The big thing that we’ve started doing this month (just recently, in fact) is getting Nathan to go to sleep at night without the boob.   He has never relaxed when put into bed, so a breastfeed has always come to the rescue.  It relaxes him and he either falls asleep on the boob or he rolls over and falls asleep.  The last couple of months Nathan has been showing interest in the bed and putting his head on the pillow when he’s tired.  So now I’m feeding him on the couch, and assuming he doesn’t fall asleep during the feed the routine is to see if he can do a wee and then lie on our bed with him.  Nathan will roll and roll and roll, try to climb on or over me, grizzle, sit up, stand up, etc. etc. etc.  If he sits or stands up I just tell him to put his head on the pillow, and he’ll usually do it if I ask several times.  If he crawls over me or won’t put his head on the pillow, I lie him down and we start all over again.  I have found that talking to him helps him relax, and it works particularly well if he’s grizzling a bit and making it clear that he wants to breastfeed.  I’ve started making up stories to tell him and that seems to help him relax.  We also talk about what we did during the day.  Last night required a bit of ‘shhhhhh-ing’ as well, but it’s not always necessary.  He rolls around and mucks around for about half an hour before falling asleep.  Then I put him in the cot and wakes up there 10 hours later!  We’ve put a pillow into his cot because he seems to love putting his head on them and climbing up onto them in his sleep.  We occasionally have a damp nappy in the morning, but mostly he’s dry.  If he wakes up in the night he will do a wee and can fall back to sleep before I even get his sleeping bag done up again, and that generally ensures that he has a dry nappy in the morning.

The elimination communication is going particularly well at the moment.  We generally have just one or two wee misses a day with everything else going into an appropriate receptacle, and we averaged one miss a day for the entire time we were away lately and that includes during travelling in both the car and aeroplanes (8 days all up).    The only thing that needs to happen now is for Nathan to be more reliable about letting us know he needs the toilet, which would be so helpful for Ebony because she seems to be at a loss with the whole toileting thing when she looks after him on my work days.  We find that he’s great in the car and at night, but I guess at these times he’s not being distracted by anything else.  During the day I’m still very much using timing when offering him a toilet opportunity.   I decided to buy Nathan a couple of pairs of normal undies today for him to wear at home instead of the training pants or going nappy free.  It will be interesting to see how that goes with them.  They are much easier to pull down than the training pants so maybe he’ll be able to start pulling them up and down himself.

Nathan LOVES playgrounds, but he still seems to hate swings.  He loves running over to the swing and patting it as if he wants to go on it, but he only lasts about 10 seconds on the swing before his face goes red and he gets very stiff, and if we leave him there he starts to shake.  If he sits on my lap while I swing he lasts a bit longer, but he still isn’t really happy.  He does love slides, though, and has started getting the hang of climbing up the steps instead of trying to climb the slide.

Other things we’ve been doing this month are:

Playing in the red boat at the Coogee playground

Pressing the pedestrian button at traffic lights

Putting woodchips, dirt, stones, coins in his mouth.

Putting coins into his money box or the guide dog moneyboxes at the airport (and then moving them around)

Playing piano, and bopping away to any music he hears

Enjoying his first time on a jumping castle

Choosing dinner from the menu

Playing with Daddy’s ham radio

Piggyback rides

Camping!!