There is every reason to celebrate today as not only it is the first day of 2014, it is also the day when our littlest child turned 19th months.
Well, our littlest child really is not so little anymore. He is growing in all the right proportion, and there have been moments when I thought he felt so compact as if his butt is made of lead when I had to carry him in my arms. The weight of his lithe body feels so dense that sometimes it knocks the wind right out of me when he is being passed on to me to be carried away.
Squirt is just as vocal as his sister at this age, and has also since start to mimic whatever his big sister is doing. He still possesses that easy going, chill out and always happy demeanor, although recently, he is showing a little bit more of his stubbornness when he disagrees with what you are doing (like taking him out of the shower or trying to help him brush his teeth). Whilst kisses and hugs from Squirt have been a little bit of a rarity, he is almost always never short of a smile at any time of the day. He generally is quite a cheerful and if he wakes up way too early in the morning, we often hear him blabbering and singing away almost non-stop. Sometimes he falls back to sleep, but most times, unless he hears us clanking away as we start our day, he would patiently wait for us till we come and get him. That being said, I am also counting the days when that would no longer be possible given how determined he has been in trying to get out of his cot by attempting to stretch his little limbs as much as he can.
His vocab is still quite limited and he has no patience whatsoever to learn the names of his body parts. Often as I try to show him where his eyes and nose are, he would turn away from me and then distracts himself with something else. Same goes with reading bedtime stories – he now has no patience to sit and listen to the stories we are trying to read him as he prefers to climb in and out of bed instead or just whine away as we try hard to get him away from the damn light switches.
When he is extremely tired, he gets hyperactive and bulldozes his way around, often hurting himself in the process. He climbs just about anything and everything and has since figured out that it would be fun for him to dive into your stomach if he catches you lying on your back. He loves all sorts of buttons and switches and his #1 favourite remains the big old remote control. Taking those things away from him get him really, really upset as if Armageddon has struck upon us.
One of the things I have been rather worried about in the last few months is the fact that he often gags whenever we feed him his meals. He still doesn’t have that many teeth yet, and so his main meal, while mostly a little textured, is still mostly quite runny. However, he sometimes gags so much that he would projectile vomit his entire meal all over us or himself.
We know for a fact that he is more than capable of eating crackers and bread, and so I do wonder why he seems to have a little bit of an issue eating textured food every once in a while. I have Googled about this and some suggests that it could probably due to his reflux as an infant. There seem to be no immediate cure and I do hope that this would pass and that he would learn to chew his food properly once those molars come through. He genuinely seems to love his food and it is a shame if he can’t enjoy them because he has an ultra-sensitive gag reflex. The good thing is, this boy knows when to stop when he is no longer hungry and have been known to pass off a cookie or chocolate or ice-cream when he is really full. I take that as a very good sign all around! (The passing off of nice food, not the gag reflex).
Squirt has really been a joy to be with. With his chilled temperament and always smiling face, I reckon, it is babies like him that makes most women want to have more babies over and over again! Luckily for us, having another one is just out of the question.
And of course, as he grows older, the scale could easily tip another way but for now, we count our blessings for Squirt being a healthy little boy who for the life of me, has found such great passion in climbing.
