Notes from a day with a toddler

[juliet]

Leon, at 17 months on Saturday, is definitely an actual toddler now, even if he still spends quite a lot of time with his hands up in the air, still busy keeping his balance. It's a bit weird -- where did my teeny tiny baby go? -- but also kind of awesome. Some things, today, in no particular order.

• He can (and frequently did during the day) walk up to the other end of the room, pick a book, and bring it back to me to read to him.


• He can make a lot of different animal noises.


• I think he may have said "yellow" today (in correct context). (Words are still a bit off and on -- he'll say something and then not say it again.)


• He asked me to cook an egg for him (via pointing and enthusiastic noises), remained patient while I offered a couple of things in that general area of the kitchen before I got what he was after, and helped me break and whisk the egg. (He then ate two single-egg 'omelettes' in a row, which seems like quite a lot for a small Leon.)


• He spent some time taking little fuzzy pompoms out of one container and putting them into another, then tipping them out and doing it all over again. This seemed very important.


• He walked to the potty a couple of times when he needed a wee (sometimes), but did not yet actually sit himself down on it. (We are still doing EC, so that's more of a cue to me than it is 'potty learning', but, y'know, progress in a good direction.)


• This afternoon, he spent over twenty minutes picking up a couple of stones from a gravel path in the park, going up a shallow flight of stairs, putting the stones in the bin at the top of the steps, and coming back down again to repeat the exercise, while I just sat and watched (in mild bemusement).


• He was ABSOLUTELY INSISTENT on going up the slide and down the steps, despite the queue of children on said steps (my mistake; there was a stoppage in the queue and I foolishly thought he would go up the slide and then down the slide. Normally I wouldn't mind either way, but see above re queue. It is not possible to lift a determined Leon off the top of that particular slide, due to the size of the barred bit.)


• But when he tried to do it again, and I removed him from the slide, and he kicked off, once I'd told him the limits for today re slide usage, and he'd calmed down a bit, I said "OK, so, can you go up the steps and down the slide?" he nodded, and then slid out of my arms and did it, no more fuss. I was more than a bit surprised, to be honest. We did have to repeat the whole discussion again ten minutes later, of course.


• He did not want his bath tonight. "Bath?" I said, as he yelled MAMAMAMAMAMA and doop handed him over. Big shake of head, still crying. "Right. No bath. Bleurgh. Nasty, horrible bath," I said, mostly for my own benefit, and, a bit unexpectedly, he started giggling. I ran with it, hammed up the terrible, no good, awfulness of the bath, and got him, still giggling, up the stairs and into the nasty, horrible, bath without any more fuss. I was proper gobsmacked. Neatest bit of parenting I've done possibly ever. Am sure it will never work again. But more interestingly, it wouldn't have worked at all a month or two back. Something has happened in his brain.


• Less impressive, parenting-wise, was the screaming fit he threw after he indicated he wanted to go home from the playground and I tried to back-wrap him. (In retrospect, I think he just wanted to walk.) Carrying is a bit hit-and-miss at the moment, which is awkward as he's really not up to walking everywhere yet; not sure a pushchair would be any better, though.


• He randomly built a block tower, just the once, then when I tried to get involved in the building project, gleefully pushed all the blocks off the table. There is something funny going on with blocks and stacking. I am not quite sure what it is.

It is my bedtime, so I will stop there. Random notes from what was actually a very quiet day. (Which we badly needed after a very busy weekend visiting all his NI relatives.) My current conclusion is: toddlers are both awesome, and very hard work.

Comments

[pauamma]

Am sure it will never work again.

If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, maybe he has cat ancestors?

[sfred]

This is a lovely update. Thank you.

[ailbhe]

Physics and engineering, is what it is. Jigsaws!

[juliet]

The stacking? Yes, indeed! But it is curious: he will stack empty plastic cups, and tins, and other miscellaneous things he finds around the house. But that's the first time he has of his own accord stacked blocks, despite having a big box of them. And as soon as they fell he stopped, whereas with tins he'll keep going. Perhaps "his" things are just less interesting than "real" things.

Jigsaws! We just got given a couple of 2 or 3 piece ones, actually. He was uninterested on the train on the way home from NI but might go for them at home; I will try again.

[lnr]

I shall look forward to these stages :) right now Matthew is definitely still a baby and a sleeping one at that :)

[juliet]

Aw man I kind of miss the bit where you can just snuggle them and they don't go anywhere or need much beyond food/clean nappy/snuggles! I do not regret any of the time which I spent stapled to the sofa with book/ipad and baby :) (Although this time is much improved if one has the foresight to arrange for water and snack box to be in arms' reach already.)

[lnr]

I still sometimes forget about arms reach when feeding. But though he can't crawl or even roll much yet he's just getting the hang of sitting and at today's picnic managed to squash some strawberries, cover himself in houmous (hands and feet), tip over a tub of flapjacks by trying to chew it, and face plant on my paper plate. So not quite so static as you might suspect. Good fun - but I certainly have to beware of what's in his arms reach! :)

[juliet]

Wow he must be bigger already than I thought! Time flying etc etc. :) hope it's all being fun.

[lnr]

He's 4 months and 2 weeks today, so not terribly big, just terribly keen on touching (and putting in his mouth) anything in reach, and stronger than he really has any right to be at this age :)

By and large it is indeed terribly fun, along with exhausting. Getting easier all the time (so far at least). Part of me really doesn't look forward to our year being up!

[titaniccapybara.livejournal.com]

Awesome Leon!

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

We're obviously emerging the other side of toddlerhood with Owen and agree it is indeed both awesome and very hard work.

Owen was very much a slide climber, though he would then slide down on his tummy. Most of the playgrounds round here are quiet so I used to let him, but probably did make it harder when there were other people and I had to enforce appropriate etiquette, especially as he didn't catch on as quickly as Leon.

Yellow seems to be the first colour that lots of toddlers learn to say (easy to say? easy to distinguish?) so very plausible that he did say it.

Owen had a couple of stages of being a bath refusenik. One of the things that I did (got the vague idea from the book Playful Parenting - think there's an example in there about being scared of swings) was lift him up and almost put him in and then take him out. He found that hysterical. More physical effort than pretending the bath is horrible though - I'll have to remember that for Alex :-)

Owen had quite a long phase where he was happy to leave places if and only if you said bye bye to every single object there. He would tell you the vital object you had managed to omit. Then when that stopped working, there was the phase where he was happy as long as he walked backwards or jumped. Now we can either race to where I want to go and see who gets there first or pretend to be a train going there. I couldn't carry him when heavily pregnant or now if I am carrying Alex, so have had to exhaust my imagination for ideas!

[juliet]

Ooh, racing is a good idea, he's nearly stable enough on his feet for that to work. Although I'm not totally sure he has the concept yet :) (like "chasing", which sometimes works and sometimes he runs towards you instead, though he is highly amused whatever) Waving bye is definitely a thing, though I think not yet at Owen's level of specificity. (The "time to go home" song is sometimes magic.)

I keep rereading Playful Parenting in an odd order (ie wherever my Kindle thinks I last left off); we were playing one of the 'power' games from there (dramatically falling over when Leon pushed me very gently) with great success, so will try the nearly-but-not-quite thing, thank you.

Yeah, like you say, the problem with slides is the etiquette when it *is* busy. Leon now has the idea that other children = must go up steps, but now we have the problem that when he is at the top he is more interested in turning round and trying to interact with the child behind him (not always appreciated) than he is in sliding down the slide :) As yet I have no solution for this...

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Owen probably only just got the concept of racing in the last couple of months, but is very into it. He will also often do something is he gets to do something of his choosing first, which is another relatively recent development. I'll ask him to do something, he'll say 'not yet'. I ask him what he wants to do first. He does that, then he very happily does what I want! Sometimes, they just really really don't want to leave somewhere and there isn't a whole lot you can do though.

I also remember now one of the other things that we did with the bath, was that he would pretend to give his doll a bath, and I would pretend that the doll didn't want to go in the bath. He absolutely loved that. We did, and still do, similiar stuff with swimming too, reenacting the classes with his dolphins and frog in the bath.

Owen used to loiter at the top of slides too. I don't remember that phase lasting too long, but I think it was one of the first times that I really had to deal with the whole 'my child is doing stuff that is socially not quite acceptable' thing. I think a lot of it was really about what other parents thought than necessarily that any of the other children minded. I suspect I also got better at picking good playgrounds to go to.