Sentimental Seadragon

Fifteen Months

My little baby is already fifteen months old - and not quite a baby anymore!

As of two weeks ago, he's finally walking. We went over to a friend's house and suddenly Squeakles just got up and started walking all over their living room. Then when we got home, it was like our apartment was a whole new playground and Squeakles couldn't get enough of roaming all around, often going in circles around the island that separates the kitchen from the living room, just for the sake of walking.

Being able to walk, while exhilarating for Squeakles, is creating all sorts of new hazards. There are the obvious accidents-waiting-to-happen (falling down, crashing into things, etc.). We are now chasing him around the apartment pretty much all day long (except when we convince him to play in the Pack and Play).

He's also getting up at night - we hear him crying and find him either sitting up or standing up (!), often with his eyes still closed. We tried sleeping with him in our bed while we were visiting J's family last week, but we woke up once to find him trying to climb over J. The idea of leaving him in the bed for naps with pillows on either side of him no longer seemed like it would be particularly safe, so we decided to try to get him to sleep in the Pack and Play. I nursed him in the bed, but as soon as he fell asleep I moved him to the Pack and Play. This used to be a delicate mission, very much like carrying a grenade and trying to put it down soooo gently so that it wouldn't explode. (If Squeakles were a real grenade I would have been dead a million times over.) But now - now! - he just resettles (maybe with a slight whimper) and keeps on sleeping!! And then! When the pacifier falls out of his mouth or he wakes up, we just go in, replace the pacifier, or turn him over, or just shhhh him and within seconds he goes right back to sleep. Unbelievable. This happens even if I find him sitting or standing - I just have to lie him down first and then shush him back to sleep.

This week, back at home, we've been putting Squeakles to bed in the crib and it's been working out wonderfully. It's the same thing - he does wake up, but he can easily be resettled, so unlike in the past we're not spending hours holding him and rocking/bouncing him. On the first night he woke up several times throughout the night, but last night he woke up once at 11:30 and then again at 5:30, which is pretty tolerable. I think he might even like sleeping now.

Squeakles has also decided to say more than "digim" in the past couple of weeks. He does animal noises in response to questions:

• What does the cat say? meowmi
• What does the cow say? mooooooo (previously was mo, sounding like mo' money)
• What does the rooster say? co doo doo doo
• What does the duck say? gak gak

Okay, so he's not exactly saying them right, but it's very cute.

He's also figured out that questions should be followed by answers, so he responds to everything that sounds like a question with "da". (We don't even have to use real words in the question, it just has to have question inflection. "Squeakles, bi di wokki wo?" Squeakles will smile and then say confidently, "Da.")

Some of this makes me wonder what he's hearing when we talk. He's started doing this weird thing when we give him a phone (with someone talking to him). He sort of pushes sounds out emphatically, kind of like grunts. Is that what he thinks we sound like? He also starts all of his "sentences" with something that sounds like "I", which I would guess a lot of our sentences do. (Often it sounds like he's saying something "I do".)

Reading books at night is also becoming actually enjoyable. (Previously: I would attempt to read while Squeakles squirmed and whined and needed to be cajoled into paying attention with big sweeping movements of the book or pointing at things.) Our current books are "First Book of Sushi", "Big Dog, Little Dog" (which actually isn't the most exciting book ever, but it's working for now), "Monkey and Me" (a paper version of the book came with a box of Cheerios), and a beautiful alphabet book that my grandmother made (it is cloth and each page has a letter stitched on the page and an example of something that starts with that letter). Of course, I still do all kinds of pointing and hand movements to keep him interested. He's picking up on some of them, like when I pretend to pick up pieces of sushi from the book and feed them to him. I caught him the other day doing this by himself.

I give him his "Look Look" book while changing his diaper and he likes to do a lot of the movements I've done with this in the past. There's a page with a car on it, and I've said vroom vroom while moving the book back and forth. So whenever he gets to this page he says "booom boooom" and moves it back and forth. When he gets to the page with the cat on it, he says "meowmi". And when he sees the page with the hands, he puts his hands on it.

And finally, now that Squeakles can walk, J is teaching him to play soccer. (If you're reading this in a feed reader or email, you may need to click through to my blog to see the video.)

Soccer Before Bed from Philly Roll on Vimeo.

I think he eats more than I do

I decided to spare you the after dinner picture, but let me share the gory details of what he ate tonight:

• three or four refills of salmon
• two full refills of rice
• three refills of broccoli
• a quarter cup of applesauce

I think he ate more for dinner than I did tonight.

(However, I did have a Kirchmayr chocolate for dessert that I didn't share with him!)

Books before Bed

Does anyone have any recommendations about good books to read a one-year old before bed?  Almost all of the books we have are just pictures with one word or maybe a sentence on each page.  I looked on Amazon today for ideas, but the best selling books for ages baby-to-3yrs tend to be these same simplistic board books.  (They are great in many ways, just not what I'm looking for in a bedtime book.)

We do have one Dr. Seuss book (The Cat in the Hat) that works well.  It is a little bit text heavy, but if I point to various aspects of the pictures as I read, it seems to maintain Squeakles' attention.

What books does (did) your children enjoy at this age?

No Words

Squeakles hasn't said a real word in as long as I can remember. (With mommy brain, that time span is about two weeks.)

We've heard a few repeats of "gago".

Then there was the favored "bwee".

And in the past couple of days, he's been enjoying "digum". (Actually, I don't really know how to transcribe that. The 'd' is actually kind of a fricative. And J says that to him it sounds more like "kee-um".)

Of course, I didn't find the time to blog (or video record!) the wonderful few days when he crawled around the apartment, saying over and over in a sweet and high pitched voice, "mommy, mommy, daddy, daddy". Nope, now we've just got "digum".

In the meantime however, he's mastering prosody (lots of ee's and oo's in high-pitched sing-song). Also, he's walking - though still not completely independently. In our apartment he sometimes walks between pieces of furniture or randomly stands up to check things out, and occasionally will walk over to one of us, though it always ends in a crash landing against our legs. This crashing towards us unexpedectly is why I updated my Facebook status to say that he was walking. However, he doesn't walk freely in wide open spaces like the park.

So if he's not actively working on word learning or walking, where is he spending his energy?

Discovering spatial relations:

Being silly:

Eating (and seriously, this boy can eat):

And generally being as happy as can be:

Stupid Fights

I know I haven't posted in forever and I have a lot of catching up to do, but since that seems a bit overwhelming right now I thought I would share the gist of the stupidest argument ever that J and I had this morning.

The cats had had one of their wild screeching and yowling cat fights during the night, which started probably in the living room but occurred primarily on the windowsill in our bedroom. Squeakles was in our bed because he'd been woken up multiple times by the light growling coming from the windowsill, which it turns out were the precursors to the cat fight. One of the times he woke up he turned over on his hands and knees and tried to climb up into bed with me and cried whenever I tried to turn him over and lie him back down (on his own mattress, on the floor next to our bed). So I took him into bed with us, figuring that if the growling continued he was just going to keep waking up if he was on the mattress by himself. So we were all three fast asleep when the cats came screaming into the room and attempted to fight to the death on our windowsill. Squeakles was terrifed and started yelling and crying instantly, I held him tight and tried to soothe him (and protect him in case the cats decided to run across the bed), while J stood up and tried to separate the cats with a pillow while yelling at them (it works, but also scares Squeakles even more). The fight ended quickly, but then it took Squeakles a long time to trust that the fight was over. He lay there quietly but keeping his eyes open (while J and I were falling back to sleep) and nervously looking to the windowsill to make sure it wasn't going to erupt in madness again. J locked Koji out of the bedroom, but unfortunately we have a folding slatted door and Koji spent the next hour or so trying his hardest to break down the door. He banged his paws on it or slipped them under the door and pulled over and over while the door banged back and forth. It was hardly conducive to sleep, but at least the cats were separated. (It's the only way to separate them that works. Another option would be to lock Koji in the bathroom, but then he would yowl from there and get even more agitated, which we worry would just make things worse.)

So this morning J and I woke up pretty grouchy.

I was ready to revisit the idea of giving Koji away, while J was devising plans for keeping the cats separated in our three room apartment. He suggested that we get a spray bottle and spritz Koji whenever he went over on that side of the bedroom, and that eventually he would learn that that side of the room is off limits.

I am skeptical that Koji could learn anything like boundaries (or even if he could, he wouldn't feel obliged to respect them and certainly not because of a few spritzes of water), so I grumpily accosted J about this plan, asking him how he was going to monitor Koji every minute of the day and night, spritzing him whenever he walked over into that side of the room. I suggested that we just keep the spray bottle by the bed and only use it when they fight. By that I meant, whenever the growling starts, but I didn't specify that so J cut me off asking snippily whether I thought he was some sort of ninja and would be able to intervene in a fight and only spray Koji but not Tako. So I raised my voice telling him that obviously I didn't mean that it would work while they were fighting, but I had meant he could spray them when the growling started. And oh by the way, would he just explain to me how in the world he was going to convince Koji not to enter one whole side of the bedroom? Was he going to stay home from work and sit there spraying him?!

At this point J suggested that we both calm down, that we were both grumpy because we hadn't slept well, but that we weren't accomplishing anything useful by griping at each other about how stupid the other person's plan was. And suddenly it all seemed pretty ridiculous and even funny.

A couple of hours after this conversation, the cats have returned to normal. They walk past each other without growling. And I fully expect to see them cuddled up together taking a nap on a bed later today.