narrating kayoz

When will I learn?

It amazes me that after 5.5 years of parenting, I am still regularly surprised by how little you can get done (and how slow it is) when you have kids around - especially of the smaller variety.

More medical dramas

This just in: Chris is waiting for an ambulance after injuring his back at hapkido training. This is why I wish he would do pilates instead of hapkido!  Not the same thing at all, I do realise, but then that's the point isn't it?

Liam had his first stitches today

He was climbing up onto a brick wall where he usually sits to have morning tea after swimming, and I guess he slipped and hit his chin - hard. I was on my way to pick them all up (Chris, Liam and Mikaela) supposedly to be dropped home so I could work while they went shopping. But as it turned out we all went to the medical centre instead. He got two stitches, which were fine, but the two injections of anaesthetic beforehand were nasty.

Funny little aside: I was holding his hand and watching the procedure and almost fainted (during the stitches though, not the nasty needles)! That has never happened to me before - I've fainted, but from my own issues (eg after giving birth and losing all that blood), not from watching someone else's. It was a little embarrassing really, but I'm putting it down to low blood pressure or anaemia or something, which I was going to see my GP about this week anyway, since I've been getting head spins almost every time I stand up recently, even just from sitting.

Luckily I had the experience of fainting in the shower after Kaely's birth (can't remember if I ever got around to blogging that), when I kept trying to put the shower head back on the wall before sitting down, and suddenly found myself waking up on the floor. So this time after a minute or so of thinking it would go away I knew it wouldn't and squatted down on the floor till the threat passed.

As for Liam, he was in tears by the second needle, and I could tell he was then feeling really freaked out and scared that the stitches would be just as bad. But they were okay (if not pleasant) and he has maintained all day since then that it doesn't hurt at all. He split his chin in almost the same place when he was one year old (I wasn't there that time either!), so he's going to have parallel scars!

Mikaela at fifteen (and a half) months

Well, while Liam has hit five and a half - another "tantrum age" - Mikaela has hit fifteen months. Not that she needed to get there to discover tantrums, she discovered those the day after her six-month birthday. But according to Gesell, Ilg and Ames in The child from five to ten (in their quick run down of the first four years), fifteen months is the beginning of a move away from harmony and equalibrium,* and that does seem to be true for Mikaela. "This is the dart and dash  and fling age" they say, "The give-and-take of to-and-fro rapport is superceded by one-way behavior."

I remember when Liam was about eighteen months old, thinking that the so-called terrible twos had hit early. He never was a tantrum thrower, but I think that was around the time that he really started to develop his will. I'd say Mikaela started that a year or so earlier, but at the same time, she was pretty easy going in most ways.

For instance, previously she would stand up sometimes in the high chair or bath, but when we said "Sit down please Mikaela," she would sit immediately. Actually sometimes I'd think she was just standing up in order to have the pleasure of our approval when she sat down again. Now, she's waaay over wanting approval. Now, she just wants to stand, or better yet, climb out! These days she clearly wants to be a Big Girl. She desperately wants to sit on a grown up chair for meals, which she is way to small to do (must get ourselves a booster seat), whereas Liam stayed in the highchair until he could switch straight to a big chair. I can imagine it won't be long before she decides she wants to sleep in a real bed too, not the cot (though I don't look forward to that day - we'll have to rearrange everything all over again).

Of course, for Mikaela fifteen months really is the age when she became a toddler. She started to walk all the time at around fifteen months and one week. And with walking has come a new independent streak accompanied, typically I suppose, by a new clinginess and separation anxiety. With dreadfully bad timing Chris has taken the last two weeks off work, so just after Mikaela started to walk I spent four days in a row shut away in the shed (the massage room), writing. Not full days, but from her perspective I think it was having four days in a row where she had to say goodbye to me in the morning that mattered, rather than the total amount of time I was absent. So I've had a confused toddler since then, who can't decide whether she wants to run away and do her own thing or cling to me like never before.

I wouldn't like to suggest that she is all willfulness and disagreement though. She is a delightful little thing actually. She has a great sense of humour. She still likes to play "where's Mikeala" (aka Peekaboo), except now instead of putting a serviette (or whatever) over her face, she just covers her eyes with her hands, often peaking through her fingers with one eye. It's awfully cute.

She's really getting into routines too. Liam's after dinner routine is to brush his teeth, go to the loo, then go to bed. Usually I sit with him for a while and tell him (or sometimes read him) a story. Then Chris brings Kaely in to say good night and I take her off to bed. We've been a bit haphazard about brushing Kaely's teeth until recently (mostly 'cause she still barely has any!), but lately I've been cleaning hers the same time Liam cleans his, usually while singing the tooth brushing song.** So the past few days when Mikaela's decided she's had enough of dinnertime conversation she hops down (by the end of dinner she's usually sitting on my lap) and rushes down to the bathroom. Often well before the rest of us are ready. And after teeth cleaning, she zips down to Liam's bedroom, where she wants to get up on the bed to play.

A few other basic baby book facts for this age:

• She's not really talking, though some people believe her to say mama, daddy, ball, boobee (blue berry), and cat (or possibly Thea - who can tell?). She jargon's a lot though, it's very cute. Oh, and she definitely has 'uh oh' down as well, and 'yum yum'.
• She does however use her own sign language to good effect. The only sign we tried to teach her that has stuck is the one for milk (we just use one hand and only use it to mean "mummy-milk"), but she uses other hand signs, notably pointing at the chair or bed (standing next to it and poking her finger down onto it) when she wants to be lifted up.
• If she wants to go outside she knows she has to put her hat on, and where it's kept. She's less good about getting her shoes or jacket on, but if you tell her she needs them first she's usually patient about getting them on (if you just stop her from going out without indicating you'll let her in a minute she usually screams blue murder).
• She's got 8 teeth: 6 incisors (four at the top, two at the bottom) and two molars. I think the two molars on the other side are on their way through, which may also be contributing to the clinginess. I thought the molars were two-year-old ones when they first came through, but I don't think they can be. Still no sign of the other incisors or eye teeth.
• She's becoming a typically picky toddler eater. We mostly don't prepare any special meals for her (and haven't for months and months), just modify whatever we're having as necessary. And she's not too picky really, but she doesn't seem to eat nearly as much as she did a few months ago, nor as widely.
• We had our first supermarket tantrum a few weeks ago, when I wouldn't let her smash up a packet of rice crackers. She was in the trolley so she couldn't throw herself on the ground, but she screamed up and down the aisles, tipping herself as far back in her seat as she could and going bright red. People stared. It was quite funny to see their reactions. Eventually Liam distracted her with a pack of pegs in a lovely crinkly bag, but when she saw the rice crackers again at the checkout the screaming started again.
• She has just started nursing like a toddler - wanting to duck in for a quick snack sometimes several times in an hour (I suspect this is related to the walking/independence/separation anxiety thing), and waving the other hand around everywhere, which is extremely annoying when I am trying to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night.
• Lately her sleep is pretty good, including one night recently when she went from 8pm till 5:45am without waking. Mostly she still wakes up once or twice a night, though often not between say 1am and 6am (maybe half the time). But I've resigned myself to the fact that her sleep will get better and worse many times (worse with every tooth, cold or other disturbance) before it settles into childlike sleep instead of baby-like sleep.
• She is still really really cute, at least in my eyes.

Things Mikaela loves:

• being outside
• climbing up and down stairs
• climbing in general
• toy cars, and anything else with wheels
• real cars (so long as you don't actually want to strap her in, though mostly she's pretty good about that these days too)
• Liam.

________

*According to their theory of child development early childhood consists of a spiral which moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back again. So as they say of the five and a half year old in The Child from One to Six, "Unfortunately, any smooth stage of behavior, like the one seen at 5, must break up before the child can reach a higher, more mature state of equilibrium."

** You know the one "When you wake up in the morning it's a quarter to one/and you want to have a bit of fun/you brush your teeth ch ch ch ch, ch ch, ch ch ch/you brush your teeth ch ch..." etc.

Liam at five-and-a-half.

Just lately there seems to have been an increase in less than pleasant – or happy – behaviour in my usually sunny boy.

I read in the Nurture by Nature book that ENTPs are not terribly wedded either to rules or to ‘being good’. Hmm, yes, that sounds like my child. But not being a rule follower or a do gooder hasn’t stopped him from being happy – he didn’t ever go through the terrible twos in the sense of becoming a tantrum thrower, and he’s always been a basically joyful kid whose experience of the world, I would say, was more characterised by likes than dislikes.

Lately, however, things seem to have changed. For instance, he’s developed some quite good tantrum throwing techniques. He screams (sounds like he must really be hurting his throat), threatens, and grabs – seems as though he’d really like to inflict pain, but thankfully generally stops short of actually doing it. This behaviour is all directed at me or Chris, not at his friends or at Mikaela, I’m relieved to be able to add. And this can all be triggered by the tiniest of things – Chris moves a chair Liam’s using as part of his ‘spaceship’, which was placed in such as way as to create a hazard to Mikaela, or I insist that yes he really must clean his teeth before we will leave the house.

So, I re-borrowed the Gesell, Ilg and Ames books from the library (The Child from One to Six and The Child from Five to Ten) to see what they have to say about five-and-a-half year olds. I remember from my reading at four-and-a-half that at around five children are supposed to become good natured and aiming to please (ha!), but what about six months later?

Here’s some of what they have to say:

At 5 Mother was the center of the young person’s world. At 6 he is the center of his own world. He wants to be first, to be loved best, to have the most of everything. And especially to have his own way! “Brash,” “combative” are words that mothers often use in describing him (or her). [Yes, I would say those are some good words for him.]

Five-and-a-half is all to characteristically hesitant, dawdling, indecisive—or, at the opposite pole, overdemanding and explosive. Behaviour is, discouragingly, often characterised by the opposite extremes we saw earlier at 2½ years of age; that is, the child may be extremely shy and then the next minute vey bold, extremely affectionate and then almost antagonistic. And when he does not have the courage to defy you outright, he dawdles—which amounts to the same thing. Whatever you want him to do very often does not get done.

Emotionally the child of this age my seem to be in an almost constant state of tension, though fortunately most are calmer at school than at home. Emotionally the child finds it hard to conclude an explosion or sulk or bust of tears. This may be the beginnings once again of a tantrum age.

Physically too we see signs of a breakup… [R]ather placid five has now reached a point where there is an increase of tensional outlets—many hand-to-mouth gestures; chewing, biting or tapping a pencil; chewing at a collar or any other piece of loose clothing. [Good time to finally give up the dummy then. Not!]

…

Unfortunately, any smooth stage of behavior, like the one seen at 5, must break up before the child can reach a higher, more mature state of equilibrium. Thus the typical 6-year-old resembles a 5½ year old at his worst. But that higher and more mature stage does come in most children somewhere around 6½ years of age.

Liam also seems to be going through a phase of wanting to be the same as his friends. He had his friend Bradley over the other night (B’s first ever sleepover, and Liam’s first one with a friend here –he’s spent two nights at B’s house – there’s another blog post I should write), and B said he didn’t like salad, so Liam didn’t like it either (though since then he’s told me that he does really). But later in the same meal he asked B if he liked raw capsicum (B didn’t), and then asserted that he loves it.

So he maintains the odd preference of his own despite his friends. Another example: We went to Floriade with a school friend, Art,* and some other friends just recently, and almost as soon as we arrived I realised my mistake. Until now he’s been a fan of flowers. Last year he enjoyed looking at and naming the different flowers. This year, encouraged by his friend, they were all stupid. But then he tells me that Art and another school friend, Jake don’t like Grape Hyacinths (I wonder if they even know what they are?). But Liam still likes them.

He’s picked up some other charming habits from his (slightly older and one year of schooling wiser) friends from kindy too. He hates this and hates that. The colour purple (up to now his favourite colour) is stupid, because it’s just dark blue, a statement made by his friend, Art, from which Liam cannot now be swayed by reason or demonstration. The same friend has taught him various other ridiculous or downright irritating fictions which he insists on as truth. I can’t tell whether this is also an age development thing, or simply a result of being in school. One particularly irritating change is that in the past few weeks he’s decided he doesn’t like ‘girls’ stuff’. He doesn’t really know what girls’ stuff is yet (eg he hasn’t cottoned on to the pink is for girls, blue is for boys theory), but he knows girls’ stuff is not for him. At school he plays with girls and boys – his core group of friends seems to be three of each (including him), but it’s the boys he talks about mostly.

This avoidance of girls’ stuff makes me sad, because we tried really hard to avoid having him exposed to the idea that things can be gendered this way for as long as possible. Some of his friends started discriminating this way up to a couple of years ago. Their parents said it was because of wanting to differentiate from their younger sisters or brothers, but notably it was only in kids who went to early preschools or child care who I noticed it in.

He also doesn’t like being mistaken for a girl. He recently refused to wear one of his hates because he says it’s a girls hat (actually it’s a completely gender neutral style in dark blue). Yet he wants to keep his hair long (it’s quite long now), even though he knows that it often makes people think he’s a girl. Then again, two of his (male) friends from school have now decided to grow their hair, and of course Chris has long hair. So I’m not sure if it’s really being mistaken as a girl that bothers him, or if he just wants to avoid being seen doing/wearing unacceptably girly things (which clearly long hair is not).

I can really see in Liam the thing about moving from having his mother at the centre of his world to having himself there. I'm starting to suspect a lot of his current behaviour and mood difficulties are related to wanting to assert more of his independence while not being quite ready to make such a big break from me. He tells me he loves me multiple times a day, which is not new, but lately he often says it as "I love my Mum" rather than "I love you Mummy". (He's switching from Mummy and Daddy to Mum and Dad, and actually commented yesterday that as people get older they tend to do that.) He's also started competing a little more with Mikaela for attention. He wants me to pick him up, or he wants to sit on my lap, when she's already there. Mind you, she's started doing the same thing (including actually trying to push Liam off my lap) so he could be reacting to her recent clinginess as well as to his own stuff.

On the other hand he still gets along really well with Mikaela most of the time, and I am still just so happy with this age gap. He looks after her, entertains and is entertained by her. For her part she thinks he is just the ant's pants.** She loves him to bits.

Other 'baby book' type notes about Liam lately:

• He's got his first loose tooth (a lower incisor)
• He's had barely any trouble in giving up his dummy (the first three nights he said he really thought we would have to buy him a new one, though by the third night he was a bit half hearted about it. Since then he's appeared to barely remember it.)
• He still loves loves loves school. He's just had two weeks of holidays, and he was very excited to go back on Tuesday.
• He had his first ever sleepover at someone else's house (his friend Bradley's) the night before Mikaela's first birthday/blessing party. Which went swimmingly. This is the friend who I used to look after one day a week, and who's mother used to look after Liam another day each week, so they know each other very well. Then Bradley had his first ever sleepover here last Thursday night, which also went perfectly. Unless you count the boys getting up at 5:15am as a problem of course (they were pretty quiet though, and didn't wake Mikaela, which is always my main concern at that time of day).
• He can now swim by himself in deep water (not unsupervised, but he can jump in an swim across the pool). I use the term swim somewhat loosely here - I just took him to several swimming classes in a school holiday intensive, and watching him trying to breath and swim at the same time (breath-arm bubble-arm they call it) had me almost in stiches one day. Chris reckons they've started him on it too early and he mostly needs to consolidate kicking and stuff. But the point is he can jump into the deep end and stay afloat. That's pretty cool I think, and not something I could do at five.
• All in all he is still a gorgeous, charming, engaging kid, in my humble opinion. But I'm still looking forward to the next period of equilibrium!

__________

*As always, I’m using pseudonyms for his friends.
** Where on earth does that phrase come from?

Child, halt thy consumption

Teaching Liam about consumerism is tricky, when I have such pronounced consumerist tendencies myself. But I am trying to do it all the same - trying to teach him to question consumer culture; to first Reduce, then Reuse and finally Recycle.

In my favour are the facts that I am a cheapskate (and with good reason, given our finances), and that I have a bit of a depression mentality. So I try to avoid spending money anyway, and I hate to throw anything out.

Against me is the fact that I am an emotional shopper. When I’ve had a bad day, I don’t just want to eat chocolate, I want to buy myself chocolate or some other treat. Also I like buying things. That seems to contradict the cheapskate statement I know, but I like buying certain kinds of things, especially if I think they are bargains. It’s hard to define better than that, but when I am in certain kinds of stores, newsagents, hardware stores, Big W, I have this urge to purchase something, anything. Bunnings especially because the options are so many – a sample pot of paint to try on the bathroom wall, a bag of cow poo to dig into the garden, a punnet of seedlings perhaps… You get the picture.

But I am trying to improve myself, and I am trying to help Liam be aware of the impacts of our consumption.

This is my Blog Action Day post, because I believe  everyday consumerism is a major threat to the environment.

So what am I doing with Liam? Well, first trying to curb my own consumerist ways.

Aside from that I do the obvious things like say No almost every time he asks me to buy him something; I don’t let him watch any commercial TV (which we wouldn’t do anyway, for a host of reasons); and I try to avoid taking him into toy shops and the like, although with even the supermarkets already in full Christmas mode with huge toy displays everywhere, that last one is a little tricky.

Luckily Liam doesn’t tend to ask for stuff he sees in shops all that much – not the big things anyway. I suspect that’s because we have always said no. Things that either we, or as often as not a certain grandfather, have bought before (certain food items in our case, rubber balls and other inexpensive junk in his grandfather’s) he does ask for, although he’s mostly learned to not bother asking me for the junk. I do let him buy a 50c item from St Vinnie’s quite often, which I explain is because it’s second hand, so no new resources have gone into making it for him. I’m not sure if he takes that in though.

I also do talk to him about the environment and the Reduce/Reuse/Recycle slogan. We talk about saving resources like water and trees, and we’ve talked about the importance of habitat preservation (though not in those terms). He understands a bit about the drought and water restrictions and a little less about global warming, although he still wastes a lot of water. This may not seem that connected to consumerism, but water use, power use – it’s all consumption.

Recently we bought a second hand freezer, and it took us a few months of haphazard looking to find one we were happy with, so again, I explained to Liam that we really wanted to get a second hand one so there wouldn’t be any new resources (electricity is the thing he mainly understands) used to make it for us.

All in all I’m not sure how successful I have so far been in avoiding inducting Liam into the rampant consumerism of our culture, but I am trying. The two most important things I think I can do are to bring up the impact we have on the environment in little ways often, and to lead by example. I’m better at the first than the second, but I’m getting there.

One other thing I will do is give him Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest, when he’s old enough to cope with it. That book had quite an impact on me (though it certainly didn’t do anything good for my packrat habit, unless you count never throwing anything away as a good thing!).

Do you have any other suggestions for this parenting project?

50 Quick, Painless Ways You Can Help the Environment Today

There are some things here I hadn't thought of: The Action Blog - 50 Quick, Painless Ways You Can Help the Environment Today.

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day, so I'm off to draft my post.

Hope and realism

In the first chapter of Linda L. Layne's Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America, entitled 'The miscarriage years' Layne writes of her second pregnancy

I am surprised now, and touched, to see that at that point, even though I was certainly by then aware and vigilant against the possibility of loss, that I could still embrace a pregnancy with such innocence and hope. (p. 5 in the Amazon online reader - I can't get this in the library, damn it!)

Even though I'm reading this for uni, I am immediately drawn to thinking about my own situation and am reminded of hopeful attitude to trying for another baby next year. I would love to leave another three-four year gap between my next two kids, but given that I will be 36 this year and Chris is already 39, and given that it took 17 cycles and one miscarriage before we conceived Mikaela, we don't want to leave it too long. But somehow I still assume that it will all be okay; next time we'll be 'normal and conceive within 6 months, or at least within a year, and no more miscarriages either.

This despite the fact that it will be four years since the last time we started trying to conceive. My expectation suddenly seems almost presumptuous.

Writing in five lines.

Frustration.

A bad first line.

Thank god for delete.

Too much pressure.

Writing sux.

Independence

As our oldest child has given up his dummy, and has his first wiggly tooth, so our baby is growing up.

Two weeks ago I was telling people she seemed to have given up walking. She'd taken a record of nine steps, though mostly stuck to two or three, and then decided she'd done that trick, but crawling was faster.

A few days after I first said that, she started walking again, and had clearly decided to put me in my place. Less than two weeks later, she is walking everywhere. Sure she still falls over a lot (she has that cute little drunken sailor walk going on), but mostly she just gets back up again and keeps going. Occasionally she gets down to crawl (say, right through our screen door) and then keeps going, but mostly it's not long before she's up on two feet again.

She's the cutest thing imaginable, but she's not really a baby any more. Thank god I think I'm having another one, or I may just have to shed a few tears over my two not-babies. But I'm right proud as well.

Sunday freewrite (aka Liam's Dummy Party)

I’m not beginning today until 1:40pm, because this morning we had a party for Liam (more on that later), and then of course came the faffing around, making and eating lunch, nursing Kaely, realizing Kaely was falling asleep and waking her up to actually put her to bed… Getting ready to come out to the massage room (making a thermos of water, bringing out all the books and so on that I took in after last weekend), coming out, checking email, checking library book due dates, etc etc.

So here I am, now at 1:42, finally settling down to do some writing, and realizing that damn it, we still haven’t gotten a computer desk out here and this desk is just too high. Sometimes I don’t notice it much till the end of the day when I notice my neck is aching or something. Other times (like now) it seems to make the very act of typing laborious.

However, enough of that.

Last Monday while Liam was busy chomping on a quesadilla, he mentioned that his tooth was hurting when he bit down. I took a look and gave it a wiggle, and sure enough he has his first loose tooth (one of the bottom incisors – the right most one I think).

This led to a conversation I’d been meaning to have with his father for a while, but in the event had to have directly with Liam.

“You know,” I said, “That means your permanent teeth will start to come in soon, and before that happens, you’re going to have to stop using the dummy.”

Should I take a step back to admit that yes, at five years old, Liam has still had a dummy (pacifier) every night, and often for naps or ‘rests’ during the day? It’s something I’ve been feeling ambivalent about for quite a while, but at the same time I haven’t wanted to unnecessarily wrest something away from him that obviously gives him a great deal of comfort. The experts are divided on whether it is a problem or not, although all the dentists and orthodontists I found discussing it online agreed that it becomes a problem after the age of about four, I assume because they can start to get their permanent teeth any time after that.

Some time in late 2006, we bought him a new dummy but told him it would be the last one. Almost as soon as we did I started to question it. Should we force him to give it up if he’s not ready? Or should we just let it go until he naturally decides to get rid of it? Is the former going to unnecessarily traumatise him, or the latter lead to ridicule from his peers?

Anyway, long story short, nearly twelve months later, this past Monday, he still has a dummy. It’s cracked and soggy looking and frankly revolting, and he’s clearly been aware that the end might be nigh for it. He’s said a couple of times lately that we are just “going to have to” buy him a new one. I’ve been deliberately non-committal, intending to talk to Chris about what our plan should be, but not getting around to it. But then he got a loose tooth, and I confirmed it – the end is nigh.

“Well,” he began, in reply to my revelation about the downside of permanent teeth, “Okay. I think I’ll have it for two more nights and then give it up.”

I was astounded, but I think I hid it well.

“Okay,” I said. “So that’s Monday night and Tuesday night, and then Wednesday, that’s it.”

“Actually, I think five nights.”

Okay, here we go, I thought, and after five nights, another five? But I went along with him, ticking off five nights on my fingers (tonight, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night).

Once during the week I mentioned it, and asked should we cut it up, or just throw it in the bin.

“No, remember we were going to wrap it up for my twenty-first birthday?”

“Oh, yeah, so we were,” I said, wracking my brains to think when we had that conversation. A few days later I got another hint.

“Remember, in the made up story he wrapped up other things that he didn’t use anymore too.”

“Oh, did he make a time capsule out of them?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to do that – put some other things in as well?”

“No.”

Okay then, now that I think about it I do vaguely remember telling him a story about someone putting their dummy in a time capsule. I hoped it would prompt him to begin thinking about getting rid of it. Huh. I didn’t think that had had any effect.

Friday night, the last night, I brought it up at dinner.

“Are you sure you don’t want to have some sort of celebration?” I asked.

Oh, actually yes, he did. He wanted a party, with his best friend, a cake – no, a Monster Truck Cake – and lollies, and lolly bags. Oh, and presents. For him. A people-giving-him-presents sort of a party. Heh. And maybe some more friends.

Well, Saturday our schedule was already full, but Sunday morning we had free. So I said okay, but maybe without the presents. Or monster trucks.

I called up my friend and asked if I could borrow two of her children forSunday morning. We had an apple-spice loaf cake (no monster trucks in sight, but he didn’t comment), a speech, a last minute addition of a “bowl, like at Kaely’s blessing” (floating candles with flowers and feathers, and with quartz stones and blue glass in the bottom). We also gave him a little congratulations present, just from us. And most importantly, we wrapped his dummy up and put it away. He wanted me to do it, but he helped with the sticky tape.

The thing that amazed me was that from the first moment he decided to be rid of it, he has not seemed to have a moment’s doubt. Yet up until this week (and actually, including this week), he would ask for his dummy whenever he hurt himself or got upset, and frankly would like to have it the rest of the time too. Mostly we would say no to these requests, because our theoretical rule was it’s only for bed time, especially as it has gotten more and more dilapidated. But despite this apparent dummy dependence, once he decided to get rid of it, he stuck to the decision without complaint, and seemed totally happy to wrap it up this morning.

Hopefully, that will be the end of it. Of course, bed time is still to come.