Ollie Update

Bold Declarations

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I mentioned yesterday that Evie has her own fun little personality quirks. So now its her turn.

Right now, Evie is all about drawing lines in the sand. Every issue is immediately escalated to some sort of standoff, her vs. the world. Everything is eminently dire.

“If you don’t ___, I’m never EVER going to ___!”

She gets this intensely angry look on her face and you know she has every intention of hurting you (or at least trying). Sometimes this can be funny, because you can see how serious she is, and how seriously angry, but the thing she is angry about is so trivial.

You never really know what is going to set her off. She routinely gets upset about things such as not being able to have “baby moses” and his basket sitting on her chair with her for dinner. And you know she really means business when she says, “I’m going to poke you if you don’t ___” and extends one finger toward you in pure rage. It’s hard to keep a straight face.

These are sort of occasional though, most of the time it is plenty easy to keep a straight face, like when she is having a screaming meltdown in a restaurant because her water wasn’t placed in the proper location. No, then it is plenty easy to keep from laughing.

Sometimes I start to wonder if she’s going to have any good memories of me at all, because it seems like all we do is fight and struggle with each other.

The funny thing is, if you didn’t know how old she was, you’d think maybe I was describing a teenager, with all the constant power struggles and bold declarations. So god help us when we get to that stage, because if she is this difficult except with more power to actually do anything about her situation in life, I can only imagine how impossible that will be.

As far as Evie and Oliver go, we are now starting to see some heavy competition over toys. Oliver now has an interest in what Evie is doing (after all, she does seem to always have the best toys). Oliver doesn’t understand things like sharing, and Evie understands them well enough to know that she doesn’t want anything to do with it. All toys are hers (even Oliver’s toys) and she’s ALWAYS using them, even when she’s not.

For his part, Oliver has taken the only road left to him: appealing to the judges. As soon as she grabs something he has, he *immediately* cries and looks at Sara or I with an imploring look that says, “Do you see how I am being wronged here?” He does this even when he is doing the wronging. And hey, who can blame him? It’s about the only possibility he has of winning the fight, and it works most of the time. I’d like to let them settle things between themselves for the long run, but at the moment it is pretty hard to ignore that imploring look, especially when I know that Evie is not yet quite old enough to understand that Oliver is a person too.

Mr. Mischief

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Oliver is starting to be that age.

It’s not just that he’s getting into more things, it’s that he is actively TRYING to get into more things. He gets that glimmer in his eye that says, “I’m going to get into trouble” and then he does it. He doesn’t stop when you say no, in fact, he does it BECAUSE you’re saying no. He stops to look back at you first to make sure that you see him getting into trouble. He just has non-stop busy hands. He hasn’t met a book he can’t pull off the shelf, or an item that can be left on the coffee table.

The other day I took him to the grocery store. Well, first off, he figured out how to take off his shoes, so of course he does that whenever possible. Also, he now has the facilities to turn around and reach into the cart and grab things. Of course I know this, so I do my best to keep things out of reach, but even still he threw the lettuce on the floor three times, and one time a stranger had to pick it up because I didn’t notice. He grabbed a block of cheese and bit it hard enough on the corner to leave a big round mouth-mark. Finally, the coup de grâce, he opened a big container of cherry tomatoes and dumped them into the cart. There were tomatoes everywhere, and I was still finding them as I went through the checkout.

It was like Hurricane Oliver passed through my shopping cart.

I remember Evie going through this phase, so it’s not abnormal or anything, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Our house has reached all new levels of destruction, after all, it’s not like Evie doesn’t get up to her own share of mischief. That’s another story unto itself.

Oliver’s still not walking yet, but he clearly could be walking if he so chose. He stands up without holding on (usually to clap for himself), he moves seamlessly from furniture to furniture,  walks up and down the hall holding onto the wall, and has even taken a half step here or there. However, if you ever try to get him to actually walk, he just says, “Hey, I already know how to crawl to get to where I’m going, why bother with this walking thing.”

However, the increased capacity for mischief he could achieve by walking might be just the motivation he needs to finally take those first steps.

Happy 1st Birthday!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Today’s the day, can you believe it? Our big boy is 1 year old.

As one always says in posts like this, a year sure goes fast! Oliver has grown up quite a bit in that time.

The words that he reliably says are “Nala” and “book”. He can sign “book”, “milk”, “more” and “all done”, though he is more likely to use his own modified signs for these things; “more” is usually hand clapping, banging a hand on his tray, or gesturing towards his mouth, and “all done” is usually just putting his hands on his head. We haven’t required him to do the signs as rigorously as we did with Evie, so this is probably our fault for not being quite as strict on that. (For example, letting him get away with just banging on the tray for more.)

He does some other “non-official” things as well. He gives hi fives, and he occasionally does “so big!” He loves to point to pictures and say, “Ba ba” which means picture in Oliver’s language. He will occasionally say “ba” for ball or “Ba be” for baby and point to the object in question.

He can crawl really, really fast, on his hands and knees now, as opposed to his long-time belly crawl. He pulls himself up to stand and cruises around furniture, etc. but no first steps yet. I would imagine those would come soon.

Physically, he has 5, going on 6 teeth. He has always been a pretty big boy in terms of percentiles of height and weight, but he never went through a really chubby looking phase. Evie looked chubbier than him, even though she didn’t weigh as much.

He eats pretty much anything you put in front of him. Even if he won’t, you can usually just offer him that thing later, and he’ll eat it. This is a big difference from Evie. Also, another big difference from Evie is that, pretty much the only thing he won’t eat is avocado, which remains one of Evie’s favorite things to this day.

Of course Oliver’s first year was dominated by the whole eczema thing. But that’s pretty much controlled now (by a lengthy, twice-a-day routine). I’m hoping that gets better in year 2, but it is certainly a lot better now than it had been.

So that’s pretty much it. Obviously a couple of paragraphs don’t properly represent the entirety of our smiling, pointing, shrieking, splashing, lovable book monster. But that’s the best I can do at the moment, so it will have to suffice.

The Book Monster

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oliver learned a new word. Oh boy did he learn it.

He’s been signing “book” for a while now, but somehow he just suddenly made the connection with the actual word. He pointed to a book and clearly said, “Book?” Evie couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d just spouted the Declaration of Independence.
Evie: “He just said book! No, he really said it!”
Me: “Yeah, he did.”
Evie: “It’s his first real word!”

He says other things (particularly “Nala”), so I don’t know why this stunned her so much. It’s certainly not his first word, but she just couldn’t get over it. Unfortunately, he can’t get over it either.

“Book? Book?” He won’t say anything else. All day long, “Book? Book?” I couldn’t even get him to stop saying it long enough to eat. It’s the way he says it too, always a question, with the voice rising at the end and the ‘k’ just barely pronounced. “Book? Book?” It’s like the cry of some exotic bird, echoing around our house 24 hours a day. It’s the answer to every question, and the question for every situation. “Oliver, what would you like to eat?” “Book? Book?” “Oliver, say night night!” “Book? Book?” It’s a noun, adjective, verb. It’s Oliver’s equivelent to “smurf.”

I guess there are worse things he could be obsessed with.

The Incredible Flammable Boy

/ Shane / 5 Comments

In order to keep Oliver’s eczema in check, he goes through a rigorous, full-body treatment of steroids and moisturizers, head-to-toe, twice a day. In the evening, we use Vaseline. In fact, we have gone through almost 4 of those enormous, should-last-you-a-lifetime Vaseline containers in the past few months alone.

Vaseline is a good moisturizer, but it leaves your hands feeling so greasy and gross, and it takes hours to get rid of it. Even washing your hands doesn’t help, because it repels water no problem. I hate having it on my hands, but I guess it is preferable to having it on my entire body.

All of this greasing up doesn’t go without side effects. All of Oliver’s clothes, and particularly his pajamas are slowly taking on a greasy sheen. It’s kind of like when you put grease on a paper plate, and it becomes transparent. His clothes are just starting to have a certain look.

In fact, his pajamas have gotten so bad, that they have developed a wet feeling and permanently weigh about 10 times more than they used to. Washing them is of no help; Vaseline repels water on clothes just like it does on my hands. When you feel this outfit, you want to wash your hands afterwards. The cloth is 100% saturated.

Vaseline is also known as petroleum jelly, and it is made from petroleum. If it is flammable, then there is no bigger fire hazard than our child’s pajamas. (According to what I found, the jury is sort of out. It’s not really flammable, unless it’s hot and there’s a wick of some kind. So it won’t burn, unless it does. Explosively.)

Just in case, lets keep open flames away from him (not that we were exposing our child to open flames very often, mind you). Getting rid of eczema is all fine and well, but not if it comes at the expensive of horrible burn scars!