18/06/2007

"Please Mumma...."

For a week or two now Asher has been letting me know when he wants me to sing to him as he has his breastfeed before bed. We have always sung or hummed the same song* to him as we put him to sleep, in the hope that it be a sleep trigger for him. This started in response to the concern that a feed would be the only way to put him to sleep, and therefore I would be the only one able to put him to bed (so far we haven't pushed our luck and I'm almost always the one to put him to sleep). I normally read while I breastfeed and now when he wants his song he pulls off the breast, looks me in the eye and starts 'singing' very softly to me. It didn't take too long for me to work out what this meant and so now I often don't start humming to him until he asks me to.

This evening he was unusually tired, having missed his afternoon sleep, so I was already humming to him as he sucked when he suddenly pulled off the breast and started to tap my chest firmly with his hand saying "Ga! Ga! Ga!" to me. After a few moments of this I thought that maybe he was trying to ask me to be quiet, so I stopped singing and he immediately went back to his business with my bosom. I thought that perhaps his dislike of my singing was a sign of sudden maturity until about a minute later he very sweetly requested that I start humming again.

It turns out he is still little enough to enjoy my voice, but he is much better at communicating. - I know adults who couldn't make their wishes known as clearly and politely as Asher did tonight.



* It's embarresing! For some reason we started with Amazing Grace and it stuck.

13/06/2007

Explosion!

This pic is taken by a proud parent to show of Asher's eating-with-a-spoon ability. Unfortunately he's much more interested in the camera than he is in his breakfast. Eating with a spoon is not the only developmental leap we have had, although he's still not walking on his own, just happily cruising and crawling very fast.

There has also been a language explosion, suddenly Asher seem to be able to understand so much more. He has understood a connection between 'bye-bye' and waving for several months but now he starts waving when he wants to leave, or when he wants someone else to leave (sorry dad! He hadn't seen you for a while!). He has also been using 'mumma' and 'dadda' more-or-less correctly for a few weeks now (I appear from the bedroom and it's 'mumumum' or he peers under the kitchen door saying 'daaadaaaaaa' hoping that Sanjay will open it for him) but suddenly he seems to understand so much more. Over the weekend Sanjay asked if he had finished his apple the other day and Asher handed Sanjay the piece of apple that he was holding. Later on I asked Asher to put his green ball in the basket and he did it. Now that we have examples of Asher understanding language we are having to be a whole lot more careful about what we say around him. We'd both like to make sure we keep the bickering to a minimum and definitaly keep name-calling and swear words out of it.

I guess all this new language is perfectly developmentally appropriate now that we are getting so clsoe to his first birthday. Two weeks yesterday til he turns one! I'll think about it a bit more and try to reflect a bit on how this first year has been.

In terms of less pleasant explosions, and I'll spare you the details, Asher got his first gastro bug - it wasn't particulalry bad, but I'm amazed by the amount of laundry I had to do for a few days. It's taken him a week or two to start eating normal foods again, which I guess isn't surprising because he threw up everything he ate for a few days. I was so glad I am still breastfeeding him though, it is a nice source of comfort and I didn't need to worry so much about him not eating food since he was still getting breastmilk.

He is going to wake up soon, so I had better race around and get ready to get out the door while the sun is still out so he can have a crawl around on the grass before lunch.