Chatterbox

It's been, um, about five months. You know what? I'm not even apologizing this time. I didn't write and I don't feel bad about it! Turns out it's hard to keep track of all the tiny ways my boy is growing. But I can tell you about the big ways. There are some huge changes, and it's really cool and exciting.

It's all just stuff I can sum up by saying, "he's growing into a big boy." There's a lot he does now, but the most interesting of all comes from his talking.

It seems last time I wrote he was saying fragments of sentences and various phrases. Well, I'm here today to tell you he crossed the gap into full sentences a few months ago. I think the big jump was learning how to use personal pronouns like "I", "you", and "me". Suddenly he had a way to frame a thought in terms of who was involved, not just the idea itself. The milk didn't suddenly get poured; someone poured it for him. A bird wasn't just seen outside; he saw it outside. There's a lot of meaning tied up in the subject and object of those thoughts, and he's taking advantage of it fully.

When we read books he's much more capable of stringing together multiple thoughts into a cohesive story in his mind. He can take the pictures in the book and infer things about what's going on. Like if someone spilled some paint, he says "she has to clean it up" or if a kid is lost he'll say "he looks worried. He wants to find his mommy." Following actions and consequences and figuring out what happens in different situations is cool to witness, and it applies really well to real life, too, not just reading books.

I think I may be to blame for this, but I might have taught him how to say "I don't know." We ask him stuff all the time, like "do you know what kind of bird that is?" or "do you remember where you put your water cup?" and so on. He used to just pause and try to change the subject if he wasn't sure, so I told him he could say "I don't know". Well, now he says it all the time and for things he definitely does know. Usually I prompt him some more, "well, can you guess what kind of bird it is?" or "well, where did you put your water cup last time?" Usually this works and he'll answer, but it's weird (or maybe inevitable?) that he latched onto this as a way to escape answering questions.

Speaking of asking questions, one of the cutest things he started doing is asking us questions. One of my favorites is he'll see me chewing something and say, "have something in your mouth, daddy?" Of course with this adorable melodic inflection. And he hears us say things like, "how you doing?" and stuff, and will echo that back at us. I think the next big mental nut to crack will be when he figures out the concept of "why", and he just asks us that for the next year straight.

But questions still come out funny sometimes. He hasn't figured out the weird English word ordering for asking a question: "Can I have some more milk?" comes out as "I can have some more milk." There's usually emphasis put on "I" and the inflection is all off, so it sounds more like a funny statement of optimistic fact or a decree. We don't correct him overtly on this, but we'll echo back the question he was asking.

You can tell he's forming bigger thoughts and bigger sentences because he has to think about them more and stumbles over them more. Sometimes he'll start saying "I... I... I saw..." and eventually spit out the whole thing, but you can see the mental effort it took to construct the complete thought with the proper wording. Even when I have a good guess what he's trying to say, at times like this I'm always careful and resist the temptation to jump in and complete his sentence for him. Plus, I just love looking into his eager, earnest eyes while he cranks out something like, "Daddy, I saw a spider in my crib and then it flew away" or "You took my milk away after I spilled it."

Words are really important now, and we've found that giving words to thoughts has a lot of power. When he's upset about something, he's started shrieking piercingly, and we sometimes try to suggest words to substitute. "Say, 'I wanted to stay outside and play more.'" Even if he says the words, he still doesn't necessarily get his way, but we're hoping it paves the way towards going for his words first rather than indiscriminate yelling.

The physical side

On the physical side, one cool thing is he's learned how to jump! I have seen him clear both feet off the ground at the same time, and he's getting more and more competent at it. I really think he sees his friends doing stuff like this and it accelerates his interest in trying to do it. Until recently he's been a bit timid about going on slides on the playground, but now he's obsessed with them ("I can go to the park and ride on a slide!").

My wife the dealhunter got a great price on something called a "balance bike", which I don't think existed when I was a kid. Back then we only had training wheels, but I can already tell this thing is way cooler. I spent the weekend starting to teach him how to ride it, though I'm reading it takes quite a while for someone so young to learn. Like jumping, it helps that there's another kid in the cul-de-sac who is already proficient on his balance bike. Hopefully that continues to fuel his interest. I can't wait to watch him go around on his own. It's every father's dream to teach their kid how to ride a bike, right?

He's been enjoying working on finger dexterity. He loves making signs with his fingers like throwing up the horns or bunny ears or the OK sign. Usually we show him some finger pose and he gets real interested. Then I tell him how to do it, like "make a fist, then put up your pointer finger and middle finger". He concentrates real hard and when he eventually gets it, he bubbles over with joy and satisfaction. That moment right there is really fun to watch.

Being two

Being two years old comes with a certain reputation. They call it the "terrible twos", but I think people who coined this are misunderstanding their children. I don't think little G is terrible now that he's almost two and a half, nowhere close! I don't know how much is due to his nature versus how we're raising him and treating him, but I do know so far the concept of misbehaving is more or less foreign to me. His job at this age is to explore and learn, and an important part of it is pushing boundaries--which I think gets misunderstood as misbehaving.

At two years old or so he absolutely started trying to exert his own agency more and in lots of different ways, not all of which were safe or appropriate or good for his health. Our job isn't to punish him, but we do have to correct his behavior, show him where the boundaries are, enforce them consistently, and steer him to continue being a wonderful part of our family.

My wife and I were talking the other day about setting boundaries only according to safety and how that's insufficient. It's tempting to keep safety as the sole principle and correct behavior only when they're endangering themselves or someone else, but if I let little G do anything he wanted that was still safe, we'd still be living with a nightmare! I want him to be polite and well-behaved and kind and to eat properly and be clean and so on; none of those really have to do with safety, yet we still enforce boundaries about them. At the same time I want to give him his own choices and his own opportunities to do things on his own with less guidance and guardrails. It's a fine line to walk, and I think about it a lot.

Mealtime!

Probably the most challenging routine activity I have with him these days is mealtime. Exactly as I would expect, he tries to maximize his enjoyment of the food at the cost of everything else. When I give him a sandwich, he'll pull out all the meat and cheese and leave the bread. If I give him a bowl of pasta and meatballs, he'll eat all the meatballs and leave the rest.

I've had to come up with tactics for addressing this, because a reasonable person in our household doesn't get to pick apart their food and eat only the good bits, wasting the rest. The main thing I do is give really small servings. Sometimes they're comically small, like half a meatball and two pieces of pasta. If you eat all of that, I'll give you more. Sorry, buddy, the pasta is part of the meal, so you have to eat all of it! I cut sandwiches into quarters--or even eighths--and force him to eat the bread and crust before I'll give more.

His reaction to being challenged on leaving the parts he doesn't like is usually not great. Lately it's been a literal scream in response, a visceral reaction. At least half the time, the endgame is saying he's all done eating, which is something we always allow. Luckily he eats well enough in general that he's not going to starve himself. We also don't give many snacks between meals, so at the next meal he'll be hungrier.

It's also during mealtime that he so clearly demonstrates a toddler's shortsightedness. I tried suggesting that he eat the whole sandwich together instead of dissecting it. That way he can have an enjoyable bite every time, thus leading to another serving. I tried suggesting he eat the crust first, so each bite of crust will also have some yummy meat and cheese with it. No way. The concept of delayed gratification is so completely foreign to him, it's not even on the spectrum of possibility.

Thoughts on the push and pull of little interactions

I've been thinking lately about how I interact with him in little ways. When I have something I need to get done with him, for example changing his diaper, it's important to me to get that done so we can move on to other things. At the same time, if he's in the middle of something, that's clearly the most important thing to him right then. From his point of view, why is my task more important than his? I try to cushion those interruptions by giving a 1 minute warning, but even that probably wouldn't be satisfactory to me.

One technique that's helped a lot is have him wrap up by suggesting he do whatever he's doing just one more time before we go. If he's pushing a car on the ground, I'll get down there and say, "Give that car one more push before we go. No, better! A really good push!" and watch him do it. Then, "Nice! You pushed it real far! Okay, it's time to go change your diaper now. You can play with the car more after we're done." For some reason doing that gives him a much better sense of closure. I wonder if subconsciously he appreciates this because he feels his own activities are being recognized as important.

I think toddlers are pretty much incapable of planning ahead, even 1 minute ahead. Giving 1 minute to wrap up is internally translated as 1 minute to keep playing right up until the last second and even then try to squeeze out a few more seconds. We'll change how we do this as he gets older and develops, of course.

Along the lines of giving respect as well as getting respect, I've been trying to notice snatching... that is, when I snatch things from him. He's so little and so uncoordinated that it's easy to grab things from him I don't want him to have. "Leave that toy in the car. *grab*" "Here, I'll hold the book. *grab*". Or even grabbing him, when he tries to run off instead of going to wherever I need him to go.

I reflected on it at some point and realized even if he doesn't complain, it can't feel good to constantly have things just snatched away from you or be steered all over the place. I've been trying to consciously remember to give him a chance to do what I want on his own first.

• "That toy needs to stay in the car. Can you put it back? *pause* OK, it looks like you're having trouble letting go of it, so I'm going to help you. *grab*"
• "Come back, please; we need to go to the changing table. *pause* I'm going to help you go there. Do you want to walk by yourself or do you want me to pick you up?"
• "That toy is delicate, so I'm going to hold it. Can you hand it here? *pause and hold out hand to accept* I'm not going to let you hold it. You can look at it real close while I hold it. *grab*"

I see it as expecting the correct behavior from him first, but having a plan to handle the wrong behavior if it happens.

Exposure

My wife often takes him to various activities and stuff where he can play with other kids. I don't as often, but when I do watch him around other kids, I get anxious about how those interactions will go without my intervention or supervision. What if some other kid is mean to him or calls him names or does something that he doesn't understand? How will he handle it?

The other day he pointed out an ant to some kid, and the kid stepped on it. All he said was, "where did that ant go?" My wife and I don't kill bugs, so this must have been confusing for him. I look at his little eager, innocent face, and I already get nervous about his inevitable exposure to the world and all the things in it that are bad and don't make sense. It's only a matter of time before he starts asking us hard questions with no good answers.

When he was just an infant we used to be able to have whatever kinds of TV shows on, but now he sees and understands so much that we're really careful about what he gets exposed to. Sometimes seemingly mundane things unsettle or scare him. They sit deep in his mind, and he keeps coming back to think about them. We don't want to risk him seeing something he can't unsee that really troubles him. Once he goes to school all bets are off, but until then we can be careful.

He's getting to the age where being with him is really fun. That foundation of language and communication springboards so much more interesting interaction. Now he can be deliberately silly with his words and make jokes and say things are funny and basically hold a conversation. It's super cool to watch his own personality keep forming.

It occurred to me that I'll have to sunset this blog eventually. He's getting older. He can tell me things and ask me things and show his feelings. At some point he might not want me to write about him publicly anymore. When does that time come? I don't know, but probably in a couple more years he'll at least have an opinion about it, and I'll need to respect it. But not quite yet, so until next time.