Toddler update
It's been ages, and I do want to keep track of what's going on, so here's another **FIXME update.
The very best news of all is that he's sleeping! Most nights now he goes to bed about 7.30pm and sleeps through to 5.30am, or even 6.30am if we're lucky, with perhaps a few seconds of crying at 4ish. Cue much laughing, rejoicing, singing in the streets, and sleeping. Mmmm, sleep.
His language is hurtling along. His active spoken vocabulary has passed the size where it's readily enumerable - I'd estimate a hundred words or so but that's a wild guess. Some are perfectly enunciated - his core favourites of Mummy and Daddy are top of the list, and he's even dropped the slight stop in between Da and Dee. But more often you need a bit of context/experience to understand. Some words are blurred, some drastically curtailed, some pure inventions with a sketchy relationship to English. 'Nana' meaning his mother's mother is hard to tell apart from 'nana' meaning the curvy yellow fruit, except that context usually makes it clear. And his mother's father is now called 'Ba-pa', with a slight stop between the syllables.
There's an interesting process whereby childish coinages become fixed, rather than being corrected over time. I've a suspicion now that personal names (including of toys) are the most common, but will be interested to see other examples emerge. The man in question originally wanted to be called Grandpa, but he's actually delighted to be renamed Ba-pa.
The admiration is mutual - **FIXME is very, very keen on his Ba-pa. So much so that he overattributes and calls just about any man with white hair Ba-pa. (Sir David Attenborough is the most common recipient - **FIXME exclaims 'Ba-pa!' excitedly whenever he sees the photo on the wallchart of Reptiles and Amphibians Of The British Isles. Another accolade for Sir David to add to his collection.)
He uses language imaginatively too - just this evening he was rather pleased with himself for determining that an olive was an "eye". (Which rather put me off eating them to be honest.)
He also seems to want to make plurals by word doubling. I can't remember which language families genuinely do that, but seem to recall that some English pidgins do. Anyway - he definitely has this idea that you have one "eye", but two "eye-eye".
He's also signing! Finally. Not many, but clearly. The two main ones are open-and-closing his fist for 'milk', and putting the outside of his hand to his face for sleep. When he first did the latter I suddenly understood what he meant by the hissing sound he kept making that wasn't 'snake' (it's the sibilant bit from 'sleep', stupid) which was rather nice.
I mentioned before that "Cat up" was his first two-word utterance. I'm sorry to have to report that his first proper sentence (complete with verb, correctly inflected and everything) was "Sit down". A sign, alas, of parents fighting a losing mealtime battle.
It's fascinating watching him get the concept of colours over time. First he seemed to be able to say the names of colours, but not really relate them to anything. Then he would say them, at increasingly appropriate times/with increasingly appropriate indications, but not getting the right colour. But now he's more often right than wrong on average, especially if it's yellow.
He seems to be grasping something of the concept of possession - he particularly likes sets of three where there's one for Mummy, one for Daddy, and one for him. So toothbrushes, plates, cups and so on. He also recognises garments as belonging to Mummy or Daddy, although does sometimes make it up. I'm not totally sure he's trying to convey possession - there are perhaps other explanations. It's possible, for instance, that he actually meant that the squirty crocodile at the Garden Centre looked like me.
Bathtime is still a favourite. There was a brief few days of total bath refusal, which was baffling, but it passed with the aid of bubbles as an enticement. So now, of course, he insists on "Bubbles! Bubbles!" every time. Which is fine.
The other day he was in the bath, and I was rinsing his hair with a cup. Like most small children, he *really* doesn't like water running down his face. As usual, I was being careful to avoid that, but he wasn't particularly caring for what I was doing. So he took the cup from me, put it away in its proper place, and said firmly "Cup bye-bye".
He's developed tool use to at least New Caledonian Crow standards - at lunch today he was using a very small carrot to dig out some tasty morsels of apple puree from a jar. (Actually, he's been using a spoon to eat for possibly a year now, but somehow the carrot trick today reminded me of all that tool-use stuff.)
He goes to nursery ("Ni-ni", as in the Knights who say) twice a week, and seems to enjoy it. I usually drop him off and pick him up, in the car. Apparently the other day at nursery he was saying "Daddy Daddy Daddy", so one of the staff told him that Daddy was at work. He immediately put his hands up to waggle the steering wheel and he said, "Brmm! Brmm!". Obviously I spend the day driving around! Reasonably enough I suppose - he sees me in the car just before I leave him, and when I pick him up it's straight back in the car.
(Actually, if he knew that I spent the whole day mostly sat at a computer he'd be very jealous. He loves the computer and would gladly spend his day in front of it. He really likes photos and websites like CBeebies and PoissonRouge.com, but will happily sit on my lap while I mess around with config files.)
I always used to wonder when and how imaginative play emerges. Pretty much all children do it, but no neonates do. I'm getting to see it with **FIXME - he's starting to do imaginative games with his toys. He'll sometimes put them to sleep in his cot, or read books to them (desperately cute).
I think he has more than a shade of the geek nature. He likes routines and patterns to things. His bedtime routine is the obvious one, but most mornings are similar, and there's going out for various things, mealtimes, and so on. He also seems to have a powerful sense of things being in their right place - he's easily persuadable to tidy things up, and he loves jigsaws and similar arranging type activities. He also seems to notice things a bit more than other children. Obviously I wouldn't particularly want for him to be unobservant, but it does make hiding things from him bloody difficult. I'm sure I can trick other kids more easily than him.
He's still physically very adventurous. He loves clambering and climbing, right up to the edge of his capability (and sometimes beyond). It's wonderful and terrifying. He has a little step-stool for standing on, and he'll move that in front of things he wants to climb up but can't reach. So far he's not thought to try it on the stairgates, but it's surely only a matter of time. He's running with confidence now, and mastered reverse gear with a few days of almost constant moonwalking. He can open most drawers and cupboards, although hasn't yet quite mastered the properly-childproofed ones.
Not all childproofing works on him, though. He can open the drawer I keep the on-hand tools in, which I find so hard to open I still can't quite believe he can do it. He even knows what's in there - he particularly likes to take out the medium-small crosshead screwdriver so you can open the battery cover on his toy train for him. (Luckily he's not yet worked out how to operate the Stanley knife that - probably unwisely - also lives there.) He's also worked out how to remove electrical socket protectors. Impressively, but profoundly terrifyingly, he can do that and then plug in an appliance.
Happily for all, he's generally a pretty healthy child. So it was a bit of a surprise when he got a sickness bug on Friday. Hooray for paracetamol suppositories. And automatic washing machines. There was a really, really gruesome moment on Friday night. (Look away now if you had a slight turn just now when I mentioned the paracetamol or laundry - it gets worse. Best skip on to the final two paragraphs which are ranty and sarcastic and only vaguely baby-related.). He'd gone to bed early, but started to grizzle at 8ish. We were listening on the baby monitor, and I worried that he'd been sick. No no, his mother pointed out, we'd hear if he'd been sick. Pause while I imagine what that would sound like. Nope, haven't heard that particular noise. Then, on cue, an awful but unmistakable sloshing noise comes over the monitor. Ah, yes, that'd be the one. Luckily he seems to be better now.
I curse whoever invented summer time/daylight savings time. Before I had **FIXME I wasn't much bothered about the issue either way - changing the clocks twice a year seemed like a recipe for unnecessary messups, and the evidence of the supposed benefits seemed equivocal at best. But it just wasn't a big deal. But now ... whoever thought it was a good idea to disrupt sleep schedules by an hour every six months? (This time, the shift comes just as he's settled in to a tolerable sleep pattern.) And I have much less freedom than previously to ignore civil time and keep my own - there's nursery and his mum's work to take in to account as well as my own.
A quick bit of Wikipedia-ing reveals that Benjamin Franklin originally devised a modest proposal along the lines of BST/DST as a satire. Then an unimaginative, selfish nutter called William Willett failed to get the joke and proposed it seriously, mainly so he could get more rounds of golf in. Really. Gah! (It's also revealing that the first countries to impose it were the Axis during WW1.) Willett died of the flu in 1915, so my curse is this: may his eternal rest be disturbed by the screams of the sleepless children disrupted by his evil invention.
The very best news of all is that he's sleeping! Most nights now he goes to bed about 7.30pm and sleeps through to 5.30am, or even 6.30am if we're lucky, with perhaps a few seconds of crying at 4ish. Cue much laughing, rejoicing, singing in the streets, and sleeping. Mmmm, sleep.
His language is hurtling along. His active spoken vocabulary has passed the size where it's readily enumerable - I'd estimate a hundred words or so but that's a wild guess. Some are perfectly enunciated - his core favourites of Mummy and Daddy are top of the list, and he's even dropped the slight stop in between Da and Dee. But more often you need a bit of context/experience to understand. Some words are blurred, some drastically curtailed, some pure inventions with a sketchy relationship to English. 'Nana' meaning his mother's mother is hard to tell apart from 'nana' meaning the curvy yellow fruit, except that context usually makes it clear. And his mother's father is now called 'Ba-pa', with a slight stop between the syllables.
There's an interesting process whereby childish coinages become fixed, rather than being corrected over time. I've a suspicion now that personal names (including of toys) are the most common, but will be interested to see other examples emerge. The man in question originally wanted to be called Grandpa, but he's actually delighted to be renamed Ba-pa.
The admiration is mutual - **FIXME is very, very keen on his Ba-pa. So much so that he overattributes and calls just about any man with white hair Ba-pa. (Sir David Attenborough is the most common recipient - **FIXME exclaims 'Ba-pa!' excitedly whenever he sees the photo on the wallchart of Reptiles and Amphibians Of The British Isles. Another accolade for Sir David to add to his collection.)
He uses language imaginatively too - just this evening he was rather pleased with himself for determining that an olive was an "eye". (Which rather put me off eating them to be honest.)
He also seems to want to make plurals by word doubling. I can't remember which language families genuinely do that, but seem to recall that some English pidgins do. Anyway - he definitely has this idea that you have one "eye", but two "eye-eye".
He's also signing! Finally. Not many, but clearly. The two main ones are open-and-closing his fist for 'milk', and putting the outside of his hand to his face for sleep. When he first did the latter I suddenly understood what he meant by the hissing sound he kept making that wasn't 'snake' (it's the sibilant bit from 'sleep', stupid) which was rather nice.
I mentioned before that "Cat up" was his first two-word utterance. I'm sorry to have to report that his first proper sentence (complete with verb, correctly inflected and everything) was "Sit down". A sign, alas, of parents fighting a losing mealtime battle.
It's fascinating watching him get the concept of colours over time. First he seemed to be able to say the names of colours, but not really relate them to anything. Then he would say them, at increasingly appropriate times/with increasingly appropriate indications, but not getting the right colour. But now he's more often right than wrong on average, especially if it's yellow.
He seems to be grasping something of the concept of possession - he particularly likes sets of three where there's one for Mummy, one for Daddy, and one for him. So toothbrushes, plates, cups and so on. He also recognises garments as belonging to Mummy or Daddy, although does sometimes make it up. I'm not totally sure he's trying to convey possession - there are perhaps other explanations. It's possible, for instance, that he actually meant that the squirty crocodile at the Garden Centre looked like me.
Bathtime is still a favourite. There was a brief few days of total bath refusal, which was baffling, but it passed with the aid of bubbles as an enticement. So now, of course, he insists on "Bubbles! Bubbles!" every time. Which is fine.
The other day he was in the bath, and I was rinsing his hair with a cup. Like most small children, he *really* doesn't like water running down his face. As usual, I was being careful to avoid that, but he wasn't particularly caring for what I was doing. So he took the cup from me, put it away in its proper place, and said firmly "Cup bye-bye".
He's developed tool use to at least New Caledonian Crow standards - at lunch today he was using a very small carrot to dig out some tasty morsels of apple puree from a jar. (Actually, he's been using a spoon to eat for possibly a year now, but somehow the carrot trick today reminded me of all that tool-use stuff.)
He goes to nursery ("Ni-ni", as in the Knights who say) twice a week, and seems to enjoy it. I usually drop him off and pick him up, in the car. Apparently the other day at nursery he was saying "Daddy Daddy Daddy", so one of the staff told him that Daddy was at work. He immediately put his hands up to waggle the steering wheel and he said, "Brmm! Brmm!". Obviously I spend the day driving around! Reasonably enough I suppose - he sees me in the car just before I leave him, and when I pick him up it's straight back in the car.
(Actually, if he knew that I spent the whole day mostly sat at a computer he'd be very jealous. He loves the computer and would gladly spend his day in front of it. He really likes photos and websites like CBeebies and PoissonRouge.com, but will happily sit on my lap while I mess around with config files.)
I always used to wonder when and how imaginative play emerges. Pretty much all children do it, but no neonates do. I'm getting to see it with **FIXME - he's starting to do imaginative games with his toys. He'll sometimes put them to sleep in his cot, or read books to them (desperately cute).
I think he has more than a shade of the geek nature. He likes routines and patterns to things. His bedtime routine is the obvious one, but most mornings are similar, and there's going out for various things, mealtimes, and so on. He also seems to have a powerful sense of things being in their right place - he's easily persuadable to tidy things up, and he loves jigsaws and similar arranging type activities. He also seems to notice things a bit more than other children. Obviously I wouldn't particularly want for him to be unobservant, but it does make hiding things from him bloody difficult. I'm sure I can trick other kids more easily than him.
He's still physically very adventurous. He loves clambering and climbing, right up to the edge of his capability (and sometimes beyond). It's wonderful and terrifying. He has a little step-stool for standing on, and he'll move that in front of things he wants to climb up but can't reach. So far he's not thought to try it on the stairgates, but it's surely only a matter of time. He's running with confidence now, and mastered reverse gear with a few days of almost constant moonwalking. He can open most drawers and cupboards, although hasn't yet quite mastered the properly-childproofed ones.
Not all childproofing works on him, though. He can open the drawer I keep the on-hand tools in, which I find so hard to open I still can't quite believe he can do it. He even knows what's in there - he particularly likes to take out the medium-small crosshead screwdriver so you can open the battery cover on his toy train for him. (Luckily he's not yet worked out how to operate the Stanley knife that - probably unwisely - also lives there.) He's also worked out how to remove electrical socket protectors. Impressively, but profoundly terrifyingly, he can do that and then plug in an appliance.
Happily for all, he's generally a pretty healthy child. So it was a bit of a surprise when he got a sickness bug on Friday. Hooray for paracetamol suppositories. And automatic washing machines. There was a really, really gruesome moment on Friday night. (Look away now if you had a slight turn just now when I mentioned the paracetamol or laundry - it gets worse. Best skip on to the final two paragraphs which are ranty and sarcastic and only vaguely baby-related.). He'd gone to bed early, but started to grizzle at 8ish. We were listening on the baby monitor, and I worried that he'd been sick. No no, his mother pointed out, we'd hear if he'd been sick. Pause while I imagine what that would sound like. Nope, haven't heard that particular noise. Then, on cue, an awful but unmistakable sloshing noise comes over the monitor. Ah, yes, that'd be the one. Luckily he seems to be better now.
I curse whoever invented summer time/daylight savings time. Before I had **FIXME I wasn't much bothered about the issue either way - changing the clocks twice a year seemed like a recipe for unnecessary messups, and the evidence of the supposed benefits seemed equivocal at best. But it just wasn't a big deal. But now ... whoever thought it was a good idea to disrupt sleep schedules by an hour every six months? (This time, the shift comes just as he's settled in to a tolerable sleep pattern.) And I have much less freedom than previously to ignore civil time and keep my own - there's nursery and his mum's work to take in to account as well as my own.
A quick bit of Wikipedia-ing reveals that Benjamin Franklin originally devised a modest proposal along the lines of BST/DST as a satire. Then an unimaginative, selfish nutter called William Willett failed to get the joke and proposed it seriously, mainly so he could get more rounds of golf in. Really. Gah! (It's also revealing that the first countries to impose it were the Axis during WW1.) Willett died of the flu in 1915, so my curse is this: may his eternal rest be disturbed by the screams of the sleepless children disrupted by his evil invention.