puff and huff

With everyone back to full health again (at last), the week has been a normal one. On Thursday we had the car serviced, and Mum and Puff took the train over to Burwood to pick up the car, then spent some time trekking around Westfield while waiting for Dad.

He had a great time walking back and forth in the Westfield, including having the play equipment, but we made the classic naive parents’ call, and took him out to dinner with us instead of going home. He was too tired, and didn’t have much fun with it.

Worse yet, after dinner, having had such a poor run at feeding him, we went to the foodcourt, and tried – unsuccessfully – to give him some more food. he was so tired that he went straight to sleep when we made it home – he didn’t even properly wake up when we changed him into his pyjamas!

Saturday was a more relaxed day – Dad even took a few photos over breakfast to show off how messy a meal the avocado toast can be.

On a visit to some friends’ house, he had a great time playing with some new (to him) toys, and with our friends’ kids.

Outside, we checked to make sure we had a change of clothes for him, and then let him play with this watering can: by the time he was finished, his clothes were soaked, but he’d had a great time.

Sunday morning, and Puff and Dad headed out to a cafe to review it. Dad found this much harder than with an extra person to look after, but managed to get everything done somehow.

Today Puff followed his favourite bakery around the city in search of hot cross buns. Here he is taking a much needed break from the chase, to have lunch.

This week also saw him wearing shoes for the first time: with all the walking he’s been doing, it was high time he tried some out.

This week sees Mum and Dad both sick with stomach bugs. This makes it much harder to keep up with Puff as he runs around, and leaves us wondering what life might be like if there were any other people to look after beyond the three of us!

Let’s recap the week.

On Friday, Mum came into the city so that we could all have lunch together. Here he is as we walk back to the car – insisting that both his hands are held while we walk.

He’s ever more mobile, and even though he can climb onto his toy car by himself, he prefers to be helped onto it by mum or dad.

On Saturday we went for a drive into the city, and wandered around Circular Quay. He managed to make it all the way to the top of the Opera House steps!

We also went through the Rocks market, and he had his first taste of Rocks corn on the cob.

He really liked it. (Dad may have helped a bit).

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.

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 PTC BBQ, 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.

Another week. Puff is asleep in bed, and there’s a brief window to put some blog posts together. The post-work evening routine is well set up. There’s taking Puff to the letterbox “check a may-ul!”, weighing him on the Wii Fit (and then using the Wii Fit to interact with the characters on screen) “poke a baby! poke a cat!”, going outside to practice walking around “grass?… wok wok wok… dad…inside…please-okay”.

This week’s speech development is adding “okay” to the end of everything. When he says grace, it’s “God.. this food… Amen-okay”. When he asks for something, it’s “Dad… grapes… please-okay”. We’re to blame, of course – we were the ones who would say okay after he said please, and so now he’s just trying to save us the effort.

Last week we had a trip over to an old school friend’s house, where we caught up with J, M, and J, A, J and T. Some of the afternoon sun remained when Puff and Dad headed to the backyard to play on the swings, while Kel and M caught up in the backroom (overlooking the backyard). Just after this photo was taken, Dad received an SMS from Kel that simply said “Hat?”. Dad sheepishly retrieved Puff’s hat from his pocket, and put it on Puff’s head.

Another toy that has captured Puff’s imagination this week is his indoor tent. It’s great fun, it would seem, to put toys away by putting them in the tent, whether there’s enough room for Puff or not.

The Grandragon has been down for much of this week for a visit: we made a trip out to Brasserie Bread for some lunch after picking up Grandragon from the airport. Puff had a great time sitting in the cloth high-chair eating grapes, but when he ran out of enthusiasm for that, Dad carried him around to look at people working in the bakery. Puff came up with a new phrase “Makin’ the bread”, which he used with much enthusiasm for the rest of the day, and still invokes from time to time.

On the walking front, while on a trip to Ryde Aquatic Centre, Puff took his first few steps walking in the baby wading pool from Mum to the Grandragon while Dad was at work – Puff has so far refused to replicate this feat on dry land.

When trying to walk inside, he seems happier using his trolley – more and more risks are taken now, with his current preference to hold onto another item while pushing the trolley. here’s a balloon with him in full flight.

And, never forgotten for long, here’s Bear.

Friday night was an attempted dinner at a noodle markets, but there wasn’t much to see, and so we retreated back to the car for takeaway instead. On the positive side, we had the chance to try out the ergo carrier in backpack mode for the first time. Dad didn’t like it much: it seems a little too much like pregnancy – lots of wriggling, but you can’t see the baby.

And on Sunday, Puff met S, N, H and S after a long time praying for them. The highlight of the trip for him was almost certainly the toy oven. Dad – ever cautious around new things – was worried for a while that there may have been some danger of burning, but a stove powered by AA batteries (and in this case, they were not even installed) doesn’t tend to bring much risk of undue heat.

See you next week!

Puff’s hair continues to grow back at an encouraging rate. He’s starting to tend towards having one daytime sleep, and a long night sleep (usually around 12 hours). When he’s getting towards a sleep debt, his mood worsens, but when he’s been getting enough sleep, we can be treated to smiles like this one:

Today was an example of a day where he wasn’t in the best of moods. Arriving home from a day out, he saw dad preparing dinner, and spotted what he was sure was an apple on the kitchen bench.

Despite our best efforts to explain otherwise, he kept insisting “apple, apple” and getting more and more worked up, refusing (unusually) to eat his dinner and wanting the apple instead.

The trouble was, what he thought was an apple was in fact a raw onion. We handed it over to him, (immediately stopping the tears), expecting him to taste it and then put it down.

No. He was keen to actually eat it: he took a few bites over the space of a few minutes, interspersed with eating the other food in front of him.

Don’t believe it?

In more tasteful news, he managed to charm his way into a free babycino from a cafe near Dad’s work. Here he is tucking into it (yes, even eating the chocolate that was sprinkled on top).

We’re noticing an increased vocabulary, and an awareness of places, as well as simple verbs and nouns. Here, we ask him about one of our regular haunts (a coffee shop called Grind, in Cronulla).

See you next week!

This was a week of expected and unexpected catching up with people, culminating in Australia Day, where we travelled across Sydney to see a bunch of the families that we regularly pray for but irregularly see.

First stop that we have photos for was at Grind. Puff can now say “Grind”, though it’s not clear he knows where it is, or what he will get out of a trip there. He is very keen on eating the “froth” from the top of a decaf latte with a spoon (well, we feed it to him on a spoon). He doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from it yet, and it keeps him quiet when we’re visiting a cafe, so everyone wins.

A different trip to Cronulla saw him playing in the park with C and (to a lesser extent) baby J. Being school holidays, some local miscreants had heaped a lot of sand into the play equipment that should have been filled with clear water. Undeterred, Puff had a great time, although he needed an outfit change.

Traps for new parents: make sure that the spare outfit you carry in the nappy bag has not yet been outgrown, and is the correct season for the weather! Puff spent a car ride in singlet and nappy while his clothes dried out.

It’s worth noting that he has an increasing love for swings.

With dry clothes again, Puff stopped to order some lunch from a favourite restaurant of mum and dad’s from their pre-baby days.

On the weekend, we had a surprise visit from M, and so we went out for breakfast at the Wah Wah lounge. Puff enjoyed being carried around by someone different, and behaved himself well in the cafe (the chair probably had a lot to do with this).

On Australia Day, he wore his new I heart OZ t-shirt (this will probably be the only day he can wear it, as by next year he will be – I suspect – much bigger). By the end of the day, there was so much watermelon juice on the t-shirt, it was hard to tell if he loved Oz or watermelon more, but time will tell.

Here he is, hard at work on a playmat introducing himself to some new toys, including his first x-wing.

One other notable event was breakfast with C, J, and special guest L.

More progress is being made on the walking front: we’re seeing signs of him, once upright, being able to stand for longer and longer (up to a few seconds) before falling down again, and take a few stumbling steps before crashing forward.

See you next week!