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sixteen months
Apr. 5th, 2018 11:03 amOh I never did a post for the fact that two weeks ago tomorrow, the prince was 16 months old!
He walks with confidence. He has a lot to say, some of which is easily understood by any English speaker ("bye-bye," "uh-oh," "no no no," "UP") and some of which we kind of have to get from context and make a lot of assumptions. He sleeps fine. Eating-wise, he's in a phase of rejecting meat - we don't know why, when a few months ago he couldn't stop putting chicken tikka masala in his face, but right now he picks the meat sauce off his pasta and spits out chicken and, hilariously, gamely tried a taste of bratwurst the other night and then gave me a look that was not merely "ugh, no thank you," but quite clearly "you've been eating this? what is wrong with you?!" He doesn't say a lot of recognizable words but his facial expressions are pretty fucking eloquent.
He's also getting pretty good at following directions. He's not allowed to play with trash cans or the recycling bin, and he does really well at looking but not touching; we do allow him to throw things away that are actually trash, and he's very pleased to do this. He's into putting toys in boxes, which I'm not going to train out of him. When he asks for another piece of toast or cheese or whatever we tell him to chew and swallow what's in his mouth first and I can see him concentrating on doing as he's asked. In the morning when he wants me to pick him up but I need to eat my breakfast, I tell him I can't pick him up but as soon as I've fixed my cereal I can sit down with him, and he sits right down and waits for me to join him. ♥ And sometimes at playtime he'll crawl up into my lap and then carry on practicing putting Duplo blocks together instead of sitting near me. What a cuddlebug.
On the down side, he thinks pulling my hair is hilarious and has resumed occasionally biting instead of kissing. (His canine teeth are coming in, so maybe when that's done he'll be less interested in biting.) He doesn't entirely understand how gentle he needs to be when we say "gentle hands" - that is, he whacks us in the face quite a lot. And his little fingernails grow fast and are super sharp, especially at the corners, and he loathes having them trimmed - but he's got an array of scratches on various parts of his face that get there before I even have a chance to notice his nails are getting too long (like seriously, they can seem fine one evening and then I put him to bed and he wakes up in the morning with sharp corners on his fingernails and his face cut up), and one of these times I'm scared he's going to scratch his eye or another kid (or another kid's eye!) so I'm trying to pay closer attention to that, but he really hates the clippers and the scissors, and the file doesn't really work. I'm just going to have to use the fact that I'm way bigger and stronger and fight him through this period, because sometimes when he cries about things I can tell he's fussing and pretending to cry as a manipulation tactic, but at manicure (boyicure, heh) time he is genuinely upset but I have to do it anyway. Boo.
He walks with confidence. He has a lot to say, some of which is easily understood by any English speaker ("bye-bye," "uh-oh," "no no no," "UP") and some of which we kind of have to get from context and make a lot of assumptions. He sleeps fine. Eating-wise, he's in a phase of rejecting meat - we don't know why, when a few months ago he couldn't stop putting chicken tikka masala in his face, but right now he picks the meat sauce off his pasta and spits out chicken and, hilariously, gamely tried a taste of bratwurst the other night and then gave me a look that was not merely "ugh, no thank you," but quite clearly "you've been eating this? what is wrong with you?!" He doesn't say a lot of recognizable words but his facial expressions are pretty fucking eloquent.
He's also getting pretty good at following directions. He's not allowed to play with trash cans or the recycling bin, and he does really well at looking but not touching; we do allow him to throw things away that are actually trash, and he's very pleased to do this. He's into putting toys in boxes, which I'm not going to train out of him. When he asks for another piece of toast or cheese or whatever we tell him to chew and swallow what's in his mouth first and I can see him concentrating on doing as he's asked. In the morning when he wants me to pick him up but I need to eat my breakfast, I tell him I can't pick him up but as soon as I've fixed my cereal I can sit down with him, and he sits right down and waits for me to join him. ♥ And sometimes at playtime he'll crawl up into my lap and then carry on practicing putting Duplo blocks together instead of sitting near me. What a cuddlebug.
On the down side, he thinks pulling my hair is hilarious and has resumed occasionally biting instead of kissing. (His canine teeth are coming in, so maybe when that's done he'll be less interested in biting.) He doesn't entirely understand how gentle he needs to be when we say "gentle hands" - that is, he whacks us in the face quite a lot. And his little fingernails grow fast and are super sharp, especially at the corners, and he loathes having them trimmed - but he's got an array of scratches on various parts of his face that get there before I even have a chance to notice his nails are getting too long (like seriously, they can seem fine one evening and then I put him to bed and he wakes up in the morning with sharp corners on his fingernails and his face cut up), and one of these times I'm scared he's going to scratch his eye or another kid (or another kid's eye!) so I'm trying to pay closer attention to that, but he really hates the clippers and the scissors, and the file doesn't really work. I'm just going to have to use the fact that I'm way bigger and stronger and fight him through this period, because sometimes when he cries about things I can tell he's fussing and pretending to cry as a manipulation tactic, but at manicure (boyicure, heh) time he is genuinely upset but I have to do it anyway. Boo.
