It’s been a normal kind of week, with a couple of exceptions.
Mum and Dad went out on Wednesday night to watch a movie, which was great, if a bit odd – we weren’t really sure about what to do with ourselves when we were out. Parenting has very much become normal life, and so to finish watching a movie and then go out for dinner feels a bit surreal – shouldn’t we be home and asleep?
Nonetheless, we took our commitment to going out very seriously, and took Puff out for dinner in Newtown on Friday night. He was getting unsettled waiting for dinner to arrive, and so needed to be distracted with a phone.
When the food arrived, he was having trouble picking it up, and we decided to mix things up for him a bit (this is a good trick for getting him to keep eating after his attention span has started to dwindle) by adding cutlery – it turned out he was a bit of a natural in using a fork!
Saturday was a day spent mostly in the house – we went out for a quick bout of grocery shopping (where negotiating the stroller around a narrow greengrocer was a challenge in places, and Puff’s desire to hold onto the basket didn’t last the whole shopping trip), and then raced back home to have lunch with C&J, followed by dinner with B&K, and then a DVD with B,K&M. We demonstrated to our friends what life looks like once there are kids around, and were encouraged with some positive comments about our parenting style.
Sunday we trekked out to another cafe, this time down at Cronulla. Puff managed to stay in good spirits for most of the meal: here he is enjoying the scenery:
From there we went to a playground to queue up and play on the slide and the swing. Puff is getting ever more confident at playing there, and kept walking around for a long while before finally agreeing to go back into the stroller, and back home for a 3 hour (!) nap. After church that night, he spent another half hour or so just walking around – he loves walking, and seems to have a lot of energy for it!
One last little insight for where he was playing during some downtime. We occasionally let him play with a little music-playing torch that projects some stars in one direction. For a long while he has happily crawled around on a bed, playing with a torch: today for the first time, he just lay down and watched the stars play around on the ceiling.
Marvin Olasky: You mentioned somewhere that as a small boy you saw very little of your father. He came home from practice, closed himself in his study, and you would push drawings and other things under his door to try to get his attention. Did it work?
A short blog post continues to challenge me about how I spend time with Puff: you are not your gift.
If I had to pick any single characteristic of this week, it would be the book “Fox in Socks” by Dr Seuss. I naively thought that Puff might find it amusing to hear the words in the book, and that he’d quickly grow bored of it and move on to something else. Not so.
I think I’ve read the book more times in this last week than ever before in my life, and it’s just the beginning of his passion for the book. Here he is sitting on a blanket in the backyard while Dad hangs out washing hoping – in vain – that he might try and help with the pegs.
Puff went out with Mum a few times this week to visit different people. Here he is enjoying some corn in the comfort of his stroller.
While playing around in his usual play area, he’s been increasingly interested in pushing the boundaries of where he’s allowed to play, and what he’s allowed to interact with. Though he’s still fairly obedient (he will often do as he’s told while complaining about it), he has moments of being more and more stubborn about what he will and won’t do.
As we spend more and more time taking him outside and to play in different situations, he’s developing more confidence in what he can do. Here he is on a special slippery dip for people his size:
Sunday, with tsunami warnings abounding, we changed our plans from a trip to Sydney Harbour to a trip to Katoomba. The Three Sisters have been massively overdeveloped for tourism, but it was hard to resist taking a photo of Puff next to this giant toy koala.
A few other adventures from this week:
going to Cronulla on Friday night for a sunset play on the equipment, some dinner out, and a night-time trip to Grind
still having a cold
having – again – to clean the bath suddenly and without much notice
visiting Grandma and Doc, Aunty Sarah (back from uni), Uncle Andrew and Uncle Jonathan
It’s been astonishing to see how fast he has gone from taking his first steps to using walking as his preferred method of moving around. With this new-found confidence has come an increased desire for independence. Here he is trying to remember “feet first” at climbing around a slide in a park.
His counting is getting more impressive too: here is a somewhat staged video of him towards the end of dinner:
This week saw me make the trek up to the Blue Mountains for MKC. It was tough for everyone. It wasn’t until it was time to leave that it really hit me how much I was going to miss having Puff and Mum around. Sure, it was only a brief time in the scheme of things, but I’ve made a number of choices to try and maximize the time I can spend with Puff and Mum, and so when I end up with choices that undermine that, it’s always sad.
Last week we went to dinner for one of Puff’s uncle’s birthdays. This week, we took Aunty S shopping for a birthday present, and Puff had a chance to ride around in a toy car of sorts:
He wasn’t entirely convinced, and in fact we spent a lot of time holding his hands while he walked around the Westfield instead. I don’t think I was ready for just how slow it is to be moving around a shopping centre at 17 month old pace.
Mid-week, Puff and Mum came in to have lunch with Dad and some of his workmates. Everyone was very impressed with how well-behaved he was: indeed, until Dad accidentally mentioned “mango”, he was happy to eat some snacks and look around.
After yum cha, he went for a quick walk through the adjacent shopping centre. It’s been suggested to us that to help his walking develop as best as possible, we should hold off on giving him shoes to wear – this means that we’re looking for safe flooring options as places for him to practice.
With Dad away, Mum took Puff for another yum cha meal – here he is waiting for the other guests to arrive.
Lastly, here’s an indication of how he’s progressing with using a cup: he still drinks water out of his cup-with-straw a lot of the time, but he’s improving on using a cup without spills.
Stairs. The theme of the week has been stairs. During a visit to Grandma and Doc’s, Puff crept off to climb the stairs. On a trip to the college BBQ, Puff made it up and down the two flights of stairs at least half a dozen times before moving on to something else.
Puff can mostly be trusted on stairs, as we have drilled into him that he has to go feet first when climbing down. He stays with this until he gets tired, where he starts to look around too much and stops being safe.
We continue to see him playing imagination games, and his favourite is indeed the “compost”. His recall is getting better – he can tell you what he was doing hours earlier in the day, and is starting to put together groups of people that we commonly talk about. When we talk about one family, if he has visited while the dad of the family is at work, he will ask for the dad, as if the set isn’t properly made up until everyone is there.
Again at the PTCBBQ, there was a chance to explore some new toys: here he is trying to drive a toy car around, but it’s a struggle: he’s not sure which way he is meant to sit, but it didn’t stop him from driving around with it!
We’re seeing him become more ticklish, and respond to some situations and sayings with a real sense of joy.
Here he is at his uncle’s birthday party at a Korean BBQ restaurant. He mostly ate food that we’d brought for him, but tried a surprising array of unfamiliar food too!
One long-awaited highlight remains for the week: Puff took his first steps! An unusually strong sense of pride at being his dad rushed through me when I saw he’d figured this out.
