Counting and other cute things

Finn has started to learn how to count to 10 and it is one of the cutest things I have ever seen. I love how he yells out the numbers that he is most confident about (3, 6 and 10), whispers the ones he isn't so sure of (5 and 7) and he never says 9.

He is learning about the concept of the bargain. So at breakfast when he says he's "done, done" after only a few bites of toast or yogurt and not touching his eggs, we tell him he has to eat one bite of egg and then he can be done. So he grabs up a big handful of egg and takes the tiniest little bite out of it. Its hard not to laugh as we tell him, "No, that wasn't enough."  Sometimes, when Finn wants to watch a video, Ben will tell him that he can watch it if he counts to 10 first (which he will promptly do perfectly, except for 9, of course). Today we were supposed to meet friends at the park to play, but Finn wouldn't go down for his nap, so I took a chance and told Finn that unless he napped right now, we would not go to the park to play.  He looked at me for a good minute as if sizing me up and must have decided I would make good on my threat (nope, I was bluffing) and went to sleep shortly thereafter!

Finn is using lots of 2-word sentences now and is even starting to break out with some 3-word phrases. My favorite is "Come on, Dadda!" He also says "I like park/zoo/Mama" and "Avo truck noisy" as he's banging it on the table. He's becoming a great mimic and is learning words quickly. Now, Ben and I don't swear at home but I do say things like "shoot" and "darn" and for some reason Finn latches on to these words and says them over and over, loudly.  And, unfortunately, "shoot" in the hands of a toddler comes out "shit." I'm not sure what my neighbors think of me as they hear Finn yelling "Oh, Shit" at the top of his lungs.

Alone

Ever since Aunt Lisa left a few days ago, Finn has been walking around saying "Alone" over and over again. This has been making me sad and wondering if he feel's lonely. Of course, I know that's silly since he can barely verbally express which toy he wants to play with, I know he couldn't possibly verbalize his emotions. But still, it does break my heart to see him play by himself while saying, "Alone," and I keep hoping he's really saying something else and I just don't understand what it is yet.

Today I solved the mystery.  He is in fact saying, "Alone." I discovered this as Finn was trying to pull the baby gate out from behind the couch and I absentmindedly said to him, "Leave that alone!" To which he started repeating, "Alone" over and over again. Apparently, "Leave that alone" has become my new "no, no, no" and just as he walked around saying "no" to everything 6 months ago, he now says "alone" to everything. That is, until I come up with a new way to suggest he refrain from tearing the house apart.

2 year check-up

It's been six months since Finn has been to the doctor and nearly a year since he last had shots and I had hoped that would be enough time for him to forget, but it was not. As soon as we walked back and tried to weight him, he started sobbing. We got it done though. He was 25.5 pounds and 35 inches. For weight that put him in the 20th percentile and for height he is in the 70th percentile. So, for the first time in a long time, his weight was not a concern at all! 

He started sobbing the minute the doctor came in but wouldn't let me hold him. He just stood at the door crying to get out.  Finally, he let me wipe his nose and then asked to be picked up. So I was able to hold him while the doctor and I talked which calmed him down. Then as it came time to examine him, he started to cry again. Fortunately their new office overlooks I-8 and so Finn and I stood at the window and looked at all the trucks, cars and motorcycles go by and this distracted him enough that he stopped crying and let the doctor do her exam. I think this is the first time she's been able to listen to his heart in well over a year. No shots this time, thank goodness, and we're good to go for another year. 

Potty Training

We have unofficially started potty training Finn. Several months ago, we started taking off his diaper before bath time and trying to get him to pee in the toilet. It worked once. After that one time, he would refuse to pee in the toilet and as soon as I would give up trying to get him to go, he would walk over to the rug and pee on it instead. Naturally, I got tired of having to wash the rug all the time and when I didn't have time to wash it, the bathroom would stink to high heaven, so we gave up.

But in the last week of May, Ben suggested that we give it another go. We had success right away and Finn was so thrilled with peeing in the toilet, that I thought, "Maybe we could try this during the day?" So anytime I was going to change his diaper, I said in a very excited voice, "Let's go potty!!!!!" Finn would race to the bathroom and wait by the toilet for me to get him up on the stool and get his diaper off. I started buying pull-ups to make the process go more smoothly. His control is getting very good. He definitely waits for me to get his diaper off before he starts going. I don't think he recognizes the sensation that he has to go, though.

Then, on May 31, Finn hollered at me and I could see that he was about to poop. I asked if he wanted to go on the potty and he pointed at the bathroom. So I grabbed him up with a book and ran off to the bathroom and he sat down on the toilet and had his first poop in the potty. He didn't seem distressed by it at all. Actually I think he found getting to read a book on the toilet highly entertaining because he often will grab a book and want to read it sitting on the toilet, even when he doesn't have to go.

On the next poop occasion, we didn't make it to the potty in time, but tonight as Ben and Finn were playing, Ben suggested that Finn might need to go. (I think Finn must have been doing a lot of tooting in Ben's face). So off we went to sit and read and sure enough, it happened again!

So we're feeling good so far by how stress-free its been for all of us. Of course we aren't expecting anything from him yet and he still requires us to help him with the whole process, but its a start and since my expectation had been that it would be absolute nightmare, I am pleasantly surprised and pleased that it has been so easy so far.

The one thing that I find funny about all this is that this is the first childhood milestone I haven't prepared for by reading a book or searching through dozens of online articles. I am flying by the seat of my pants for the first time as a parent. Hmm....Maybe I can follow my own instincts and my child's lead and everything will turn out fine!

The last few weeks have been rough as evidenced by this conversation

Ben (to Finn): Your grandma and grandpa need to come visit.

Me: You think we could convince your parents to come down this summer? (Pause) Or were those not the grandparents you had in mind?

Ben: I don't even care at this point.

Vitamins

I have been trying to get Finn to take a gummy vitamin for nearly a year now with absolutely no success. But recently Finn has started wanting to do everything that Daddy does. So, now when Daddy takes his gummy vitamin, he gives one to Finn, and of course Finn just gobbles it up and asks for another one. Somehow he knows that Daddy doesn't take the DHA gummy vitamin, though, and he has steadfastly refused to take that one. I thought maybe it was just a fun novelty to Finn and the new shine would wear off quickly, but so far we have a week of successful vitamin ingestion under our belts. We will have to use this Daddy magic to our advantage for as long as it lasts. Some day the tides will change and he will only want to do the opposite of anything his parents do.

New Words

We are still waiting to hear from our case manager regarding Finn's eligibility for speech therapy services, but in the meantime Finn has started saying a few new words for us. His latest have been: Ball, balloon, wa-wa (water), and bubble. Occasionally he will say one of these words at random, but most of the time we have to ask him to say things for us. Today I was changing his diaper and asking him if I should just let him run around with a bare bottom and he repeated "bottom" several times for me and just laughing and laughing. We'll see if we can get him to say it again tomorrow!

We're coming along on animal noises too. The wolf (or wild thing) howls, the pig snorts, and the kitty says "ow-mow" apparently. I wonder what the neighbors think of all the animal noises coming from our apartment?

Finn is making leaps and bounds in his progress of identifying body parts. He now knows exactly where his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, elbow, knee (or owie), belly button, leg, and hair is. He loves to point out Daddy's beard. Although he will only put up with us asking where certain body parts are so many times. He gets exasperated and I get the feeling that he can't understand how his parents can't seem to remember where their ears are!

Speech Regression

In the back of my mind for the past couple weeks, I have been noticing that Finn has stopped saying new words. Yesterday, after reading an article about Regressive Autism (something I didn't even know existed) it struck me full in the face that not only was Finn not saying any new words, but he wasn't saying any of his old words either. Suddenly, alarm sirens were going off in my head and I was on high alert, scrutinizing Finn's every sound and action. I haven't felt this anxious about my son's well-being since he was a newborn.
After about a day and a half I calmed down enough to realize that Finn was not showing any signs of autism or regression in any other areas of his development. It seems to be limited to his verbal abilities. Ben and I agreed that the responsible thing to do was call the doctor, even if that meant someone telling us we were crazy, over-concerned parents. She told us to call the local early intervention program, which I did and got bumped around to several different departments until I was finally able to leave a voice mail for someone to call me back.  It was the longest voice mail greeting I had ever sat through. They wanted me to leave so much information, I had to take notes! They never called back, so I'm thinking that after I got done giving all our names, spellings, dates of birth, address, favorite colors and shoe sizes, I forgot to leave my phone number. This wouldn't surprise me at all. I think I'm now at that level of sleep-deprivation that causes permanent brain damage.  So after waiting a couple weeks (during which time I tried to talk myself out of it, but my sense of responsibility nagged at me) I called again and remembered to leave my phone number and got a call back that very day. I was able to set up an appointment to have a couple therapists to come for a home visit to evaluate Finn. It was probably best for Finn to be in his home environment to get the best evaluation, but it meant an awful lot of work for me in the cleaning department. Its generally all I can do to keep up with the superficial housework that needs to be done for us not to drown in a sea of dirty dishes, laundry and crumbs. I doubted I'd get the opportunity to explain to the evaluators that I'm just trying to strengthen my child's immune system one mold spore and dust bunny at a time, so I neglected Finn for a couple days and deep cleaned until I was dead on my feet!

The evaluation went well in that Finn was very charming and engaging and scored at or above his age level on nearly all the assessments. But with speech he demonstrated a 50% delay in verbal ability. To put it in perspective the therapist told me that in reasoning, problem-solving,

and language comprehension he is functioning at a 2 1/2 year old level. But in his verbal ability he is at a ten-month old level. The evaluators reassured me that he shows no signs of autism and even did an extended autism evaluation just to be thorough. 

 

So as relieved as Ben and I are that Finn is developing normally in nearly all areas, we're still feeling the heavy weight of this speech delay. I don't think either of us expected it to be that bad. Unfortunately, its left us with more questions than answers, the worst of which for me is, "Why?" I am the one staying home and raising this child, if this delay is caused by something lacking in his home environment, then I am at fault. I feel like I need to know if there was something more I should have been doing or if this is just the way Finn is and even if we had worked with flash cards and I had overcome my introverted nature and talked incessantly to him all day and banned all screen time and let him cry-it-out so that he got 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, he would still have been delayed in his verbal skills. I just don't know, and it bothers me.

According to the early intervention paperwork I received, children under 24 months that show a 33% delay in one area of development will qualify for services. Now we have to wait to hear from our case manager to find out what the next step is. I am assuming (and hoping) that it will be a more in-depth evaluation that will determine why he isn't talking. And once we know what's going on, they can refer us to the appropriate therapist. I haven't done much online research on speech issues yet, since I don't know what I'm looking for, but what little I have seen suggests that speech issues are among the easiest to correct when caught early. It is reassuring to know that we took the appropriate steps early on, and hopefully in a few years we'll wonder how we ever worried that he didn't talk enough!

Howling with the Wild Things

As I've mentioned before, Finn's favorite book is "Hugless Douglas," but a close second is "Where the Wild Things Are." In the middle of the book, during the "wild rumpus" there are three pages of just pictures. Now for some reason, Ben and I couldn't just leave them as pictures to look at but felt we had to add some sounds to go along with them. So when the wild things are howling at the moon, Ben and I howl, when they are swinging through the trees, we say "whee, wheee," and when they are marching in a line we sing the conga line tune. Last night when Ben and I started howling, Finn joined in and howled along. This was hilarious and awesome but then we tried to turn the page and move on but Finn would have none of it, and turned the page back to the howling page. We howled some more and tried to continue the story, but no, back we went. We howled and howled and howled until I was certain the dogs across the street would join in and the neighbors would call the cops. Ben practically had to wrestle Finn just to turn the page and continue the story. I fear this was so much fun for Finn that howling at the moon will become part of our bedtime routine....

A Barbershop Trio

Lately Finn has taken to waking up at 5 am. Since I still get very little sleep, Ben has graciously started taking over the morning shift and watching Finn while I go back to bed and try to catch an hours nap. This morning they crawled in bed with me at about 7 and I was trying to wake up. For some unknown reason, Ben decided to sing "Ahh" and for some other unknown reason I sang "Ahh" a third higher and then right on cue Finn opened his mouth and sang "Ahh" a perfect third higher than me! It was a perfect major triad and a beautiful way to wake up in the morning! We all had a wonderful laugh over it and then tried again, but Finn gave us some very strange notes that resulted in weird minor chords so I don't think I can claim that my child has perfect pitch yet. 

First jump

Finn has been trying to jump for a long time now, but he has never quite gotten his feet off the ground. Yesterday, while we were at the park we were jumping and his feet finally left the earth at the same time. He landed and then promptly fell over. He hasn't been too keen about jumping since. 

He has also started making "vroom, vroom" noises while he plays with his trucks. He must have picked  that up from daddy!

What's in a name

Ben has started asking Finn, "what's its name?" in regards to people, objects and characters in books. Finns answer is always the same, "Dadda."

Night-weaning

The time has finally come. After Christmas and all the illness and upheaval, I had let Finn get into the habit of nursing all night long.  My hope had been that as life got back to normal, the night wakings and nursing would return to normal as well. I was sadly mistaken. If anything, in January and February he started waking more and wanting to nurse more and more during the night until we were nursing nearly every hour. This is nothing new for us, of course, but in the past when I have looked into night-weaning all the books and articles I have found said the same thing: night-weaning and co-sleeping were incompatible. It seemed that if I wanted to eliminate one, I would have to eliminate both. I desperately wanted to be done nursing all night long, but I was not ready to give up co-sleeping, so I trudged on.

But then as I was hopelessly researching the subject of night-weaning once again, I stumbled across this article by Dr. Jay Gordon: http://drjaygordon.com/attachment/sleeppattern.html  It was the first article I had read that gave me the immediate sense that this was a plan that I could follow and that might actually work for us. I had Ben read it too and his comment was "Wow. He knows Finnleif well." Exactly! This spoke to our situation perfectly.

I didn't follow his plan exactly. We actually started on step 2. I know Finn well enough to know that taking him off the breast before he falls asleep would make him just as angry and frustrated as just saying "no" in the first place, so why torture him (and me) unnecessarily? We started out by talking to him during our bedtime routine about the change that was about to take place. I told him that the nursies were tired and so he could nurse right before bed but then the nursies were going to go to sleep and they wouldn't wake up until morning, just like he was going to go to sleep and not wake up until morning. I felt like I might as well throw that last pitch in there and see if I couldn't get him to sleep through the night as well just by suggesting it.

The first week was rough. He did some screaming and clawing at my shirt, but I stuck to the plan and told him the nursies were sleeping. Once he realized I wasn't going to give in, he climbed on top of me and laid his head down on my chest and fell asleep. That wasn't quite what I had in mind, but at least he wasn't nursing! Oh, how my back ached that week with 23 pounds of toddler lying on top of me for hours on end, but as things progressed, he even started falling asleep just lying next to me.

After that first week he started consolidating his sleep more and would sleep un-aided for 3-4 hours at a time. One night, even though I was technically sleeping in his bed with him, he didn't wake me up or need to cuddle at all the entire night, but put himself back to sleep whenever he woke briefly.

Now we are about a month into our night-weaning routine and I would say it has been thoroughly successful. Now I only nurse before bed and in the morning (even if he wakes before 11 pm). Finn seems to understand and he no longer demands to nurse by screaming and yanking on my shirt and I no longer have to tell him that the nursies are sleeping.

The biggest breakthrough came last night when he slept the entire night by himself in his bed without needing any assistance from me!  I woke up at 2:30, shocked that he had not awoken yet and then spent the rest of the night in my own bed waking up every 20 minutes to check the baby monitor. If Finn keeps this up, I will be the one needing sleep training next!

This has been a long 20 month journey and I know that it is nowhere near over. I fully expect that most night will not look like last night, but I am hopeful for the first time in a long time that his night wakings will become fewer and fewer until one day they are no longer a problem for either of us.

Hugless Douglas

Finn has always liked books from a very early age. But the first book that he really started to interact with (point at the pictures, laugh at parts of the story, etc) was a book called Hugless Douglas which was given to him by my friend and former employer in Bozeman, Bill Bradley and his family.
I thought this deeper interest in books would extend to all books, and it has in many ways, but not to the same level as with Hugless Douglas. It has become his absolute favorite. He requests (maybe "demands" is a better word) that we read it every night at the exclusion of all other stories. When Ben and I have tried to sneak a different book in, Finn will get up out of bed, find Hugless Douglas and plop it down on top of whatever story we are trying to read.
His devotion to this book has recently reached new heights. Lately, when he wakes up from a nap, he will come out into the living room clutching this book. When he wakes up at 5:30 in the morning he somehow finds it in the total darkness of his room, brings it into bed and sets it, not very gently, on my face.  This morning when he woke up, he couldn't find Hugless Douglas (because he had left it in Mommy and Daddy's room last night) and so he rummaged through his book pile until he found the book jacket for Hugless Douglas and brought that to me to read. Fortunately(?), since I now read this book to him 3-4 times a day I have the gist of it memorized so that I can recite some version of it to him, even at 5:30 in the morning, when I am nowhere near being awake and the book is being pressed into my face.

UPDATE: Ben has started asking Finn at the end of the book "Who does Douglas hug?" (the answer is his Mommy). At first Finn wouldn't say anything, but the past couple of times Finn has turned to Ben and whispered "Dadda." Yet another example of how this kid is Daddy's boy all the way! 

Bubbles in the bath

Finn has been discovering his bodily functions lately. Ben has been taking him to the bathroom with him in the morning so he starts to understand what that is all about. Now, when I take his diaper off before bath time, he loves to stand by the toilet and pee...on the rug. Maybe this means I need to get him his own potty?

Last night in the bath tub Finn passed a little gas and made his own bubbles. He thought this was hilarious and was cracking up with laughter several seconds before Ben and I realized what was so funny. I think he started straining a little bit to see if he could make some more bubbles, but I whisked him out of the bath so we wouldn't have to deal with poo in the tub. It hasn't happened to us yet, but I'm sure it will someday.

In other news, Finn has started giving us "high-fives" which is pretty cute. He has also said his first 2 word sentence. I was trying to dress him and he wasn't cooperating so I told him he had to "lie down" to which he started saying "lie down" over and over again.

First haircut

We gave Finn his first haircut today. It was starting to hang into his eyes and was falling straight over his ears. The only curls were in the back, and they kept getting dreadlock-like snarls in them. So we decided it was time. Finn was really good. He didn't cry at all. He did fuss and wiggle a little but that is to be expected from an 18 month old! All in all I think I did pretty well for my first time cutting hair in general, much less cutting a boys haircut. It's not perfect, but then I didn't expect it would be. It pained me to cut off the curls in the back though. I had thought maybe once I cleaned up the front and sides of his hair, I might be able to leave the curls long for a while, but no, once the front and sides were short, the curls in the back had to go too. He looks way too grown up now. It's really starting to hit me how quickly he is leaving his baby days behind him.

To that end, he is continuing with new words. He is getting pretty good at repeating words we say. He has recently started saying "uh-oh" and "ow" and using them in the appropriate context. "Yuck" and "yummy" he has starting using during mealtimes but they both seem to mean "I don't like this!" We're trying to get him to say his name but so far he just smiles at us. Once it sounded like he said "Leif" but it hasn't happened since.

There was one funny story that came about this week. I was cleaning in the kitchen when Finn crawled up onto the couch and started to reach for the lamp. I came over and reminded him that he is not to touch the lamp and he quickly whirled around, said "Shit!" in his high baby voice and wiggled off the couch. Now, since I'm pretty sure I haven't said "shit" since before Finn was born and I know Ben has probably never said it, I can only assume he was just making a noise. Or maybe his grandpa's let a few questionable words slip over Christmas and he remembered....

18 Month Doctor Appointment

I am happy to report that this doctor visit went much better than the last one. Granted, my expectations were not very high, but there was no Finn running around the hall naked and shrieking at least. He still cried, but wasn't frantic and he actually allowed the doctor to examine him.

There were two really good things that happened. First, Finn did not have to have any shots! He was supposed to, but somehow we did a couple early so now we get to be shot-free until he's four. Yay! Second, she praised me on getting his weight up to the 45th percentile. This shocked me so I asked what his weight was and she said 25 pounds. I had to tell her that I didn't think that was correct since on the bathroom scale at home he was only 23 pounds. So she had him weighed after the visit and his weight came to 22.6 pounds, which I thought was a little low, but at that point, the visit was over, so there was no opportunity for her to get after me about his weight. So I got a free pass too! We'll just keep working on getting him to eat and increasing his milk intake to 2 cups per day (he currently drinks 1/2 a cup).

I didn't leave this appointment feeling so morally dejected as I did the last one. My next goal will be to get him sleeping through the night before his 2 year appointment so I won't have to spend the 2 weeks before his appointment practicing my excuses for why he doesn't sleep.

New words

Words are starting to flow for Finn. We were stalled it seemed for a long time on just mama and dadda. But just yesterday he said "glasses" and "lights" repeatedly. Then this morning he was playing with my hairbrush and so I asked him "Can you say 'brush'?" He looked at me a moment and then said "brush" clear as anything! I would imagine that things start to snowball from here.

Teaspoon "keys"

Finn was "helping" me empty the dishwasher today and grabbed out my teaspoon measures on a ring. They are metal and they jingle like keys on a key ring. I heard him playing with them down the hall and when I went to look, I saw him trying to use them to unlock the front door!

Honk, honk

Tonight, as Ben was reading a story to Finn, he came to a page that had geese in the picture, so Ben automatically said "honk, honk." Finn promptly turned to Ben and "honked" his nose!