Peas

I like a little boy who likes his food.
This week, he's been eating well. On Wednesday he had a nice nourishing lunch of home made risotto followed by fromage frais and a little bit of home made cake. As he was finishing the latter (open mouth wide, cake on palm of hand, slap it in there) I popped upstairs to do a few important things like tidy up and change the sheet on his cot which was getting a few dribble stains on it.
I arrived back downstairs to find a very sated little boy, belly pushed out and generally leaning back in the chair like one very exhausted. He even seemed to be breathing quite heavily and I was really rather temped to offer him a "waffer theen mint", but decided not to as I didn't want to risk an explosive side effect.
Today we had a garden centre lunch and Joseph had "chicken boulders and chips" which to you and I would be nuggets, but I guess to a small child they must look more like boulders. He began by picking up the peas one at a time in his usual fashion and when the food had cooled to a more palatable temperature for him he began to make good progress with the chips. For the boulders he needed a little help as he just couldn't seem to get the idea of picking them up and biting off a small piece. They wouldn't go in whole and it upset him. Still, he ate nearly all of it in the end which impressed me as he's often not so keen on chicken breast meat.
It would seem that little old ladies like a boy who likes his food too. My son is already turning into something of a flirt, he's got sweethearts of all ages. The old ladies love him and we were interrupted in our meal twice by comments about how good he was and how handsome he was. I know how handsome my son is and I'm very proud but here's the odd thing: - when the old ladies comment they hardly ever talk to me! More often than not they just address Joseph as if I'm not even there (ooh, you are a good boy aren't you, yes you are!) and I'm left sitting there with a piece of chicken boulder on a fork wondering whether I'm meant to join in the conversation or not.
Towards the end of the meal Joseph started throwing peas at one table of old ladies, but they didn't seem to notice. It's certainly not my idea of a chat up line.
In the end, he had to concede defeat. I had chosen a rather nice piece of cake for us to share, but it was a classic example of eyes being bigger than the head. We had to keep the cake hidden as it distracted him from his peas, throwing, eating or otherwise. I cut the cake into small pieces with the idea that for every small piece he ate, I'd have a bit. This was to stop me eating my share too quickly.
Like every small child, the cake on the plate is always more interesting that the bit you're squashing in your hand. The icing was eaten first, followed by the sponge, but by his third mouthful he was struggling, his mouth full of crumbs. It was spat out all in a lump, but that didn't stop him demanding more. In the end I realised that it was the icing he wanted as with the last piece he sucked the icing off the top and dropped the rest. It was more cake for me, then. This left him with nothing more to do than to pick a few discarded peas out of his bib and see just how far he could throw them.

BBQ

It would seem that, for the moment, we have a little bit of summer and we all know what that means.
Sun, sweatiness, sunburn and heat rash.
Well, that's what I usually end up with if I don't slap the factor 50+ on with a trowel. I end up looking like an Elizabethan all painted up with white lead, but it's better than lobster skin and the risk of melanoma.
Joseph doesn't seem to mind the general warmth at the moment. He's in an old pair of trousers that still fit well round the waist but are much too short in the leg. In the winter this lead to cold ankles but now he just looks like he's in three quarter length trousers. If I don't mention it then people will think that's what they're supposed to be.
Ooops.
It's also the season of barbecues which is always fun, but keeping Joseph away from the hot stuff is going to be tricky. I'd like to point out that when I do a barbecue there's no botulism burgers or salmonella sausages. It is possible to cook on them without carbon on the outside and blood still in the middle, as long as you actually know how to cope in a kitchen. My advice? If you don't regularly cook on the hob, then don't think you can suddenly produce wonders over the coals, one of the hardest methods of cooking good food. Still, when it comes to grilling, my favourite thing to do is to stuff a sardine with garlic butter, wrap it in tinfoil and put it on. Yummy!
Joseph doesn't like fish that much. He'll cope with the highly processed fingers with their crispy crumb coating (but not too crispy) and that's about all. I gave him a mouthful of mackerel once and he gave me a look that would freeze the sun, followed by a grimace and then followed by the fish.
He doesn't like sausages much either, which is going to put a bit of a crimp in the grilling season. Nothing like some chunky cumberlands sizzling away.... ahhh.
I tried to give him salad once but I think he only ate it by mistake. It was a nice cous-cous salad with some spiciness to make it interesting. He liked the spice and the cous-cous and the bacon and ate some lettuce because it had some of the former attached to it, but the second bite was very much refused. 
No, I fear he will always be holding out for the desert. It is a funny thing how he will behave like he is full up with main course, only to suddenly find some room for a bit of cake or a biscuit.

So, for this years barbecue season Joseph will be eating: -
Half a bun and some ice cream.

Wordsmith

I can say, with some degree of certainty that Josephs first word where I am pretty sure he knew what it meant as he was pointing to one at the time is: -

DOOR!

He was pointing to the front door when he said it. I smiled and said "Yes!" and clapped him. He then ran to my kitchen door and said "Door!" quite clearly and I again responded positively with clapping.
It was spoiled when he ran to the fish tank and said "door" which made me wonder, but he wasn't done yet. I told him calmly that it wasn't a door, it was a fish tank. He then ran to the front door again and repeated the process, with me giving encouragement. He returned to the fish tank, looked at it and said quite firmly "Ni do" which, if I understand baby-ese correctly, probably means "not a door".
This brings his total of understandable syllables up by one as we now have "Mummy" meaning sometimes me or sometimes "I need a hug" or just that he's heard someone else say it and he likes the word. "Daddy" which sometimes means Andy but more often "What's that?" and "No" which just means that he's heard me say it a lot and he likes to repeat it.

As for words he can understand but not say, the list is increasing rapidly. He knows feet, socks, shoes, head (sometimes), nose, wheel, kitty and cat, his own name, and probably several others that escape me for the moment. My favourite at the moment is "bee", courtesy of Granny reading him a storybook about a garden quite regularly. Whenever the bee appears she demonstrates by saying "Buzzzz!" and waving her finger around. Now if you say the word "bee" to Joseph he quite happily makes a noise halfway between a buzz and a raspberry and wiggles his index finger about in the air. Ironically, when we saw a real bee in Grannys garden, he was scared of it and not inclined to demonstrate its behaviour.
I'd take him out in our garden to get a little closer to nature, but for some reason our stupid cat (note the lack of capitals, she no longer occupies a place of monarch in our house) has decided that she will no longer do her sinful business in the flowerbed or under next doors hedge, but in the middle of the lawn. Boy, does it make hanging the washing out a voyage of stinky difficulty when you don't always know where it's safe to tread and I can't let Joseph run about out there, I don't want him to get toxoplasmosis. She, by the way, still can't stand him, even though he's getting really good at giving her treats.
Better finish up now, he's posting wooden bricks out of the letterbox, whatever must the neighbours think?

The Next Age of Baby

When a child is born, there is little to their personality beyond hunger and uncomfortable feelings in the bowels. For the first weeks of their lives you are doing little more than simply keeping them alive.
As they start to grow, they start to come out of their shell, if you'll forgive the rather poor analogy. They recognise faces, they start to smile and then laugh. They begin to move around under their own efforts and start to understand that there's a whole world of experience out there that goes beyond milk and nappies.
There is an age of enlightenment. The dawning realisation that for every action there is a consequence, everything that they do will impact on someone somewhere in a good or bad way depending on what it is they have just done. This, if you ask me, is the start of a conscience in a small child.
Joseph's not quite that far along yet. The age of enlightenment for him I fear is still some way away, although we are getting closer. No, Joseph is still very much a selfish little being, all his emotions are directed towards making himself feel better. It matters not to him what the consequences are, I doubt he is at all aware that there will ever be any. All he cares about is that there's something interesting going on in the kitchen and he wants to know what. The interesting activity was in fact me getting things in and out of the oven, a rather hot environment which we all know would have devastating consequences if a small child put himself in the wrong place. By the way he was howling every time I turned him round and escorted him from the kitchen the terrible consequences might have already happened.
By the way, I can't just shut the door on him any more. He stands outside and screams for a bit and then remembers that he knows how to open the door anyway.
Today was another step on the pathway towards self understanding. He knows what he wants know and generally speaking, wont stop till he gets it. This was evident with the kitchen routine and at dinner time when every spoonful I gave him was rapidly spat out. It was cous-cous and I felt as if I was under siege from some sort of human cannon using grape shot.
He wanted the spoon. As soon as he had the spoon he was happy. I did give a little assistance getting the food on the spoon and directing it, but the food was now being eaten and not orally machine gunned across the room. I decided that two spoons were better than one and fed him myself which was fine as long as he had his own spoon. Very little of the dinner made it into his mouth under his own direction, but I think it was the principle of the thing that mattered. Hey ho, now I can only give him foods that are safe for him to try and self feed with a spoon, no more tomato or carrot based foods for you young man.

Bang Bang

I'm sure it's normal for all little boys.
My son seems to have something of an obsession with acting out the part of a Christmas song character, namely the Little Drummer Boy. Oh, if he would only stick to the drum.
He has a little drum with two beaters and he does rather like bashing it and has done it some damage. He also has a rather tuneless xylophone on which it is really only possible to play atonal chromatic style music. I feel as if I should put the word music in that sentence in inverted commas.
To start with he will sit and play on these instruments, but he sees no reason to stop there. Why just hit the drum when you can hit the floor, the sofa, a book, the Cat and Mummy's knee? Although Mummy doesn't go bang, she goes ouch.
The fish tank makes quite a good noise when hit, but this also results in the pictus catfish being disturbed from their algae festooned depths, rising quickly in panic and waving their long whiskers in shaking disapproval. There's also a chance he might break the glass and then I'd have to scrape green water, bits of plant, various species of tropical fish and gravel off the carpet. Andy would probably be a bit cross too, what with it being his fish tank.
My knees (and the rest of me, for that matter) and the fish tank are off limits. Still, given the reasoning power of a small child, just because he's been told off for hitting things with a beater doesn't necessarily mean he can't hit it with something else. Now, I don't mind being gently thumped with a small stuffed owl or even a large stuffed tiger for that matter. I really do object to being hit with a large wooden spoon, sneakily stolen from the dishwasher. Many things were tested with that spoon and there was even an experiment to see if it was edible, after all many nice things are found on the end of spoons. It wasn't edible, but the experiment was repeated a few times just to make sure.
Today it's more of a duplo day, which is nice. It's certainly quieter.

My Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday. I'm of an age now that when the day rolls around I'm a little bit less keen to advertise the fact and I have no ideas in my head at all about what I want for presents.
Joseph gave me a card and I suspect he had a little help in writing his name, but there was a drawing in it that was clearly all his own work, created when Andy turned his back and left Joseph with the pen for a moment. All right, it was more of a scribble, but it was still sweet.
I went out for a meal with my Mum. Yes, if there's one thing I'm sure to like it's going to a place that does good steak. I like mine rare, the way the French do it. I can't see the point of cooking it to the point there's no juice in it.
Joseph had cheesy omelette, French fries and peas and sweetcorn. To be honest I was expecting him to struggle, but he liked the omelette, he liked it a lot. He liked the chips too, but that's hardly a surprise. If he was presented with chips and he didn't want them then I'd start to wonder if he was feeling a little unwell. He did his usual thing with the peas and ate most of them one at a time. In the end I helped by shovelling them in on a spoon which speeds things up but means he chews them less. I guess I'll be seeing them again soon!
We had chocolate cake for pudding which was very gooey in the middle and Joseph had chocolate ice cream which he absolutely loved. It dribbled down his chin and gave him a chocolatey goatee beard and when I fed him some of the white chocolate ice cream some of that dribbled, making the beard look a bit more greying and middle aged.
After that I had to make use of the facilities for babies as Joseph had produced something rather explosive and smelly for me to deal with.
We went shopping and I bought a t-shirt for Joseph that read "I'm cute, my Mummy is cute and my Daddy is lucky". I would like to point out that I had seen this t-shirt before and when I had told Andy about it he had seemed sad that I had not got it.
In the evening Andy set to and would have created me a feast had I not still been full from lunch. He ate chilli-con-carne and I had a taste. Then, he made my birthday cake!
It was a chocolate layer sponge. I know, it's a lot of chocolate in one day but it was my birthday and I like chocolate cake. It had thick buttercream icing with lots of chocolate melted into it. Absolutely yummy. Alas for Joseph, he'd gone to bed by the time the icing was done and he didn't get any. Still, I think he'd had enough at lunch.

Rhinovirus

Oh joy, he has a cold again. We've had intermittent sleep thanks to him waking up quite a lot to have a little whinge. All he ever wanted was his dummy back or a quick stroke on the cheek, but disrupted sleep still leaves you with the feeling like you've been turned inside out and scrubbed with sandpaper. Andy made a comment on his way out that I think I'm going to get printed on a T-shirt - "He's a somnocidal maniac."
So, I now have the prospect of days on end of snottiness and desperately hoping I don't catch it. It's my birthday this week and I have booked the day off work and everything. It would really spoil it if I had to spend the day feeling ill. As for where he's caught it from, I have no idea. He's not gone anywhere I haven't and he's not met anyone I haven't, unless one of the children in the Sunday creche were secretly snotty. On the other hand I did spend yesterday feeling like my nose was itchy and sneezy, so maybe I have had it, but very lightly. Please!
Poor little chap, his canine teeth are on the move so he's already a bit uncomfortable and the dribble is back. The points of the top two are through, but they're moving very slowly and you can see two massive triangles in his gums where the bottom two are on the move. Give it a few weeks and my son will have a full toothsome smile!
The trouble is, we've got teething dribble, snot and extra dribbling because his nose is blocked. Should I perhaps just dress him in plastic for the whole day to help prevent the rash on his chin coming back or should I just sit back and accept the oncoming storm of liquid and clean it up later?
Despite being under the weather he's still climbing all over things. He seems to have got himself to the point of no return at the moment, so I'll sign off for now.