Fourteen Months

Having a toddler is a little like having a bipolar roommate.  When he's good, he's just so good.  We went to the botanical gardens today and he was running around, cute as can be, dancing to the Christmas music, touching the plants, playing in the fountain, smiling at strangers.  Then we came home and he helped me gather the trash and carry the bag to the door, looking so proud of himself for doing big boy things.  And when I put him to bed, he snuggled with me in the rocking chair for an extra-long time, even though I think he was just humoring me.

But when he's not so good...oh dear.  This evening I refused to let him eat Tums straight from the costco-sized jar, and it resulted in fifteen solid minutes of screaming histrionics, complete with red face, crocodile tears, and flailing on the floor.  Lordy, what are the terrible twos going to be like?  Some of the crazy probably results just from being a toddler -- he gets frustrated easily and doesn't deal with it well.  But he's also had a rough month that was partially our fault -- Karl traveled, we all traveled and thoroughly messed with Henry's schedule, and I skipped a lot of work in the last two weeks, which gives us a lot of nice time together but really gets him off his routine.  He also cut two molars this month.  Throw a nasty cold into the mix, and it's not surprising the poor guy isn't in peak form.

Mood swings notwithstanding, Henry is a joy most of the time and still changing so much.  He has a few new words, most of which have just popped up in the last week or so:

• Bwoo -- blueberries
• Guck -- duck
• Ba -- bottle/cup
• Nana -- banana
• Pup -- puppyhead

And he says a few other totally adorable things even though he has no idea what they mean:

• Gogago -- Go, dogs, go! from the book by that name.
• Yellow
• Moo -- repeated after Karl makes the cow sound when reading the animal book

I'm occasionally amazed at how much he understands.  He has a clear plastic block with two colored sides that sort of look like they should come off.  He was trying in vain to take off the sides, so he handed it to me, and I pretended to try really hard to take them off.  Then I told him, "Go see if Daddy can do it," and he promptly took the block and ran into the next room to hand it to Karl.  He might not understand all the words, but he clearly gets the gist of what we're saying.

It's also getting more fun to play with him now because his attention span is longer.  He'll focus on a task or toy for half an hour or more sometimes -- Karl had a great run with the Duplo this weekend, and Henry will focus intently on his set of Russian stacking dolls for as long as we'll let him (we try not to let him eat the Soviet-era paint too often).  Where he used to just try to figure out what the heck the object was, now he's trying to figure out how it works and what it can do.  The downside of these more-sophisticated interests is that waving a new shiny object in front of his face is no longer provides a guaranteed distraction.

January is going to be a hectic month for us -- Karl will be gone for two weeks, then I'm traveling an additional week.  It's the most that either of us has been away from Henry, and I suspect it will be rough on everybody.  We'll miss the little man, crazy and all.