I have a friend I made in the lactation room, Rinli, who now has resigned from her job to focus more on her son. She had told me (quite some time ago) that I should record every moment with Tristan because it all goes by so fast and is quickly forgotten. I had previously made a picture book which lasted until 10 months but then I stopped. Being the slacker that I am, I am resuming it only now.
Tristan is 15 and a half months now. He can walk pretty well, and occasionally will mimic some of the simpler words we say. He is a very gentle baby with others and when he does get rough with us we always stress that he should be gentle and shouldn’t hurt. He loves, loves, loves anything techy we are fooling around with: our cellphones, laptops, desktops, and remote controls. He pretty much ignores his stuffed animals. His current fascination is the DVD player which kind of spooks him when he manages to eject out the DVD. He is afraid of loud noises and anything vacuum-y or blender-y sounding, which I would like to use as my excuse for our apartment being so dirty. Despite this, he has a curious fascination with said device producing loud noise. For example, if the Roomba is running, he gives his baby sign that he is scared but then he motions that he wants to see it. He also loves smashing the keyboard (we are currently using a babysmash program) and interfering with daddy’s surfing. He loves bubbles and says “baba” in anticipation of seeing some. He loves to eat corn, spaghetti, bananas, and strawberries. He is so cute, it’s really hard to get mad at him, even if you’ve just spent an hour and a half trying to get him to sleep. In my defense, I don’t think I am exaggerating his cuteness since he always has a fan at church, at the grocery store, at the restaurant, pretty much wherever. He loves chasing after the older kids, even if they are gone by the time he gets to where they were. He likes daddy’s massages and mommy’s kisses. I mentioned that we taught him some baby signs. He knows “more”, “eat/drink”, “a/sleep”, “milk”, “car”, “flower”, “dog”, “book”, “banana”, “hurt”, “gentle”, “elephant” (sometimes), “cat” (sometimes), and then he taught himself “scared” and ‘happy”. He is most vocal right before bed when he blabbers to himself and I sometimes catch him practicing his signs. If you bring attention to him when he happens to repeat a word you say, he will quickly stop repeating it (He’s the same way with food so sometimes the best strategy is to place some food on his tray and pretend to ignore him instead of forcing him to try it.). Even though he manages to make me scream at him at times, I have found this is not only a mommy-guilt inducing action but also a very ineffective one because he works better with being gentle and redirection. If daddy scolds him, he cries and the desired effect of stopping is achieved, whereas a mommy scolding is, for some reason, funny.
Today’s Magical Tristan Moment 07/15/08
Tristan has some sort of ritual before finally nodding off. After a bedtime story, he nurses on and off and then stands up and sits down repeatedly. He will try to get anyone to play with him so both George and pretend we are asleep but sometimes he will poke like, directly in my eye to get me to name parts of the face. Tonight, he actually repeated eyes which sounded like “as”, and mouth “ma” when he pointed to the parts of my face and I named them for him. Aha! No early intervention required! Though I doubt he will repeat it for us if he isn’t in the mood. Bedtime seems to be talkative and playful time for him. Seems like he is teething again. He’s been biting both my fingers and his own. It’s a shame because we were planning to start sleep “training” soon. Don’t worry, the Sleep Lady Shuffle, not the Ferber kind of sleep “training” (we couldn’t take the latter). Yeah. Whoopee! We’ll let you know how it goes.
