Dear Son,
Today you are 17 months old! Everyone who asks how old you are always guesses you are two. TWO? I quickly correct them because I don’t even want to pretend you are older than you are! It’s surprising that anyone would think you’re two because you’re still such a little guy. At your last doctor’s appointment you weighed 24 lbs 11 oz.
We visited the doctor twice in the last week because you picked up some sort of virus and broke out in a strange rash. It looked like a hybrid of Hand, Foot and Mouth with Chicken Pox. Fortunately, it was neither, just a really bad viral rash as Dr. C put it, but by the end of it you were running a fever and even had a little diarrhea. I’m just glad that it passed quickly and you’re feeling like your old self again!
You continue to make me so happy. I absolutely love my time with you and it gets harder and harder to leave you every morning! All I think about during the workday is how excited you’re going to be when I arrive to pick you up. You give me the biggest smiles and run to me. I always crouch down so that you can run into my arms and you do. The best and most heartwarming part is that you finish off the hug with a great big kiss and even say “muah!” as you plant one on me.
As sweet as all of that is, there are definitely challenging moments. You are such a smart little boy, so you’re already entering the self-assertive (aka terrible twos) stage.
I’ve had to put you on time out more often this past month than any other time and I’m sure we will continue down that road until you’re a little older and better able to express your needs or wants without having a fit or challenging me and daddy.
It’s pretty cute to see you stand your ground though. You have even started to use the words “no” and “mine” which came out of nowhere. It hasn’t gotten out of hand yet, and I’m not sure how we’ll handle it when that picks up, but for now we usually just talk through things with you. For instance, you took back one of your toys from your little cousin and said “mine!” I walked over, got down and said, “Yes son, that’s yours. But you need to share it with your cousin. Let’s go get something else to play with.” You easily let go of the toy and walked with me to get another. I wonder how long it will be before you start resisting that redirection…
Another thing to mention when it comes to discipline is that we always have you apologize for negative behavior. Your method of apologizing is to hug, saw “awww” and give a kiss. It’s so sweet! Sometimes when I get down to your eye level to discipline you with a stern voice, you’ll jump the gun and try to kiss me so you can move on about your business. It’s pretty funny actually, but I do make sure to get my point across before letting you move on ahead.
Your vocabulary is really picking up. You can put two word sentences together and you repeat words easily now. Sometimes you’re not willing, but I know you can do it which is great!
Some of your favorite things are the movie “Rio” any kind of sports balls (football, basketball, baseball, bouncing ball, etc.), your tent, and cars. In the past month I’ve noticed that you started to push your cars and say “vroom!” You’ll even do it when you don’t have a car at all you just push your hand back and forth and pretend.
Daddy has been wanting to buy you a Tonka Truck for a while now, and this past weekend we found a big truck (not a Tonka, but similar) and you love pushing that thing around and loading it up. I taught you to say “Beep, beep” when you push it around and it’s so cute to see you do it.
This football season is going to be so much more fun than last year because now whenever you see football games on TV you exclaim, “football!” We were in the store one day and when you saw football on one of the TVs you yelled, “football!” and the workers there thought it was so adorable. One of them even said, “That is the cutest thing ever!”
We brush your teeth twice a day and floss once at night. Whenever I ask, “can we brush your teeth, son?” you say, “teeth?” and then open wide and say “aah!” You’re so good at it, except that you always cover your bottom teeth with your tongue and it’s hard to get to them, but we work it out!
It’s also important to mention that you now know where your eyes, nose, mouth and ears are! When I ask, “where’s your ear?” you say, “aye” and point to your ear. You aren’t repeating the other parts, but you do point to them when you’re being cooperative.
Your ears were the first part you recognize and I think it’s because you started this new thing when you hear an airplane where you cover your ear with your hand and then point to the sky. You get so excited and I will say, “Do you hear that with your ears, son? Let’s try and see it with our eyes.” Most of the time we can only hear it and I’ll repeat, “We didn’t see it with our eyes, but we heard it with our ears!” So anyway that is my theory of why you started to pick up on the placement of your ears before anything else.
We continue to work on animal sounds. When you were younger you would roar for every animal sound. Then you dropped that and would only do the dog sound. Now you know dog, cat and bunny (you hop when I ask what a bunny does). This morning you repeated every animal sound I made, but would only say “meow” “woof” and hop without my examples first.
Finally, you are following directions really well. You throw stuff away when asked; you bring stuff to people when directed to, etc. I’m so proud of all your progress, but most of all I just love how sweet and loving you’ve become.
On a drive home one day, Daddy sat in the back seat with you. I looked back to see you snuggling him and he was completely melting and it was so touching that I almost cried. We’re so blessed to have such a lovable little boy. You have the best personality and life just keeps getting better every day that you’re here.
Happy 17 months, son!
Love,
Mommy
Maria, he is too cute! Sounds like you are doing a wonderful job raising him and handling discipline issues. How long do you do a timeout and does he stop crying in that time? We are recently dealing with little fits especially at diaper changing time and would love your input!
ReplyDeleteDianna – I feel like I try to be the best mom I can be, but I always doubt myself, so thank you for the encouragement! Time outs last only one minute (I like Supernanny’s rule of one minute per number of years old). If he gets up I put him back without saying a word and start the time over. This could mean that the process takes 5-10 minutes but he has to sit in time out for one solid minute. Anyhow, he usually is done fussing by the time he’s had a chance to sit quietly, but even if he’s not, once the time is over I will get down face to face with him and say in a softened voice (but still sort of stern) “Mommy put you on time out because xyz.” Then I’ll soften my voice to a loving tone and say “Can you say sorry to Mommy?” That to him equates to a hug and kiss, so he’ll give his hug and kiss and I’ll say, “I love you. Now go play and be a nice boy.” If he goes right back to doing it, he gets one warning: “If you do that again we’re going straight back to time out.” And then we repeat the cycle. He is most likely to have a time out as he gets closer to nap time (that is when he is the most difficult) and then I’ll say “Oh boy, you’re getting tired aren’t you? Are you ready for a nap?” and most times he’ll say, “Please” which means for him also means yes. Diaper changes are hit or miss with us now. He used to be really difficult and I would just do my best to get it done while staying calm and talking to him about it. Now I’ll keep him busy by asking him to hand me a wipe (he loves to pull them out of the package) or hold the clean diaper for me or whatever the case. When he gets too worked up I have had to swat his leg a little to grab his focus because he was drowning out my voice so I had to startle him a little to get his attention. I don’t like doing that, but I’m not 100% against spanking, so when all else fails he gets a swat (especially if the diaper is poopy and he’s getting it everywhere by squirming). Oh, I should mention that I don’t give a lot of time outs. If he’s throwing a ball at someone or something I’ll instruct him not to, but if he keeps it up, I’ll walk over to him and say “Son, we don’t throw the ball at the TV if you do it again, I’m going to take it away.” Sometimes he follows sometimes he doesn’t and the toy gets taken away. Another example is when we play outside, he’ll want the dog food. He’ll play in it and eventually I have to tell him, “If you don’t leave the food alone, we’re going to go back in the house.” If we end up going back in because he touched the food, I’ll make sure to explain, “We’re going in because I asked you to leave the dog’s food alone and you didn’t listen.” I think being consistent and having 100% follow through is the best discipline no matter what your exact method is.
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