My descendants
Sep. 11th, 2008 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundI'm just going to type this and post it, and not WORRY about including everything that's occurred to me in the last, oh, six months or whatever since I last did one of these. Bah perfectionism.
It's a bit embarrassing that a big reason I haven't posted much about F is that I can't think of a good sobriquet for him (analagous to The Oyster). The Feaster? Hmph. It'll do for now.
So. The Feaster (hem hem) is now nine months old, and his accomplishments are LEGION. He has a particularly infectious grin - enhanced, to date, by not one or three or five but seven teeth - and if reports from innocent bystanders are to be believed, he exudes a sense of serene contentment that would made the Buddha look like a hypercaffeinated futures trader.
He conquered crawling a while back (for my own record, he was really getting the hang of it in the first half of July), and since then has graduated to pulling up to standing, cruising, and, since around a month ago, letting go and balancing on his feet. His observed record for this latter trick is around 20 seconds, and he's improving by the day. He can now stand unsupported while vigorously waving a toy. A few times in the past day or so I really felt that he was considering taking a step towards me, but so far he's always elected to drop back down to all fours instead.
No recognisable words yet, but he holds long conversations in babble, both with people (if they participate) and with toys. He can make himself very clearly understood in ordinary situations, such as indicating whose arms he wants to be in. He waves bye-bye, pops his grinning face out from behind things, and goes "aaaaaaaaaa" in your ear until you jiggle him gently to make him go "aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa".
He hates being bathed (or showered). It distresses him so much that we dread it, and it therefore happens about once a month. (I wish that were an exaggeration.) Now that he's so much more mobile than before, he gets dirtier, so this needs to change. Argh.
His favourite foods, other than breastmilk (which still makes up the vast bulk of his intake) are bread and pasta. He loves breadsticks, rice cakes, toast crusts. He also likes peas, and sometimes potato, banana, carrot, spinach. Avocado and tomato have left him more or less cold. It all has to be finger food, as he will not, on any account, be spoonfed. (This makes giving him Calpol a horrible ordeal.) He's currently uninterested in his sippy cup, but we have hopes.
The best thing in the world ever is when Unny plays with him. Melty squish.
-------------
Meanwhile, the Oyster goes from strength to strength.
The Three Rs
Reading: I've no idea where he's at with this. It hasn't been a focus recently. I suspect he can read quite a few words, but he strenuously resists being called upon to perform. He says he can't read. We don't push it. I bare my teeth at my father when he jokes about the "illiterate boy".
Riting: My brother gave Oisín a Learn To Write set for his birthday last month. (Oisín, incidentally, did a brilliant impression of his uncle saying, "Oh, Oisín can't write - I'd better get him this." OK, you probably had to be there.) We played with it a couple of days after his birthday, and he hasn't asked for it since. But a few days after that, he wrote a beautifully legible birthday card for Niall - I told him how to spell what he wanted to say, and he wrote it all down, asking me for help once or twice. He's very good at writing his own name now, too.
Rithmetic: A few months ago, he used to count to 20 as follows: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, sixteen, fourteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I restrained myself from correcting him, on unschooly, John-Holty principles (the idea being that children generally want to learn things properly, and will self-correct if given a chance). Then one day, we were counting the swimming pools in Eat Your Peas, and he went from one to seventeen without error. I said, "Wow, you counted seventeen swimming pools!" I haven't heard him do it wrong since then.
Meanwhile, he's very good at multiplying small numbers by 2, because a given train engine, tender or carriage will have x wheels on one side and 2x wheels altogether.
The other night at around 9pm, suddenly nothing would do him but to learn about odd and even numbers. So I found a few ways to explain them, both verbally and using our number-rods. I've no idea whether any of it stuck, but it was a fun half-hour.
Another time, it was powers of ten. He gets the idea that (say) 50 is "the zero of 53" - meaning that the units reset every ten. We counted up to 100 in 10s ("100 is the ten of tens"), then up to 1000 in 100s, and so on up to 1,000,000 in 100,000s. He loves getting me to count up to a given number (particularly when I sing the numbers to make it more interesting for myself), but I refused to count up to 1,000,000. Mean me.
Art, darling
Along with his progress in writing, his drawings have recently become much more detailed. They're also quite frequently, now, about things other than trains. (OMG eleventy-one.) For instance, I have on my desk beside me a portrait of Long John Silver, featuring (among other things) a tricorne hat, an eyepatch, a cutlass, and hands with palms and five fingers each. Meanwhile, yesterday morning involved sellotaping an intricate paper model of a sailing ship (it was in fact the Hispaniola from Treasure Island) to the kitchen table. Other themes include the knight-dragon-castle axis and characters from Shrek or Monsters Inc.
Things I hope he doesn't ever say in public, no. 4701
You're my electric Mama. When I hug you, it turns you on.
Favourite mishearings, no. 31750
When![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yiskah visited us a few weeks ago, she and the Oyster had great fun with the stacking-animals game he got from ailbhe and family for his birthday. They made a hugely intricate scenario with alliances and enmities between the various animals, and then they hit upon the idea of making composite animals by stacking individuals on top of one another (actually not far from what the game is designed for). yiskah called hers a behemoth.
The Oyster and I have been playing games featuring "bear muffs" ever since.
It's a bit embarrassing that a big reason I haven't posted much about F is that I can't think of a good sobriquet for him (analagous to The Oyster). The Feaster? Hmph. It'll do for now.
So. The Feaster (hem hem) is now nine months old, and his accomplishments are LEGION. He has a particularly infectious grin - enhanced, to date, by not one or three or five but seven teeth - and if reports from innocent bystanders are to be believed, he exudes a sense of serene contentment that would made the Buddha look like a hypercaffeinated futures trader.
He conquered crawling a while back (for my own record, he was really getting the hang of it in the first half of July), and since then has graduated to pulling up to standing, cruising, and, since around a month ago, letting go and balancing on his feet. His observed record for this latter trick is around 20 seconds, and he's improving by the day. He can now stand unsupported while vigorously waving a toy. A few times in the past day or so I really felt that he was considering taking a step towards me, but so far he's always elected to drop back down to all fours instead.
No recognisable words yet, but he holds long conversations in babble, both with people (if they participate) and with toys. He can make himself very clearly understood in ordinary situations, such as indicating whose arms he wants to be in. He waves bye-bye, pops his grinning face out from behind things, and goes "aaaaaaaaaa" in your ear until you jiggle him gently to make him go "aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa".
He hates being bathed (or showered). It distresses him so much that we dread it, and it therefore happens about once a month. (I wish that were an exaggeration.) Now that he's so much more mobile than before, he gets dirtier, so this needs to change. Argh.
His favourite foods, other than breastmilk (which still makes up the vast bulk of his intake) are bread and pasta. He loves breadsticks, rice cakes, toast crusts. He also likes peas, and sometimes potato, banana, carrot, spinach. Avocado and tomato have left him more or less cold. It all has to be finger food, as he will not, on any account, be spoonfed. (This makes giving him Calpol a horrible ordeal.) He's currently uninterested in his sippy cup, but we have hopes.
The best thing in the world ever is when Unny plays with him. Melty squish.
-------------
Meanwhile, the Oyster goes from strength to strength.
The Three Rs
Reading: I've no idea where he's at with this. It hasn't been a focus recently. I suspect he can read quite a few words, but he strenuously resists being called upon to perform. He says he can't read. We don't push it. I bare my teeth at my father when he jokes about the "illiterate boy".
Riting: My brother gave Oisín a Learn To Write set for his birthday last month. (Oisín, incidentally, did a brilliant impression of his uncle saying, "Oh, Oisín can't write - I'd better get him this." OK, you probably had to be there.) We played with it a couple of days after his birthday, and he hasn't asked for it since. But a few days after that, he wrote a beautifully legible birthday card for Niall - I told him how to spell what he wanted to say, and he wrote it all down, asking me for help once or twice. He's very good at writing his own name now, too.
Rithmetic: A few months ago, he used to count to 20 as follows: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, sixteen, fourteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I restrained myself from correcting him, on unschooly, John-Holty principles (the idea being that children generally want to learn things properly, and will self-correct if given a chance). Then one day, we were counting the swimming pools in Eat Your Peas, and he went from one to seventeen without error. I said, "Wow, you counted seventeen swimming pools!" I haven't heard him do it wrong since then.
Meanwhile, he's very good at multiplying small numbers by 2, because a given train engine, tender or carriage will have x wheels on one side and 2x wheels altogether.
The other night at around 9pm, suddenly nothing would do him but to learn about odd and even numbers. So I found a few ways to explain them, both verbally and using our number-rods. I've no idea whether any of it stuck, but it was a fun half-hour.
Another time, it was powers of ten. He gets the idea that (say) 50 is "the zero of 53" - meaning that the units reset every ten. We counted up to 100 in 10s ("100 is the ten of tens"), then up to 1000 in 100s, and so on up to 1,000,000 in 100,000s. He loves getting me to count up to a given number (particularly when I sing the numbers to make it more interesting for myself), but I refused to count up to 1,000,000. Mean me.
Art, darling
Along with his progress in writing, his drawings have recently become much more detailed. They're also quite frequently, now, about things other than trains. (OMG eleventy-one.) For instance, I have on my desk beside me a portrait of Long John Silver, featuring (among other things) a tricorne hat, an eyepatch, a cutlass, and hands with palms and five fingers each. Meanwhile, yesterday morning involved sellotaping an intricate paper model of a sailing ship (it was in fact the Hispaniola from Treasure Island) to the kitchen table. Other themes include the knight-dragon-castle axis and characters from Shrek or Monsters Inc.
Things I hope he doesn't ever say in public, no. 4701
You're my electric Mama. When I hug you, it turns you on.
Favourite mishearings, no. 31750
When
yiskah visited us a few weeks ago, she and the Oyster had great fun with the stacking-animals game he got from ailbhe and family for his birthday. They made a hugely intricate scenario with alliances and enmities between the various animals, and then they hit upon the idea of making composite animals by stacking individuals on top of one another (actually not far from what the game is designed for). yiskah called hers a behemoth.The Oyster and I have been playing games featuring "bear muffs" ever since.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 08:36 am (UTC)When 1 to 10 are laid out you can then see, at a glance, which numbers are odd and which are even.
like in this pic - http://www.wagglepop.com/auction/images/imgupld/373950_1.jpg
(I don't know how to insert an image offhand - sorry)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 09:09 am (UTC)I twooly love the electric Mama.
(Linnea's writing doesn't go in *order* and she doesn't WANT to know how to spell things) (also, she still can't read) (also, Emer is still wearing Ushy Shoo).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 10:33 am (UTC)Spoonfed
Date: 2008-09-12 08:02 pm (UTC)He still prefers to Be In Charge of the spoon, at 21 months, but occasionally tolerates some help.
We 'solved' the Calpol problem by always using the syringe that comes with infant nurofen. One of us has to hold him still while the other squirts the stuff into his mouth a little bit at a time.