Sunday, September 5, 2010

Toddlerhood.


The developments lately have been pretty cool, and a little challenging. The more Elliot understands but cannot communicate about, the more frustration appears.

The coolest thing yesterday was to see that he is experimenting about size and volume. He has some blocks that fit inside each other, and he tries to put one of the big ones inside the smaller one, seemingly not at the stage yet where he differentiates between smaller and bigger. He tries and tries, then, if he's grumpy, gets really frustrated and pushes it all away, mad. (If not grumpy, he just moves on to another toy, like, "Huh, I'll figure that out later.") Then, by chance, he'll go back and put the smaller one inside, and the tears stop, and there's this "Oh, really?" moment. But he's not completely figured it out yet because then it's back to trying it the wrong way. It's very hard to not step in and just fix this for him each time!

The other fun thing is that he is starting to put things back into places, like if he takes something out of a drawer, sometimes he'll put it back in. Elliot the destroyer is becoming a little more organized.

Elliot is loving books lately. He'll grab a book, bring it to me, and get all excited to climb into my lap to read. He now knows that when the reading pauses, he has to turn the page. Sometimes we make it through the whole book, over and over, and sometimes the joy is shortlived until this monkey wiggles his way back down to play with something else.

He has bitten me a few times lately when he is being reprimanded with our "handcuff with our hands" method. Pat thinks it's his only thing left to push back with (his feet are in the mix too sometimes), but I think it's amazing that he knows at 1 year old that biting can hurt someone and uses it that way. The look on his face says he's really mad and, to me, it's more than, "Oh, this is all that's left to use" and more "Take that, mom!" Eeep. The whole point of the handcuffing method was to not model violence/inflicting pain when things go wrong. I'm a bit worried about this. My sister-in-law says you have to tame the beast, teaching everything to curtail the barbaric instincts. Maybe she's right.

Throwing food on the floor is a common problem. I'm assuming this is par for the course, but we're not sure how to nip in the bud. What we've tried so far is not working.

We're working on tapering off the bottle and onto the sippy cup still. He was doing much better, but just like any other milestone, if there's a great day of progress, there seems to plenty of days of backwards progress. He makes it through the day with less bottles, sometimes drinking enough from the sippy cup, sometimes not. But on the days that he does not get enough, it seems we're up at 1:30am, giving him a bottle. Not sure if this means he's simultaneously hitting a growth spurt lately, or if he just truly needs the calories and we shouldn't push the sippy cup if it means he won't drink enough in the end. We've talked about going cold turkey, but it doesn't seem our style.

He's cognizant of the walking now-- he will set himself up, balance, take a few deliberate steps, fall, then get all excited and proud. Yesterday there were about 4 sessions of 4 steps or so in a row. He seems to like working on it. This is super fun to watch.

Standing on his chairs is an issue lately. Same as most things, not sure how to stop this. He knows it's not something he's supposed to do, but there's no connection as to why yet, since he's not fallen or anything. Funny, he just did it as I am typing... goes up, checks that I noticed, has this grin of "This is cool, right?! But bad, right?!" then after I tell him to sit down, he slowly sinks to his chair. Sometimes I have to physically sit him, but usually the verbal cue is enough.

The all-out tantrums are quite interesting as well. Wow.

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