Up until a couple of weeks ago Joe would not leave my side if we went out anywhere.  If we went to play areas both indoor and outdoor, I had to take him on the play things; if we were out walking, he would hold my hand; with swimming, he would always hold on to me.  That was until the Summer.  Maybe, it was the fact that we went to our local park almost every day, that gave him a confidence boost or that we went swimming for fun where he could jump in as many times as he wanted, I’m not sure but he runs off to play ahead of me in the park now and at swimming he swam on woggle which was completely out of character as he would never go near one, let alone swim on his own on one!  Not that I’m complaining, its fantastic to see him swimming from one side of the pool to the other with his arms resting over the woggle, while he frantically kicks his legs and reaches out with his arms.  It certainly makes 2 years of swimming with Merbabies worth it.

Today, we went swimming as usual and then stopped by a local family pub for lunch with a friend and her little boy who is Joe’s age – we met when they boys were about 5 weeks old so they have pretty much grown up with each other.  Anyway, in this pub they have a room with a ball pit, slide, climbing stuff for kids and the boys were so excited that I think they were fit to burst!  I thought I would be in for an afternoon of climbing up and sliding down an throwing balls around, however the boys ran straight to the play area when we got into the room and that was that.  There was a twisty, covered slide which Joe went down, he loved it, so much so he went on it about 12 times!  He was quite happy to climb and run and shout, “Hello Mummy!” from the top of the play area… so out of character for him but equally fantastic at the same time.

You never quite know what is going to happen next with toddlers!

Well it was over a year since I last wrote anything on this blog about Joe’s progress in life, I thought I should really update a little on whats happened over the past 12 months.  Joe’s language is fantastic, he was saying words very early and once he reached about 18 months, the sentences began albeit two worded ones.  He rapidly expanded his vocabulary and I cant even imagine how many words he knows, but he learns at least 3 new words a day.  His new thing is adding the word “too” so everytime I say that I like/want/don’t like something, he will say, “Joe likes cows too” (as an example!).  He is starting to recognise yours, he has known mine for a while and at the moment he likes things to be his which he confirms with “mine” or “my” and especially so if anybody stands next to me or if Chris put his hand on me, Joe will shout “No, that’s MY Mummy!”.  He can count to 10 confidently and today got to 15 and he is even trying out the time on a Postman Pat Tell The Time book he was given by one of my friends.  He was showing which hand was for minutes and was very good at counting round the clock face to find the correct hour – this astounded me! Im not sure if he is progressing as well as he could be with colours, although today he was pointing out colours on the bus without being asked but will hardly ever tell you the colour of something if you ask, but then do toddlers ever do anything on demand?

Joe’s memory is SO good, I think Joe has been to the Doctors only a handful of times but remembered that the Meningitis poster (you know, the one with the baby and the symptom labels) in the back of his red book which he found was a poster he had seen at the Doctors.  We go to certain places and he points out things that even I didn’t remember.  He can tell me the way to places by pointing out things he has remembered along the way (houses, cars, trains etc) and has now learned how to spell his name.  Chris taught him his full name and where he lives a while ago so the next thing will be the address no doubt hehe.  Everytime we see a horse, its the “football horse”, the local team has a horse on the strip so now every picture of a horse is linked to football.  I really enjoy watching and listening to his thought processes, the things that boy does amazes me.

Sleeping is a heck of a lot better, well lets face it, it couldn’t get any worse!  For almost 20 months, Joe had me awake every 2-3 hours in the night and by changing his bedtime routine somewhat we got him down to waking once a night.  Recently, and I know Im going to screw it all up now, he has been sleeping ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT! Wahoo.  Sleep, something I’ve not had for almost two years, well when I say not had I mean not had for any lengthy periods of time.  I think the longest was 4 hours once.  So, now Joe goes to bed 7/7.30pm might wake once around 9pm (we’ve still got one set of molars to come and the dribble suggests that they are coming) and will sleep until 5.30am when he comes into our bed, then he will sleep until 6.30am/7am.  His naps are easy now, he will go down at around the same time every day without a battle and he will sleep anything between one & two hours.

Joe loves food, he will eat nearly everything other than tomatoes or carrots (except for the carrots we have grown in the back garden).  We’ve hit a bit of a phase where if he doesn’t like the look of something, then he wont eat it but then he might eat it the next day without the “Yuck” comments hehe.  Funny little man!

Potty training is going swimmingly.  We didn’t really push it upon him, but have had a potty in the house for a little over a year now just to get him used to it.  I started to ask him if he wanted to use the potty and he would sit on it but wouldnt perform and then one day, we had a wee and he loved the response so much that he nearly always asks for a wee or a poo on the potty now.  Equally he will sit on the toilet but prefers the potty.  I’ve not been brave enough to try it outdoors yet but I might do that from next week.  Ive bought the changing pads for the buggy ready and have plenty of room in my bag for spare clothes!

I gave birth to a natural comedian, Joe loves to make you laugh. He will tickle you, pull funny faces, do funny walks and has this funny voice that he does when he really wants to impress you.  He loves to be outdoors, on play things (swings, slides, climbing frames) loves the ducks, squirrels and the park and loves nothing more than to kick a ball, bounce on his trampoline or play with animals and farm houses.  His favourite tv programmes (I know, I know, but it gives me time to cook/tidy) are Show Me, Show Me and Something Special.  He likes to dance and sing – he does a fantastic rendition of Baa Baa Black Sheep!

Im sure there is more, will add it as and when I remember.

TP is now standing for a considerable length of time without falling over and for the past week has gone from taking one single step to two or three.  He is very wobbly but he is getting there and soon there will be no stopping him and Mummy will be even more tired!! He loves to climb aswell and if he can get his leg up on it then he will climb, its quite funny watching him try and climb on everything, he’s like a boy possessed.

We’ve also got another tooth pushing so his sleep is all over again, waking every 2 hours during the night and his new waking time seems to be 6am!  I’m hoping its a phase and will pass once the sun stops coming out so early because I thought 6am was still night time haha.  So, because of this early waking his first nap is now at 9am, which is very odd indeed.

TP has finally decided that nursery is fun.  He will very rarely cry when I leave now and only cries when I arrive to pick him up, me popping in at lunchtime to feed was upsetting him quite a bit and once he started to eat his lunch there I began going in later and later and now I dont go in at all.  I do leave milk for him but he is obviously far too busy to drink it and pushes it away in favour of dinner and snacks!

In general, TP’s eating habits have greatly improved.  I think because he drinks less milk now, he is eating more and more food.  Yoghurt is still by far his favourite and he is quite adept with his spoon these days, only occasionally covering himself in yoghurt on the scoop and when he gets bored with scooping he picks up the bowl and drinks it which is why I’ve taken to serving the yoghurt in his doidy cup!

I’ve introduced a fork aswell and TP is going great guns with it, he tries to stab it into the food which usually ends up with me doing it for him but once the food is on the fork its straight into the mouth and he’s looking for the next bit.

TP seems to have developed quite a bad habit where when he’s had enough to eat, whatever is left gets thrown on the floor, Im assuming its a normal phase – it just seems to be a pretty long phase.

Well Im off to try and figure out how to upload photographs as it is about time I posted one or two!

Today we gave swimming a miss, its the first time in 9 months that we’ve missed a session.  TP had a better nights sleep but was still quite poorly, he kept waking 2 hourly but went back to sleep fairly easily and was willingly taking his medicine so I’m assuming that he realised that it made him feel better.  I was trying to hold off giving medicine today but he had some Calpol at around midday because the poor boy was in so much pain he couldn’t get to sleep, its so horrible to watch him in pain and not be able to help him.

This morning, while he munching on his banana and throwing his cinnamon & raisin bagel to the dog (!) I noticed that he had some white spots on his tongue but was unsure and he would not let me look inside his mouth (because of the painful teeth!), so I played the “Lets stick our tongues out” game where I stuck my tongue out and held it there and then he copied and he definitely has creamy white spots across his tongue, which I’m pretty sure is oral thrush so I’ve booked an appointment at the GP on Tuesday but plan to speak to the HV on Monday just to make sure that I don’t need to get him to the GP urgently.

I don’t really know anything about oral thrush but I’m pretty sure that we both have to be treated, urgh!  I mistakingly Google Image’d oral thrush and got some very nasty looking pictures.

A couple of weeks ago TP cut his first top tooth and although he had shown a little discomfort it didn’t seem to cause him as many problems as the bottom two had. That was until I noticed that THREE more where making their way down his gums and are bulging, ready to pop through that gum at any given moment. Last night, the poor boy did not sleep (nor did Mummy!) which made today (a nursery day) quite difficult. After a rough night, he finally got off to sleep at 4am and managed two hours sleep before we had to get up for nursery/work. I dropped him off at nursery and when I went back to feed him at 11am, they said he had been a bit better today, less crying and he’d been enjoying the garden and the sun, when I went in I saw some improvement in that he whinged and whimpered a bit but didn’t full on scream like he had done the week before. Anyway, I fed him and handed him back to his key worker twenty minutes later, then he began to scream very loudly, so I said my goodbyes and left them to it. At 1.10pm, I got a phone call at work to say that he had settled down quite quickly after I had left and even ate his lunch of pasta (there’s a story here but I’ll write about that in a minute) and then yoghurt but had suddenly thrown up over his key worker and could I go and collect him.

TP looked very pale and red eyed when I got there, he had not napped in the morning and his teeth were giving him so much pain. So I brought him home and gave him some Calpol, two hours later I managed to calm him down and we had a little play and then we went for a walk where he fell asleep at 4.30pm having been awake since 6.30am and only having had about five hours sleep in the night, he was exhausted – so exhausted that he promptly woke up ten minutes later and lasted until 7.10pm when I think the Calpol Night knocked him out, either that or he was completely shattered! TP has woke three times since going to bed and its only 9pm, I think we are in for a long long night!

Just over 1 month ago I bought this book by Joseph Garcia because I had read great things about baby signing and wanted to give it a go for a couple of reasons, the first being that it’s brilliant that TP will be able to communicate with me before he can speak and also because its beneficial (for both of us) to learn a new language. Anyway, I got the book and was a bit disappointed with myself for not realising that it was American Sign Language (ASL) and NOT British Sign Language (BSL) but had heard that the differences were very few and that anyone who could use BSL would be able to understand those varying words so I began to teach TP.

We started with 4 signs: Milk , Eat , Drink and More and eventhough I do keep forgetting to do ‘drink’ and ‘more’ I have been very good with ‘milk’ and ‘eat’.

After about 3 weeks, TP started to motion his hand when he wanted milk but its so close to his wave that I wasn’t sure if it was the sign or not. By week 4, I was sure that it was him asking for milk and he does it lots now!!

Last Wednesday whilst on the bus, TP moved his hand slowly from his side to his mouth (which resembled the ‘eat’ sign) so I gave him a rice cake and once he had finished that he motioned again, so we went off for lunch where he ate jacket potato and cheese, followed by half of a banana and several blueberries, so he was obviously hungry! I’ve not seen him sign it again though so whether or not he has the hang of that sign is anyone’s guess.

So well done TP and now Mummy needs to go and find new signs to teach.

I read that a baby’s bodyclock doesn’t start to set itself until around 10 months, well I think TP’s has started and I’m not sure I enjoy these 6am starts! It doesn’t seem to matter what time he goes off to sleep as he will always wake up between 6 and 6.30am. Ahwell, it will come in handy on those days that I have to work I guess. Tp’s getting on average 10 hours sleep a night, its obviously enough for him as he’s bright as a button, unlike his zombie Mummy!