Time flies ... When you're pregnant AGAIN.

Didn't I say I wouldn't do this again?  Didn't I? Didn't I *specifically* write down the gruesome details of pregnancy so that they'd stick in my mind and prevent any stupid decisions of going down the path of bloated, nauseous, ginormousness ever EVER again??

Seems that I don't listen to me, either.

I'm at just about 15 weeks, and the sickness has mostly tailed off, so yay for that.  What really surprised me was the unexpected fertility of my body after four years of not wanting to know.  Seems like those weird round growths in the ovaries actually have a function after all.  Huh! Who'da thunk it?

Anyway, I'm not going to harp on about it too much, as this is my second pregnancy in the last 6 months, the previous one ending in a miscarriage at 12 weeks, which was an experience - and not one I'd really like to repeat.  Tomorrow I'm having an amniocentesis to make sure everything's ok - but to be honest, right now I'm just keen to have another look at the ultrasound and make sure that the little heartbeat is still going strong.

But the Monkey!  I really should write some updates, as without them I'm inclined to forget that the little fella IS actually making some progress!  I don't know how other parents feel, but at every stage in his life, I feel that it's been that way FOR-EV-AH, and it's going to stay that way FOR-EV-AH, and I do lose sight of the fact that he is inching his way to becoming (I hope!) a fully functioning human bean!

His language is really coming on.  I think he has excellent language comprehension (and no, I'm not boasting of any superior-for-age abilities - frankly, I have no idea of the language comprehension of other kids his age - but I'm just impressed by how much he does appear to understand without overt teaching).  He'll follow simple instructions, mostly when he feels like it:

• "Pick up your cornflakes" (yes, because he likes to put things in containers)
• "DON'T pull the cat's tail again!" (no, because .. because ..  just because)

His language production is certainly better than it was - we have moved away from "dah" as the single utterance, and we now have a few different ones.  The problem is that I think he has quite a sizeable spoken vocabulary now, but a very limited set of sounds and syllable structures, that we're almost back to the "dah" stage where I need a lot of context to understand what he's saying.  

I apologise here - I'm a linguistic nerd, so I'm going to be boringly pedantic at this point.   So - he only speaks in monosyllables, and the structure of those syllables is almost exclusively C (consonant) + V (vowel).  His consonants predominantly are [p t d k m n h w z ʔ], and his vowels [i e æ a u ə].

So, if he says [wa], it could mean "water" or "flower", depending.  If he says [pi], it could be "pea", "bee", "biscuit", or "bread".  You can understand that I might be a little nervous when he tries to hand me something while saying [pi]!   His strategy seems to be to take the first syllable of the word, and fit it to a CV structure with the sounds he has, regardless of the stress of the syllable - though I have noticed one recent change - "banana" has stopped being [bə], and started being [na], which suggests that syllable stress might be starting to play a part in his choice.  I've only heard a couple of words where he attempts a consonant at the end of the syllable:  "juice" (often [duz]), and words like "hat" and "heart" [hæʔ] or [haʔ].

Anyway, I have no idea why he has decided that a monosyllabic CV vocab is the way to go, but he has.  We try all sorts of implied correction: "[æ]!" he says, and "yes .. that's an APPLE", we say back.
He'll even imitate directly:
"Say 'a'"
"[æ]"
"Say 'pul'"
"[pu]"
"Say 'aPPLE'"
"[æ]!" 

At some point, he's going to get multi-syllabic words, and you can bet I'm going to celebrate that day! :)

As to everything else not language related - he shows signs of taking after both his parents.  He loves the ipad, and he loves books.  He's quite shy when there are large groups of children, and tends to stand back and watch, waiting until the coast is clear before he'll have a go.  He doesn't often fight for possession of something - if another kiddie takes something he wants, he'll either watch them making triumphantly off with it with a slightly puzzled expression, or else (if he REALLY wants it), he'll come crying to me.  He's reasonably physically fearless (happy to climb up the slide), and doesn't startle too easily.  Because he's been at home with us all his life, he still gets anxious when either mum or dad leave, though he's been looked after at home by grandparents a few times, and seems to settle down quite well, as long as the parents are out of view.   I think he really thrives on routine as well - and we've been SOOOOO lucky with his sleeping, as he gets in bed awake, and has no trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep.  What a champ!

As to food ..  Well, he's probably no more picky than any other 18 month old.  He will eat almost any kind of fruit (though for some reason, he detests cherries, which is a shame, as they're particularly delicious this summer).  Bread, yes (plain, or with some kind of spread), salty biscuits & rice crackers (he would eat sweet biscuits no doubt, but he rarely gets the opportunity), cheese, milk, orange juice, meat (SUCH a little carnivore!), but not keen on many veggies.  Peas are a huge hit, and I give him some in a bowl as a snack, and he'll eat broccoli when liberally seasoned with garlic and anchovy.  Spinach (silverbeet) soup goes down a treat, but anything else is a bit of a battle.  He doesn't like carrot, corn, cucumber or capsicum.  Not a fan of tomato.  Had a brief flirtation with beetroot, but appears to have gone off it now.   Will eat things like pumpkin and sweet potato (and lentils, and a whole lot of other things actually), if mushed up in a curry-flavoured soup.   Which is what I make when a) I'm feeling that his veggie intake is a little low, and b) I don't feel like puking into the soup pot.  Which means he hasn't had a good veggie soup in months now.

Sigh.

Cheese makes everything better, right?

Banana is NOT a hair product.

So - for the first time in the Monkey's life, we've actually washed him down with a soap-based product (normally a washcloth and enough warm water produce the desired results).   You can probably guess the reason.

I suppose it was my fault.  I'd given the Monkey some banana to nosh on after his lunch, and at some point he got a tiny little piece stuck on his 'free' hand.  At one point he wiped this hand in his hair, and I said - stupidly, in retrospect - "Are you wiping banana in your hair?".  Well, he took that as a cue to apply the half-banana segment in his other hand to his head - as if it were an eraser, and his hair was a stubborn pencil-drawn thatch.  My reaction was somewhere between horror and amusement.  Yeah, I know, novice mother - because it was all that he was hoping for and more.  After that, every time he managed to catch my eye, the banana-head-rubbing was repeated with a huge grin.  Eventually I confiscated the fruit, as it became clear that it wasn't going to morph back into an edible product as far as he was concerned - and to be honest, as far as I was concerned either.

Banana is damn sticky, that's all I can say!

The Hair Apparent

I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of going to the hairdresser's. And I can quite happily ignore the state of my own hair for a fair while.  When it comes to the Monkey, however, I need to be a little more attentive.  After his brief spate of near baldness, he's developed a lovely thick mop - with some interesting characteristics all of its own.  He's inherited my tendency to have cowlicks - both front and back.  And added to that is his cool double-crown: one at the back in the normal place, and one at the front, a sort of mirror image of his cowlick.

Anyway, his hair grows reasonably fast, so in no time at all I'm faced with the neccesity of trimming it

I'm afraid I balk at taking him to a hairdresser for a couple of reasons.

1.  I'm too cheap.  I don't see the point in lashing out $20 (or whatever it costs) to have a stylist chop the Monkey's locks.  It's not like he'll get teased by 2 yr old bullies at playgroup or anything.

2. I don't think it's fair to inflict the Monkey's attitude to haircuts on an unsuspecting hairdresser (or any other salon patrons).  I think he may have inherited some of my dislike of the haircut experience, as he HOWLS during any haircuts I've been brave enough to give him.  I really think he's carrying on a bit unnecessarily - after all, it's not like I cut his ear OFF that last time.

So, I just do it myself.  The first time I tried was abysmal - I chased him around the room, trying to pin him between my knees while randomly snipping at his (dry) hair with - lets face it - probably rather blunt scissors.  The result was ...  interesting.  Avante garde, perhaps.  I decided that perhaps help was to be found online - as indeed it was.   Isn't the internet a wonderful resource?  It seems that noone was willing to show how to cut  the hair of a screaming and flailing unco-operative toddler, but I did pick up a few tips.

Pin them down in some way: high chair, person with baby on the lap, velcro suit and a patch of suitably fuzzy sofa.  It doesn't really matter, as long as you can access their head from all angles (unless you like mullets, in which case, feel free to pin them with their back against the wall, and also be prepared to pay for years of psychotherapy).

Distraction, distraction, distraction!  I use the television shamelessly - and morsels of honey toast, but whatever works for you - if they're paying more attention to the novel stimuli and less to the fact that there are interesting and sharp (hopefully) scissors within grabbing range, then you're doing well.

If your immobilisation plus distraction method winds up something like this:

then I'd suggest that you might perhaps want to tone it down a notch or two.  Just sayin'.

After this I guess it comes down to the cooperativeness of your victim, and your stylistic tendencies.   Even with maximal distraction, the Monkey is quite resistant to hair grooming.

There's a lot of vigorous head-waving - which, as you may appreciate, makes me a little loathe to approach closely with a sharp implement.

My strategy thus far has just been to grab a small hank of hair between my first two fingers, and apply the scissors to the bits of hair that stick out.  So generally, he gets the one-finger width haircut, though it's in no way consistent or even or any of the other things that you might expect if you were paying for a service.

But it IS shorter.

When he starts coming home from playgroup with nappy wedgies, I might reconsider my current MO.

First words?!

I know I've implied that the Monkey has already spoken his first word (and doesn't he make "dah!" do a lot of work??), but really, for truly really this time, I think we might have a genuine, actual first word.  

It is ..  (drumroll please!)  ...   "dzzzzzzzz"  or sometimes "thzzzzzzzz"  /ðzzzzz/ for you linguini types.

The Google translate page for Monkey > English was down, but Hubs was on the ball.  Houston, we have "juice".  I repeat, we have "juice"!

Mimicry

Lately, it seems that the Monkey has been a bit keener to imitate us.   We can now get him to make a greater range of sounds than his favourite "dah!" simply by making the noises at him.  We say "beebee!" and he does his best.  We say "maamaa" and so does he.  It's interesting at this point to see that while he can confidently point to a whole bunch of pictures, and while he can imitate a limited set of sounds, he doesn't yet have the idea of bringing these two concepts together and actually using the different sounds to identify different objects.

I think this is probably almost as frustrating for him as it is for me, as he stands pointing up at the bookcase.  "Dah!", he says.  I look up.  "You want a book?"  I pull one out and hand it to him. "Nanana!" he says, waving his hand impatiently, then points again. "Dah!", a little more insistently.  "The ribbons?".  Again, I'm rejected with "Na"s and more hand waving.  Several "Dah"s later, and he's almost on the verge of tears, before I finally realise (through a process of elimination) that it was the crayons he was after all long.  I suspect he thinks I'm being purposefully obtuse - and as much as I'd rather not have crayon decorations all over the walls, I promise that this doesn't factor into my lack of Monkey language understanding.

Anyway - we have put his new found penchant for mimicry to a good purpose at meal times.  He's not too fussy an eater, for which I'm thankful, but he's much keener to eat food he sees us putting away.  The other night, Hubs was picking up broccoli florets, and biting the heads off the trees, so to speak.  The Monkey watched this procedure for a little while before reaching out to our plates and whining to have his own broccoli tree to play with.  So we obliged.

Well, I think in the end there were little bits of broccoli all through everything, but he did seem very pleased with his destruction of the foliage, and that's all that matters, right?

A day in the life at the zoo

It's been a while between posts, and much has happened.  So much, that I shan't really bother to recount more than just the highlights ..  Soooooo ..

The monkey is now officially a bipedal creature.  It started around the end of July (at about 13 months), was consolidated in the first week of August, and after a short period of preferring to crawl rather than walk, he now walks everywhere - provided "everywhere" is "some place outside" where he can get his hands on leaves, earthmould, twigs, and random bits of dog poo.  He's also a very keen hand-holder.  At first, I thought this was due to a lack of confidence in his new style of perambulation,  but I now figure that he just wants to ensure that an attentive parent is on hand at all times to "ooh" and "aah" at his latest accomplishment.  The hand-holding also means we don't need to resort to the leash. Not that I mind using one, but he's not particularly cooperative - particularly when I don't want to go in a direction he does (middle of road, muddy ditch, into neighbourhood houses).  At these points, he shows all the cooperativeness of a tethered cat.

He has 6 teeth now - top 4 incisors, and bottom 2.  As yet, he uses these almost exclusively for food.  He has only - so far as I can tell - accidentally bitten into living flesh, but it doesn't make it any less painful, I can tell you!

He can understand quite a few words now.  Really useful ones, I might add, like "rhinoceros" (which I had to spell-check), "giraffe", and "tortoise" (notice a theme?).  But he still doesn't produce anything recognisable.  Whether it's due to an immature vocal tract or sheer bloody-mindedness, I couldn't say.  Either way, we are finding new and exciting ways to interpret "dah!" (cat, star, door, daddy, ipad, phone, lights, mandarin... the list goes on!).

What else do you talk about regarding babies?  Oh yeah, sleep.  Well, in that department we have been lucky.  Exceedingly lucky.  SUPREMELY lucky.  So far, at least.  He's been a great sleeper - and in the last couple of months, we've been putting him in his cot wide awake for naps and bed, and he goes down like a lamb.  Did I mention luckiness?? I'm certainly not putting it down to any rigorous sleep-training habits on our part - we went totally against all the literature, and he still worked it out.  Hooooo-boy.  Lucky, lucky, lucky.

There are days when I feel like a champion mother: I'm inspired to entertain him with walks or playing in the garden, or going for a swim, or splashing in the kitchen sink, or - I feel I've really made it as a SAHM here - squashing about some home-made playdough.  Those are also the times when I've managed to feed him to my satisfaction - a breakfast of weetbix and fruit of various kinds, a lunch of home-made broccoli soup and fish patties, snacks of fruit & yoghurt and rice-cakes, and enough of whatever we happen to have for dinner.  Those are the days I feel like supermum, and sadly, they seem to eventuate maybe once a month.  Perhaps once a fortnight if I'm really lucky.

The more standard days go like this:  It rains, so we're trapped inside. The Monkey is feeling frisky and chases the cats, trying to pull out their fur (sometimes getting a clobber for his trouble), or throwing things at them, producing supersonic ear-drum-rattling shrieks all the while. I follow the Monkey alternating between bellowing at him to leave the cats alone, and trying to distract him with some other activity.  He brings me several books - I read about the first 2 pages of each before he runs off to fetch the next.  I check my watch every 10 minutes wishing that it was his naptime.  When it's time to eat, he systematically rejects any food which he's previously yummed down, either by throwing it on the floor, or by extruding it from his mouth so it lands with a nice sclop! in his lap.  Occasionally if he's self-feeding, I'll think he's doing really well as the food disappears from the tray, only to find that he's been burying it under his bottom or between his legs.  When you're buying a high-chair, I implore you to think just how easy it will be to clean after meals like this.  The little sod will also choose these days to wake up early from his naps, ensuring that we have an extra long afternoon of the both of us going stir-crazy bored till dinner-time (forget about actually MAKING dinner - if I leave his side to go into the kitchen on one of these days, he'll stand at the gate red-faced and howling, and producing great resentful fat tears as if to show me just what a terrible mother I am).  Man.  Those are the days when I am exceedingly happy when his bedtime finally rolls around!

Did I mention how lucky we are that he sleeps so well?  It surely is his saving grace on days like these.

Don't Feed the Monkey!

The advantage of being a stay-at-home mum (which, to all intents and purposes I am, at the moment) is that you - theoretically - have time.  Gallons of time.  Oodles of time.  A plethora of seconds, and indeed, sometimes minutes!

Anyway, like a good mum, I have decided to put some of this precious extra time into food.  You know, nutritous, home-cooked, so full of whole-meal flour it's indistinguishable from horse chaff.  Each thing I make, I present to the Monkey with a small fanfare, and await his reaction. They are something like as follows:

lasagna (special low-salt variety, with formula bechamel): frantic arm-waving to fend off incoming spoon.  Upon distraction (a sudden loud shriek from mother tends to result in freezing and open-mouthed gormless expression), spoonful of food was watered down with large amount of drool, and extruded.  Baby 1, Mum 0

fruity muffins (no sugar, LOTS of fruit):  I actually thought these were quite tasty, plenty of grated apple and currants meant they were really sweet enough.  But apparently far too moist.  Poked about with finger for 10 minutes, then tossed overbard. Baby 2, Mum 0


apple-oat biscuits:  I can't blame him with these. They turned out soft, rather than crunchy (as I'd hoped), and tasted far too mealy and oaty to me. And they bounced nicely.  Baby 3, Mum 0

banana bread: First part of my attempt to make rusks - thought I'd leave some of the original loaf un-rusked to see if he'd take to it.  He took it, and experimented with its aerodynamic properties.  Baby 4, Mum 0

banana bread rusks: Second part of the rusk experiment. Slices of banana bread dried till hard and crisp.  Again, pretty tasty as far as I'm concerned, but probably a reasonably full set of teeth required for proper consumption.  To his credit, he did actually attempt to gnaw the edge of a piece before deciding I was playing a practical joke with him, and ... yup, you  guessed it.  Baby 5, Mum 0

pumpkin & cheese scones:  Given up on sweet snacks, thought maybe his tastes ran to the savoury.  He likes cheese.  He eats pumpkin without too much of a fight.  He loves bread... so, I thought I might be in with a chance, here.  They turned out a luminous orange - like something scraped off the bottom of one of the Chernobyl reactors.  He spent a large amount of time dissecting a scone into its component crumbs, sending each crumb sailing into carpet oblivion - although, given the colour of the carpet, and the colour of the crumbs, not nearly oblivion enough for his mother.  Baby 6, Mum 0

Tomorrow, we're feeding him McDonald's!