off one of the sides of his cot this month in the hopes that he will like being in his bed if he can get in and out on his own.  I think it’s helped a little, but we are still a long way off him actually going to sleep in it!  Currently I transfer him after he falls asleep in our bed, and more often than not he still ends up in our bed at some stage during the night.  I have stopped breastfeeding him during the night, though, as it wasn’t helping him get back to sleep at all and I was finding it quite irritating to have him sucking for up to an hour almost every night if it didn’t help him sleep.

To finish up, here are a few photos from the last month.

A very sleepy boy eating his dinner.

Yummy soup!

On Daddy’s back (for the first time) in the city

Reading books on his bed

Looking for ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’

Asleep with Arthur-Bear

Stomping with the soldier crabs (open a bigger file of the crabs by clicking)