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I can’t believe it’s 14 weeks already. The most striking thing that’s emerged over the last week or two has been her starting to express very clear preferences, particularly location. She’ll wake up and start gurgling around five or five thirty and by six, she’ll be getting bored of the bedroom and will want to go somewhere else. On more disciplined days, that means rocking gently in her bouncy seat next to me whilst I do yoga, looking very hard at her surroundings and trying to pull a blanket over her face. On grouchier days, it means a lot of carrying around and dangling of toys. She’s also started to grab things and attempt to put them in her mouth (and I think she’s right handed, though it’s really too early to tell).
By five to seven, dudelet has also been up for a while playing in his room. He generally arrives with a definite question, popping his head around the door and asking me to do something. The ‘no leaving your room till 7 am’ rule has actually done very well for us all on a number of levels – he’ll go to the toilet by himself (he’s even started wiping his own bottom – hooray!), play independently and explore toys he hasn’t touched for ages. His current favourite is a very loud electronic globe with one volume setting and a little aeroplane that tours around it looking for different places. According to its setting, it prompts the user to look for animals or places located around the world. It kicked off at about 6:40 am so his first question this morning was “Daddy, I need to find the elf!”
“The what?”
“The elf.”
The elf turned out to be the Alps. We found this particular toy (like so many things) in a charity shop. It sat in front of him through breakfast, obliterating other forms of conversation or background music. At one point it was joined by a toy ghetto blaster that was even louder. I put my foot down at that point and he slightly sulkily agreed that having both roaring away simultaneously was a bit much.
There’s a little too much going on at the moment so I haven’t been keeping up with other people’s blogs the way I usually do (sorry). I’ll be posting a more regularly soon and I really want to start focusing on fatherhood and its challenges (and interpretations) more explicitly.
Filed under: family, parenting, toys | Tagged: children, family, newborn, parenting, play, toys
Sounds like they are both reaching new milestones! The bottom-wiping is particularly exciting!
I forgot about counting ages in weeks : )
And yes, hooray for self-bottom-wiping!
We have a universal ban on battery-operated toys. We (the adults) already have an abnormally low tolerance for noise as it is, without amplified tinny little speakers in everything.
We’d have had to have enforced a ban from day 1, unfortunately. Too late now. Wish we had! (on some days, mind)
Wiping is weird. What seems to have swung it was a little sample pack of wipes left near the main box of ’special’ wipes. We got up one morning and they were gone. Neither of us had used them for anything so we asked dudelet who cheerfully confirmed that he had, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. He hasn’t asked me since.
Counting ages in weeks, I miss it so much! We’re up to eighteen months now, on the cusp of the Terrible Twos, yet everyday he seems to get smarter and smarter – the beginnings of a new word, learning how to climb onto the couch, playing with his xylophone, that kind of thing. Savour every minute, it all goes far too quickly!
(You left a comment on my blog a while ago and I have been too dizzy in the brain to reply to you – I read through some of Rev Mugo’s blog and like it very much, and will read more. Thankyou for the recommendation!)
- JB
Hey! With the twos, we found that they weren’t so terrible first time around. But the fours – oh dear, oh dear! Oh, and glad to be of help. Shasta Abbey is a very special place and Rev Mugo is very much an embodiment of that.
The challenges of fatherhood (as motherhood) never end. I can atest to that. All we can do is take comfort id the small day-to-day accomplishments (like wiping one’s own bottom).
The Threes were much worse than the Twos for my kids. Much, much worse.
“a very loud electronic globe with one volume setting and a little aeroplane that tours around it looking for different places”
Oh dear. I know another little boy who would go crackers about this… and I can just imagine the racket! I’ve found that Kiko gets lots of electronic toys as presents. He’s got this car that screams: “This is the police! Let’s go!” over and over again. It has two volume settings, you can almost mentally block out the lowest one (after lots of practice) but he now knows how to switch it up to the highest setting. GAH! What disturbs me is his habit of picking up obviously non-electrical toys and demanding that I switch them “on”. He was doing that for his rubber bath duckie today – what on earth did he expect it to do?!
The best toys come from the second-hand shops. I was really impressed by the quality of stuff donated in UK. We got Kiko’s Christmas presents from the UK charity shops then donated most of them back when we returned to Australia. He was too young to notice and he got 6 weeks of playing out of them. Someone told my mum that the charity shops have trouble shifting donated toys because loads of people nowadays only want their kids to have new stuff!
And then there’s the option of…taking out the batteries and not replacing them! Sneaky, bad parents!
Helen, I can believe it about charity shops. But so much stuff seems to be nearly new in some shops. Henitsirk – or the toys kind of stop working or vanish. Actually, they tend to be so badly made that this doesn’t need any help from us. Though I confess that the “mysteriously vanish” option really did take place with one particularly appalling example.