Setri at 16 months

Ok it seems I've overdone it this month and written more than my BlackBerry is capable of pasting into an email. Same format as usual, recent updates are written first, getting older as you read down the page. Will post the rest soon :) [Update: done!]



Tonight, we were arguing over whether to put bacon in the meat sauce Gam was making for nachos. Needless to say, Gam wanted the bacon, I was against it. "Let's ask Setri", Gam said. "Setri, who does most of the cooking in this house?". "Daddy!", said Setri, most emphatically. "Setri", I said. "Who is a better cook, Mummy or Daddy?". Setri paused and thought for a second. "Daddy". Soooo... guess who won that argument?

Earlier today:

Grandma: Setri, would you like to go to Woolworths, or to the park?
Setri: School!

Setri has wondered from time to time why I call his grandma 'Mum' and his daddy 'Gam'. Once in a blue moon he has tried the words himself, as might be expected, and been satisfied with my explanation for why I use them. Last night he sounded like he really liked saying the word 'Gam', so I told him Mum's name (Teen) and my name too. He pronounced Teen as 'Leen' and seemed quite pleased, and seemed a little unsure of himself with my name, saying 'Lair-luh' (he pronounces his own name as 'Leh-li'). Tonight he copied me again, calling out 'Gam' instead of 'Daddy' when I called out to Gam. He answered correctly when asked what my name and Mum's name was too. Also when watching a video tonight of him at 6 months of age (he requested it by pointing to the thumbnail on my desktop and saying 'baby'), I told him "That's YOU!", and he proceeded to ask that the video be repeated by asking for "More Leh-li". Awwwwww :)

Toilet training has gone backwards. Since I stopped letting Setri have so much play time in the shower after doing his wees, he has stopped telling me when he needs to do one (or rather, he will say he needs to do one, then say 'no' when I ask if he wants to go the bathroom)! He even refuses to go outside these days, except in his plastic clamshell (the exact reverse of what we are trying to teach him!). A couple of times we've been outside and he has been holding on so long that a couple of drops of wee will leak out. I'll ask him if he needs to wee, he'll say 'yeah', then refuse my offer to take him to the bathroom, and ignore me when I suggest he does it on the grass. He will wait until I take him in, then do an absolutely massive, flooding wee in his nappy the minute I put it on. He will wee in the shower, but only on the proviso that I turn on the shower first for him to play with. It has nothing to do with being unable to go if the water is not turned on; he has 'performed' before for the promise of the tap being turned on, and also for the prospect of seeing his wee go down the plug hole and being able to use the shower hose to wash it down... He has realised, I think, that these options leave him less time for playing with the water, because it only comes on after he pees. I think we really need to work on finding a comfortable potty or kiddy toilet seat, and something that works as a bribe to keep him there. Hard to believe that someone like me could wind up with a kid who isn't reliably interested in chocolate or lollies as bribes!

Was wondering a few days ago how Setri was doing with his numbers. At the moment we don't have any counting books out of the library and his interest in participating in 'how many is that?' games/pop-quizzes waxes and wanes. Tonight, however, he was watching 'In the Night Garden' and two of the wooden peg-doll characters called the 'Pontipines' were on screen. 'Dooo' announced Setri, holding up his index finger and thumb, before pausing and using his other hand to manipulate the first while he tried to figure out how to sign it correctly. 'Dooo'. Whether the narrator had also just mentioned that there were two Pontipines I'm not sure. Quite possibly. But Setri definitely showed that he grasped the concept of the number two, without any input from us. I was so impressed :)

Last few days Setri has seemed perfectly healthy but has been right off his food. Nothing can tempt him. Today it's nearly 4 and all he has eaten is most of a ripe pear and a few sultanas. I stayed home so he has been able to have breastfeeds.. Same thing happened yesterday only I wasn't here so he ate nothing all day and only drank a tiny bit of water even though mum offered juice and soy milk. He's a funny little boy. When we ask him what could tempt him to eat he jokes with us and replies "Beer!", or occasionally "Mai (pie). Beer!" He even does 'pie hands' when he says beer! [Next day update: asked him what he would like for breakfast this morning. "Mai! Beer!"... And as we laughed, he piped up and added "Liine!" for good measure]. Little jokester still asks for "Daddy boob" quite regularly, too! I remember doing a child psych subject in undergrad at uni and reading that kids basically don't have a sense of humour and take everything literally until they are 5 or 6. What a load of crap!

Pretending: Setri regularly pretends to do things that he sees us doing. Not surprising. What is surprising is that he can demonstrate that he knows the difference between pretending and doing something for real. For instance, he has known and been able to use in appropriate context the word 'burp' since he was 11-12 months old. If I were to tell him to burp, he would try. But if he was unable to produce a burp he would follow that try by saying 'no' to indicate his inability to do one at that point. Now, if I tell Setri to *pretend* to do a burp, however, he makes an 'erp' noise just like anyone pretending to do a burp. Another example is something that happened a week or two ago. Setri frequently gets hold of bottles of skincare products and motions as if he is getting product from the container and applying it to his face. Stupid as it sounds, I didn't fully realise he knew he was pretending, or grasped the concept of pretending vs doing something for real. When mum came into the bathroom as Setri pilfered my moisturiser jar one morning, I told Mum to watch and share in the cuteness. "Show Grandma how you put the beauty treatment on", I told Setri. Instead of cutely pretending to moisturise, Setri looked at the jar in his hand, held the jar up to me and said 'ope'. Oh. I didn't want him doing actually doing it! I didn't know if he really had much of a grasp on 'pretend', but given that he understood the difference between real and pretend burping I tried anyway. I asked Setri "Can you *pretend* to put moisturiser on?". Whereupon he duly performed his cute little moisturising ritual for his Grandma, and simultaneously impressed me once again with just how smart babies can be :)

We hardly ever drink, but (embarrassingly), Setri can identify wine and beer by their respective bottles, and by the glass too. Tonight he pointed to a glass of red wine that Gam and I were sharing: "Liiiine". "Yes, Setri, wine." . Setri pointed to his nose and sniffed loudly to indicate he wanted to smell the wine (this is something he does a *lot* lately, every day he asks to smell different spices from our spice rack). I held the glass under his nose so he could smell the wine, and he leaned forward, took a sniff, then stood upright and touched his index finger to his tongue. "Teth" (taste), he instructed. "Setri, are you a baby or a man?", Gam asked. "Baby", replied Setri (phew!). "And that's why you can't have any wine", said Gam. Unlike a lot of things, this didn't precipitate a tantrum because Setri already knew he isn't allowed to taste alcohol (being a baby who happily sips tea and coffee, counts gherkins and liquorice among his favourite foods and yesterday ate a bite of raw onion, we know that chances are he would probably quite like the taste of alcohol). [Next day update: this morning I was drinking orange juice in a regular glass and asked Setri if he'd like some. His answer: "Liine". I asked if he meant iron, seeing as I have iron supplement in my OJ, and he said "No, liine", affirming what he meant when I asked if he'd just said he wanted wine for breakfast!][Further update: now when Gam asks him the 'baby or man' question, Setri says 'Man!'.]


Can answer questions in the past tense even if the subject has disappeared. E.g. A car travels down our street, we can ask him "Did the car go up or down the hill, Setri?" Or "What colour was the car?".

'Mine' is getting used more and more frequently. And, of course, generally inappropriately when he has pilfered something particularly desirable. Not always, though. He has an old mobile that we have always told him is 'his phone', and he was only happy to pretend to use it when he was very young, say 10-11 months, until he realised that it didn't work and that other phones have lights and make beepy noises. So any suggestion along the lines of "Why don't you use your phone, Setri", when he asked for one of ours would precipitate a tantrum. Just recently though, I was surprised to see that Setri had dredged his old mobile out of the toybox. "Mine", he told me, clutching it to his chest. I have explained to Setri what it means to borrow something that belongs to someone else (i.e. you may have it in your possession, but it is not *yours*), but he is yet to use it in conversation.

For a couple of weeks now, when Setri (or *cough* one of his toys) asks to go out and we say "Where are you going, Setri?", he doesn't reply 'mark' (park), he says 'cooo' (school). This is all Gam's fault. Gam teases me by saying Setri will soon be putting on a little backpack and waving me goodbye, just like Timmy the lamb does on the Aardman animation show on the ABC kids channel. Of course Setri never passes up a chance to join in teasing me, so he now regularly tells me he's off to school. He always follows it up by telling me that "Mummy, Daddy, Mam-ma... everybody" is going with him to school :)

Piano 'man': Setri has shown a renewed interest in 'Roland' since he has been allowed to sit on the bench seat on his own. Instead of wanting to mash the buttons (it's an electric), he 'plays' rather dramatically, and sometimes even somewhat tunefully when he is up there on his own. He really likes applause from Gam, in particular. Occasionally he still likes me to play his favourite children's songs, especially Wheels on the Bus. Mostly I sit to his right, playing the upper registers on the piano. Yesterday, because he was in the way, I played at the lower end. Then I stopped. "More bus", said Setri. "Man". Huh? "Did you say 'man'?", I asked him. "Yeah," said Setri. "More man". He was telling me he wanted me to play Wheels on the Bus using the low notes! I thought that was a really interesting way he conveyed his message. He liked it so much I wound up playing Wheels on the Bus about 20 more times while he sat on the chair bouncing up and down, frantically performing all the actions... [Update: now when he wants me to position the piano stool so he can muck around on the low notes, he says 'man'.]

He can reliably hold one finger up when asked to show '1', and five fingers for '5'. He tries hard for '4', but not sure he's nailed that yet. He says 'Lor' if I hold up four. I don't know if he really gets what the numbers mean yet, but for obvious reasons I'm not going to assume he doesn't, either.

Pulled a square block out of his trolley this morning, saying 'lair'. He also says 'lair' for 'hair' and 'pear'. This is the first time he's said anything about shapes, other than to tell me that circle shapes are round but they don't *go* round and round. Again, apart from the circle thing (which we taught him so he would stop expecting every circular object to entertain him by spinning), we have only mentioned shapes in the most offhand of manners. So I wasn't sure if 'lair' really meant square or not. I therefore asked Setri if he could get me a triangle block, which he duly did, bringing it over to the lounge and placing it in my lap.
I've noticed that lately Setri has become a little sensitive to being corrected on his pronunciation. A correction and request for him to repeat a word can elicit a bit of a grizzle from him, where it never used to bother him. Also requests for him to say difficult words seem to bother him occasionally these days, whereas he always used to just have a go and garble something, whether it approximated the word requested or not. He also gets very upset when he says he wants something and we suggest that perhaps he might prefer something else. For instance if he asks for boob and we suggest a drink of water instead. It makes sense, because if he wants a drink of water or something else he says 'Ding' or 'Ding. Awah/jew/whatever'... It is kind of patronising to suggest that he doesn't really want what he has just asked for. He reacts better to an outright refusal of his request, because we have at least acknowledged what he has asked for! One doesn't really think not to patronise a 16mo baby/toddler, though, it's so ingrained that that is what we do to kids. I have resolved to stop prompting him to repeat himself, even if he starts saying a word that he previously used to pronounce better (e.g. last night he said 'law' for 'draw', where he used to say 'daw'). I will model the word for him and move on. His vocabulary is so darn impressive I have to keep in mind that his pronunciation is perfectly age-appropriate and it will match up in time! Don't want to give the poor little guy a complex.

Halfway through this month now. Setri strings 3 words together very regularly. Mostly along the lines of 'Mumma, (*instruction), NOW', or '(*instruction), (*instruction), NOW', 'Mumma, (*request), Leez?) or '(*Request). Now, Leez?'. He has- get this- started saying 'bed', and saying 'leep' making the sign for sleep when he is ready for bed! We are so shocked! Sometimes he folds out his toddler-couch, says 'leep' and screws his eyes up tight. I just die of cute overload when he does that.

He still has a bit of an imperfect grasp on reality, and exactly what a photo is. He will often see something in a photo that he would like to change and demands it be made to do what he thinks it should be doing, e.g. a doll sitting down will be told to 'dan-duh', a box will be told to open.
Nailing his colours with 100% accuracy, with the exception of colours that even I find difficult to label (e.g. Pinks that are very close to purples or vice-versa, colours that could justifiably be labelled either an orange-y yellow or a yellow-y orange). Blue, yellow, red, green, pink, purple, black, white, brown and grey. Trying to teach him indigo, teal, beige and 'mustard colour' now.

Physically, Setri is just over 80cm tall but very hard to measure! He seems to have gotten noticeably heavier recently, but when we last tried to weigh him a couple of months ago our own scales were blatantly inaccurate (putting him at 10.5kg or something stupidly low like that). Haven't bothered getting him onto a scale somewhere else- I'd guess he's around 13kg?

We are just past 16m and 1 week, and it's getting hard at this point to explain the concepts that Setri seems capable of grasping! These days we quite often seem to be able to reason with him. The other day I needed to wash his bottom in the sink, and he kicked up a fuss because he wanted a shower, squalling and refusing to squat down in the sink to make it easier for me to wash him. I explained that we would be finished faster if he squatted down, so he stopped crying and did it. Gam also explained why Setri should not pull his hat off his head the other day, and Setri left it on thereafter. This doesn't happen every time (particularly nappy changes, or when there is little perceivable benefit to him in our actions, such as when we remove the car keys from his custody after he has pinched them off the table), but often enough that we can call him quite a reasonable baby on the whole :)

I had a work colleague the other day tell me her daughter had hit the 'terrible twos' and not take me particularly seriously when I empathised over the tantrums. "You wait, it'll get worse", she and an older colleague with 4 children told me, before going on to say that she expected the tantrums to get better once her daughter was able to say the words for what she wanted. They were in the process of trying to teach her the word 'more', something Setri has been able to say since 9 months of age! I didn't tell her that, though. Because Setri is fairly reserved/shy, he hardly talks around strangers (though he has started answering- very quietly- yes/no questions from strangers), so he really does seem fairly normal, maybe even underpowered in the speech department. It's only when talking to us, such as when he points out a yellow object and announces 'Yellow!' that people pause for a second in surprise.

Over the past month he has sprouted a few more teeth. He has chipped both his bottom middle incisors, only little chips but it bothers me. The first chip was when he took a bit of a tumble down the back stairs at about 11-12 months, the second happened more recently, probably from biting something made of metal I'd guess. Will ask dentist about it in near future in case he has some kind of defect that causes his teeth to be softer than usual.

In the last few days Setri has been tacking an irresistibly polite and adorable 'Leez?' onto the end of almost every request he makes. He must have known he was onto a winner the minute he tried it, I can never say no!

Setri seems to enjoy drawing with his crayons, but not nearly as much as I thought he would.

At any given time, Setri can identify with about 70% accuracy any of the numbers from one to ten. Mum arrived back from a brief visit to NSW a week ago, and sat down with Setri to read a book (a really good one from the library, called 'One Mole Digging a Hole'). She began reading the book with Setri, asking him to identify the numbers from 1 to 5 as they moved through the book, without pausing much because she didn't expect much in the way of answers. "I think 5 is enough, we'll stop there", she said after reaching number 5 and Setri answered it correctly, being rewarded with a high five. She wasn't going to stop reading of course, just to continue without offering Setri the opportunity to participate. A couple of months ago I was doing the same thing. "Keep going Mum, you'll be surprised", I told her. Setri then proceeded to correctly identify 'Lic, Lehleh, eight, nine and Len' to his astonished grandma (he had flunked 1 and identified 3 only after I had held up my fingers and counted "One, two..." for him).

This morning I let Setri run around with no nappy after he'd done his poo. I was sitting drinking tea and Setri made a distressed noise and came running up with an anguished expression on his face. "Mumma, oh NO!", he said, pointing to a spot on the floor. There was a puddle of wee. Setri made his distress noise again (the one he uses if he sees someone sleeping, sad, or being hurt) and looked at me anxiously. I realised that last time he'd weed I'd reacted pretty much the same way! I reassured him that it wasn't his fault and told him that if he couldn't make it to the bathroom in time, what we do is get a floor towel from the cupboard to mop up the wee (something manageable for him- I didn't want to go on with wet sponges or mops and buckets!). Well, a couple hours later I had a chance to see whether my previous overreaction had scarred him for life. I'd just taken off a nappy so wet I thought for sure it would be a while until the next wee. I was in the kitchen while Setri toddled off to the study to play, when he reappeared at the kitchen door: "Lee." he said. Do you need to do a wee? I asked. "Lee", said Setri again, pointing down the hallway. "Do you need to go to the bathroom or are you telling me you already did a wee?". "Did", he replied matter-of-factly, taking my hand and leading me to the study and pointing at a puddle located alarmingly close to an open book on the floor. Sigh.

Mostly because of time constraints, I haven't talked much about my mum living with us for the past 7 and a half months. She has been such an important part of Setri's life and I feel so lucky to have her here looking after Setri while I work. I feel much more comfortable about Setri going into daycare around the 20-21-month mark in January when Mum goes home than I would have when he was around 11 months when I went back to work. Setri LOVES his Grandma (Mam-ma). He loves to throw open her door in the morning and shout 'Hey!' (Part of his 'I'm being naughty' game where we are supposed to say "Hey! Whatareyoudoing?!"), and 'No-no-no' in the naughtiest tone of voice he can muster. He also says 'Awah. No no no' when he spies a bubbler/drinking fountain, as Mum is always trying to keep him away from those (particularly the ones with dog water dishes attached) when she takes him to the park! Setri saves his cheekiest grins for his Grandma. She is really the only family member he knows and loves apart from Gam and I (although he seems to have this instinctive love for my cousin Natalie even though he's only met her 4 times, I can't say she reciprocates in the head-over-heels way that a first-time Grandma does). It's thanks to Mum's presence here that Dad visits so often, and Setri has finally started treating him like someone he knows instead of an almost-stranger.

We watched Funniest Home Videos tonight, something we usually despise for its content of old people being injured and parents thinking it's funny to film their child/ren in situations that actually require a parent's intervention for the child's wellbeing and/or safety. Despite Setri getting some joy out of seeing a seal and some dolphins (episode was filmed at Seaworld), and us getting a laugh out of Setri saying 'Loof loof!' To a barking dog on the screen, we wound up having to change the channel because he found it distressing to see people falling down and hurting themselves. Even after I explained that people who do stupid things kind of deserve it, the sweet little soul.


Sent via BlackBerry® from Telstra