Text update from October/early November

After finally getting some photos up (see below), now I’m doing a text update. If you just want the eye candy, scroll down – there are lots of fun shots. Thought I’d start, though with two: of joyful Elliott with his dad and pensive Elliott with his friend Joey (son to my friend Katie who is due to have her second baby later this month).

Elliott is a super lot of fun these days. It’s hard to explain through a keyboard, but he seems to be saying and doing more fun things all the time. I’m writing to record this before things change even more and hope some of the info is useful to friends & family trying to get a sense of our current reality.

Elliott has started calling me by name a lot more; frequently when he wakes at night (or at the end of nap if I’m not there), he doesn’t cry but rather just calls, “Mama.” Day or night, when he wants a snack from me, he says fairly clearly (and signs) “nurse.” That’s pretty funny at night, especially last night when he combined it with his new word, “yeah.” As in “Nurse. Yeah.” If I’m trying to push him off from nursing to do a diaper change or some other little task first, he can get a little dictatorial in tone, too. “Nurse! NURSE!” He cops the same ‘tude and tone sometimes with other food items. “NUT!” (for both real nuts and pomegranate seeds) “BAYS!” (berries) and “CHIPS!” for veggie chips, are one pseudo-junk food. We do try to give him well-rounded meals, but if he’s hungry and at my heels while I’m cooking, I’d rather get more calories into him than endure frustration. He tends to want whatever is actually visible, but he sometimes also requests things behind cupboard doors, like raisins.

If I don’t understand his language and try to offer him something else, he’s very clear that I’ve got it wrong. Both the affirmative and the negative are pretty funny these days. There is the new “yeah” and also a mmm-hmm for agreement. We used to hear only one type of “no” – it was sort of an indignant “mno!” Now there are nuances, smaller gestures to tell us “try again.” John likened Elliott’s shaking-head no’s to a pitcher disagreeing with his catcher’s pitch calls. There are also very upset no’s – one in anger when he’s surprised with something he didn’t want and another kind in despair/frustration that we are deliberately flouting his desires. However, those nastier no’s seem to have decreased in frequency lately.

I would say that Elliott seems to be doing better with transitions and more receptive to the ending of activities. He has helped to put away instruments at music class and chalk at home. He is doing better stepping away to give other kids turns, and he just seems a bit more mellow (or at least he did when I started writing this; we’ve seen some intensity back in just the past 24 hrs., but I’ll leave the rest of the text as it was). He could just be growing out of an aggressive phase, or maybe the repeated craniosacral therapy and a trip to a funky applied kinesiology chiropractor with homeopathic remedies have helped. He just seems more comfortable in his own skin. I was amazed at how well he did adjusting to new surroundings when we went to Indy last weekend. The only thing that really upset him was getting into the car – not his car, not his carseat, and the newness other kids! in the same car. Oh, and he also protested when I ignored his calls for the “door” and tried to get him to sleep when he wanted to eat more food and socialize with his aunt and uncle (at 10 p.m.!) Otherwise, he had a blast, even with much less rest than normal. He was so excited to be around his cousins I could only get him to nap for about an hour a day.

Even low on sleep, he was fine once we got home – fine with our sitter on Monday, very happy at school Tuesday, played totally on his own Wednesday at Parenting Playgroups even though I did a double lecture (make-up) that day and didn’t play with him myself at all, and fine trying out a new sitter on Thursday. Both Tues. and Thurs. there were some initial tears, but reports were that he went on to have a great time, and he seemed more than content when I picked him up. He blew a kiss to the class aide, Miss Elizabeth on Tuesday, and when we went to the playground after school, he loved watching the older kids and whenever he saw Carsten, a girl in his class, he ran up to her and hugged her. On Thursday, he didn’t seem to want to leave two-year-old Charlie and her mother Jenni. He protested at first, but once I made it clear we were going, he relented and said and waved a nice “bye-bye.” On Friday I had a stomach bug (which I hope he doesn’t get), and Elliott was really cooperative just playing on his own while I watched and chatted with him.

I didn’t feel terribly sick but also had no desire to read, eat, or do anything on the computer. Without those distractions, it was nice to just be with Elliott, even though I wasn’t really up to playing. I just observed him and commented on what he was doing – playing with the CD player, reading books, playing with the crib aquarium toy that is still attached to the dismantled crib in the extra room (no, it’s not really safe). If I never had to eat and didn’t have any ambition to do anything with my life or have friends, I can see how being a stay-at-home mom could be a calmer existence. But as it is, I usually feel like there are too many things I want to do and not enough time, so I may have Elliott in an at-home daycare for a few hours on Thursdays, as noted above. It’s really just a mom (Jenni) and her 2-yr-old for now. Jenni is super nice and advertised (on the BirthCare birth center Yahoo list) that she’s no TV, organic food, etc. We met once and then had her watch Elliott a few hours the following week. Jenni said the two kids played really well together. If she gets two more full-time clients, we might get booted, but I hope we can use her on Thursdays and maybe for a few hours on Wednesdays, and then more during the summer when we don’t have school, or Doris to watch Elliott, or the Parenting Playgroups class (at which I’ve been learning a lot about child development).

Elliott is doing much more mimicking of sounds. Weighing his thoughts, he says “um” before launching into a big babble or when pretend talking on the phone (wow, I do that a lot, don’t I?). He repeated his cousin’s “shake, shake, shake” when playing instruments (even though I’ve been saying that for over a year!) and repeated some other phrases – I think it was something like me saying “sounds good” that really surprised me. He is picking up more and more words – leaf, tree, bear, balloon – I can’t really keep track. He doesn’t really put words together, though, except for something with “please” after it or something after “bye-bye” or maybe a few other things. He still uses some signs, and that’s helpful for me. Car, home, peas vs. please, raisin – the sign helps a lot.

One sign he doesn’t use much is for music. He just shouts “CD!” when he sees a CD or wants one or wants me to trade him the one in his hand for the one in the player… all music became “CD” for a while, though I think that generalization might already be fading. When he heads toward the silly Brahms-playing crib aquarium, I guess he does sign for music. Another generalization we saw for a while was everything with wheels being a choo-choo. This was after several days of playing with his name-letter magnetic train from Grandma B. I think we are back to things being a “bus,” “car” or “truck.” I think trains will remain “choo-choo.”

Elliott frequently says “mmm” when eating. His favorite foods these days are green beans, peas and broccoli, pomegranate seeds, beets, apple, rice crackers, banana and pear, sausage, crispy egg white edges, carrot with hummus, nuts (whatever I have in a bag if we’re out but at home usually cashews and pecans). The chiro said he should not have any dairy (including goat) or corn, and best to still avoid gluten for now. She also said he was sensitive to sugar, so I’m trying to watch the fruit intake but am not very consistent. He finally understands to tip sippy cups up, so we’re no longer at the mercy of the cups with straws. New food words are “beet,” “nut,” “chip,” “burr” (for sunflower seed butter), and something that sounds like “spoon,” which he is finally using with decent accuracy (and he’s enjoying trying to figure out the fork, sometimes manually placing food onto it or onto the tines). In the past few days, Elliott has also started turning off the white noise machine in the bedroom after nap or in the morning, and I think if I thought of more things to ask him to do, he would do them. He sure does love to brush his teeth lately.

He’s more often saying “Dat do” (“thank you”) and said it spontaneously when we got to the page in the book I Like it When where the big penguin says thank you to the little penguin who is helping to sweep. Also with that book, on the page that says “I like it when you tickle me,” Elliott wiggled his hands as if tickling the air and gleefully squealed “ticka-ticka-ticka” over and over, working himself up into ear-splitting laughter. I think his cousin Amelie’s tickling may have contributed to him getting this word. When Elliott says something in a particularly despotic tone and I ask, “Can you say that politely?” he then signs (hand in circular motion on chest) and says sweetly, “Please?” (well, without the “L”). I’m not big into forcing manners beyond modeling, but I do think it’s cute that he understands my request and takes himself down a notch on the adamant-meter.

Elliott loves to find a moon in the sky or in a book. He has become a big fan of the book Goodnight, Moon and asks for it by name, which for him is “Bye-Bye, Moon.” He still says “bye-bye” to me when going to bed rather than anything resembling “good night.” And he still blows kisses, but he has also become a really great kisser for real. He puckers and smacks like the best of them. Sometimes he takes my face in his hands and just lays one on me!

In other physical developments, Elliott has lost interest in slides for now. He’ll go down the small one we have in the back yard but doesn’t want to do them at the playground. However, he does want to climb ladders and seems pretty good at doing so, apparently unaware of the quickening pace of my heart beating. At Susan’s on Halloween he pulled himself up into Sawyer’s high chair with no help (other than spotting) from me – fully pulled up with his arms, then found the footrest, then hiked himself up, turned around, and sat down. He’s also throwing overhand pretty well now. He can spin around in both directions and is getting pretty fast on the Sit N Spin. He has pretty strong abs and likes to pretend fly like Superman with John just holding him out in front of his chest. I’ll have to get a photo of that sometime. Elliott enjoys dancing to most any kind of music. We have most of his CDs burned onto our hard drive for use with the Slim Server device I once thought was a crazy toy of John’s. So we let Elliott play with the actual CDs, and some of them – most of them – are pretty scratched up. When there’s a pause or a skip, he announces, “Uh oh.” He also does this for things that fall or when a buzzer goes off. But when something big falls, by accident or design, he says “boom.”

Elliott knows when the right time in a song is to clap or stomp his feet, even if I am just singing the song a cappella. His singing along keeps increasing. It used to just be the note, now it’s notes with the right vowel and sometimes consonants. I’ve started signing “Twinkle, Twinkle” while changing his diaper, and if I don’t, or if I only do one verse, he asks for “star” and tries to sort of sing along the second or third time (and beyond). He can kind of get the right idea for the last line of each phrase and happily bumbles through the rest. He mimics my signing a little bit, especially for “up above” and pointing to himself like I do at “you are.” It’s starting to become clear how much sway I have over what he learns when the repetition makes such a difference.

But at the same time, he’s just picking stuff up! And of course I don’t know what all happens at school. His report this week said he was waving and saying “hi” to everyone (he does have a really cute “hi”) and that the class painted pumpkins. The next day at Parenting Playgroups he was the only kid to try a kind of painting with little brushes that go on the fingertips. He also tried out some roller paints. A few weeks ago, he wanted nothing to do with paint. He seems less likely to put markers and crayons in his mouth now. We still don’t have the two-year molars, so I’m not sure what all the mouth stuff was a few weeks ago.

Well, that’s not the best wrap-up to a rambling post, but at least it’s documented!