Friday, June 12, 2009

Year Two in Review

Well, another year has passed. In looking over last year’s, I noticed a few goals I’d mentioned for you to work on:
1. Sleeping thru the night for two weeks, followed by several weeks in a row of no sleep was intolerable. This was an area that needed lots of improvement.
You are still not a great sleeper, but improvement has been noted. Late night wake-ups are generally related to illness or your need to urinate. If the issue is easily resolved (like the need to pee) then you generally fall right back to sleep when it’s done. If not easily resolved, it’s not something we can control and thankfully much more rare.
Other advances in your sleeping have come about in that you can put yourself to sleep. If we follow the naptime of evening routine and just place you awake in your crib, there is no problem. It’s a wonderful thing.
2. Nursing. While it appears last year’s period of your waning interest was not permanent, my loss of interest in the activity was. You weaned without much upset and now it only occasionally seems to irk you that the dairy is closed.
3. Independence. It comes and goes, understandably. After all, at this point in your life you’re still very much a baby. But slowly we’re making progress. There are a lot of things you usually want to do yourself. Granted, feeding is still not generally one of them (the skills involved in utensils appear to take a lot of concentration and you get frustrated with your lack of mastery long before you’re done eating). However you are mastering small and large motor skills, as evidenced when you removed the bolts from the wood stove this weekend. So, it’ll just take more time and practice.
You have also begun to master several other skills:
1. Empathy. This isn’t something toddlers are known for, but you’re beginning to show faint glimmers. Occasionally when you land a blow you’ll look concerned, ask if we have a boo-boo, and offer to kiss it. Occasionally. Hopefully in a year’s time we will see this on a much more frequent basis.
2. Conversation. Your vocabulary has grown such that we can have short simple conversations. “We” meaning a select few people who understand your brand of toddlerese. Unfortunately, those conversations seem to focus on feces, urine, and all things stinky to inordinate degree. While I don’t see this necessarily changing much in the near future, I’d like to expand our subject matter further than it has as of yet and expand the population of people who can understand it.
3. Speaking of feces and urine… Its time to learn to do those activities in the appropriate location. You know what a potty is. You know what people do there. You know when you are about to do it in your pants. I know you are aware of all of this because you talk about it all the time—it’s your favorite subject. When we tried previously, you simply didn’t have the focus to sit long enough. This time, we know you do. By this time next year, I would very much like to say that you are potty trained.
4. Motor skills. You can walk, jump, run, climb, color, catch, throw, kick, take things apart…really we’re doing just fine here.

Other than that, darling boy, I don’t see anything we can work on. I would enjoy it if your legs would actually grow (and so I wouldn’t have to keep buying larger pants just to keep up with your Buddha belly). But what to do about that, I’m not so certain

1 comment:

caramama said...

Happy Birthday, Sasha!

Sounds like he's doing great overall!