We are stunned that suddenly, the countdown to two years old has begun. It seems like it’s been forever, and yet we’re not sure where the time has gone.
New words? We’ve officially stopped counting. He picks them up so quickly, usually directly after you tell him one. The ones I remember are: alone, sorry, teeth, hot dog, scone, spider, bottle, quilt, alone, play, peanut butter (“peanabbudder”, which makes HRH and I giggle every time), ice cream, hamburger, outside, stop. Liam is now using descriptive words, which is awesome because it further underlines his sense of self-awareness. He was crying the other day and told his caregiver, “Liam crying”. (Thanks for the tip; nice of you to narrate the action for us, kiddo, otherwise the subtle action might be lost on us.) When he asked for milk two nights ago and we gave it to him he took it with a smile saying, “Happy”, and he says it at random times during the day to us as well when he smiles. Likewise, when he relaxes in bed after we put him down, he sighs and says “Happy.” It’s a nice way to end the day.
And as to bed, that brief period of rocky nights of short or interrupted sleep have given way to a cheerful little boy who looks forward to bed and now limits us to one story before sliding off my lap and pattering over to the crib of his own accord. Sometimes we don’t even get the full story in before he slides off my lap and says, “Night-night!”, heading for the crib, dropping his cup in over the edge, and trying to climb in after it. He’s sleeping around eleven hours a night, with a nap averaging two hours in the afternoon.
In the past week alone I’ve seen such a physical change in him; he’s becoming more and more of a little boy in his face and body. He’s wearing 2T pants, and 2T or 3T tops, with shoe size of 6.5 or 7. He recently learned how to climb up on our bed, and now we really have to watch him in the bedroom because he likes to stand on it, too, as well as burrow under the covers. He tries to climb into his crib, but fortunately hasn’t considered climbing out. He’s becoming more physical as he ages, more confident in his body and ability. This means less fear (not that he ever had much to begin with, alas), along with a tendency to forget how strong/heavy he is and what kind of momentum he carries when he throws himself at someone, or swings a foot or hand or elbow. He can also soak up damage like a little tank. Along with better control of his body has come an increase in his awareness of his effect on other people. Recently this has been demonstrated by hitting someone (not very hard, but firmly), then saying “Ow” to describe what happened, followed by, “Sorry, [Person-I-Hit]”. 
It’s very interesting to see him make the connection between the three things after having learned from us that hurting someone is Not Okay. It’s not so great to be the person he’s pretending to beat up on, of course, but it’s part of the learning process for us all.
Recent new foods have included chicken dogs and a bite or two of hamburger. He’s usually more interested in the buns. He’s begun drinking cambric tea and feels very proud of it, and we have a nice little ritual where we each sit on the floor with our teacups and sip our tea together.
His alphabet is really coming along well. Every once in a while you hear a very clear “T U V” coming from somewhere in the house. His colours are really settling too, and he can count to four almost all the time. You can have conversations with him, so long as you get into the Liam headspace to interpet his singsong statements and facial expressions. He loves to sing, and does it while he draws an dplays and rides in the car. He runs different songs and words together too, one of our favourites being: “A B C D E F G, how I wonder how you — apple!” His sense of humour regarding the ludicrous in language now complements his sense of ludicruous in the physical, as the previous example demonstrates. If we pause to let him fill in a word in a song, sometimes he gets a mischeivous look and says something completely different. Our caregiver found it very amusing one day when she sang the first line to the ever-popular Twinkle Twinkle and stopped to let him supply the final word, and he said “Turtle!” instead.
He is a joyous and unabandoned tree hugger. He loves to run around the backyard, and to balance himself on his tummy on one of the swings. His official backyard job appears to be picking up rocks and moving them from against the house to the garden, or vice versa. He has also developed a fascination with sitting in buckets and baskets. The laundry basket is especially exciting. He likes to be picked up and carried or dragged around in it, and dumps all sorts of things in it before getting in himself, as if he were packing for a trip. He has also learned to fake a smile for the camera, creating the oddest expression, baring his teeth and closing one eye. HRH calls it his Calvin face.
This past month also saw the loss of his dear little daycare pal Boo the bunny. Every once in a while Liam finds a picture of a bunny and puts his finger on it, looks at me and says, “Boo?” Boo is playing the Summerlands, he is told. It saddens HRH and I more than it affects him. He found a picture of Boo in his scrapbook the other day and kissed it. Again, it choked us up. He chases the cats with great delight; all he wants is to pick them up and hug them, but being cats they are of different minds, and so he tries to hold them down or pull them to him with fistfuls of skin and hair, which does not go over well. He got boxed by one of the upstairs cats the other day (with very good reason), and was so stunned that something he loved so much would hit him with a pointy paw that he cried in astonishment and was upset. He wasn’t physically hurt, you understand; he was wounded in spirit.
The potty training continues along. We don’t make a big thing of it, allowing him to guide the process. He refused to use it at home for while but used it at the caregiver’s and his grandparents’ homes, so theorizing that it might be our cold bathroom floor deterring him I moved it from the bathroom into his room, and voila, everything was back to normal. He woke up pretty much dry this morning, so I asked if he wanted to use the potty, and he did. Later in the day he asked his grandma for it and proceeded to use to for both solid and liquid waste, so great strides are being made.
I gave him a round rice cracker in the car yesterday and instead of putting it directly in his mouth (he places them between his teeth vertically to bite them, we have no idea why) he held it in both hands and rotated it back and forth. “Wheel,” he said thoughtfully. It’s so great to see him connecting the shape of a cracker with the shape of an object he’s seen elsewhere.
His current TV show/DVD of choice is Peep and the Big Wide World. HRH and I love it too, as the writing, characterisation, humour, artistic style, and pacing are great. His current favorite book is a tie between The Patchwork Cat and a version of The Night Before Christmas starring a family of mice visited by a human Santa. (Not that we read the poem; we talk about the story happening in the pictures, which are what really interest him.)
Liam loves the DS. It’s the perfect size for him, too, which is a bad thing because it’s only got one operational hinge and he’s stronger than he thinks when he grabs for something in two hands and pulls in two opposite directions. I may try to find a secondhand Finding Nemo game and play it with him. I think he’d enjoy that a lot. He loves to read, loves to draw — he’s filled an entire book with drawings, and we’ve given him a second one, planning to build up an entire collection of Liam’s Sketchbooks volumes one through whatever — and he loves music. I think we’re all doing pretty well.
And so the countdown is on: thirty-one days until Liam’s second birthday. That means I ought to start thinking about a birthday thing.
Working where I am working, on what I am working on, has clearly done something odd to my wiring. Specifically, over the past two weeks I’ve deliberately been researching the world of casual gaming, which has in turn led me to reading and talking about the subject to people. I’ve been making private posts to myself, which I will now collect here for your amusement.
Among the new words this month are shadow, flying, dancing, bump, egg, bacon, animals, bike, tools, tunnel, the end, fire, storm, lightning, tools, bike, knock-knock, crane, draw. HRH got him to call Thomas ‘Tom’ instead of ‘Ati’ the other day. It hasn’t stuck yet, though. ‘Noddles’ have now properly become ‘noodles’. Numbers are really sinking in as a concept, although sequence hasn’t. When we ask him to count the wheels on a toy, he touches each of them in turn saying, “Wheel, wheel, wheel, wheel.” If we begin counting with “One”, he’ll often say “Two”, but then the next number is usually nine. Yesterday after I had put him to bed I heard him counting: “Two, two, two, two, two…”.
His current book obsession is the collection of the first three 
His current favourite toys are the MegaBloks. He loves to make towers and “nunnels” for his cars and trains to drive through. He’s remarkably good at stacking them, and at choosing colours and sizes. On top of a structure the other day he built a stack of single unit blocks about five high, and put a two-unit block on the top. He looked at HRH and said, “Flag.” “Uh, yes,” said HRH, and freaked out quietly as Liam turned to do something else.
Originally, we were supposed to travel to Oakville for the holiday weekend, but with my full-time two-week contract and only one day off for the holiday, it wasn’t going to happen: a day of travel, one day there, and another day of travel home is a recipe for family-wide disaster. So that trip has been postponed to later in the month, post-contract, and we spent Easter Sunday with the locals instead. Liam was thoroughly gifted there with clothes, little books, a stuffed turtle and a small Lightning McQueen toy that he hasn’t let go of except in sleep. And when he ran into his bedroom there, he found what he delightedly called “a bike!“, a plastic three-wheeled ride-on toy with a trailer attached. Once he’d figured out how to drive it by pushing it along with his feet and steering, he gave his toys rides for the rest of the day.
This month has been an explosion of new words. Among them have been French fry, bean, animals, shade, table, chair, jam, elbow, noodles (which he calls ‘noddles’, terribly cute!), rainbow, two, blue, mail, CD, night-night, dear, deer (yes, he differentiates), puppy, little, yo-yo, bell, sticker, snowplough, tow truck, dump truck, paper, tickle, happy, down, yoghurt, running, beaver. We’re thrilled that he can identify ‘happy’ correctly. He’s working on ‘mine’ and ‘sad’, and he tells us he’s tired by saying ‘night-night’. Of course, he also says this when I pull the afghan over my legs when I’m cold, since tucking someone in is an indication of bed. He names lots of body parts, and strings words together: “Dada go? Puppy up. Love Maggie. Yoghurt later.” But the best new word this month: LIAM! Not only that, but he can look at himself in the mirror, point, and say “Liam”, or pat himself on the chest and say it. He’s also said “Me!” a couple of times while looking in the mirror, or when we say his name to him. 
He is so terribly gentle with Maggie. He leans his cheek against her as well and says ‘love’, or ‘gentle’, or ‘nice’. He touches her various body parts and names them: “Maggie ear… toes… eye… tail…”. HRH explained to him that Maggie was actually the oldest in the family. He loves her so much that I can already see the issues we’ll have to deal with when her age finally negatively affects her quality of life.
Remember that picture of Thomas the Tank Engine he drew? Every time he passes it, he glances up and says “Ati!”. So not only did he draw something representational, he recognises it as the original subject weeks after he drew it. This boggles my mind. Last night HRH asked him what he wanted to draw, and he said “Nemo!”. He picked the marker colours on his own, pulled the caps off and snapped them back on again properly, and drew something orange with green, blue, black, and brown accents. And then he later looked at it and said “Nemo!” again. I don’t know what to be more excited about: the ability to uncap and recap markers properly, or the execution of a representational drawing and correct recognition of that representation after a delay.
The daily routine is nice and simple. Liam wakes up on his own around 7:00, and has some toast and milk. At 7:30 we let him watch Thomas and Friends on PBS. Then at 8:00 he gets dressed, and then sits down at the table for cereal or oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, with juice. Then it’s either out to the caregiver or Grandma, or to run errands, or settling down to play. Around 9:45 he has a snack of more juice and crackers. Lunch is served between 11:30 and noon, and usually consists of some combination of grilled cheese sandwich, pasta, chicken nuggets, potatoes, and vegetables, followed by fruit or yogurt. After lunch we settle down with some milk to read stories for about ten minutes, then Liam goes down cheerfully for a nap. It feels like he shoos us out of his room — yes yes, this book, now this book, okay, bed now, bye, later! Naps last between 90 mins and 2 hours (although last week he pulled a 2 1/2 hour nap, yikes). Once he’s awake we play some more, have a snack of cheese or fruit and crackers, and sometimes watch part of a film or some TV episodes on DVD. We all sit down to dinner around 6:00, then Liam has his bath around 6:30. By 7:00 he and a parent are snuggled in the chair for a couple of stories, then he asks to be put down in the crib and left alone. He reads to himself, talks to his bunny, then nods off and sleeps for around twelve hours.
Toilet training proceeds apace. He stayed dry through his nap last Thursday, but I think that was luck. Some days he only uses two diapers/training pants, other days he uses six. He adores brushing his teeth, to the point where he’ll brush them five to seven times a day. I’m not going to argue.
At the doctor’s on Tuesday Liam was measured standing up (tall instead of long!) and weighed on the big people’s scale for the first time. He kept crouching down to put his hand on the dial, saying “Car!” because it looked like an odometer. Yes, Liam goes fast — why walk when you can run? — and grows fast, too: he has hit the 75% percentile in everything and shows no sign in slowing down. He’s 84.5 cm tall, and 13 kg (or 33-something inches and 28 lbs), so anyone who claims that they can actually see him grow from week to week may well not be engaging in hyperbole. Goodness knows that I’ve had to go through his clothes for the second time in a month and remove yet another round of stuff that doesn’t fit, and his pant legs no longer need to be turned up as much. Also, two sets of brand new pyjamas don’t fit properly, one of them a Christmas gift that he just tried on. It’s the tops: size 2 tops in flannel that don’t stretch are just too small to fit over his shoulders and get onto the second arm. (I may cut slits up the sides and hem them, or I may just find him a big floppy t-shirt to wear over the pyjama bottoms and put the tops away.) The fourth and final canine tooth made its appearance around New Year’s Eve, so he’s all on schedule there.
We’ve begun dispensing with the snap-on tray for the booster seat, and pulling him right up to the table instead. He feels much more grown-up, and seems to eat accordingly. I try to give him meals on real plates or bowls too. Last week when I called him for dinner he pulled a regular chair out and scrambled up, so I let him sit in a real grown-up chair at the grown-up table, and it was mostly okay. The lack of straps holding him in meant that when he leaned over to share food with Maggie there was nothing preventing him from falling right over, though, and he discovered that he could turn around and put his legs through the posts in the back. But other than the ongoing attempt to convince us to allow him to sit in a grown-up chair, it’s all good. He handles a fork very well, although half the time he picks food up in his free hand to put it on the fork before fitting it into his mouth. New foods include gravy, chicken nuggets, ham, prime rib (!), Yorkshire pudding, Jell-O, clementine oranges, penne, mushrooms, rotisserie chicken, coleslaw, and lots of other stuff. He eats any cheese I hand to him. In fact, if I grate cheese on something he’s more likely to eat it, and now it seems that gravy makes everything cool too. One wonders what he would do if I gave him poutine: potatoes, gravy, and cheese are three of his most favourite things. I think he’d die of sheer bliss.
Liam is currently obssessed with the new book 
Speaking of cardboard boxes: he is in love with the expanded cardboard box house HRH made for him. It’s getting wobbly because of the beating it’s taking from Liam trying to drag both parents inside at the same time, but it’s well-loved. He throws himself inside it and falls on top of the Thomas pillow that Matthieu, Karine, and Adam gave him for Christmas, and giggles infectiously. Toys collect there. The cats quite like it as well. We tore the house apart looking for Nix the other night, and just as we were giving up we finally caught a glint of light reflecting through the window from two tiny emerald eyes inside the playhouse, where she was perched on the pillow, all tucked up into a little loaf of black cat. Maggie plays with cracker crumbs and random small toys inside it. Cricket has, I think, been traumatized by the episode where Liam found her hiding inside it and tried to tackle her. (Well, everything else inside the playhouse is a toy; why isn’t she?) She shot out through one of the windows and we didn’t see her for the rest of the day.
He climbs on everything. It’s great to see him flop onto the chesterfield and pull himself up to sit down. It’s not so great to see him standing or bouncing on it, or climbing the bookcases, or standing on the coffeetable. This is the child with a penchant for head trauma, after all. He can go for walks, real walks, but it’s always a good idea to have the stroller or someone with strong arms handy. Also, pack lots of patience, because there are lots of side trips and close inspections of hedges and cracks in the sidewalk. He may finally have understood what mittens are for, after pulling them off in the cold car yesterday morning and complaining “cold!’ all the way to the caregiver. They stayed on today.
Liam enjoys simple things, too, like watching snow, or turning a wooden train over and over to see how it looks from every angle, or simply leaning his cheek against one of the cats. He still tries to feed toys, and pictures in books, and all of us. Lots of tidying and sweeping and wiping up of crumbs and other boggan-like activity still going on, too. He likes to watch incense smoke as it spirals up in the air. He sometimes asks to be picked up so that he can point and talk to the deity statues — hello God, hello Goddess. Liam wanted to know what I was doing a week ago on the day of the full moon as I lit a candle at the altar, so I picked him up and explained that we were lighting a candle for the Goddess to say happy full moon day to her. He thought about it, then nodded very definitely and held out a slice of mandarin orange he had been about to eat. I put it on the altar for him and gave him a great big kiss and hug.
The MD recorder I bought is not, after all, Hi-MD. I thought it was. I must have mixed up all the reviews I read at the same time. This means that I can’t transfer a recording to the computer to burn it to CD.
