Thanks everyone for kind comments & emails. I am sucking at answering things lately. April is my month of reform for that, so watch out in your inboxes. :)
Since gathering life up again (and coming to the end of the funerary rites, on that strange other track in my head), Noah and I are back to our intense little pod, broken up by V.’s time.
V. continues to be the best thing since sliced bread, by the way. He was happy to see her, although Monday he did cry after about an hour just ’cause, I think, but today he was just his normal self with her and wasn’t even all that concerned about my reappearance. And the more I hear her interact with Noah the more I like what I hear, even if that deep wounded part of me keeps checking him over for damage or bruises or anything amiss. And she arrives when she says she will and is careful and thoughtful and generally just a complete gift. My main concern is that she’ll dump us.
But after she’s left both days it’s been toddlerville again and wow, that is intense these days. Yesterday Noah was a little clingy and very ambivalent (shall we play trucks? Yes, he says, but if I would touch one he would cry! Well okay then!) and would not, simply not, go to sleep. Instead he told me about the bug I squashed (sign: bug; sign: all gone; say “awwwSHHH” which is squash; lather, rinse, repeat) about 50 times. It made an impression!
We also really cooked together for about the first time. I made a crockpot stew and he was fussy about my attention being on chopping, so after that was done I got out pancake mix (evil, I know, but we keep it for emergencies) and omitted the egg so it would be safe (it works without the egg just fine, by the way) and he stirred the batter up with much glee and sloppiness and then I put him up on the stepstool at the counter where he could see the griddle, and he ate a whole pancake with much excitement after all that. And the stew, later. And after the pancakes we played in the sink to wash up. All that was way better than toys, but then he was really not understanding why he could not then use all the adult toys and the day sort of dissolved at the end into way-too-many-nos.
Today I took him out to tire him and head the bedtime woes off at the pass, despite cold weather and lack of car (parts are still being ordered), so we walked alll the way down to the bus stop (or I should say, I did, since once I decided to forgo both stroller and Ergo, he refused to take a step), and Got On A Bus! Lo! The Excitement! and went to the library. And to the coffee shop for a milk and a cookie. And then we did the Bus! thing again, and then he did indeed walk the two blocks to the house, meandering up several driveways and being picked up as strange dogs came near in between. And it worked. And it was a lot of fun.
His favourite games this week though are all pretty much separation games: various rifts on peekaboo, shutting doors on me to have me open them, hiding from me and jumping out. He seems to go back to these whenever we’ve had a big change, and I guess that makes sense. As long as I’m there when the door opens, we’re good.
His verbal development also picked up again as soon as we walked in the door from vacation… literally. The combination of signing and verbal stuff is weird, because he has pretty much the basic toddler vocabulary down in sign and isn’t all that keen to transition yet, but then he fills in other words like… squash. Drip (‘dip’). Straw (‘tahhw’). And then with the animals he does the sign and the animal sound concurrently, so he’ll do the sign for dog and go “woof” at the same time. Of course his animal sounds are a little… weird. He knows the following: a cow says “moo” a dog says “woof” a snake says “ssss” and a dolphin says “eeee eee eee” (and a rubber ducky).
Pigs, cats, sheep, goats, chickens, rooster, lions, tigers, bears – no interest in them at all, as far as noises go. Oh except purring. Cats do not go meow, they purr. But he does have those signs down, along with squirrel, monkey, rabbit, turtle, fish, crab, bug, butterfly, shark, whale, deer, hippopotamus, wolf, and a few others I’m forgetting. The zoo’s been good for that, on top of the DVDs.
I’m not sure whether to count signs as sentences or not. But he does use sentences if so, like “cat play peekaboo.”
Gross motor skills: he can pretty much run, and he’s hard, hard at work on stairs. Dangerously so as he likes to try to walk up and walk down them (we’re working on at least going down on his bum now that he won’t go down on his stomach). He’s also trying to jump without a whole lot of success except in his crib. He stands on his head, sort of, with his feet still on the ground and his arms out to the side – not sure what that’s about. And he can kick a soccer-sized ball, which I find impressive. And throw but let’s not get into that, since we’re sort of downplaying the throwing toys bit.
And of course we know he climbs everywhere. Third shelf of the linen closet. Top of the change table. Kitchen counters. Those crash helmets are starting to look good.
Fine motor is where I find him scary though. He can plug my cell phone charger into my cell phone, a move I occasionally miss, and he can thread the shoelace through the firemen’s hands in the Melissa & Doug fireman set. He can unscrew any lid he has the strength in his hands for – water bottles, spice bottles, (empty) Honeybee honey bottles. He can eat with a spoon and a fork, although he can’t always keep the food on them between bowl/plate and mouth (but he can get the food on, no problem). He can draw the letter O although it’s sometimes wobbly and/or spirals in on itself. (He is obsessed with the letter O and finds it everywhere and then says “O” and signs it. It’s not a reading thing, it’s an object thing.) He can open doorknobs (woe is me). And use a key, if the lock is not too stiff and we help him get the key right side up. He can shape sort most of the basic shapes. Stack alphabet-sized blocks 5 high. Take apart almost anything. And zip and unzip Ziploc bags, which he now does for me because that is not one of my top skills. :)
The thing I sort of wish he could do, whether developmentally appropriate or not, is sing. He shows interest in music and he mimics sounds like the alarm clock sound, but so far no singing.
And one thing he sometimes seems to be doing is decoding phonetically? But can that be? I don’t know enough about language acquisition and so I’m assuming it’s more confusion than anything else. But an example is that we were on the bus, and he kept signing “bug.” And I kept saying, no, “bus,” and making a driving sign. But he was pretty insistent, and I’m reasonably sure he wasn’t seeing a bug. Another example is that I said his bum looked “sore” and he signed “sorry.” Now that second one I figure is because usually if he’s getting a rash I say I’m sorry he has a bum rash, but I dunno. This kind of thing is recent. He couldn’t possibly be decoding/encoding at 18 months? And wouldn’t the signing, not being based in sounds (duh) unless you finger spell (which we don’t, double duh), confuse that if so? I dunno.
Emotionally he is definitely volatile, but I wouldn’t say we’re into full out terrible twos yet. But man, is he… persistent. I suppose that’s a given, given his parents. :-) But Noah is also painfully gentle and tender at times. His latest thing is to come up and stroke mine or Carl’s back, tenderly, and then lean against us. It’s to die for.
So things are pretty good on the parenting front. More after deadline on other fronts. :-)
