14 Months and 6 Days

I knew this blogging is hard to do regularly and this long absence of mine proves it. This, despite my having the mood and material to write. I kept writing up small notes every week for the past 4 weeks but none of them got converted into a full-length blog for reasons not more significant than failing to make the time to sit down. There are too many bits and prices to write about now.
There haven't been any significant milestones since I last wrote; I don't suppose there will be any more until he starts talking which, by the looks of it will be taking some time yet.
I always have something to talk about his food habits, so let me start there. His dinner or lunch generally has rice with vegies/dal and yoghurt in the end with some variations of pasta, soup fish patties and mince meat on occasion. I feel guilty about not giving him enough variety, so I made him vegetable cheese squares from a Heinz recipe book last week. Like I was expecting, he kept spitting it out. He doesn't like textured foods; he prefers things he can just swallow without having to chew much, or rather, not at all. Finally I had to grind the vegie squares to a paste with milk to get him to eat it. And after all that, he woke twice in the middle of the night and Praveen's theory was that he didn't have his usual heavy carbohydrate dose of rice and so kept waking for hunger . So much for me trying to introduce variety!
One food he does like chewing on is sultanas. The only problem is the chewing never ends. He can go on with one like a bubble gum. When I added sultanas to his bowl from which he was already eating banana pieces, he spat out the banana in his mouth(which until then was very likable) and picked sultanas from the bowl. His dad tried to be clever by hiding the sultanas under the banana pieces but guess who is smarter? The remainder of the banana pieces were left to go black in the end.

With summer almost upon us, feeding has become an outdoor activity. Suits both of us well: he is happy to roam around the entire garden, climbing up and down the stairs, hanging by the gate and pointing and waving with both hands to the cars going past and this means he eats well. He did, meanwhile, officially kill his first fly last weekend during one such outdoor feeding fest. The poor fly got in and was flitting around the blinds and was too sluggish for my son who simply crushed it between his index finger and the window pane. He kept coming back to it later on to look at the spot it had fallen and wanted to crush it further.

I brought him home early last Friday and took him to the Glen. It is such an arduous task taking him to a shopping centre on my own! I end up having to manage two things: him and the pram because after about 10 minutes of riding in the pram sitting like a king with both hands on the arm rests, he decides to start a freedom struggle. He wriggles around so much that he gets stuck between the seat and the safety bar while trying to slide off the seat. Before you ask why his belts are not strapped, I must explain that he would have gone in and come out of it so many times by now, that I don't bother strapping his belt on after the first couple of times. If you think about it from his perspective, you can imagine it must be terribly boring to just sit around watching when he could be pulling out and exploring so many things if only we they let him free! Sometimes I let him walk by my side, but even there he has his own mind: neither should I hold his hand nor will he hold my hand. If left alone, he will wander off in completely the opposite direction, walk into any shop and promptly pull out the display items from the lower racks. And after all this, he got treated with his first ever soft serve from Wendy's. I am happy to say he wasn't exactly smitten although he did enjoy it. I also tried to put him on the mini rides but he seemed too scared to sit on them on his own. I am told once they get hooked onto those rides, there is no stopping them. Can't wait for that!

I taught him the "bow-wow" sound of a dog so he now associates the bark and the word "kukka" (dog) with his rendition of the bark- "tha-tha". Praveen took him to Chadstone yesterday and he tells me I missed a sight at the pet shop. The Pet's Paradise apparently caused him to go wild with excitement because of the puppies in the display playing around. He pointed to them running here and there crying "tha-tha" "tha-tha" all the while.
I had to move my microwave out of his reach up to the workbench level because he had learnt to press the buttons. He insists on banging its door closed if it left open. Praveen was telling me today afternoon that new microwave's empty carton in the garage caught his eye today and he went over to press the buttons on the life-size image of the microwave!

The other day there was a little girl when we went clothes-shopping for him. He was good to her for a few minutes, pointing and showing her the dresses hanging off the racks and trying to cuddle her. When she went over to the playpen and started to play with a toy there, he kept trying to poke her eye, tried to pull the toy from her and held her at arm's length when she tried to approach for the toy. For someone who goes to the childcare everyday he seems very unfriendly! Is it just a boy thing? He has never exactly been an open-arm receiver of people but I thought he will be more accepting of other kids after spending so much time around them. Part of the disappointment I suppose is also because something we full-time childcare mums tell ourselves will be an upside of full-time childcare isn't turning out to be so. Only goes to prove they are always born with their personalities and sometimes there is only so much we can do to mould them. I am forced to believe nature rather than nurture has a stronger hold over children since I have had Pranav.