Motherhood 22 months on….

My baby, my little baby boy is growing tall and lean.  His pot belly is becoming flat and his hands and fingers long.  He jumps and jumps up and down all day long.  He’s so proud of getting both feet off the ground at the same time that he just has to keep jumping over and over again.  He is easily amused by burping sounds thanks to the McD’s baby shrek doll and is repeating some single words and using words whenever and where ever he likes which is fairly rare.  It may be that I just don’t understand him.  He puts his head to the side, follows my face and eyes with his own as if he’s being ultra sincere and just tells me so much stuff that I don’t understand. It’s very funny.  He’s very funny. 

This past month Marley managed to scare the hell out of us on a couple of occasions.  One was when he and I were having a lovely playful morning and he ran after me into the bedroom and tripped and fell face first onto the corner edge of our bed.  This resulted in a 2 hr drive to Canberra and some plastic surgery performed on the space between his nose and his top lip.  It’s healing very very well considering how awful it was and hopefully he won’t scar much at all.  That was one of the most horrible days of my life.  A week or 2 later his left leg just kept giving way on him and he couldn’t walk without falling and was unable to pull himself up to a standing position or to walk up or down steps.  Again, quite frightening especially considering he hadn’t injured his leg at all.  The Dr took it seriously and sent us home with forms for a brain scan should his leg not improve.  Thankfully his leg did improve and he was back to normal the following day. The Dr thought it might have been a virus. 

During this month Marley has developed an aversion to doctors, hospitals, blood tests and even cried when I had one done the other day.  He had nightmares for a couple of weeks after the injury to his face and has become very stand-offish when being examined by the doctor.  All of this but he still managed to dance to the wiggles in his cot at the hospital.  Funny boy.  I sing him a special I love you song before bed now and he really loves it.  We did some artwork with his hand prints and made a mobile of heaps of his hand prints cut out and each time we pass it he has to give it a high five.  He has gone off his food recently, just doesn’t have much of an appetite and is only sleeping for an hour in the afternoons. 

I’ve found that until recently he’s refused to use words that anyone else instigates...eg if you were to say ‘Marley can you say Cathie???’ he’d ignore you.  If you said ‘Marley, can you say pig?’ he snorts like a pig.  The only word Marley will say when you ask him to is CAR.  Car car car car car!!!  I decided this might be a clever way to encourage him to say new words.  I started ‘Marley, can you say Car?’ and he says loudly and proudly ‘CAR’, and so I say ‘can you say TA’ and he says ‘TA’.  .....Marley can you say foot? and he says “SHOE”.  This is very typical of Marley’s use of language.  There is no doubt that he gets his message across though, nomatter what he’s trying to say. Today for example he got sick of trying to tell us something and so he walked to the table and grabbed his cup and then to the kitchen and reached up and grabbed the milk off the bench and poured himself a drink of milk!!!!!!! Tim and I nearly fell over. 

The picture above illustrates what I found him doing in the bathroom the other day when I was hastily packing our bags for a weekend away.  Turn your back, you take a risk is my new motto.