Good Enough Mum

What Katie Kaffrin did

My sister, championing the cause of little sisters in general, has asked why Katie doesn't yet have her photo on my About page.  The reason is that this would mean sacrificing the photo of someone else in the family, as I don't, as yet, have a photo of the four of us together.  I keep meaning to get one when relatives visit, and somehow we've never yet managed to get round to it.  I swore I'd get it done on Wednesday when Barry's parents were here, but I went to the breastfeeding group in the morning and then when I got back they'd gone into town and then when they got back it was time for his mother to open her birthday presents and then Katie started one of her spit-up marathons and by the time I managed to get her to stay in one outfit for long enough to get downstairs it was time for Jamie's lunch and then Barry was doing something else... you get the picture.  (Or, rather, you don't.)  Anyway, I'm holding out for a photo of the four of us together before I change the one that's there now.  If it's any consolation, I have at least now updated the bio to mention my second child's existence, although it may or may not say something that the comments policy got considerably more writing space than she did.

Anyway, in hopes that it will provide at least a partial substitute, here's a post about her.

Katie is now eleven weeks old.  Well, actually nearer to twelve weeks for now, but for some reason I felt kind of a pang over never having put it in writing that my daughter was eleven weeks old and wanted to grab that particular moment while I still could.  She hasn't been weighed for almost a fortnight (I'm going to get her weighed again this coming Monday when I take her in for her second lot of jabs), but she was 11 lb 11 oz then, so extrapolation from the rate at which she's been gaining so far means that she is almost certainly over twelve pounds now.  This, according to parenting folklore, is apparently some kind of magic age at which babies start sleeping for longer periods of time.  I haven't seen any particular signs of that over the last few days (particularly not last night.  Sheesh) but I am awaiting further developments with interest.

She's longer, too.  Length is no longer routinely measured at the check-ups, due to the general inaccuracy of trying to measure a baby, but I measured her last night out of curiosity and it seems she's 23 inches.  That's a gain of four inches since her birth, if I'm correctly remembering what the midwife said her birth length was (annoyingly, I didn't realise they hadn't written length in the red book until I'd already handed back my maternity notes and could no longer check).  I can tell she's longer - nursing her in my accustomed position in the living-room armchair with the laptop balanced on the arm for easy reading is becoming increasingly hazardous, as I have to be careful she doesn't kick the thing off.  When I carry her cupped in my arm, the way I used to carry Jamie - my hand cupped under her bottom, her body lying along my forearm - her head no longer nestles comfortably into the crook of my elbow but spills over to partway up my upper arm.  I don't carry her that way very often anyway, as she gets heavier - more often I have her propped up on my shoulder, balanced there with one arm, where she can peer over, bright-eyed, or curl her head trustingly into the curve of my neck when she falls asleep.

Jeff Vogel, author of The Poo Bomb, wrote when his daughter was this age that he didn't agree with the term 'quiet alertness' and thought 'lucid dopeyness' would be a better description of his daughter's waking non-feeding non-crying moments.  Well, in your face, Vogel - your daughter may have been lucidly dopey, but mine is alert.  She looks at the world with fascination, drinking it all in.  Interestingly, she appears to have a particular predilection for bookcases.  That's my little girl, all right.

She waves her arms and legs in huge jerky swings that inspired Barry to speculate on whether they're attached to a big wobbly spring in the middle of her.  She put concentrated time, in the past few days, into trying to grab the flowers on her grandmother's jumper and the pictures of strawberries on our tablecloth (and took it in good part when, mysteriously, she couldn't manage either of these endeavours).  When I pull her from lying to sitting by her hands, her head comes right along with her now, not lagging at all.  When I hold her in the air face down in the Superman flying position, she can hold her legs straight out behind her.

She loves it when somebody comes and talks to her, or echoes her gurgles back.  She rewards such attention with a massive smile that almost eliminates any need for other light sources in the room.

That, according to Open Office's word count, is 617 words about her, which, according to traditional exchange rates, should account for marginally more than three-fifths of a picture.  I shall work on getting an appropriate picture up, but hopefully that'll fill the gap for now.

Nursery

"What are we doing today, little one?" I asked Jamie as he fitted the last of the shapes into his shape sorter.  "Can you remember?"

Jamie screwed up his face in concentration.  "Mummy... is... um... showing..." he hesitated.  "Little baby!" he finished with satisfaction as it came to him.

"That's right!" (Well... close enough, anyway.)  "I'm going to go to the birthing centre so that the midwife can listen to the little baby in my tummy, and check it's OK."

"Birthing centre."

"Yes.  And... do you remember where we're going after that?"

More concentration.  "It's... um... um..."  I got ready to step into the breach, as this level of hesitation normally translates into a "don't know" - not a phrase Jamie has mastered, as he is unflagging in his optimism that if he can just hang on long enough the word he seeks will magically come to him.  Thus, we get quite a few sentences that stall half-way through, never to be resumed (as well as some others that are continued in unarguably non-specific ways: "It's a somesing!" "I sink it's a sing that is like... um...")  But on this occasion, waiting paid off; Jamie's face lit up.  "Nursery!" he announced.

Yes, indeed.  Jamie has now reached the exalted age of almost-three, and that means he's eligible for a place at our local nursery school.  I'd booked him in for one session a week, and that was the morning of his first one.  For the previous week, I had been taking every opportunity to work in comments on the many toys and books that would be available to him there, as well as clarifying such issues as the fact that Daddy and Mummy would leave him there with the teachers but return to pick him up in the fullness of time, and the requirement for sitting on the floor with the other children when it came time for the teacher to read a story (something I suspected would be more likely to present a difficulty than any separation anxiety).

I had, a little sadly, resigned myself to missing the experience of dropping him off and collecting him on his first day; as much as I liked the idea of being there for it, taking a half-day off purely for that reason seemed excessive.  Fortunately, it turned out that by sheer luck superbly impeccable forward planning I had conceived my second child at precisely the right time for one of my infrequent routine antenatal appointments to fall due that same week; I asked for one on that morning, and got it.  There were, of course, limits to how far I could stretch that in terms of time off work, but I could quite feasibly fit in the drop-off before having to head back to work and thus be there for half the experience, at least.

So, I got him into his lovely new nursery T-shirt and filled his special nursery cup (with a button you can pop to make the lid spring up, and 'Jamie' in fat yellow letters on the side against a background of colourful squiggles and stars) with diluted apple juice, and we headed off to our first stop of the day.  I'd planned to use our visit to the birthing centre as an opportunity to talk to Jamie about the fact that this was where Mummy would be staying overnight after the baby was born, but I'm not sure how much of this he took in - he was far more interested in the Wordsearch book he'd found in the pile of magazines.  Letters!  And a number at the top of each puzzle!  And a number on the front of the book to say it was Book 2!

"Book Three!" he sang out.  (He's a huge fan of the whole concept of counting.  Give him a number, any number, and he'll start counting either forwards or backwards from there.  Or, alternatively, tell you which Mr Men book corresponds to that number.)

"Well, no.  This is Book Two."

"Book One!  Book Zero!"

The appointment itself, when I was called through, was the standard-issue blood-pressure-urine-dip-check-heartbeat routine, with a minor counterpoint of Jamieness in the background.

"So... how many weeks are you now?"

"Twenty-eight, I think."

"Number 28 Mr C'yumsy!"

"So, how are you feeling?"

"Absolutely fine, thanks."

"Mummy got a S'yinky!"

(Mummy would, while we're on the subject, totally and unequivocally recommend the Slinky as a keep-children-quiet-in-boring-situations toy.  Preferably one of the plastic ones, as I suspect the metal ones would not be great for teeth if chewed.  I bought this one for £1.25 in a souvenir shop while staying with the in-laws over the Bank Holiday on the basis that it might keep Jamie occupied for at least a smidgen of the long car journey home, and it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, keeping him fascinated for all the time not accounted for by "Baked potatoes!"  I'd recommend keeping the box it came in, as well - putting it back in the box and taking it out again turns out to be a minor but important part of the distraction.  I had passed it to Jamie to distract him from any thoughts of wrecking the joint during my appointment, and it was once again working well.)

"Have you brought a urine sample?"

"Yes, I've got it here."

"Nursery!  Nursery!  Nursery!  Nursery!"  (Hmmm.  You think he might have been looking forward to the nursery session somewhat?)

Despite his obvious impatience to move on to the good part of the day, he was actually very well-behaved during the appointment.  He busied himself commenting on life in general as above, swinging the Slinky, and bouncing round the room, and responded quite well to being pulled away from exploring the bins or jumping on the scale.  He was very interested indeed in the process of blood pressure checking and blood-taking (I'd forgotten that I was due for a blood count check at that session), leaning against me and demanding "What's dat!" (and joggling my arm somewhat, which did not make it easier for the midwife taking the blood).

The midwife and I both agreed that everything appeared to be going fine, and I packed the S'yinky back into the box, and was informed indignantly that Jamie wanta do (by the way, did you know that it matters which way up a Slinky is put back in its box?  No, neither did I, but apparently it does - "Wrong way up!" Jamie informed me, extracting the Slinky and righting matters), and we got everything together and made it to nursery to discover that in spite of reading the bumf half a dozen times I had somehow managed to completely misread 9.00 a.m. as 9.30 a.m. and thus bring him in half an hour late.  Fortunately, Jamie is young enough to be completely oblivious to such maternal howlers.  I have two years to get my act together before he starts big school.

Jamie headed straight in to check out all the toys, pleased that we'd finally gotten to the point of the day, while Barry and I had a quick chat with Zoe, Jamie's key worker.  I explained his predilection for reciting large chunks of Mr Men books while engaged in doing other things (I thought it might be useful to her to know the likely source on those occasions when he's muttering something to himself that appears to bear no relation whatsoever to what's actually going on).  She gave us a two-page form to fill in on the subject of Jamie's likes, anxieties, family situation, and other pertinent information, and an invitation to a "Learning to Learn" evening in two weeks' time where we apparently get to find out a bit more about how the nursery are doing things (or rather, I do, having called dibs on attending the evening while Barry gets lumbered with the babysitting again - hey, he gets to do all the dropping off/picking up and get any associated regular low-down from Jamie's teachers, so I figure it's only fair if I get some of the nursery-related fun).  Another staff member managed to distract Jamie from playing for just long enough to identify the sticker with his name on to stick on a drawer for his stuff, and Barry got him to pick out another sticker with his name on to stick on the flower on the wall to show his belated presence here - a system they have at this nursery to let the children register themselves, with help from a parent, as they come in.  Jamie had by now found the paper and felt-tips, the toy oven, and a little toy cup that he could practice drinking out of, and was going great guns.

On the off-chance of him actually stopping playing long enough to notice at any point that we were gone or to mind about it, I crouched down beside him to let him know that the scheduled parental departure was now about to happen and that, as previously stated, Daddy would be back at lunchtime to pick him up.  It is possible that he may have devoted a nanosecond's worth of time to taking in information about such irrelevant-to-the-playing-situation parental vagaries, although he gave no outward sign of it.  And then Barry and I headed off, looking proudly back at our wonderful big little boy so happily and confidently exploring this new stage in his life.

..............................................................................

As you can imagine, I was longing to hear every detail of Jamie's nursery experience.  Unfortunately, I knew this wasn't likely to be an option; Jamie doesn't really do narrative.  I did try (and I realise that when I type all this out it does sound a bit shine-a-bright-light-in-your-face, but I promise I was gentle and tactful about it):

"What did you do at nursery today, little one?"

(No answer)

"What toys did you play with at nursery?"

(Indecipherable mutter)

"Did you have a story?"

"No."

"Did you get to play on the slide?"

"No."

"Did you show Mummy your painting, little one?" Barry asked, coming in at this point.

He hadn't, of course.  The painting, which was propped up on his storage unit at the side of the room, was an impressive study in blues, pinks, and purples (My Son's First Painting!  Hooray!).  I inquired eagerly as to whether the staff had made any comment about Jamie's day when Barry picked him up, but it appears not - just the painting in his folder.  So I resigned myself to never getting to know anything more about the subject.  But, rather to my surprise, when I talked to Jamie again about it that night as I put him to bed he was rather more forthcoming.

"So, today you went to... nursery!  What did you do there?"

"Washed your hands and had a snack."  (He still hasn't got the hang of pronouns - he uses 'you' to mean 'me' and vice versa.)

"What did you have for your snack?"

Concentration.  "Sticks an'... apple an' 'nana."  Which did indeed correspond reasonably well to what I remembered of the menu from the day I took Jamie along to check the place out ('sticks' being breadsticks).

"And what else did you do?"

"Painting.  And Play-doh."

"Really?!  What did you do with the Play-doh?"

"Made a s'eep.  An' a pig."

I was elated.  This has got to be more information than Jamie's ever given us about any previous experiences.  The Big Snowball didn't get this level of detailed recounting.

On top of that, we have one further detail from an unexpected source.  Apparently, when Jamie got in from nursery, he declared that Tinky Winky and Po wanted to look at the picture, and arranged them in front of it accordingly.  Then he squatted down and thrust his face between theirs for a few seconds, looking at it himself.  When he straightened up, he declared to Barry "Tinky Winky says maybe you painted dat with your hands."

Barry also thinks maybe he painted dat with his hands, based on the state of his hands when Barry picked him up; but it's good to have it confirmed by such an august source.  Maybe I'll hear a bit more about Jamie's adventures when I go to this Parents' Evening in two weeks.  In the meantime, I look forward to any further dispatches that Jamie or Tinky Winky might choose to share with us.

Some general Jamieness

Jamie is two and a half now, and it seems incredible that only a few months ago he was barely talking.  Now, he's expressing his thoughts in long complicated sentences: "Take Maisy Mouse upstairs, read in bedroom, then have nap."  "Put handles on cup.  I think yellow handles might be good."  He's learning to negotiate: "One more time."  "Go in garden little bit."  "If want music off, then put telly on."  (This last was advice to my husband, who dislikes the Bob the Builder CD that Jamie loves playing - he was torn between being impressed and being annoyed that Jamie had advanced far enough to figure out a way to use this as leverage to try to get what he wanted.)

He's starting to get the hang of rudimentary manners.  Specifically, he has figured out that "Thank you, Jamie" is the appropriate phrase to be uttered on the occasion of him handing either of his parents something.  So he now announces "Sank you, Jamie!" loudly as he presses some object into our hands.  (Or as he tries to lift my food to my mouth for me whenever he decides that I'm taking too long a pause between one bite and the next and might, perhaps, have forgotten how to transfer food to my mouth myself and need some assistance.  I'm still working on convincing him that I do need a modicum of time to actually chew the stuff.)  I started trying to teach him 'Please' just the other week, when I got bored with being peremptorily ordered to go get more Mr Men books, and he does seem to be getting the general idea.  At least, when I prompt him with "Now, how do you ask nicely?" he responds "Ask nicely please".  I prefer to think of this as his attempt at getting it right rather than as a reciprocal instruction to me.

When he had his assessment back in March, one of the questions the health visitor asked me was whether he could follow the plot of a simple story.  At the time, I wondered how on earth it was possible to know - while there was no doubt that he adored books and being read to, how did I know what he was following and what he wasn't?  I would now unequivocally be able to answer this question in the affirmative, because he has taken to commenting thoughtfully, apropos of nothing much, on events in his favourite television programmes.  I've grown quite used to hearing a little voice pipe up with updates on what Pocoyo and Pato have been up to while I'm trying to bathe him, put his toys away, or do something otherwise totally unrelated. 

He has also taken to coming out with random quotes from his favourite books - usually the Mr Men books, though the line from the Dr Seuss Sleep Book about the clock not going tick tock but going tock tick is also something of a favourite.  It's at times like this that a good memory comes in useful, because when I hear him musing to himself "Had to stay there all night" or "Tried to open door outwards 'steada inwards!" then instead of being hopelessly bewildered I can simply agree that, yes, indeed, it was very unfortunate that Mr Bump fell into a hole when there was no-one around to help him out, or that Mr Wrong got stuck in his house for ten minutes while he figured out how to open the door properly.

He is also utterly fascinated by the numbering of the Mr Men books.  Every time we read one, he has to start out by checking the little number on the spine to confirm to his own satisfaction that, yes, this Mr Man book is still such-and-such a number and the universe is as it should be, and then look at the back where all the different Mr Men are listed with their numbers.  And he knows them in amazing detail.  The other week, when we were in the shop and I asked him which book he wanted this time, he told me "Mr Nonsense!" and I couldn't find it straight away on the shelf so I asked him what number it was and he knew it (number 33, in case anyone's interested), and then, when we got it home and read it, we discovered that Mr Silly (one that we didn't have at that time) appeared in it as a character and Jamie immediately announced "Mr Silly number 10!" and, what do you know, he was right.  He goes through them all and recites lists of the first ten - "Mr Tickle number 1, Mr Greedy number 2..." and will point at and name lots of the other pictures of Mr Men on the back.  It's practically his specialist Mastermind subject.

I recently started singing to him.  Yes, I know I should have been doing this all along and that singing to your child is just one of those Things A Mother Is Supposed To Do, but somehow I always used to go blank on thinking of songs (apart from the ones from my medical school days, and, believe me, singing those is not on any official list of Things A Mother Is Supposed To Do), and when I did think of any he didn't look overwhelmingly interested.  But then, a few weeks back, I spontaneously started singing "Five Little Ducks" while Jamie was playing with his ducks in the bath, and he loved it.  Then he demanded the Tumbletots song, which didn't actually narrow things down very much as Tumbletots change their songs every fortnight, but I tried him with "Little Peter Rabbit", which was the one we'd been singing at the most recent meeting, and he was delighted with that one too.  Then, since "Little Peter Rabbit" is sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, I impulsively tried him with one of the old campfire versions that I happened to know, starting out "He jumped from thirty thousand feet without a parachute...", which I would be the first to admit in retrospect was not one of my smarter moves because he also loves the Parachute Song, as he calls it, and asks for it often, and, yes, I will regret it deeply when the day comes when he demands "Vicar took him home for tea an' spread him on his bread song!" in front of my eighty-something-year-old grandmother.  But right now it's great fun.  And since then I've just taught him most of the less raunchy songs I know.  He comes up with his own names for them, which are sometimes hard to decipher.  "Go home song!" proved to be "Sloop John B", and "Walk song!" is "You'll Never Walk Alone" (tremendously important to any child born into my husband's family of die-hard Liverpool fans), but we are still trying to decipher "Tunnel song!" or, at the very least, to convince him that we might have an easier time singing it for him if he could recite enough additional lyrics to serve as an identifier.

He's just starting to use the hand gestures for action songs, as well - something he really hasn't shown much interest in until, well, basically the past few days.  But at Tumbletots last Tuesday, when we sang "Grand Old Duke of York", I went through the 'up' and 'down' arm movements with him for the first chorus, but he then started doing them quite of his own accord in the second chorus, and got them pretty much right, as well.  He can point to all the right bits in "Heads and Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and will recite the lyrics to himself (he doesn't sing) while pointing, or point while I sing if I go through very slowly.  (The other night he got a bit excited trying to recite it to me when he was supposed to be going to sleep: "Heads an' shoulders, knees and toes... an' glasses an' shorts an', an' trousers!")  And, earlier this week, when I sang him "Ten Green Bottles" during his bathtime he picked up the empty sunscreen bottle that's one of his bath toys, held it up against the wall, and let it slide down when I got to "accidentally fall".

He still loves reading letters and numbers, but he's now also just starting to read words.  He can read Jamie, Mummy, and Daddy.  This weekend, he's extended his repertoire to James, thanks to a lovely present of a cup with 'James' on it from a visiting cousin.  It puzzled him at first as he went through the letters "J... A... M... I... no I!  E... S" but, once we explained, he rapidly picked up the idea that J...A...M...E...S spells James.  (Or Engine Number 5, as the name James is otherwise known in our house.  His fascination with numbered characters extends to the "Thomas the Tank Engine" stories.  If he ever reads This Perfect Day, he probably won't even realise that it's meant to be a dystopia story.)

He now has his own computer, put together by Barry out of leftover parts and a few new ones.  This is an extremely exciting development in a boy's life, although it was unfortunately delayed by some of the parts not working once it was fitted together.  Poor Jamie had to wait patiently through days of "It's not working yet, little one.  Daddy will fix it when we get the new parts" before Barry could finally get it functioning.  He's learning how to start it up, how to use the mouse, and how to open the programmes he wants (quite a bit of which he already knew from his insistence on using our computers, but being able to practice with the mouse on his own computer has made a big difference).  He loves practicing typing (mostly just random letters and numbers, though Barry's taught him how to type 'Jamie') and playing on the Teletubbies website.

The other day, we were playing together in the garden.  Jamie played with the stones by the terrace, and ran round on the grass (carrying one round stone that took his fancy everywhere with him), and played on his slide (sending the stone sliding down first each time before he slid down to pick it up), and poured water out of the watering can onto the flower bed to make into mud, and balanced along the wall at the side of the garden and the low wall round the flowerbed in the bottom corner, and climbed up the stairs to the deck where he could get me to play peek-a-boo from just below the edge of the deck (this is a particularly hilarious game), and tried to poke bits of earth through the cracks between the planks of the deck, and squatted down on the edge of the deck to share grins with me as I stood on the grass below and laughed with him at the fun of it all. 

And, at intervals, he would announce "Going to lie on grass" and throw himself down to stare up at the sky, a mini-Hallmark moment come to life.  I would lie down next to him and reach over to rub his little tummy affectionately, and we would look up together at the sky, me pointing out the contrails to him, he commenting on the clouds.  Quiet, shared, joyful moments together before he jumped up and ran off to the next exciting project grabbing his attention.

So, um... probably not speech dyspraxia, then?

This is, as best I can remember, a list of the words Jamie came out with on Saturday:

Moo’.  (Moon.  While pointing at the crescent shape in one of his First Words books.)

Noo-Noo.  (The Teletubbies character of that name.  He was watching it on the computer in the car, as we travelled up to visit Barry's parents.)

Bi’.  (Bird.  In the parking lot at the place where we stopped for lunch.  I took him out of the car to change his nappy just as several birds - they looked like seagulls - were taking flight, quite close to us.  Jamie was enthralled.  “Bi’!” he announced, flapping his hands enthusiastically the way he does to indicate flying.)

Be’ tawk.  (Beanstalk.  While reading In Wibbly’s Garden in the car, just before we arrived.)

’No.  (Snow.  This was a particular favourite of the weekend.  He'd briefly seen snow earlier in the week, but it melted before he could go out and play in it.  But Barry's parents live in North Wales, so there was quite a bit more of it available.  He first came out with this word as we approached their house, and it took me a while to realise what he meant, as he was making so many different noises at the time he sounded like the world's smallest voice coach - No!  Na!  Nee!  It wasn't until later on, when he had the chance to encounter it closer up, that I realised what he meant.  This also led on to...)

’No’ ball.  (Snowball.  Which he did indeed make.  Just like the Teletubbies.)

Bi’ and ’maw.  (Big and small.  In description of the Lego models that Barry had brought in Woolworths.  He later started using these as names for the toy frogs my MIL has for him to play with in the bath - “Bi’, ’maw, ’maw,” he recites solemnly, as he places each in turn carefully on the edge of the bath.)

Nana.  (Barry's mother.  (For those of you reading from the US, it's a well-established British alternative to Granny.)  He kept rushing into the kitchen while she was busy cooking dinner, demanding further attention from Nana, not to mention more playing in the 'no.)

Dog.  (I don’t actually know how he pronounced this or just when he came out with it, because I wasn’t there at the time and MIL only reported it to me the next day - by which time he’d also apparently had a stab at saying “Ro’”, for Rosie, her name.)

Pi’ ba’.  (Piggyback.  When he got out of the bath and tried to climb on my back as always and I asked him “Do you want a piggy back, Jamie?”, he repeated it to me.)

Those are the ones I was sure of (there were other times when I thought he was trying to copy a word I'd made, but couldn't be certain) and that I remember (as you can probably imagine, it was reaching the stage when it was hard to keep track.  I'd leave the room for half an hour to have a shower and come back and he'd have more words.)  And then there have been more since.  Plus he's now producing the coveted Two Word Combination, that landmark in speech development: "More 'no!" (a frequent command on the Sunday since, alas, the snow had mostly melted by then and we had some difficulty convincing him that, no, it really wasn't going to be there if he went out to check yet again) and "Bi' 'no'ball" (an even more frequent comment over the past few days - having an extra-large snowball rolled for you by your Uncle Simon is clearly quite an event in a toddler's life, and the treasured memory still lingers on).

As Barry says, by the time we get to the appointment with the speech therapist he'll probably just toddle in and announce to her "Honestly, I don't know what the problem is.  My parents make such a fuss over nothing."

Speaking of...

A couple of weeks ago, the health visitor suggested to Barry that Jamie's dummy might be slowing down his speech and that it would be worth cutting down on the amount of time he spends using it.  So, Barry and I made a few mildly assiduous attempts to leave it behind and distract him from it during the day, without ever making a big deal out of it when he really wanted it or getting into a struggle over it, and, after a few days of this, I suddenly noticed that he'd been through the whole day and only had the dummy at naptime and bedtime.  The same happened again the following day.  After that, we decided to make it official. 

We don't make a big thing out of it, but, when he gets up in the morning, whichever of us is taking care of him sneaks the dummy away in a moment of genuine or manufactured distraction (his morning swig of milk is a prime opportunity) and leaves it in his bed or ours, somewhere out of sight.  Then it gets given back to him at naptime and removed similarly at the end of naptime, until the final countdown before bedtime, when, at some stage, it will find its way back into his mouth again.  On one occasion a day or two ago, when he was clearly a bit miserable and just seemed to need a moment of lying down with the dummy and a cuddle, I let him have it for that time and then took it away from him once he wanted to get up and run around, which then required taking him downstairs to distract him from it.  But, overall, he has given it up during the daytime.  And done so with astonishingly little difficulty.  I think he must just have been ready enough only to need the smallest of nudges.  I must say, it's a bloody relief not to always be trying to track the damn things down or rinse them off when he's dropped them on the floor.

Not only is this a notable and unexpected milestone in its own right, but it also appears to be having the desired effect.  In the past couple of weeks, Jamie has come up with more new words than he did in the couple of years before that.  His choices are somewhat idiosyncratic, and quite an intriguing example of his interests.  Here's the list so far, in the order he started saying them as best as I could remember it, with the intended word followed by the Jamie version in brackets:

Three (Three)
Four (Hoor.  An unfortunate mispronunciation, as Barry points out, although not as unfortunate as Tertia's son's pronunciation of 'truck'.)
Five (Ffff)
Ball (Ball)
Nine (Nye)

We are also fairly sure about 'blue' ('Buh'), and we have as-yet-unconfirmed hearings of 'red' ('Rrrr') and 'banana' ('Nah').

Plus, he is saying letters.  Lots of letters.  I would have put those on the list as well - they may not technically be words, but, since they're sounds that represent things he sees, I don't see why they shouldn't count as words from the perspective of a toddler learning to talk - but he has picked so many up so quickly that there's no way I could remember the order in which he started saying them.  I know his first was 'G' ('Goodnight Moon'), but after that they blur.  However, the letters that I have definitely heard him say at one point or another include A, B, D, G, H, M, N, O, P, R, T, U, V, and Y.  He pronounces some of these as letter names, and some of them as sounds (except for 'O', which he pronounces with a peculiarly Scottish accent to sound like the 'O' sound in 'Och'.  Perhaps he's been watching too much Balamory.)

(I'm going to need to write posts more quickly if I'm going to keep up with my son.  He's added 'E' to that list since I wrote it last night.)

By the way, those are just the letters that he'll actually have a go at saying.  He knows most, and quite possibly all, of the rest.  (I've never officially been right through and checked, but he seems to be getting them right on a regular basis on the electronic widget my grandmother gave him for Christmas.)

His favourite word is definitely 'Three' (which was also his favourite number to point to, even before he learned to say it).  He toddles round the house piping "Three!  Three!" with an accuracy that is slightly eerie in a child who has been so non-verbal.  He remains fascinated by numbers generally.  One result of this is that it's more obvious than is usual with a toddler when he's trying to come out with new ones as opposed to just uttering grunts, because they're in a sequence.  Hence, he's taken to pointing at the '1, 2, 3' on the back of his ride-on car or on the front of his numbers book and saying "Unh, unh, three".  (And, no, I don't have an explanation for how he can pronounce 'three' and not 'one' or 'two'.  It seems like it ought to defy the laws of something-or-other.)

Yesterday evening, he was sitting on my lap at the dinner table as I hastily finished off my last few bites of potato.  I'd pushed the plate out of his reach so that he couldn't grab my food, thus exposing the pattern of three leaves in a row on the placemat.  Jamie pointed at each of them in turn saying "Unh, unh, three".  He gets it!  He's starting to understand that numbers aren't just decorations - he's starting to get the concept of counting!

But, for now, the biggest fascination seems to be just in saying the numbers.  This makes shopping trips fun.  He already loves pointing at all the numbers he sees on price tags, and now he also pipes up with "Three", "Hoor", or "Nye" as he points emphatically at the appropriate digits.  If we see a woman with a 4 on her clothing at any point, we could be in for an interesting Embarrassing Moment story.

The second year in retrospect

I expected Jamie's second year - the start of his official toddlerhood - to be tough, and it has been, but not really for the reasons I'd expected.

What I was expecting was tantrums.  I was braced for tantrums.  Lots of them.  The parenting books all assured me that toddlerhood and tantrumming are practically synonymous.  I've never seen the film 'Kevin', but apparently it starts out with a sweet co-operative child bidding his parents goodnight on the night before his thirteenth birthday, then coming downstairs the next day having mutated into a full-blown Teenager.  I sort of expected toddlerhood to be like that - my sweet baby would go to bed after a lovely day partying for his first birthday, and when he woke up in the morning his first act would be to throw himself down kicking and hitting the floor and screaming "Nooooo!  Noooooo!", and thus life would continue for the next year, with brief intermissions every so often while he picked up new words.  While I vaguely supposed it probably wouldn't literally be like this, that's still a fair summary of what I expected.

It has, in actual fact, been almost nothing like this (as far as either the tantrumming or, alas, the learning to talk is concerned).  Oh, we did have a brief spell after he met up with the granddaughter of a friend of my mother's, who is about ten months older than him and who did have classic spells of screaming and arching her back when she was frustrated about anything, when he apparently thought "Aha!  That looks like fun.  Must try that".  Which, despite what I'd expected, turned out not to be a problem.  Although all the books go on about how infuriating tantrums are and what a pain they are to deal with, what none of them say is that they can actually be a highly welcome break.  Slumping to the floor screaming is one of the few activities a toddler can undertake that's harmless to both himself and the world at large.  Whenever he started, I thought "Thank goodness for that!  I can get a couple of minutes of computer time in."  Unfortunately, he got bored within a few weeks and stopped, but, believe me, I made the most of those breaks while they lasted.

The hardest part of having a toddler is, you see - at least for me - the fact that their ability to get into everything is, at this point, running so far ahead of their ability to understand why it might be a good idea to show some caution and restraint in doing so.  Oh, we have the house safety-proofed, but safety-proofing isn't annoyance-proofing.  Unless your decorating arrangements happen to include large numbers of high cupboards in every room into which you can simply shovel everything from the remote control to the salt-cellar to your entire pen collection, there are going to be plenty of things that are still within a toddler's reach that they shouldn't have, and that number is going to increase as time goes by.  (For example, Jamie has recently figured out how to climb onto the shredder next to my desk and thence onto my computer table, therefore gaining access not only to the stereo - which is what he's really after - but also my expensive and pokable LCD monitor and the stuff such as pens and floppy disks that I put out of reach at the back of my desk or on the control tower.  And there just isn't really anywhere else I can put the shredder.)

With a young toddler, the simplest of daily activities becomes an exercise in logistics.  A while back Shannon, from Peter's Cross Station, wrote about how she spent a typical day caring for her then-eighteen-month-old toddler, and she was saying that after Nat's breakfast Nat toddles round the kitchen while Shannon sorts out the stuff from the dishwasher and gets a load of laundry on... Believe me, that sort of simple description does not begin to cover it.  The reality is more like "Open dishwasher, put away one item, open dishwasher again because toddler has closed it as soon as you had your back turned, put away a couple more items, switch dishwasher off because toddler has closed it and pressed that interesting-looking button on the front, open dishwasher again and realise the knives on the top layer are within his reach, grab them and try to dry them while fending off a toddler with, um, the third hand, tell toddler how good he is for trying to help but could he give Mummy that plate, please, as it isn't really a toy, and, yes, that fork as well, try to inspect items removed from toddler's fingers for stickiness/do any needed rewiping/put them away before toddler has a chance to switch dishwasher off again, fail, remove toddler firmly from vicinity of dishwasher, switch off dishwasher, switch off washing machine that toddler has just switched on due to having been moved away from dishwasher, manage to put another glass away, agree with toddler that, yes, the bright lights on the front of the water filter are indeed most fascinating but DON'T PUT YOUR HAND IN THAT SALT, pull toddler's questing hand out of salt container on water filter and put lid straight while trying not to drop glass or tea-towel that you haven't had a chance to put down, remove toddler from vicinity of water filter and washing machine and dishwasher, maintain running commentary aimed at Enhancing Language Abilities on how Jamie's opening the cupboard door, adding request that although that's all well and good could he now please shut it again instead of playing with Mummy and Daddy's wedding present crockery, remove toddler from vicinity of cupboard, realise he is now back in vicinity of dishwasher, switch off dishwasher that he's just switched on, give up, take toddler out of kitchen, leave stuff in dishwasher until husband is awake to watch him."

Multiply that by every single darned activity, no matter how trivial, you do during the entire day (and then the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after...), and you can see how it gets pretty exhausting.  I'm glad I go out to work four days a week, because I desperately need the break.

And the not talking!  Watching Jamie learn to talk was the thing I'd been looking forward to most about the second year, so, believe me, it's been pretty bloody annoying that he hasn't.  While every other blogging parent of a toddler seems to be writing about how quickly their child is picking up new words, combining them into sentences, and all that good stuff, Jamie has a vocabulary of four words total.  (To his original 'Muh' for 'milk' and 'Dada' for 'daddy' he eventually added 'Hiya', after Barry finally managed to convince him that this was a more appropriate form of telephonic conversation than blowing raspberries, and 'Ooo-wow'n-wow'n', which means 'Round and round', and is used as a catch-all term for the washing machine, the dryer, the home movies that Daddy's been recording from Nana and Grandad's old-fashioned projector onto computer, and anything else with a rotatory motion.)  I'm sure that in a few years I'll be looking back on this time longingly - but, when I'm being driven mad by a child who won't shut up, can someone please remind me just how darned frustrating I found the alternative?

But what I also hadn't expected... was just how much things would improve over the course of the year.  I'd thought of the Toddler Years as a sort of vast desert of parenthood that stretched on until at least the age of three, and I somehow vaguely visualised them as all of a piece, so that the best I'd hoped for by the age of two was that there would be some sort of faint glimmer of light at the end of the, um, desert.  (I really must stop mixing those metaphors.)  I hadn't realised what an amazing thing it would be to see the little two-year-old person who's spent the year emerging from the one-year-old baby.

It's been such a gradual change that I didn't quite realise just how much things had improved until I started writing this - it's one of the posts I've been meaning to write for months, and it was only when I finally sat down and did so that I realised that most of what I was writing came from the pre-written post that had been living in my head all this time.  It is not, any longer, an accurate description of current events.  These days - and I cannot tell you how dim and distant this halcyon state of affairs seemed just a few months ago - I can leave Jamie alone for a few minutes while I sort the dishwasher out or do something else that needs doing, and he will play contentedly by himself.  Of course, he's quite likely to be playing contentedly with a biro or the remote controls or this computer or something else that he isn't supposed to have, but, by checking in at frequent intervals, I can usually keep things under control.  And when we go out, he actually spends more time sitting in his pushchair than he does trying to climb out.  Amazingly enough, life is feeling almost restful.  Relatively speaking, anyway.

Another thing that's improved drastically is his language comprehension.  He may not say many words, but, my goodness, he's got them in his head all right.  For this particular change, I actually can pinpoint a turning point; the moment when, aged around eighteen months, he pointed emphatically at the picture of the ball in his Winnie-the-Pooh counting book and then at his own ball.  I agreed enthusiastically that it was indeed a ball - how clever of him to spot it.  The next day, he did the same thing, only this time pointing through to the next room where the ball was.  I know it doesn't sound like much, as turning points go, but... it was like a light going on in his head.  Pictures aren't just there for decoration - they represent concepts.  And words aren't just sounds - they're ways of expressing those concepts.  His understanding - not just of language, but of how the world works generally - has spiralled upwards in the second half of his second year.  I can see him putting it all together in his mind, making the connections. 

When I told him that we needed to put his clothes in the dryer, he responded "Ooowow'nwow'n", making the accompanying round-and-round gesture that I taught him by mistake when trying to illustrate the washing machine's motion for him (understandably enough, he thought it was a new sign).  When I got the newly-dried clothes upstairs and started sorting them out, he grabbed an armful of trousers and stuffed them into the drawer before I'd even started to put things away.  Admittedly it wasn't much help, since they hadn't been folded yet and, besides, he was trying to put them in the T-shirt and sock drawer... but how impressive is it that he remembered, from the times he'd seen me putting away laundry before, that this was meant to be the next step?  When Barry told him we were going to the park, he signed "Ball".  He understands not just what words mean, but how the concept behind them fits together with other concepts and memories in his little universe. 

How much more of that understanding is he going to show by the end of his next year?  I don't know - but I know I'm looking forward to finding out.

Figures

This is going to be a terribly dull post, but I'm recording this for myself:

Just weighed and measured Jamie.  His weight is 2 stone 5 for those of us in the UK, or 33 lb for any US readers I have, or 15 kg in new money.  This puts him on the 91st centile.  I'm impressed but not terribly surprised - he's a solid little chunker!

Measuring him was more difficult as I made the mistake of letting him see the pencil I'd put ready to mark his height on the wall, and he was most annoyed that I wouldn't let him play with it.  However, we were able to establish that he is now 89 cm, or 2' 11".  If we go by the old rule of doubling his height now to get his height as an adult, this means we can expect him to be 5'10".  However, there are some big-time height genes in Barry's side of the family (Barry is 6' 4", and all the men in his mum's side are over six feet), and my mother-in-law tells me that Barry's brother was less than three feet at the age of two (he's now six feet two), so we shall see.  I don't think he'll be as tall as his father, but that's just as well - it would be nice for him to be spared the lifetime of never fitting in aeroplane seats or being able to buy trousers that Barry's faced.

His height is 75th percentile for his age.  Now, I didn't measure him when he turned one, which is a shame - I'd have loved to have a direct comparison.  (And we'd already moved into this house then, so I could have had a succession of heights up the wall for each birthday.)  But the measurements that I have for his length at six months and his height at sixteen and eighteen months all have him on or near the 25th centile, so it seems a reasonable bet that that's where he was when he was one.  If so, that would mean he's grown six inches in the past year.

Six inches?!  No wonder I feel like it's got a lot harder to put stuff out of his reach!

Last day as a one-year-old

It seems strange to think of Jamie as a one-year-old, although as I type this it will technically be true for another fifty minutes.  There's so much difference between a child who's just turned one and a child who's just about to turn two.  On his first birthday, Jamie was officially a toddler not just according to the baby book chapter headings, but also in the literal sense - he would, when he felt like it, lurch a few unsupported steps.  But he was still very much a baby toddler, if you see what I mean.  Now, he's a little boy toddler.  He's grown up so much in a year, and all day I've been thinking about the differences.

His last day as a one-year-old started with him waking up twice in the early hours of the morning, which only underlined how unusual an event this is now - he has the occasional morning waking, but I can't remember the last time he woke twice.  The first time was at around 5.20 with an excessively wet nappy that had soaked through - I thought it might take a while to settle him, but as soon as I'd finished changing him he crawled back into bed and went straight back to sleep.  Then he came in again around - I can't remember exactly, but some time between 6 and 7, and I just took him back and lay down with him in his bed for half an hour.

After that, he slept until an unheard of 9.00.  In fact, he was still sound asleep then, but I woke him at that point.  I hated to do it (for my sake, not his - seemed a shame to throw away perfectly good blogging time), but we'd planned to take him swimming that morning and, if we were to get back in time to let the guests in, we needed to get going.  So I got him up and ready and we set off.

This was Jamie's third swimming session.  His attitude's certainly changed since the first, thanks to Barry putting in the effort to nudge him that little bit past his fears - this time, as last time, he was raring to go.  The only problem was that he seemed to have forgotten about kicking when he got in the water, which meant that he couldn't warm up, which meant that he clung to me as closely as he could to try to stay warm, which was something of a vicious circle as it made him even less willing to kick.  After a short while, Barry hit on the idea of moving him towards me through the water as I moved backwards gradually so that we stayed the same distance apart, until he started kicking, whereupon I stood still so that he closed the distance between us.  The idea was that this way, he'd make the association between kicking and moving closer to his goal.  This seemed to work well.  By the end of the quarter-hour we spent in the pool, he was a lot more willing to kick when we moved him through the water, and, after seeing me swim a few strokes, he even started making the arm movements as well.

We stopped off on our way home to buy a couple of helium balloons (I got one with Bob the Builder on, as he loves his Bob the Builder CD and musical doll, and one which lets you apply your own number stickers to say which birthday it is, because he's fascinated by numbers) and a card for him, and then managed to get home before the others arrived.  Jamie was delighted with his Bob the Builder balloon, promptly heading into my study to switch on the stereo with the CD in and grab the Bob the Builder figure to show me that it was the same as the one in the picture.  Barry's parents and brother turned up shortly, then my mother, and finally my sister with her boyfriend, and there was a short chaotic time of people running round trying to get lunch put out for the nine of us and find someplace for the piles of presents (and my mother trying to wrap the last of the presents). 

Before going through to eat, we gave Jamie his first couple of presents - I wanted to spread them out a bit during the day, as we did last year.  One thing that has definitely changed is that he now gets the whole idea of trying to get the paper off presents to get to what's inside, a concept that definitely baffled him last time around.  (In fact, when we left him unsupervised for two minutes in the general pre-lunch kerfuffle, we found him up on a chair on the dining room table half-way through unwrapping the present my mother had just wrapped.)  This is interesting, because the last time he had any wrapped presents was at Christmas - nearly a year ago, and he wasn't too sure what to do with them then, either, as far as I can remember.  So this isn't something he's learned directly.  It's one of the many, many little signs of how much more he's learned about how the world works, how you go about doing things.

The first present he opened was his Aunty Ruth's present, which was a tractor and trailer which did lots of interesting things when the appropriate buttons were pressed (lights went on, horn blared, animals made species-appropriate noises, tractor chugged forwards, and it played a cheery little song).  He was very pleased with this, and had so much fun trying out all the buttons that it took a few minutes to distract him long enough to open my mother's present, a shape-sorting sphere.  He liked that a lot, as well, but he couldn't get the hang of finding the hole that matched each shape, so we helped him find all the right holes to post all the shapes before we went through and all crowded in round the dining table for lunch.

Jamie joined us at the main table for lunch last year as well, but then he was in his high chair, still eating with his fingers.  This time, he was sitting up properly on a chair (though he did find it easier when we gave him a cushion) and even having a fair bit of success in using a fork.  In fact, he was almost trying too hard with this - he hadn't realised some foods were meant to be eaten with the fingers and was trying to eat everything with a fork.  This worked quite well with the grapes, but he was rather stymied by the slice of bread and butter.

After that, I took a sleepy little boy upstairs and he settled down easily for his nap.  (Another big change from last year and the baby who could only fall asleep nursing or drinking from his bottle, with someone cuddled next to him.)  Then, when he woke up, Barry got the birthday jelly ready on the dining room table, illuminated by torchlight from underneath, along with the football cake we'd bought for the grown-ups of the party who didn't like jelly.  Jamie was very pleased with the jelly.  He ate two bowlfuls of it, and even managed to use his spoon for some of it.

After I'd taken him upstairs for his clean-up and change of clothes, I brought him downstairs and the present-opening started again.  Let's see if I can remember everything he got:

I gave him a CD of children's songs, and some plastic zoo animals.  Barry's brother Simon gave him Thomas the Tank Engine wellingtons that light up when he stamps his feet.  Barry's parents gave him a little gadget from the Doctor Who exhibition that lights up with lots of flashing lights when he presses a button, and Archie Mouse from Bagpuss, who sings the mice's song when Jamie presses his tummy.  And from Barry, he got Teletubbies.  First a mini-Dipsy, to go with the mini-Laa-Laa we've already given him; then, as the grand finale to his presents, a Po which plays the Teletubby song when you squeeze its hand, complete with moving pictures on the tummy screen.

Jamie really liked all his presents, and it was hard to get him to stop playing with each one long enough to open the next.  (We should really have stuck to the spreading-the-presents-out plan, but by then people were carried away with the sheer enjoyment of watching him open them.)  He's almost figured out all the shapes on the shape-sorter already, and he's had enormous fun pressing the buttons on the various other things and looking at the flashing lights.  And Po was every bit as much of a success as Barry hoped for.  Jamie's eyes got huge when he pulled the wrapping paper off and saw what it was.  The evening's activities have been conducted to a steady background of the Teletubbies theme tune as Jamie made her play over and over again, interspersed with bursts of "We will mend it, we will mend it..."

When Barry's mother pumped up the inflatable mattress for Simon in my study, he thought this was great fun as well.  He wanted to try stepping on the pump as well, alternating this with throwing himself down on the mattress, giggling, rolling over, jumping up to run back to the pump and step on that again.  Dinner was a lot later than he was used to, but he dealt with this like a trouper.  He sat up at the table again and ate chicken and mashed potatoes and potato wedges and carrots and sprouts, and did such a nice job of using his fork.  Even though it was after his bedtime by now and he'd had a long and tiring day, he stayed in a really good mood, though I could see his eyelids drooping.  When he finished his dinner, I took him upstairs for his bath and stories and bed.  And, at the end of his last day as a one-year-old, he fell asleep playing his musical star and cuddled up to his little Dipsy toy.

When I tucked him into bed and talked softly to him about all the exciting things he'd been doing that day, the way I always do last thing before I kiss him goodnight, I tried to tell him how special it had been watching him that day, how special it was to have him for a son, how very much I loved him.  I know he can't understand the words yet.  But he understands what I really want him to understand.  He understands that when he wakes up in the middle of the night and he's soaking wet or just a bit confused and not sure how to get back to sleep, it's OK.  He doesn't need to cry, because he can just come and find Mummy, and Mummy will take care of him and make it all better again.

A semantic milestone

Jamie is now twenty-two months old.  As he was coming up to this age, it occurred to me that this seemed to be the ill-defined point at which it seems appropriate to stop referring to age in months and start referring to it in years with qualifiers.  Which means that Jamie is now nearly two.

Nearly two.  My little boy - who runs everywhere and can climb the climbing frames at the park and walk up and down stairs if he has a bannister to hold, who's been in his own room for the past few weeks and now eats meals at his own little table and chair because he's outgrown the high chair - is nearly two.  Two years ago he was a bump; a year ago he was a crawler and a cruiser, fascinated by life but with little concept of what any of it meant.  These days, he loves being read to and music and spinning round and round and dancing and going to Tumbletots and watching the Teletubbies, especially the baby in the sun.  And he's nearly two.

The Houdini Chronicles, Part III

We're visiting my mother this weekend (which, if you're wondering, is why you won't see this post until Sunday afternoon at the earliest even though I'm dating it Saturday - I don't think anyone has located the exact whereabouts of my house from this blog, but I'm not actually about to advertise our temporary absence from it on the Internet). My mother bought a small cot last year to put in the spare room for visits of her First Grandchild, but two months ago Jamie got big enough to climb out of that, so now we're back to bringing the travel cot, which has higher sides, on visits.  Since it doesn't have a proper mattress, we put a folded-up duvet in the bottom to pad it, along with a pillow for him.  (I can tell you, it's good getting past the magic one-year-old mark and being able to stop worrying about SIDS.)

Today, after setting the cot up for his nap complete with duvet and pillow, I looked at it and mused "Hmmm... I wonder how much longer it'll take him to figure out that if he piles all of that bedding up at one end and then stands on it, it'll boost him up just enough to get out?"

About fifteen minutes, as it turned out.

Fortunately, I escaped this particular joyful milestone in my child's life, since Barry said to me as I picked Jamie up to take him up for his nap "Do you want me to settle him?  After all, he behaves better for me than for you."  My natural instinct to protest that I could so get him to behave perfectly well thankyouverymuch did struggle briefly against my other natural instinct to take the offer of help and run, but it wasn't even close - I thanked him profusely, handed Jamie to him, and waved bye-bye with a light heart.  So, while I got to read some more Harry Potter to my mother, Barry got the fun of holding a wriggly toddler in place on the bed until he finally fell asleep.  Of course, there's still tonight to deal with....