Monday, February 25, 2008

Praise Bee




Aimee is a very clever girl. I know so, because she told me. After counting numbers to 13 or 14 yesterday, she finished by saying: WELL DONE AIMEE, CLEVER GIRL – and then clapping self-approvingly.Of course she has no idea what it means (or maybe she does, which would mean she is indeed very clever), as she is just mimicking what me or Cat say after each accomplished task. In the early days, we started off praising her with high targets such as, can Aimee change her clothes or climb the stairs, but now our targets are much more, erm, realistic, like, just trying to get her to put a spoon of food in her mouth and not spitting it out again.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Year of the Rat

Chinatown New Year lanterns, Cat with kids

"I HATE KIDS"
Not me you understand, but others. Yes, nothing divides opinion and causes normal sane people to act irrationally as much as their personal feelings about kids. You either love em or hate em. And those that hate them (who are in most cases, though not always, childless themselves) , are quite vocal about it, often adding a blasphemous expletive in front of the above quote. I get this fairly often. People I know actually say that they hate kids directly to me. Like what am I supposed to do? Hide them from view and not talk about ANYTHING kid/baby related. Not only that, but they'll go into such amazing detail about exactly what aspects of children really annoys them (you name it: noise, too small, too precocious, too noisy, too whingey, noise etc).
People who bang on about never wanting ever to have kids, how they hate the idea of kids etc, really annoy me. They're in huge denial and probably hate themselves more than they hate kids. But the worst offenders are the people who say this: "Well, I don't mind kids cos when I play with my nephews/neices/friends kids etc... I know full well that I can give them back and let them deal with the tantrums whilst I can go home to a quiet house...hahahha" (the laugh at the end is really important.) What a dumbass mindless thing to say. Grrrr.

Anyway, onto more important matters.
We thought Dylan could teeth for Britain but these past few days he has excelled himself with tortured teething symptoms. But still no sign of a tooth. But his crying, red cheeks and constant drooling have definitely increased. Poor kid, one day they'll come.
Aimee has developed a new habit. Somewhat embarassing. She likes to, erm, how can I put it, pleasure herself against the car seat or pram harness. She'll really go for it quite vigorously and refuses to stop when me or Cat ask her (trying hard not to sound hysterical) to stop doing it. She was going flat out in Ikea today whilst both me and Cat were going bright red and desperately hoping no one passing by noticed. It's all thoroughly normal according to the child books, and a brief phase that will pass. But at least Aimee has been getting better at potty practice. We've managed to get her to do a biggie in it several times as well as her usual wee. She's now fascinated by the whole excretory process that she constantly looks at the bowl to check if she has eliminated anything. It's a good sign of course, but still a long way to go before she's ready to stop wearing nappies.




Monday, February 04, 2008

Face to face


Doesn't really seem that baby Dyls has changed much in his appearance over 3 months. But the camera lies. He is longer and heavier - as the growing mounds of too small clothes can testify - and he holds his head pretty well. Plus he is fitting his size 3 nappies fairly snuggly now. The poor cheeks glow red with teething pain every day. Despite this, our little soldier still manages to down his daily quota of milk and night time sleeps. But he can now laugh - you gotta work hard at the funny faces but he definitely laughs.
Aimee is regularly weeing into her potty now. You have to initiate it with copious Pingu, but if you time it right, she can wee. A very handy incentive is the Kandoo froggy soap which she loves - so it becomes her reward whenever she is succesful on the potty.