So, yesterday when Jeyanth got up from his nap we noticed a yellow discharge in his eye, and a quick trip to the doctor confirmed that he has conjunctivitis - probably viral.
The worst part of this is that the treatment is an eye lotion that needs to be smeared under his lower eyelid - and Jeyanth is not keen on this. Not keen at all. I don't know if you have any idea how hard it is to get something into the eye of a toddler who doesn't want it there, and who has screwed his face up and is howling with betrayal at the fact that you are trying to do this to him.
We only have a little tube of the ointment, and at the rate it ends up on his face, our faces, his hands, everyone's clothes, I don't know if it is going to last the five days. For that matter, I don't know if I'm going to last the five days...
Yesterday Jeyanth went out for his first decent walk - all the way up the cul-de-sac to the little park at the end. In fact, he walked (or walked and crawled) about 100m of it before the desire to eat twigs got the better of him and he finished the trip in his stroller.
Video (warning - 15MB - for the very keen only!)
Jeyanth has obviously read all the books on toddlers.
Over the last couple of weeks, our historically laid-back, undemanding boy, has developed some extremely clingy behaviour. Seperation anxiety peaks between 12 and 15 months, say all the books. So we're 13 months and counting.
Thankfully, the high-maintenance behaviour is intermitten, with good periods of perfectly normal playing on his own etc. However, when he's in the mood, Jeyanth either requires a parent to pick him up and carry him around, while he disconsolately points in random directions, or to sit down within cm's of him, and give him completely undivided attention. In the latter state, picking up a book or even looking away, can bring about howls and tears.
Stuart very aptly described this as the 'Clownfish Behaviour'; reflecting Jeyanth's reluctance to swim out of the tentacles of the parental anemone.
This is particularly trying on the days he goes to playschool. Last week, for the first time since he started, the poor girls at CSIROCARE had to call me and ask me to come around, coz he'd been so miserable. He of course turned into a beaming bucket of good-cheer the moment I showed up.
The behaviour can be really frustrating, but it's hard to be annoyed when he is so obviously and genuinely distressed. On the whole, this is pretty tough all round, but we are praying its a passing phase.
I don't know if it's something I just haven't noticed before, but today for the first time I noticed Jeyanth pretending to do something; he had pulled a bowl and a spoon out of his cupboard (memo to us: time to get cupboard locks for all the cupboards, not just the ones with cleaning fluids) and was putting the spoon first into the bowl and then into his mouth as if eating the contents.
So I sat down with him, with another spoon, and started to join in, whereupon Jeyanth stopped what he was doing and started to 'feed' me with his spoon. Apparently Daddy acting like Jeyanth does (holding the spoon in my mouth and waggling it up and down ) is hilariously funny...
Sorry, no video :)
In the last couple of days, Jeyanth has started to discover the fascinating alternative to knocking down - building. In the past 24 hours he has built towers (either of blocks, or of giant lego) 3, 4 and even 5 bricks tall, and has realised that the secret is not banging the new block onto the tower as hard as he can, but placing it carefully and gently.
Anyway, he is so excited about the possibilities that he is now trying to build towers out of anything he can lay his hands on. In the process I think he has also started to learn that things with pointy tops do not make a stable base upon which to place another toy.
Now we just need him to extend the concept of gently to the way he treats people. He's developed a naughty habit of whacking people at the moment...
Jeyanth has been able to get a spoon into his mouth, if placed in his hand, for a while now. Yesterday we let him have the (almost empty) yoghurt bowl and spoon, and videoed the result...
Video (warning - 7.5MB)
He isn't very good at it yet, but Jeyanth can now walk. The furthest he has managed is about two meters. I've maanged to catch a short trip on video here (1.6MB).
Being stable(ish) in two feet has also led Jeyanth into a great new game - picking up. He's very pleased with his ability to bend down and pick something up off the ground at his feet - so pleased, indeed, that he will pick it up and then drop it, and then pick it up, and then drop it, and then....
Ammamma and I were talking, and we realised that Jeyanth had pulled himself up on the dining table, had turned around to face us and was swaying forwards as he has done before, as if trying to take a step. Except that this time he did it.
With a bit of encouragement he was coaxed into repeating his acheivement a couple of times (only one step each time) before getting bored and wanting to go and play a proper game.
Jeyanth has all sorts of great toys, but, as I think we've mentioned, amongst the best are a set of stacking cups that we got from Ikea (for about A$5, or two pounds).
They are amazingly versatile - you can nest them inside each other, stack them (either in the same orientation as each other or 'mouth to mouth' if you follow), bang them together, throw them around and chase them, put other things into them, put them onto pointy things (like parental fingers) and spin them around - the options are almost endless.
One of Jeyanth's favourite games at present is for Amma or Daddy to put the stack of nested cups face down, and then take the biggest cup off the top and put it next to the others. J will then proceed, with a little help (holding the tower stable so it doesn't get accidently knocked over), to take each of the other five cups in turn and stack it on top of the biggest cup, building a tower six cups high.
As far as we can see, Jeyanth is going to be an engineer. Very limited communication skills, great grasp of things mechanical.
I think we can confidently declare that Jeyanth has at least one word now - it may or may not be his first word, but "up" is certainly in his vocab. Not only does he say it with every step as he climbs the stairs, but today he also said it when playing downstairs - he looked at the stairs, pointed, and demanded "up!". Katrina, who witnessed this, told me that I had to count it as a word, and she's an almost qualified audiologist, so she would know :).
Jeyanth is also making valiant efforts to imitate words more and more frequently; at dinner today he had a pretty good shot at yoghurt, once we'd agreed on the Sydney pronunciation (which starts with an "o" as in "low", or "yo!", rather than the "o" in "log" that I would have said). He managed "og-ar" which isn't bad going...
Photos are now up of the Mums Group Birthday Party and also some of Jeyanth brushing his teeth.
Video of a couple of Jeyanth's journeys up the stairs here (5MB). He makes a noise as he goes up each step which sounds awfully like a triumphant "up!"...
A while ago I invited people to introduce themselves for posterity ("hello, posterity!"). If you haven't done so, and you read Jeyanth's blog, please follow the link on the left to sign the guestbook.
Just the other day Sureka and I realised that we must be one of few parents of a one-year-old who didn't need a stair-gate. A combination of our cautious son, the fact that our stairs are steep and slippery (polished wood), and the fact that we don't go upstairs much when he is around left Jeyanth content to treat the bottom step as something to pull up on, and nothing more.
As of yesterday, this is no longer the case.
At the Mums' group 1st birthday party (photos hopefully to follow soon!), there were two shallow steps up from the garden to the patio. Jeyanth wanted something up on the patio, and spent about ten minutes working out how to climb the steps. When we got home, Sureka wanted to find out if his new skill was transferable - and it was. He went straight up the stairs without a moment's hesitation.
So now Daddy has to try to work out how to rig a gate up at the bottom of our stairs, which is not going to be a trivial engineering problem :(.
(btw, have you seen Jahan's blog? He talking in sentences! At one year and one week!)
A few more days into the dropping of his morning bottle, and it looks like an almost complete success. Jeyanth is now eating three big meals a day, plus a decent morning tea, and is making up for his drop in milk with lots of cream cheese and yoghurt. He's slept right through all three nights since the change of routine, and is now quite happy with porridge being the start of the day instead of a bottle.
Only two things make it not a 100% success. One, which we expected and just have to live with, is that mornings now start earlier. When he used to wake up at 6am, a bottle would be enough to get him back to sleep until 7:30 - now when he wakes up and has his breakfast, the day has begun. This has been at 6:30, 7:10 and (today) 5:50 (although he first woke up at 5:30...).
The other is that he is not drinking any significant amount of milk from the cup. He'll take a lot of water, but having realised that there is still a bottle at the end of the day, he spurns the cup of milk when offered. Dropping the evening bottle (which we'll probably try to do in a few weeks) may be a more interesting challenge...