Tim is my adorable, smiley, meticulous little man. He gets
streaks of typical two year old, running around clutching someone else’s toy
shrieking “Mine!” but he spends more time amusing us with cute antics.
He has a very strong sense of where things belong. Leo tends
to leave big paper maps in the middle of the floor and the other day I told him
that if he didn’t put it away soon, I’d recycle it. Immediately, Tim ran across
the room, began crumpling it up and wouldn’t stop until he’d gotten it into the
recycling bin despite Leo and I both doing our best to pry it out of his
fingers. He gets mad if I sweep and don’t let him use the dustpan (which he
carefully dumps into the garbage). If given a pile of towels or other linens
while I’m sorting the laundry, he places them on the correct shelf on the other
side of the house without instruction. We’re at the cabin now and after a few
days, he has figured out where everything here is too.
At the beginning of the summer, I decided to make use of his
“this is where it goes” sense and potty train him. I didn’t use elimination
communication with Tim as a baby, although I’ve done my best to change his
diapers as soon as I’ve noticed that they were wet. Since he hadn’t ever used a
potty, he didn’t immediately know what he was supposed to do on the potty. Once
the older boys were home from school for the summer, I pretty much let Tim go
bottomless at home (which was most of the time) to help him make the
connection. As of this week, if he’s bottomless, it’s rare that he has an
accident. We’re trying to transition him into wearing underwear, but he’s much
less consistent that way. For now, we usually put him in Leo’s outgrown
underwear so they’re loose and don’t feel like a diaper. He can’t pull anything
up or down by himself yet which is likely the biggest problem. He’ll use the
bathroom as we leave the house and then arrive somewhere, so I’m starting to
bring him on short errands in underwear and bringing a change of clothes as
backup. Over the weekend, he peed in his overnight diaper and that was it – he
stayed dry through church, at the Y, and during naptime. I’ve been putting him
in a thin PUL diaper at naptime because as long as he gets out of bed on his
own he’s almost always dry when he gets up. I’ve been experimenting with
nighttime. I’ve been getting him up before I go to bed. About half the time
he’s willing to pee, although he’s always dry still at 12 or 1am. Then he
usually wakes up before we really want him to get up, often between 6 and 7am
and again, if he climbs out of bed to get us, he’s generally still dry then. We
just need to be coherent enough to bring him to a potty and that doesn’t always
happen. He does climb up onto the big
toilet by himself (and flushes repeatedly), even out of our house.
Speaking of sleeping, over the past six months, he has
finally transitioned to sleeping through the night. For a while in late winter,
he was sometimes waking up between 12am and 2am but by spring he’d mostly
phased out of that. He still woke up between 5am and 7am to come into our bed
and nurse. This summer, I’ve stopped the early morning nursing, which sometimes
means he’s awake for the day before 6:30am. Ugh. But neither of us was really
sleeping while he was nursing so I’m trying to tell myself it’s worth it. I
nurse him to sleep at night between 8 and 9pm. About half the time, he doesn’t
fall asleep in under half an hour, and we put him in the pack n play with his
water and he eventually sleeps on his own. He’s been in his own bedroom since
we finished the basement in April, although both his brothers camped out in his
tiny room with him for a while. He’s been sleeping primarily in the pack n play
since January – he was in Peter and Leo’s room until his was ready. He has a
twin mattress and box spring on the floor that I put him on if he nurses to
sleep. He can climb out of the pack n play but is only sometimes determined to
do so. I nurse him to sleep at naptime, whenever we finish lunch, and his naps
have been more consistent since I stopped having to pick the boys up some
afternoons. He probably misses his nap once every couple weeks. Most days he
sleeps 1.5-2.5 hours. He wasn’t a consistent napper until he was 14 months old
and the boys went to school fulltime – then he finally switched from 3ish short
naps to one long afternoon nap.
He’s not much of a talker. He’ll put together 2 word phrases
like “more eat” or “bye-bye daddy” but mostly still uses one word at a time. If
we show him a photo of himself or a mirror, he’ll say “me” or occasionally
he’ll call himself “Mim”. For a long time, he used the word dee-dee to mean
both water and Peter but he now says der-der for each of them. He also names
Mama, Daddy, Eo (Leo), Pee-bee (cousin Phoebe), Ra-ie (aunt Randi), Nana, and
Bappa (Grandpa). For the last couple
weeks, he’s been mimicking us a lot – we can tell what he’s saying by his tone
but not actually the sounds. Last week, Dan and I asked each other if he was
singing “Twinkle Twinkle”. He won’t sing it if we ask him to, but we know it’s
that and not the alphabet song because we hear dar (star) and are. Mostly it’s
just sounds with parts of the right tune. He still signs please, thank you,
Amen, and bye-bye, although he says the words at the same time.
We need to bring him in for a 2 year well-child check so I
don’t know the percentiles, but he’s about 25 lbs. He has gained at most 2 lbs
since Christmas. Both he and his not-quite-3-year-old cousin are on the small
side and it throws me off to see higher-percentile toddlers although Peter and
Leo were both larger at this age.
Until recently, he used his right and left hands
interchangeably and I was hopeful that I might finally have a lefty like me,
but he’s beginning to favor his right hand. He almost always throws with his
right and draws more often with it too.
He has been properly holding pens, pencils, and all other
writing utensils for most of the past year. He loves coloring on sheets of
paper – it’s rare that he goes off onto the table. He doesn’t draw anything in
particular yet. He very carefully takes the cap off the marker or pen, places
it on the back of the utensil, draws a while, then recaps it. Neither Peter nor
Leo wanted anything to do with writing until they were close to 4, so it
surprised me to see Tim interested so much earlier.
I’ve been cutting his hair haphazardly since last fall. If I
see it getting long while he’s in the bathtub, I snip off pieces here and there
until it stops looking mullet-like or hanging over his ears. I have barely needed
to cut the top. It’s white-blonde and very thin and wispy still. He’s gotten
tan this summer and his skin is considerably darker than his hair. Peter and
Leo’s hair gets buzzed so the color isn’t as obvious, but their hair is both
about the same color as Dan and mine – something between dark blonde and light
brown. Dan and I were both blonder as kids and I wonder if the older boys’ hair
will reach more of a medium brown by the time they’re adults.
Last week, we knew when it was time to put him to bed because
every night, he got out the Mastermind board and moved the big pegs from the
bin into careful rows on the board and the little pegs into their spots. It was
his way of zoning out when he was too sleepy to run around anymore. While at
the cabin, he’s been playing with the tin of dominoes, moving them in rows to
the tin’s cover and then making stacks on top of those.
He hasn’t been too much of a comfort nurser, especially
since he began primarily eating solid foods, but he uses belly buttons
(bee-bo) as his comfort object. He’s
starting to get a little pickier about food. If I give him apple slices to dip
in peanut butter or veggies to dip in dressing, he’ll mostly eat the dip and
avoid the fruit or veggies. He adores cheese. He only rarely has beverages that
aren’t water. We introduced him to ice cream cones recently and he only needed
a little help eating evenly around the edge. He is ravenous in the morning –
he’ll eat cereal when he gets up, then something else when his brothers get up and
would eat more if we let him.
We got our Brio trains out for him over the winter and he
loves them. He’s pretty good at getting the pieces together and even makes
loops if they’re partially completed already. He needs help with the hills and
supports most of the time. He moved into 24 mo/2T shirts at the beginning of
the summer (he’s still in 18 mo shorts and pants) and he was very excited that
he now fits into two train shirts. He also has a shirt that matches one of
Leo’s pajama shirts (a pair that I originally made for Peter and Leo when they
wore sizes 4T and 2T) and the first time he saw it, he insisted that it was
Leo’s shirt, not his. He enjoys putting on shoes belonging to everyone else,
along with his winter boots and rain boots, and any hats he finds. He can’t
quite pull shirts or correctly-sized shoes on or off yet but he tries.
We put all 3 boys in swimming lessons this summer – it was
Tim’s first time in parent/child lessons. He refused to jump into the water but
would sometimes blow bubbles, kick, or make ice cream scoops on demand. He’s
been scared of fountains at splash pads but likes zero-depth entry pools. At
the cabin this week, he wants to get his swimsuit on when his brothers do, but he
hasn’t wanted to be in the water very much. We have a rocky shoreline with some
sand at a depth where he can walk around. Sometimes I can get him to collect
rocks with me but usually not for long.
All winter, I was going to the Y 4-6 times a week and he was
usually in their childcare for up to 90 minutes most of those times. I never
had to be called back because he was scared – he waved good-bye and ran off to
play.
He began walking at 14 months and quickly moved to running
up and down hills while carrying toys. I guess by child #3, he’s got to keep
up. He throws quite well and gets his feet off the ground jumping. At parks, he
manages to go up some slides, enjoys running across bridges and through
tunnels, and climbs up structures meant for much longer legs. He recently began
going down short and medium length slides but is usually too scared of tall
ones. He sobs if someone else goes
outside and he can’t: “Ide! Ide!”