Ewan at 19 months
If you saw a few blog posts back where Ewan ripped the front off our dishwasher you may be correctly inclined to believe he’s a handful. Like most 1 year olds he’s always on the move, wanting to learn and ‘help’ with absolutely everything. These days he’s coming up with more and more new words each day which is such a joy to see him learn and delight in communicating with us.
His favorite thing to do is ‘help’. If you have something to put away, something to put in the trash or recycling, clothes to move from one place to another, he’s your man. He wants to help with the dishwasher, setting the table, laundry folding and even taking out the trash. He’s devastated when he’s refused with a big crumpled up face and crying. Yesterday he started learning to fold his wipes on his own by copying Celia and using his hands very slowly and deliberately.
Ewan has also very recently started to be interested in books. He loves ‘Where’s Spot?’ which allows him to say ‘no’ as you turn each page, Josie taught him how to read that one. He also likes ‘Buenas Noches Luna’ and to point out the cats.
He also regularly can be convinced to make us pretend tea, he uses the pot and pours us cups. It’s very good for distracting him from something else he wants and cannot have. He also helps to make real tea by filling up the tea kettle.
One of his greatest joys though is of course big motion, running around, jumping, throwing and spinning. He loves to jump, run, and kick, which is tough in this winter weather. He’ll be over the moon (and hopefully a bit more tired!) once we get to play outside again. He’ll play outside in the snow a little while now, but he gets tired off it (and cold) after only 20 minutes or so. He loves our indoor gymnastics sessions. He despises his swimming lessons. The second we show him the bathing suit he starts to chant ‘no no no…’ He is lucky that he only has one more, and then we didn’t sign him up for the next session because the timing didn’t work out correctly, and he hated it. [Edited to add – he actually somehow decided he liked his last swim lesson] So it didn’t take too much thought. He does enjoy free swim with us so we’ll stick with that for now. He also will kick and ‘swim’ in the bathtub! As I type this he is now helping by pulling dirty tissues that fell behind the radiator out and then insisting that I pick him up to the trash can to throw them out.
As for food, he’s extremely variable. Some days he’ll eat like a horse, but a lot of days now he’s refusing most everything we put in front of him except for cheese and rice and blueberries, even things he ate the day before. Clearly he’s trying out where he has free will and what else he can expect to get.
Ewan also insists on being involved in all art projects. The most recent one, where we painted on bubble wrap and then made prints from it, he showed the first sign of actually understanding and wanting to participate in the process as we suggested it to him. He painted, and then he printed, and then printed again and again on the same piece, but he looked at it each time experimenting and seeing what would happen!
He’s wonderfully full of live and love, very happy to greet everyone he sees especially his favorite people. It will be nice though when he can keep his hands out of messy and dangerous things upon request.
- Size/weight: 24month clothes, 25 lbs
- Favorite food: breastmilk, cheese, pasta, blueberries
- Favorite toy: ball, anything he can use as a stool
- Favorite book: go, dog, go!
- Favorite activity: throwing and dumping things
- New game: loves to jump into the pool, even if you’re not there to catch him
- Sleeping: bedtime ~8:15; one short nap at 1:30; gets up 7am
- New skill: tons of words!
- Teeth: 16 and more coming
- Vocalizations: talking in single words, naming objects and learning things like ‘in, out, up, on’
Entries (RSS)