After Nathan’s puddle stomping efforts last week we decided it was worthwhile getting him some gumboots.  We were at a second-hand baby and children’s market today and found this cute yellow ones.   They’re pretty large and Nathan tends to trip over them a bit at the moment, but they are perfect for puddle stomping!

At La Perouse yesterday.

Someone once told me that the only constant with babies is change.  I’m finding that’s still true for toddlers too.  Last month I was ecstatic that Nathan was going to sleep at night without being breastfed to sleep, and he was sleeping well and just waking once for a wee when he would relatively quickly go back to sleep.  Getting Nathan to sleep at night during the last month hasn’t been so easy and I have often had to resort to a breastfeed just to get the boy to relax.  Oh well, he’ll get there sometime!

We had a really nice holiday on Hamilton Island.  It’s worthy of another post, so I won’t say much about it here.  The photo at the top of this entry was taken on Reefworld, the gimmicky-named platform run by FantaSea that is located on Hardy reef.  It is essentially a platform on the reef from which you can snorkel or dive.  There was a little area for children to stand in the water and feed the fish, which Nathan just loved.

Nathan has quite a large vocabulary, though many of his words need to be interpreted because he doesn’t make ‘c’, ‘l’, ‘r’ or ‘g’ sounds yet.  A selection of words off the top of my head are: bowl, ball, pool, bath, bus, ice, rice (ice), up, down, hockey, let’s go, bye bye, banana (nana), no, bib, more, back, poo, wee, car, purr (for cat), book, hum (mmmmm….flies hum in one of the books we have), neigh, baa baa, moo, moon, star, mummy, daddy, two, and he howls at the moon either in the sky or in books.  He is also getting  the hang of colours, and he recognises the letter ‘o’.  He is getting the hang of a few other letters, but he is reliable at picking the letter ‘o’!  He says ‘oh’ as he points to it as well.  He also is getting really good at putting shapes into his shape sorter, and recognises many of the shapes and picks them up when I ask for them.  I often wish I’d written more about Nathan’s development over the months, just to keep track of what he was doing at different ages, but things sort of gradually happen and then suddenly you realise you have a child that does all these different things!

Nathan’s latest trick is to spin on the spot, and now if I say “spin” he will start spinning.  hehe.  He also rushes up to the lift and used to stand right infront of the doors, but now he rushes up and then says “back, back” and takes little steps backwards until he’s a little distance from the doors.  He’s also quite good at using a spoon, as long as what he’s picking up isn’t too liquid) and a fork, which means that meal times are getting less messy in general…until he throws his leftovers (complete with bowl or plate) onto the ground.

We bought a blackboard from Ikea last weekend ($26) and Nathan seems to love it.  Please ignore the washing in the background of this photo, but we are starting to get more and more convinced that Nathan is going to be a leftie like his mum!  He does a lot of things with his right hand, but he seems to generally use his left more often and with more control.

We tested out our new underwater housing today in a pool at Hamilton Island.  It worked well, so we should get some nice coral photos next week when we snorkel on the reef.

Since Nathan was 8 months old he has been cared for by a nanny while I am at work, and he hates me leaving him.  This means that every work morning for the last 7 months I have had to walk away from my screaming child while every fibre in my body is telling me to go back and comfort him.  I absolutely hate it.  Today, however, we had a breakthrough!  I walked away from my son to go to work, and he waved  good-bye to me.  🙂