I've just watched Jeyanth put all of his blocks into the bucket, carry the bucket into his bedroom and put it into the toy cupboard, pick up a different box of toys and carry it back out into the living room.
Yes, at 15 months Jeyanth is already better at putting things away than his daddy.
There's nothing quite like the lurch in your heart when you turn around to see your child with blood streaming down his face.
Of course, the anticlimax is when you realise he's given himself a nose bleed by picking his nose. Anyway, it was more of a trickle than a stream, and stopped in seconds. I swear all that milk he's drinking is going directly into finger-nail growth - I only cut them two days ago!
New photos from October:
A Walk in The Park
Satara's Party
October Favourites
Jeyanth has always got a decent wiggle on whenever bouncy music was on. However, till this week, his dancing has been primarily been arm waving and something that could be described as high-frequency-half-squats, with leg movement limited to bending at the knee and wagging the bottom.
A few days ago, Jeyanth and I were dancing together to 'Walking Oliver' and he stopped suddenly to study my shuffling feet with great concentration. You could almost see the little light bulb go on, as he realised that feet could move on the spot, without having to walk. His first few attempts at dancing with his feet left no room for bum-wiggles or arm waving, but now, after a weekend of practice, he's a pro.
Its only now that we think about it, that it feels odd that he hasn't been able to do something so basic before. Now all that remains is to teach him how to play spin bowling.
Last week our Vice President came to visit the labs. As wednesday was her last full day in Sydney, there was a social in the afternoon - a few words from Linda, then nibbles and beers and general hobnobbing.
Since wednesday is also a school day for Jeyanth, and Sureka had some other commitments, I went slightly early to pick Jeyanth up, and brought him back to the labs to join the fun - and to test out Avaya's family friendly rhetoric.
I'm glad to say both Jeyanth and Avaya passed the test... Linda didn't seem in the slightest bit upset that Jeyanth interrupted her (and generally competed to be the center of attention), and Jeyanth was absolutely delighted to have so many people to charm. He showed absolutely no shyness at all, happily toddling off hand-in-hand with colleagues, playing ball with the management team, and poking at various telephones to see what noises he could make them make.
He also showed that he has the makings of a true Aussie bloke, by going straight for the esky with the beer in....
Yesterday night, in the bath, Jeyanth suddenly seemed to understand pouring.
For weeks he's been fascinated by watching water being poured from a cup down into the bath (recently this has also made it easier to wash his hair - the pleasure of watching water run off his head has overtaken his dislike of water on his face and in his eyes). We've got a plastic jug and a bucket in the bathroom (used to decant his bathwater for reuse on the garden), and he loves watching a cascade of water splashing down into the bucket.
He's also tried to play pouring himself, but never quite got the hang of scooping water into his cup, keeping it the right way up as he lifts it up, and then inverting it to pour. But yesterday, quite suddenly, he figured out what was going on. Not only did he discover pouring, but, in one swoop, expanded his understanding to include 'pouring outside the bath', 'throwing cup when full' and 'pouring onto parent'.
Bathtime is suddently more fun, and a lot wetter.
So, what does Jeyanth's day look like now he is fifteen months old?
With the odd exception, the day starts at 6:30am, give or take five minutes, when Jeyanth wakes up and discovers that he hasn't had anything to eat for twelve hours. He's more patient than he used to be, putting up with a nappy change and getting dressed before starting to protest for his breakfast. Breakfast is followed by playtime - besides the perennial favourite toys (anything that can be thrown to make a loud noise) Jeyanth is currently very keen on books (having just figured out how the 'bring book to parent = get cuddle while parent reads' formula works) and on the giant teddy ("te-de") that great-grandad bought him. In fact, the two often come together - several of Jeyanth's books mention teddy bears, and whenever he gets to such a page, Jeyanth will stop reading until he has found te-de and given him a hug.
If it's a school day (wednesday and thursday) then Sureka is home in the morning (Chris having headed off for work at about 6) and around 8 o'clock they head off to CSIROCARE. Jeyanth has settled in so completely now that he often doesn't even bother with the nominal cry when Sureka leaves - the moment they arrive he'll have toddled off into the garden to push around the trolleys or dive into the sandpit (which is being brought home, shoeful by shoeful). If it's a home day, the morning will be a shopping trip, or a walk to the park, or playing in the garden.
Whatever sort of day, lunch is around 11:15, followed by a nap, which might be anything from one hour to three hours long. The afternoon brings more playtime, booktime, trips, whatever. On a school day Chris picks him up at about 3:30; Jeyanth is happy to see his Daddy (and Amma, who normally comes as well, since her office is just next door), but doesn't want to go home, and will protest tearfully - just for a minute or two - when taken to the car.
Dinner is server around five, or a little earlier if Jeyanth's protests become too distressing (the run up to dinner is the one time of day that he sometimes gets a bit whingy); play with Amma and Daddy follows (the best time of the day - songs and nursery rhymes and books and cuddles) until milk ("paaa!") at six, then bath (a whole new adventure since we let him have a bucket...), more milk, clean teeth, cuddle and prayers and bedtime around seven.
It takes a while for Jeyanth to go to sleep, but most days he'll talk quietly (or not...) to himself; perhaps twice a week we need to go and resettle him; once he's asleep its very rare that we hear a peep from him before six thirty the next morning.
Because Jeyanth is considered a high-risk for having eye problems (a mother who is incapacitated without her glasses and a father who was diagnosed with childhood "lazy-eye", and ought to wear glasses, even if he doesn't), we were advised to get him checked out when he was one. So today, after a bit of procrastination, we finally took him to a paediatric opthalmologist.
It was a mixed sort of day. We were booked in for a 10:20 appointment, but the centre was painfully inefficient, and we didn't end up seeing anyone until after 11. Then, after fifteen minutes of consultation, the opthalmologist put some drops into Jeyanth's eyes (to dilate them) and said we would now need to wait half an hour for the drops to work. This wouldn't bother us if it were not for the fact that 11:15 is lunch time and 11:30 is nap time, so Jeyanth's patience was wearing very thin by the time we had the second half of the consultation. (In passing, I noted that the innefficiency of this private consultation was in stark contrast to the excellent treatment I got from the public system when I amputated my finger.)
That said, the opthalmologist himself, Neil, was excellent - obviously very experienced in working with small children, he sang nursery rhymes, and waved small toys around to keep Jeyanth attentive and happy while making detailed observations of his eyes. It helped that his conclusions were reassuring: Jeyanth has no signs of lazy eye, normal refraction (for his age) in both eyes, and, while he does have slight astigmatism, isn't - as far as can be tested at this age - likely to need glasses.
He recommended we bring Jeyanth back when he is about three and a half, and able to respond to some more interactive tests, but until then it's one fewer thing for paranoid parents to worry about.
Last week saw a first in Jeyanth's life that signals the dawn of a new era, and one that we're not so sure that we going to enjoy.
It was around 6.30pm, Jeyanth was having some quiet play before bathtime. He was sitting on his chair at his table and learning what to do with the playdough Ammamma had bought him. As bathtime was nearing, we got him to 'play put-away' and got all the playdough back into the pots. Jeyanth was getting enormous satisfaction from slotting the little pots into the circular cavities of the playdough box, accompanied by cheers from Amma and Daddy.
When the last pot was in; I reached over and picked Jeyanth up with a cheery 'bath-time now', but little JJ was really quite attached to the idea of pulling all the pots out and starting again. And there it was, completely out of the blue - Jeyanth's first full blown tantrum! There were screams, there were bellows, there was the flailing of fists, there was a stiffening up of the little body and there was the unmistakable display of temper.
We decided that the best way to respond was to keep talking cheerfully while we got him ready for his bath, assuming that it would only be a matter of moments before he was distracted by something else. But the furious little thing was not having a bar of it. During the entire 20 mins that it took to strip him off, soap him up, pop him in the bath, wash him, get him out, dry and dress him, he kept up his tantrum and wilful uncooperation. Just because we were bigger, and could actually do all this to him, wasn't going to distract him. The fact that he loves baths, and was being enticed to play with his favourite bath toys wasn't going to distract him. The fact that both parents were keeping up a light banter and fixed grins on their faces while trying to jolly him up wasn't going to distract him. He was mad! And he was going to stay mad!
Thankfully, his utter slavery to the concept of milk was our salvation. As soon as he was dressed, and in a cuddle with a warm bottle and a story, he calmed down, and by the time it got to tooth-brushing time, was back to his cheery self.
So there we are. Our warm, happy, eager to please, easy to cheer little soul has developed a will and the capacity to fight for it. I know it's progress, and I know that if he remained completely compliant, we'd be worried etc. But still, it is quite scary.
I think the smallness and helplessness of babies lull new parents into a sense of security. We forget that it is not for very long that all their needs are simple; the window we have in which we can almost guarantee their happiness by feeding, cleaning and cuddling them is small and disappearing fast. Inside the little body that now curls up and yawns contentedly in your arms, is budding an entirely new and autonomous personality which will inevitably be alien to you at some point. In this child is already the potential for the kicking and screaming, for the "I hate you's", the slammed doors, the days of sullen teenage silence and all the myriad ways in which our hearts will be broken in the coming years.
And yet, I can't wait. I can't wait for my son to start talking, to develop ideas of what he likes and what he doesn't like, to develop into a complex real person. There is nothing that I know more certainly, than that I will love him in all his complexity, in his ugliness as well as his beauty, and I can't wait to get to know him. God must have felt a bit like this on the sixth day.
As Sureka wrote earlier, Jeyanth is just starting to experiment with saying things. He clearly understands about 30 words now, and has made occasional valiant efforts at saying a handful of them, and at imitating things we say.
Yesterday, for the first time, he also managed to put two words together. I asked him where his train was, and as he picked it up he said "tr'n", then after a short pause "atch tr'n" (atcha is a Tamil babytalk word roughly meaning good).
So, yes, Jeyanth's first venture into the world of adjective-noun was one word of English and one of Tamil...