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2006-05-14 - 10.57pm previous entry next entry
My little boy is 18 months old!!!
Wow, I can't believe Arthur has reached that big "18 months" milestone! He is a year and a half old. This time one year ago, he was just starting to try his first solids (which he did NOT appreciate!), and I would never have believed you if you had told me that in one year we would be twenty-something days away from having another baby boy!
Babycentre tells me that many see this age as the stage where babyhood ends. They say that potty training can start from 18 months and stuff. I don't know. I know I'm literally about to have another baby, but Arthur is still my baby! He is still soooo little, in so many ways. I guess before I had children I considered 18 months to be "little boy" (or girl!) age rather than thinking of the word "baby", but I think only because of things like hair on their heads, walking, some speech, feeding themselves, etc. Maybe those things ARE the difference between a baby and a toddler/child?
Arthur is showing lots of the signs of readiness for potty training, but I don't really want to encourage him yet. I am in NO hurry to see him move out of nappies! I love using cloth nappies and I will honestly be so sad the day he is potty trained for good! He tells us when he has done a poo, or if he is doing one. Or even sometimes he tells us when he is about to do one. He sometimes points to his nappy, and then says "poo poo" :) If he has done one, he tells us, "poo poo". One evening when he pointed to his nappy and said "poo poo", BEFORE he started trying to do one, we asked him if he wanted to try sitting on his potty. He didn't seem to mind the idea so we took his things off and sat him on it, but he was already mid-poo and then decided (within like 0.5 seconds!) that he didn't want to sit down on the potty any more, and got up. Much rinsing of the bathtub and cleaning of carpets ensued for Neil and I after Arthur was in bed that night, hehe! Also Arthur didn't seem happy about having made a poo-poo mess everywhere so I would say the whole thing was a complete disaster. But oh well. I don't think we'll try that again in a hurry.
He turned 18 months old 5 days ago, and literally since that time it's almost as though he has thought to himself, "Right, I'm 18 months old now! I think it's time to start speaking!" He is attempting all sorts of words all day long, every day, all of a sudden. He repeats everything we say, and tries all sorts of different sounds. He is so excited when he says a word that actually sounds like the word we asked him to say, that he'll then say it 50 million times, over and over and over for the rest of the day! Poo-poo is one of these ;) He also says "Boo", leaping out from behind a doorway or something, as though he is trying to scare us! Of course we react like he shocked the living daylights out of us and he laughs soooo much till his eyes are all sparkly, and then goes back and does it again and again :) Eventually he is enjoying our response so much that he doesn't bother hiding before saying "boo" - he just stands right there and shouts "BOO!" with a big beaming smile, waiting for us to be shocked and jump, hehe! Funny boy :)
He likes anything like that, anything loud that might make him jump. He says, "DAP!" (snap!) for sharp snapping sounds, and "GEH!" for the word "bang" (not sure why it comes out "geh" but there we go!). We hear those two words a LOT every day, as he slams the doors shut on his Duplo barn or bangs a toy car onto a hard surface for the sound effect. He LOVES hearing us say "BANG!" or "Snnn-AP!!" with accompanying enthusiasm - it makes him laugh till his eyes water and he repeats the words over and over to make us keep on saying them!
He seems really interested in trying to pronounce new sounds, whereas just a week ago he wasn't interested in that at all. He says, "knee", "ball" ("boah"), "bib" and a few other new words like that, and yesterday he got ultra excited at trying out two more complicated words - "pasta" and "drawer"!! He says pasta such a lot now. It sounds like "daf-dah", or even sometimes quite like "dada" but it does sound different to the "dada" he says for Neil. When he eats a meal with pasta in it, he literally picks out every single piece of pasta one by one (eating them one at a time), so that he can hold it out enthusiastically and declare, "Daf-dah!" (which we must immediately acknowledge or there is usually trouble!), before popping it into his mouth! He is soooo excited about the word "pasta", hehe!
When he gets up in the morning, I am always in the spare bedroom as that's the only place I can get sleep at the moment. If I hear him waking then I sometimes go in and breastfeed him before he gets up, but more and more often now he climbs out of bed and toddles down the hall and into the spare bedroom. I am usually woken by the sound of his sweet little footsteps getting nearer and nearer, till I open my eyes and see the smiliest boy EVER approaching my bed! He climbs right on with ease and lays down next to me to breastfeed :) He never nurses for long though, because he is really just touching base with me again after the night (which now does not involve me going in to resettle him at ALL from when I go to bed until when he gets up - Neil does that if he wakes, and he sometimes sleeps through, and other times he wakes a couple of times but settles pretty quickly with Neil patting him). He likes to keep popping off the breast to put his finger on my nose and have me say, "Mummy's nose!" and then my mouth, and each eye in turn, and my ear (he says, "eeear!") and then my hair "aair!"). Then he has a few more sucks, and then wants to sit up and point at things he can see in the room. Yesterday he pointed at one of the drawers in the chest of drawers by the bed, and I said, "Drawer!" He immediately made some odd-looking efforts with his mouth and said, "Rrrwrww!" or something! I could tell he was trying really hard to say drawer. This morning when he came in, he pointed straight at the drawer and said to me, "Rawer!" without any prompting from me! He seems to be suddenly trying new words a lot at the moment, so I think it's possible that his speech could come on pretty quickly now. I'm excited about it! I love hearing his teeny tiny chipmunky voice saying real words to tell us things that are on his mind or things that he sees and finds interesting.
He is saying, "Yep!" a lot, often as an obvious "yes" to things, but not every time. Today he had just finished his tea and was busy running out of the kitchen to play with his toys. I called to him and asked him if he wanted a mini rusk, and he stopped and shouted a gleeful, "YEP!", turned round and came back to me, where he plucked a mini rusk from the bag I was holding out to him, and gave me a big beaming smile before running off again to eat it with his toys :)
He makes lots of animal noises as he plays with any of his toys that involve animals, or reads books with animals in. Last night it was so sweet - I had just breastfed him to sleep and he was soooo tired from a busy day! Neil had taken him to the park that morning and when I say park, I do not want to give you the impression that our local park is flat and smallish and used for playing football or going on the swings. Nooo, ours is this gorgeous huge place! It's one of London's Royal Parks and it's unfathomably huge - miles, you could never walk it, honestly - and is hilly and has woods and plantations of beautiful flowers, and hundreds of wild deer. So Neil took Arthur to a hilly bit, and he said Arthur had such a great time! He was so determined to do the groundwork all by himself apparently! I wish I had been there with them to see it. He stumbled all the way down a steep slope, and only tripped once over a thick tuft of grass, even though the steepness was making him run when he didn't mean to run sometimes! He also insisted on climbing all the way back up by himself. Neil said he put so much effort into climbing the steepest parts, and he made it all by himself! He got tired sometimes but Neil said he would just walk ALONG the slope for a little way before starting up it again, as though to take a break from the uphill work for a while. So we weren't surprised when he fell asleep almost instantly that evening! He did have a nap in the day but it was just an hour, like he tends to take, no more.
Anyway, he was soooooo sleepy when he was going to sleep. I took him off the breast when I could tell he was asleep, and he rolled onto his back, opened his mouth and made... chicken sounds, hehehe! He just lay there, completely asleep, saying, "Bup-bup-bup" (the sound I make for a chicken, well, mine is more like, "buck-buck-buck" but Arthur's comes out more like "bup-bup-bup"). Neil and I had SUCH trouble keeping our laughter silent so as not to wake him! When he finished making chicken sounds, he raised his arms in the air and made milk signs with both fists, and then rolled towards me again and slept on! We both said how we WISH we could have known what was going through his little mind at that time! So sweet :)
Another sweet thing was one night when he woke during the evening all upset, and I went in to lay with him and cuddle him on his bed. Neil came in to help settle him, but Arthur seemed upset about something and wouldn't settle. He would snuggle up to me, then pull back, look up at my face and point to it, as though trying to tell me something, then make agitated sounds and eventually get upset. Then he would try snuggling and sleeping again for a few seconds, and repeat the whole process. Eventually I wondered if he was pointing at my glasses. So I said, "Do you want Mummy to take her glasses off?" and he gave a relieved smile and gave an affirmative, "Mmmm!" sound! So I took them off, and he snuggled right up and went to sleep straight away! Neil and I chuckled to each other silently while Arthur dozed off, until we were both wiping our eyes. It just seemed to tickle us so much that Arthur is so specific about what he wants, and in this particular situation, he wanted Mummy to lay with him, but it wasn't kosher snuggling unless Mummy took her glasses off! It's like he has got wise to the fact that I'm not really resting or planning to stay long when I am in bed wearing my glasses, so he doesn't like it if he wants me to snuggle with him and I am wearing my glasses! Funny boy :) This is his character through and through - he has always been very specific about what he wants and everything has to be "just so" for him to be settled with things! Neil and I find it so sweet and amusing :)
Arthur's hair is growing long AGAIN. I'm sure it has only been a month - maybe not even that! - since I took him to have it cut! It curls at the back. I love that :)
We are just soooo crazily busy getting ready for having a new little baby boy! Every spare moment is taken up doing stuff to prepare, or writing lists of how to "do stuff" to prepare! I am packing my labour bag and stuff, and frantically buying last minute things on eBay (fun!). I am getting myself plenty of clothes in size 14, as I was a pre-pregnant size 10 and then pretty much stayed as a small size 12 after having Arthur. I have gained about 40lbs so far this pregnancy (I gained 54lbs with Arthur in total) and I know I will be a size 14 when I go back into non-maternity clothes, just like I was after Arthur at first. When Arthur was born, I hung around in baggy maternity clothes for a while, convinced that I would lose weight in no time at all, but when it didn't fall off immediately I realised I would have to go out and buy some basics to wear that weren't maternity clothes! My bump had disappeared by then but I just remained the same size in the bum, thighs and milk-filled bust, and didn't fit into anything I owned from before my pregnancy. Again, I figured it would just be reeeally temporary, so I went to Tesco and bought some very cheap jeans and jogging bottoms to slouch around in. They weren't comfy and didn't fit my shape well, but they went over my bulk (!!) and that's what mattered at the time. I can't remember when I finally slimmed down to a size 12, but it took a while for breastfeeding to really kick off some of my weight. Once it started, it came off fast though. But I was in those uncomfy, ill-fitting clothes for longer than I had expected.
So this time, I decided I would go to eBay and buy second-hand clothes that would save me lots of money and still be really nice, well-fitting clothes - a decent wardrobe of things to wear for as long as it takes post-baby for breastfeeding to start burning off my pregnancy weight. I don't care how long it takes, but I have a feeling it might not be as long as last time, given that I'll be tandem nursing this time. But anyway. I will be having more babies after this one, and so I know I'll want a selection of nice clothes for the immediate postnatal period! I was dreading wearing the cheap stuff I bought last time, and none of it was suitable for hot weather anyway.
So it has been so much FUN to shop on eBay and build up a little collection of basic comfy clothes! I have some lovely cropped jeans and shorts, and a couple of pairs of Next jeans and stuff too. I have also been bidding on some wrap-over style tops because those have got to be easy to breastfeed in, and I need ease even more than last time now that I'll be breastfeeding two at the same time, sometimes. Ideally I would LOVE to buy a ton of actual breastfeeding tops, but they are SO expensive. I have found a few on eBay and bought two white sleeveless breastfeeding tops, one green one and a grey one too. So I have cool tops that are made for breastfeeding - yay! I also won a couple of long-sleeved breastfeeding tops. I wonder if I could sew my own and save money? Hmmm, maybe I will look at them when I get them in the post and see.... but then I have such a HUGE list of things still to sew, and probably not enough time left to sew them in, so maybe not! Other than those tops, I have won a few nice tops that should be easy to breastfeed in, so I'm happy with that.
I built that toy storage unit that was bugging me!!! Yay! Neil helped me, but if he helped too much then we got into arguments about how to do it, and eventually I did much better just getting on with it by myself. I varnished the wood outside (minimising the fumes) and then sanded it and measured and drilled and fixed the parts together with brackets and screws like my scribbly design said. And it seems to work! It's much bigger than I thought it would be, but it holds all the clear plastic boxes that I had bought for it, with nearly all of Arthur's toys in it! I underestimated the number of screws I needed, so we still have to fit the top shelf that will hold his books. I'm going to buy the screws tomorrow after we go to the supermarket, after we take Neil to work! Soooo busy at the moment!
I am tired all the time, and achy and stuff. It hurts to move about. I am just so pregnant now! I can't believe there are only 3 weeks left till my due date, just over, and we really are about to have another baby!
Today we moved all the living room furniture around, and put the armchair under the kitchen table (sounds weird but it's what we had to do last time to make room in the living room for the homebirth!). We fitted the new BabyDan thingy around the bottom of the stairs. It needs proper wall fixings and I have to order them from BabyDan, which we were mighty annoyed to only find out about when we opened the box to fit the thing to the wall! But it is very secure locked behind the radiator on one side and with two panels pinned to the wall behind a sofa on the other. Sounds crap, but trust me, it's very steady and functions safely! We will fix it properly though, when the fittings arrive. So Arthur can no longer get up the stairs, yaaaaaay! I'm SO relieved to have that sorted!
I can't think what else I was going to say.... we have decided to delay Arthur's MMR yet again, until Matthew's first Hibb booster, which will be in August I think. Then I think I'll get them both done at the same appt. It should be a good time of year for Arthur NOT to be dealing with billions of viruses, and he will hopefully have a window of no teething there too (he is teething again today and yesterday - we even had to give him Calpol tonight, poor love). Plus he will be getting lots of breastmilk by then to help his lil immune system. And he'll be that older, again to give his immune system a bit of a better chance. So that's what we'll do. I got a letter from the doctor's surgery last week, saying they have noticed from Arthur's records that he hasn't had the MMR and they want me to inform them if I've decided not to have him vaccinated, or otherwise make an appt. I have been ignoring letters about the MMR so far, but I think I will reply in writing to say I AM planning to get him vaccinated, but when I am ready, and not before. I think I will tell them that I plan to have him vaccinated when my new baby has his Hibb booster, which should placate them I think. Anyway. I am so nervous about that MMR. Like I am nervous about peanuts. When he has had his MMR and is fine, and then peanuts and hasn't swelled up and stopped breathing, then I'll breathe easy, hehe! Well, that is until it's Matthew's turn. *sigh*
Okay it's getting late and I need to go to bed. I'll try to update again soon! I can't believe I haven't taken any photos since last entry! When I finish the toy storage unit I will be sure to get a photo of Arthur with it - he LOVES it! Neil said it was like watching him on Christmas morning when he came downstairs this morning to see it standing there in all its glory with all his toys displayed on it! He has wanted to "organise" the toys in the boxes on it all day today. So I'm sure there will be photos of Arthur doing that soon!
Thank you for the messages and notes lately - yet again I am so crap at communications at the moment, I just seem too busy or too tired all the time. I am reading diaries but not every time they're updated, and not really having time to sign guestbooks like I wish I could. Yesterday evening I finally got TWO emails written that had been many months overdue! So hopefully I will get organised on stuff like that before Matthew is here, otherwise I fear I will never email again or something, heh. I can't imagine how much LESS time I'm going to have once my occupation is caring for TWO gorgeous little boys under the age of two!
Okay I need sleep. And water. And maybe chocolate.... but sleep! Oh but I changed my breastfeeding milestone blinkie to 18 months :) I'm always so proud to add a new blinkie each month! I love breastfeeding! I'm not sure what I'll do with blinkies when I have two little persons' breastfeeding milestones to count, hmmm. Oh my gosh, I just realised that this latest monthiversary of Arthur's is possibly going to be the LAST one before I have another baby in my arms!!! Matthew is due 2 days before Arthur turns 19 months. I wonder if he'll be here when I am writing here to say Arthur is 19 months old? What a crazy thought!! Soooo close now. It's kind of scary, but exciting all at the same time. I will update when I can here, as usual, but all my news of labour starting and Matthew's arrival will be in my pregnancy diary, also up there in my links on the left hand side. When I went into labour with Arthur, I was able to write a couple of entries during my labour and I hope to do the same again since I'll be at home. So you won't see updates here during that time, but I'll be sure to update there when I can!
Yeeeep! I'm going to have a baby! :D
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