Archive for January, 2009

11.5 Months Old


26 Jan

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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.

11 Months Old


11 Jan

Posted in Nathan's first year | 2 Comments »

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.

Memorable Christmas Days


05 Jan

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Andrew and I have been together now for almost 4 years, and that means we have had 4 Christmases together.  All have been memorable for one reason or another, and most have been related to incidents at Kosciuszko National Park.

Our first Christmas together was in Horsham with my family.  I spent the day sitting around with my leg elevated because I had a broken bone, a foot that felt like it was swelling and a sore calf when I lowered my foot.  I had broken a bone in my foot at Charlottes Pass in Kosciuszko National Park a few days earlier when I had slipped down some steps, and on Boxing Day I was diagnosed with a 6 cm clot in a superficial vein in my leg.  We saw a lot of medical professionals in a short period of time that Christmas period.

The next Christmas found us back at Kosciuszko National Park where we had snow on Christmas day.  At our campsite it was pretty slushy and didn’t sit on the ground, but we took a drive to Charlottes Pass and the snow was thick enough to throw a snowball or two.

Last year was the first Christmas I haven’t had to travel in at least 20 years.  I was nearly 8 months pregnant and we decided it was best to stay put and not make the trek to Victoria.  My parents flew up to Sydney to spend Christmas day with us, and Aurelie and Nico also had lunch with us.

This year we decided to go back to Kosciuszko National Park for Christmas, as Nathan isn’t a great traveller and we thought that driving to Victoria would just take too long.  Anyway, we wanted to take Nathan camping, as we were sure he’d enjoy being outdoors.  So Christmas day was lovely, the weather was fantastic, and Andrew’s parents joined us at the campground with their camper trailer.  Nathan just loved crawling into and out of the tent, so we left the inside zipped down so he could play in there and move freely.  In the afternoon Andrew decided to have a look at the thermorest that I was sleeping on, because it seemed to have a hole in it and wasn’t staying inflated.  Andrew was in the tent when he called out to me and asked if anyone would have put a rubber snake in our tent.  HUH???  No, I couldn’t imagine that.  So we pulled most things out of the tent, carefully avoiding the small, motionless snake.  We got a stick and Andrew had a go at poking it…it moved where the stick touched it but the rest of the snake stayed still.  If it was real, then it certainly wasn’t very lively!  Andrew eventially removed the snake from our tent by getting it over the end of the stick.  It was real, but dead.  Our mostly likely explanation was that the snake had crawled into the tent during the day because it was hot in there, and burrowed underneath the thermorests.  When Andrew was moving around in the tent he must have kneeled on the Thermorest on top of it and killed it.  Whatever the reason we ended up with a dead snake (Highlands Copperhead) in our tent underneath Andrew’s thermorest, and it just brings home how easily Nathan (or any of us) could have been bitten and I feel lucky that nothing like that happened.

Elimination Communication


02 Jan

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We have been doing EC now for close to half a year.  Five and a half months we have been putting Nathan on the potty, holding him over toilets/buckets/sinks/gardens etc. and cueing him to wee.  Poos tend to come when he needs to during a wee offering, though he sometimes lets us know that he needs to poo.

So right from the start the elimination bit was working a treat…well, it’s going to work one way or another, I guess.  What I mean is that he eliminated in a suitable receptacle when offered.  I simply couldn’t believe how easy it was to start him using the potty/toilet/bucket.  The communication part was working, I guess, from our end since he knew what we meant and went when offered if he needed to.  The communication bit from his end was a lot longer in the making, or at least I didn’t pick up on it if it was there.

We tried potty hitting for months.  The idea is essentially that you leave a potty in his play area, and every time he plays with the potty you put him on it.  Every time you offer a wee on the potty you also hit the potty and get him to hit it before putting him on.  Research shows that this method works, though I found it quite difficult because he loves to play with his potty…it’s great for putting toys into, hitting to make a sound, turning it over and more hitting….so he started to get grumpy with me when I put him on the potty and I just gave up offering when I had just done it and he went straight back to playing with the potty.  Still, over the last month or two he seemed to occasionally hit the potty and look at me , and when I sit him on it at these times he generally did a wee.  He also often did the potty refusal thing…arching his back and refusing to bend his knees.  I started taking that as being a sign that he didn’t want the potty…so also a form of communication!

Up until very recently I did all the potty offering on the basis of timing and/or intuition.  However, nearly 6 months on and we seem to have had a breakthrough, of sorts.  The other sign for toilet that we have been using is patting the our thighs.  I’ve been using this so that we can still communicate when we are out and not near a potty.  Just before Christmas we realised that he seems to be using this sign, and so I have now stopped offering so much based on timing and waiting more for Nathan to tell us he needs the toilet.  I constantly remind him verbally to let us know if he needs to wee, and he seems to be trying to tell us quite regularly that he needs the toilet.  We do, however, have a lot of signing when Nathan doesn’t wee and these confuse me.  I sometimes wonder if he just wants my attention, or or maybe he just gets excited and slaps his leg.  I know it is hard for him to learn the feeling of needing to wee and then communicating it prior to actually weeing, so I guess it is all a part of the learning process.

Truthfully, I’m amazed at how well EC is going.  I never expected Nathan to be essentially out of nappies before he was a year old, but there you go, that’s what’s happened.  I have been sewing up a storm, trying to adapt a free pattern I found online for training pants to be made the way I wanted to make them and fit Nathan.  We now have 8 pairs of training pants and I love using them.  Nathan hates having nappies put on, so he seems to prefer his ‘undies’.  They are easy to pull down when we need to put him on the potty, they take up less space in the washing machine than the nappies did, and Nathan no longer has the big cloth bum look so his jeans and pants will fit him for longer.  We do still use nappies at night, not because Nathan needs them because he is dry most mornings but because the very few night wees that we miss are large and need the absorbency of a normal nappy to contain them.  The photos below are of some of the training pants I’ve made and Nathan modeling the first pair of training pants I made him.

10.5 Months Old


02 Jan

Posted in Camping, Nathan's first year | 1 Comment »

I’m way behind on posting Nathan’s 10.5 month achievements.  I guess it is always a busy period around Christmas, and we went away for a week which hasn’t helped.  We are still trying to clean up and pack everything away after our camping trip.  Before our trip we went to a couple of Christmas parties, and one was at the hospital for people who went to Mumsense during the year.  Mumsense was the highlight of my week during the first 4 months of Nathan’s life, and it was great to get back and see Cheryl (photographed with Nathan above) and have a chat with her about how Nathan was going with his sleep and car travel and realise how much better he is now at these things than he was at the start.

Development wise, Nathan is now standing very steadily and can push himself up to standing from a squat without using his hands (I don’t know that I can do that!).  He spends quite a lot of time standing, and the day before Christmas he took 3 very deliberate steps before falling down…it was almost in slow motion and you could see him trying to work out how to make the steps.  He likes supported walking, and is pretty good when only supported with one hand (which is a lot easier for us if he only needs one hand held).  I tend to think that independent walking isn’t too far away now.  One thing that I was surprised about recently was when I asked Nathan to smell a flower, and he did just that!

We weren’t sure how a week of camping was going to go with Nathan, but it was a total success.  We ended up with a beautiful grassy tent site with a view of the Thredbo River, and a picnic table and fireplace very close by.  Nathan loved the tent, loved being outdoors, loved crawling on the grass and picking up sticks, leaves and stones, and loved looking at the birds and animals that frequent the area.  He would stop still and stare at any new animals, and then after a few minutes he’d want to go closer.  He saw kangaroos, wombats, ducks, other birds, and wild horses.  Nathan just loved the ducks that frequented the campsite, and spent almost the entire week saying “Du” (u as in up), and when he got really excited he would scream “Du, Du, Du!!!!”  If my attention was elsewhere and I heard Nathan say “Du!” and I would turn around and sure enough Nathan would be staring at a duck.

Nathan has started putting noises and actions to simple toys like aeroplanes and cars.  He makes aeroplanes fly in the air and cars drive along the ground while he makes appropriate noises. Talking about aeroplanes, he loves looking at them and every time he hears a plane he stops and looks in the sky trying to find it (and since we are so close to the airport he gets lots of opportunities for plane spotting).

Nathan has been inspecting his hands lately and seems to be trying to work them out.  He started clapping several weeks ago now, but he seems to be progressing to trying to open and shut his hands/fingers with relevent songs such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the Open Shut Them song and the Five Little Ducks song.  It is interesting that he seems to have rediscovered his hands because he first discovered them months ago now.  Perhaps he now sees new possibilities for them.

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