The Glorious Oyster
Jan. 4th, 2006 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundHere are some things that my marvellous son is doing as he enters his third calendar year. (This is very long and rambling, and mostly for my benefit, but some of his fans might like an update too.)
[ETA: I've thought of a few more things I wanted to note and added them without comment.]
Today, Oisín is 16 months and 13 days old. He's still breastfed - no plans to give up any time soon.
He's very much got the hang of climbing (his grandmother taught him kitchen chairs a few weeks ago; we're discouraging the table). Happily, he had already learnt a reasonably reliable version of Down before he mastered Up, so parental heart attacks are relatively rare. His favourite thing to climb is our kitchen stepladder, which he can push to wherever he wants to go. So far, he's only managed to grab a sharp knife once...
His job is to turn off the kitchen timer (on the oven): when it beeps, he comes running, gets up on the stepladder and pushes the button. He still occasionally announces "beh-beh!", but not as often as he used to.
Stairs hold no mystery for him these days. He can get up them very quickly, and he'll hold a hand and the bannister and walk down forwards, quite steadily. Sometimes he still prefers to be carried.
He eats what we eat (yay!); we now reserve spoo for emergencies or curry, which doesn't agree with him. Spoons are for babies. Forks are where it's at, man. Even for soup. He's getting pretty handy at feeding himself. He rarely now signals that he's had enough by upending his bowl on his head, preferring instead to dump its contents on his highchair tray (or the floor). He does rub food in his hair, though - and I suppose one advantage of his having BARELY ANY hair is that it's easy to wipe off.
In the morning, he isn't often hungry for his own breakfast (usually he's had lots of milk all night; urgh). He'll have a bit of toast and maybe some yoghurt. What he really likes is to come and go as we're eating and be given spoonfuls from our bowls. He can drink very neatly from a glass that someone is holding.
He's picking up some grown-up mannerisms. He's been pointing, waving, and shaking his head for ages now, but he's recently added blowing on his food and nodding (awkwardly, with most of his upper body - it's painfully cute). He also has the gesture for "I don't have it [any more]" - the one where you stand with arms held slightly out from the body and palms pointing forwards.
If he wants to go out he'll go to the hall, point at his coat and make the "I want!" sound (a sort of "uh! uh!", which I think is fairly universal). He can climb into his buggy, particularly if the brake is on. His playground structure of choice is the slide, but he also enjoys swings and the easier bits of climbing frames.
Balls are his absolute favourite toy. If it's roughly spherical, it's fascinating (this also applies to fruit, Christmas tree baubles and - we speculate - chickpeas). He's been known to take a ball to bed with him. He's very good at throwing - not just balls - and recently acquired the habit of giving a little preparatory flick of his hand before he does the actual throw. He can catch his biggest ball from a distance of about three feet. He can dribble a ball all the way down our hall. My brother is a devoted footballer, and his skills (heading, bouncing ball on feet, fancy footwork) provoke delighted squeals and a gaze of sheer adulation from the Oyster.
He's very into electronic gadgets. He has two toy land-line phones, a toy mobile and several defunct remote controls. Most things can be phones (wooden bricks, bread crusts, bananas). He loudly demands whatever phone we're speaking on, but (like many toddlers) is struck dumb if he gets it and there's a voice on the other end of the line. He can turn on (or off) our cordless units, and there's a game with the spare-room phone where he pushes the loudspeaker button and the adults have to sing "beeeeeeeeeep" until he turns it off.
He loves his new easel, which Santa Claus brought him. Crayons taste marginally better than chalk. He's not into soft toys or dolls at all. Vehicles are a bit meh, frankly. He's reasonably interested in the little wooden train set, but the dump truck and the cadillac have been more or less ignored. He ADORES his legoid bricks. The long cardboard tubes left over from wrapping paper are great, as are some plastic pint vessels left over from our wedding. Our large ostrich-feather duster is another hit. He's fond of his tripartite wooden elephant.
He went through a serious piano phase a while back, where he'd ask to be sat up in the chair and plink away for ages. This was before he learnt how to get down safely, so it was a little inconvenient. He's lost interest in the piano now, but he quite likes the percussion instruments that he got for Christmas. He hasn't yet succeeded in climbing onto the piano keyboard and thence to the Interesting Things on top of the instrument, but perhaps one day...
Recently, he's been starting to pretend: he'll give me an empty stacking cup and say the word for "food/drink", for instance, and I have to sip from it.
He's become interested in colours: he'll take out all the blue blocks from his trolley first, then all the green ones, and so on. He's been wanting me to make towers with them too - which he then enjoys toppling. (We say yes! smash capitalism! when he does this, because we are pinko lefties and we thought it was hilarious when his grandmother said it first.)
He helps us tidy up - indeed, he likes emptying stuff onto the floor just so that we can put it back. This morning, he found a stray arch-bit (as in the section that got cut out of the arch, which is included in the jar of painted wooden bricks) under the bean-bag and asked for the jar lid to be unscrewed so he could put it away. (He has not yet figured out torque. This is good.)
He's enjoyed being read to for a while, but usually only stays around for a page or two of whatever book he brings you. The exceptions - in that he'll stay for the whole thing - are Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell, which he's LOVED since he got it for his birthday in August, and more recently Janet and Allan Ahlberg's Each Peach Pear Plum and Peepo! (the latter I read to him one morning during the holiday, and he was engrossed for two and a half goes).
He's not rebellious (yet). He does go for things he knows he's not allowed to do, but he does it to check that the reaction is still the same, I think, and doesn't get too upset when he's prevented. (He's not actually prevented from doing much, since we try not to thwart him for our mere convenience.) I presume that this will change over the next year, but he's basically a pretty chilled-out, thoughtful child.
And finally, there's language acquisition. I believe the stage he's at now is called "immature jargoning", where the babble gets much more complex and sounds like a private language. (It's UNBEARABLY cute - I swear to you, if I am found DEAD, it will be on account of the immature jargoning.) Words are beginning to emerge. Long before he was one, he was saying "da-da", which means "ta-ta", the creche's version of "thank you". Around one, he added a beautiful Italianate "mamma", which started out meaning "gimme!" and later became associated with food/drink and breastmilk. Then maybe two or three months ago he started saying "ssiz", which means "shoes". I've been planning to write down his vocabulary for ages, so I'll have a stab at it now (I'll silently edit if I remember any more).
da-da: thank you
mamma: [give me that] food or drink, [feed me] milk (depending on context)
ssiz: shoes
baw: ball (usually said repeatedly, with ENORMOUS excitement and insistence)
ow-oh: hello (said into a phone or phone-like object)
goh: gone, in the sense of "not in my hand any more"
oh-gaw: all gone
baba: picture of baby or child (rarely an adult)
beh-beh: beep-beep (of kitchen timer)
dowww: down (this originally also meant "up")
stez: stairs
at: hat
ot: hot (not actually as differentiated from "hat" as my spellings here imply)
daw: door (not 100% sure of this one)
He probably also says "there", but I haven't isolated a definite instance yet. There are other words the meaning of which is not entirely clear. "Goh" means "gone", but he also says it repeatedly to mean something like "I disagree". There are lots of single syllables beginning with "b", but only "ball" is clear. Others may mean "bread" and "book". I don't know what "biz" means, but it might be "please". He's also been saying "bishops" a lot recently, but I'm not entirely certain that he's referring to senior members of the clergy.
EDIT (8 January)
Since I wrote this entry, Oisín has added a very cute ya ("yeah") to his vocabulary, and he also, this evening, made his very first TWO-WORD UTTERANCE! How cool is that? With a theatrical look of distress, palms outstretched, he announced, "baw goh!". His ball was indeed gone. But not far.
You'll notice that I've made a new tag for this entry. If I find myself a good sturdy round tuit, I'll post something similar in a couple of months. Won't that be nice?
[ETA: I've thought of a few more things I wanted to note and added them without comment.]
Today, Oisín is 16 months and 13 days old. He's still breastfed - no plans to give up any time soon.
He's very much got the hang of climbing (his grandmother taught him kitchen chairs a few weeks ago; we're discouraging the table). Happily, he had already learnt a reasonably reliable version of Down before he mastered Up, so parental heart attacks are relatively rare. His favourite thing to climb is our kitchen stepladder, which he can push to wherever he wants to go. So far, he's only managed to grab a sharp knife once...
His job is to turn off the kitchen timer (on the oven): when it beeps, he comes running, gets up on the stepladder and pushes the button. He still occasionally announces "beh-beh!", but not as often as he used to.
Stairs hold no mystery for him these days. He can get up them very quickly, and he'll hold a hand and the bannister and walk down forwards, quite steadily. Sometimes he still prefers to be carried.
He eats what we eat (yay!); we now reserve spoo for emergencies or curry, which doesn't agree with him. Spoons are for babies. Forks are where it's at, man. Even for soup. He's getting pretty handy at feeding himself. He rarely now signals that he's had enough by upending his bowl on his head, preferring instead to dump its contents on his highchair tray (or the floor). He does rub food in his hair, though - and I suppose one advantage of his having BARELY ANY hair is that it's easy to wipe off.
In the morning, he isn't often hungry for his own breakfast (usually he's had lots of milk all night; urgh). He'll have a bit of toast and maybe some yoghurt. What he really likes is to come and go as we're eating and be given spoonfuls from our bowls. He can drink very neatly from a glass that someone is holding.
He's picking up some grown-up mannerisms. He's been pointing, waving, and shaking his head for ages now, but he's recently added blowing on his food and nodding (awkwardly, with most of his upper body - it's painfully cute). He also has the gesture for "I don't have it [any more]" - the one where you stand with arms held slightly out from the body and palms pointing forwards.
If he wants to go out he'll go to the hall, point at his coat and make the "I want!" sound (a sort of "uh! uh!", which I think is fairly universal). He can climb into his buggy, particularly if the brake is on. His playground structure of choice is the slide, but he also enjoys swings and the easier bits of climbing frames.
Balls are his absolute favourite toy. If it's roughly spherical, it's fascinating (this also applies to fruit, Christmas tree baubles and - we speculate - chickpeas). He's been known to take a ball to bed with him. He's very good at throwing - not just balls - and recently acquired the habit of giving a little preparatory flick of his hand before he does the actual throw. He can catch his biggest ball from a distance of about three feet. He can dribble a ball all the way down our hall. My brother is a devoted footballer, and his skills (heading, bouncing ball on feet, fancy footwork) provoke delighted squeals and a gaze of sheer adulation from the Oyster.
He's very into electronic gadgets. He has two toy land-line phones, a toy mobile and several defunct remote controls. Most things can be phones (wooden bricks, bread crusts, bananas). He loudly demands whatever phone we're speaking on, but (like many toddlers) is struck dumb if he gets it and there's a voice on the other end of the line. He can turn on (or off) our cordless units, and there's a game with the spare-room phone where he pushes the loudspeaker button and the adults have to sing "beeeeeeeeeep" until he turns it off.
He loves his new easel, which Santa Claus brought him. Crayons taste marginally better than chalk. He's not into soft toys or dolls at all. Vehicles are a bit meh, frankly. He's reasonably interested in the little wooden train set, but the dump truck and the cadillac have been more or less ignored. He ADORES his legoid bricks. The long cardboard tubes left over from wrapping paper are great, as are some plastic pint vessels left over from our wedding. Our large ostrich-feather duster is another hit. He's fond of his tripartite wooden elephant.
He went through a serious piano phase a while back, where he'd ask to be sat up in the chair and plink away for ages. This was before he learnt how to get down safely, so it was a little inconvenient. He's lost interest in the piano now, but he quite likes the percussion instruments that he got for Christmas. He hasn't yet succeeded in climbing onto the piano keyboard and thence to the Interesting Things on top of the instrument, but perhaps one day...
Recently, he's been starting to pretend: he'll give me an empty stacking cup and say the word for "food/drink", for instance, and I have to sip from it.
He's become interested in colours: he'll take out all the blue blocks from his trolley first, then all the green ones, and so on. He's been wanting me to make towers with them too - which he then enjoys toppling. (We say yes! smash capitalism! when he does this, because we are pinko lefties and we thought it was hilarious when his grandmother said it first.)
He helps us tidy up - indeed, he likes emptying stuff onto the floor just so that we can put it back. This morning, he found a stray arch-bit (as in the section that got cut out of the arch, which is included in the jar of painted wooden bricks) under the bean-bag and asked for the jar lid to be unscrewed so he could put it away. (He has not yet figured out torque. This is good.)
He's enjoyed being read to for a while, but usually only stays around for a page or two of whatever book he brings you. The exceptions - in that he'll stay for the whole thing - are Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell, which he's LOVED since he got it for his birthday in August, and more recently Janet and Allan Ahlberg's Each Peach Pear Plum and Peepo! (the latter I read to him one morning during the holiday, and he was engrossed for two and a half goes).
He's not rebellious (yet). He does go for things he knows he's not allowed to do, but he does it to check that the reaction is still the same, I think, and doesn't get too upset when he's prevented. (He's not actually prevented from doing much, since we try not to thwart him for our mere convenience.) I presume that this will change over the next year, but he's basically a pretty chilled-out, thoughtful child.
And finally, there's language acquisition. I believe the stage he's at now is called "immature jargoning", where the babble gets much more complex and sounds like a private language. (It's UNBEARABLY cute - I swear to you, if I am found DEAD, it will be on account of the immature jargoning.) Words are beginning to emerge. Long before he was one, he was saying "da-da", which means "ta-ta", the creche's version of "thank you". Around one, he added a beautiful Italianate "mamma", which started out meaning "gimme!" and later became associated with food/drink and breastmilk. Then maybe two or three months ago he started saying "ssiz", which means "shoes". I've been planning to write down his vocabulary for ages, so I'll have a stab at it now (I'll silently edit if I remember any more).
da-da: thank you
mamma: [give me that] food or drink, [feed me] milk (depending on context)
ssiz: shoes
baw: ball (usually said repeatedly, with ENORMOUS excitement and insistence)
ow-oh: hello (said into a phone or phone-like object)
goh: gone, in the sense of "not in my hand any more"
oh-gaw: all gone
baba: picture of baby or child (rarely an adult)
beh-beh: beep-beep (of kitchen timer)
dowww: down (this originally also meant "up")
stez: stairs
at: hat
ot: hot (not actually as differentiated from "hat" as my spellings here imply)
daw: door (not 100% sure of this one)
He probably also says "there", but I haven't isolated a definite instance yet. There are other words the meaning of which is not entirely clear. "Goh" means "gone", but he also says it repeatedly to mean something like "I disagree". There are lots of single syllables beginning with "b", but only "ball" is clear. Others may mean "bread" and "book". I don't know what "biz" means, but it might be "please". He's also been saying "bishops" a lot recently, but I'm not entirely certain that he's referring to senior members of the clergy.
EDIT (8 January)
Since I wrote this entry, Oisín has added a very cute ya ("yeah") to his vocabulary, and he also, this evening, made his very first TWO-WORD UTTERANCE! How cool is that? With a theatrical look of distress, palms outstretched, he announced, "baw goh!". His ball was indeed gone. But not far.
You'll notice that I've made a new tag for this entry. If I find myself a good sturdy round tuit, I'll post something similar in a couple of months. Won't that be nice?
