Baby diary: 18 months 4 weeks
Jul. 5th, 2020 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia The food-related fussiness has continued since the last post. It's not neophobia, precisely, since the issue is more that Alan will refuse foods he's eaten steadily, like banana. Even the pear puree packets are a no-go. Or he'll eat a couple of bites and stop; or accept the food the third and seventh time it's offered (out of ten), for no perceptible reason. What he will eat consistently tends to be junky, eg. lobster chips and animal crackers. He also guzzles milk more the hotter it gets, which kills his appetite.
Still, he manages a bit of fibre and fruit and veg in a day, enough not to be disastrous. He still eats green peas and cucumber, and I have a photo of him sitting at the table with my dad, gnawing respectively on corn on the cob. But that only increases the mystery: acidity isn't the problem, since he'll guzzle every variant of lemonade (we've tried yuzu and kalamansi, and I have a rhubarb batch infusing in the fridge), and eat strawberries and raspberries. Bitterness isn't the problem either. He wants to try every adult's beverage, and as far as I can tell, if I didn't stop him he would simply continue drinking my Heineken and cold brew coffee. He's pretty into seltzer now; I don't let him have soda pop, but he enjoyed some fizzy rose-hibiscus kombucha on our way back from the pool.
Sleep is also a bit fraught. If he's not in my room he seems to wake up easily, and I'm back to tiptoeing around in the dark. (During the day he's often tired from playing outside, so naps well at least.) He also gets upset at more things? When he meets other toddlers w/ parents he starts crying when we go separate ways, even though he doesn't know how to share toys and mostly stares with fascination as the other kid smiles and babbles and runs circles around him. There's a little girl, for instance, who usually passes by Parc Poirier in the mornings as her mom walks her to daycare, and Alan thinks it's just the best to swing side by side. Yesterday we went to the pool for the second time, and bumped into S and his parents there. So of course he cried to leave after our public health-mandated 45 minutes, and cried that he couldn't continue hanging out with S afterward.
(45 minutes is a perfectly reasonable timeframe for toddlers to take a noontime dip in the kiddie pool, and indeed for a grownup swim - before Alan I would typically go after work, swim 30-45 minutes, and leave at 7pm closing time. So much the better if I don't have to go through the germy public showers and locker room. But now that they only let in about 50 people at a time, there's a queue during peak hours, and half an hour is a long time to queue in the sun with a toddler.)
Other notes:
Still, he manages a bit of fibre and fruit and veg in a day, enough not to be disastrous. He still eats green peas and cucumber, and I have a photo of him sitting at the table with my dad, gnawing respectively on corn on the cob. But that only increases the mystery: acidity isn't the problem, since he'll guzzle every variant of lemonade (we've tried yuzu and kalamansi, and I have a rhubarb batch infusing in the fridge), and eat strawberries and raspberries. Bitterness isn't the problem either. He wants to try every adult's beverage, and as far as I can tell, if I didn't stop him he would simply continue drinking my Heineken and cold brew coffee. He's pretty into seltzer now; I don't let him have soda pop, but he enjoyed some fizzy rose-hibiscus kombucha on our way back from the pool.
Sleep is also a bit fraught. If he's not in my room he seems to wake up easily, and I'm back to tiptoeing around in the dark. (During the day he's often tired from playing outside, so naps well at least.) He also gets upset at more things? When he meets other toddlers w/ parents he starts crying when we go separate ways, even though he doesn't know how to share toys and mostly stares with fascination as the other kid smiles and babbles and runs circles around him. There's a little girl, for instance, who usually passes by Parc Poirier in the mornings as her mom walks her to daycare, and Alan thinks it's just the best to swing side by side. Yesterday we went to the pool for the second time, and bumped into S and his parents there. So of course he cried to leave after our public health-mandated 45 minutes, and cried that he couldn't continue hanging out with S afterward.
(45 minutes is a perfectly reasonable timeframe for toddlers to take a noontime dip in the kiddie pool, and indeed for a grownup swim - before Alan I would typically go after work, swim 30-45 minutes, and leave at 7pm closing time. So much the better if I don't have to go through the germy public showers and locker room. But now that they only let in about 50 people at a time, there's a queue during peak hours, and half an hour is a long time to queue in the sun with a toddler.)
Other notes:
- Brings the bucket over to the kitchen sink a few times a day, hoping we'll fill it with water and let him go play with it on the balcony.
- If we're snoozing in the morning but he feels I should get up, he'll retrieve my glasses from my bedside table and nudge me to put them on.
- Often learns non-essential gestures from videos (by which I mean, after "Skidamarink" and "Head and Shoulders" and so on, he assumes every move the people/characters make in a music video is part of a set choreography. Will he be... a Tiktok dance boy...)
- Is able to follow some instructions, like "go press that button for mom."
- Understands that if he's being chased in a game, he can see the grownup coming one way and run the other way.
- Loves the kiddie pool, as expected. I'll have to get him a flotation vest: he went under twice the first time we went, and although it didn't upset him unduly, it was nerve-wracking for me.
- A couple more words: after he stopped saying "car" for everything, he started pointing at things and saying "goon". Had no idea what it meant at first but now I think it means "go" or "gone"? i.e. there's a moving object. He also says "coco" for Cocomelon, the Youtube channel. =_= And sometimes he'll say "boo" to initiate a peekaboo game, around a tree.
- We've been watching some Ghibli films on Netflix. The younger-bracket ones, Ponyo and Totoro, hold Alan's attention very well, as long as what's happening onscreen is within his frame of reference. But Totoro scared him at first! I had to hug him close and explain that he's friendly, albeit large and loud and full of teeth. This represents an advancement -- he was never able to parse frightening scenes in media well enough to be actually frightened.
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