We are finally iinto Summer and the weather has been hot and sunny - the perks of working evenings is that I get to spend my days with Liam at the beach & parks so I have that "relaxed" tanned look. Even Liam with his factor 55 baby sunscreen has a nice bronze glow to his hands and arms. We are still doing playgroups every week but most of our time is spent enjoying the outdoors. Liam loves the beach and it's nice watching him play with his bucket & beach toys while sipping my morning coffee. It's not California but Summer in Victoria is stilll pleasant once it arrives.
Liam's vocabulary has sky rocketed. He now has a consistent set of about 30 words and is like a small parrot - he likes to repeat things we say so we have to be extremely careful with the swear words. He's very intersted in learning body parts and can say "eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair and toes". If you ask him what a body part is he'll point to it and name it. He also calls his u-know-wot his "pee pee". Yesterday he strung together his first sentence while pointing at Ian's feet and said "it's a toe". We have been upgraded from "mama" and "dada" to "mommy" and "daddy" - if I say "mama" to him he says "mommy" back. Clever boy. His favourite words of the month however are "beep beep" and "hot". Whenever he hears our keys rattle or sees the car he instantly says "beep beep". "Beep Beep" also refers to the car being locked or to the horn being honked. Even toy cars are "Beep Beeps". Whenever I am holding tea or coffee he points to it and says "hot". He also uses "hot" if he finds the play ground to be too warm or if the inside of the car is roasting when we get inside it. I constantly say "hot tea" when he comes too close to my mug and a few days ago he actually said "hot tea". We still read an average of six books a day and it's starting to show - if you pojnt to an item like an apple and ask him what it is he'll say apple. I've taken him to the grocery store and shown him different coloured apples and he still gets it right so he seems to understand what it is as opposed to it just being a word he likes to say. I have now started to teach him "ABC" using his wooden alphabet blocks. If he's anything like Ian he'll be reading by the time he's three. He is getting pretty good at his animal sounds and can do "Baa", "Moo", "SSSS" (for a snake), "Twoo Twoo" (for an owl), "Meow" and some his own variation of "Woof". When we read books I ask him to turn the pages or open the flaps which he does himself. He's going to be a book worm when he's older for sure.
Another thing Liam is good at is his hand-eye coordination, in particular with balls (he mostly calls balls and balloons "bubbles" but will say the correct word if he feels like it). He will throw or roll a ball back to me very accurately. I also discovered at one of the play groups that he loves hockey so I bought him a minature set of plastic hockey sticks, nets and a soft ball. Ian taught him how to say "hockey" and everytime he hits the ball into the net he shouts "goal!!!!!". He understands that the ball goes into the net and it's amazing how he can do it over and over again, especially since holding the stick is a bit awkward being a bit big for him.
The obsession with buttons continues - our TV has been completely reprogrammed (we have no idea how it works now) and Mr. Nimble Fingers has figured out how to lift the tape on the contraption we used to protect the power button on the computer. The computer has been turned on and off so many times it keeps crashing. Even the microwave buttons are interesting if we let him near it - he likes to cook imaginary frozen vegetables. It's rather different taking Liam to play groups since toys don't really interest him that much - he's far more interested in things that are mechanical - like doors. He loves doors. While all the other kids play with the gazillion fun toys around them, Liam will crawl for the nearest exit door or better still; the washroom doors. He'll sit and point at the male/female signs for ages and babble at the top of his voice. It's plain weird. If anything play groups are good for tiring him out from crawling around inspecting doors, not from playing with toys.
There are only a couple of other toys that I have recently bought that interest Liam other than his hockey net and that is his new corn popper (you push the handle and the balls make a popping sound inside the attached bubble) and his magna doodle. At Ian's company picnic his bosses kids had a magna doodle and he spent ages drawing with it. The magna doodle is a magnetic white board that wipes clear once you're done "doodling" with the magnetic pen - no mess, no fuss. Since we bought it last week Liam has played with it every day. I also bought some finger paints and construction paper for him to do some art work - unfortunately he put his fingers in his mouth to taste the paints and barfed everywhere. So finger paints are on hold for a little while longer. We've had more success with the bath tub crayons Ian found - provides Liam with tons of entertainment and makes the bath tub look very colourful with all the scribbles. Plus for now they seem to be barf proof since he mainly draws on himself or the sides of the tub & does not seem to feel the need to stick them in his mouth and induce vomiting.
In the mobility department crawling has progressed from high speed to warp speed. Liam crawls so fast that he lowers his head to streamline himself. If I dressed him in an aerodynamic suit he'd leave smoke behind him. He is spending a lot more time standing and furniture surfing. He can hold onto things himself with one hand or walks around holding onto our fingers - actually he literally runs when we're holding on to him. We are getting very close to walking, it's just a matter of time.
So the sleep issues continued on from the moment we got back from San Diego. After two months of battling with trying to get Liam to sleep in his crib and him refusing to the point of screaming tantrums, we finally gave up and had him sleep between us in our bed just to keep our sanity. Even a brand new mattress didn't work. After weeks of co-sleeping we were getting really tired of interupted sleep every night so we decided to retire the crib and get a "big boy" racing car bed. So as it stands we are in the process of transitioning starting with having him sleep on his mattress next to our bed until we are comfortable enough to move him to the racing car. He still wakes up at night but the combination of a bed time snack and the lack of confinement seems to be helping. Guess being a crib jail bird wan't working for our freedom baby. I should have figured this all out when he started napping on the couches - I'll blame it on the exhaustion from lack of sleep for 2 months straight. Plus the recent appearance of two molars explains a lot. It seems that the teethings phase lasted forever this time round. Thank God for those calming teething tablets - Liam says "yum-yum" every time we go near him with them. 10 teeth down, 20 more to go. Good times!
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