My birthday this year

Today was my 34th birthday, but more importantly 1 year since Jude suffered terrible burns from a simple cup of hot tea.

We decided to make January 31st International Hot-Drink-Free day, and drank iced tea and other cold drinks, enjoying a very hot day at a tea tree lake in lennox head with a lovely picnic lunch.

It was such a perfect day. I don't remember the last time I enjoyed my birthday so much, and it was really the first birthday I've shared happily with Jude.

Jude actually thought it was a giggle to learn that mummy has a birthday, too. He then joined in and sung "happy birthday to mummy", and was particularly excited to share my chocolate cake.

What a wonderful memory on top of another, deeply embedded, memory of a much darker day in my birthday history.

Days Like This

You would not believe the day I am having... Unless you have a child, in which case you might.

Despite having done several small wees on the potty just before lunch, Jude decided in the middle of eating his toasted sandwich to release a great waterfall of fluid from his bladder. Thankfully I had just moved him from the padded booster seat back to his plastic highchair so he could see better, and the urine all landed on his plastic splash mat. After lunch, I stealthily moved all offending articles (including Jude) to the laundry and cleaned them down one by one.

Now, lately Jude has been pooing about 10 minutes into his midday nap. It interrupts his sleep and makes our afternoon somewhat hellish, so I am desperately trying to coax him with bribery to poo on the potty before he goes to sleep. Today I tried extra hard, reading him a story and entertaining him for quite some time while he sat on his potty before bed. He did not poo. Eventually I put him in bed, taking advantage of the narrow window of peace while my neighbour was eating lunch, and therefore not banging loudly outside Jude's window while he attempts to renovate his garage.

20 minutes later I heard a squawk from Jude's room and went to investigate. There was Jude, half naked. Poo-filled nappy dumped unceremoniously on his bed. Brown streaks across his room. Argh!

I ran a bath and dumped Jude in it while I hastily set to cleaning up his room, but I knew it was getting rather hopeless. It wouldn't be long before the neighbour finished lunch. My window was closing. So after his bath, I took Jude to our bed and tried to settle him.

I think it probably took me an hour. I was, meantime, building some Ikea furniture on the floor of our bedroom and firmly encouraging Jude to sleep, but he has never been good at sleeping anywhere but his bed. The fact that it took me only an hour shows just how tired he was.

I haven't finished cleaning up the poo yet, but I needed a break. The neighbour is back to banging and crashing, which isn't great for the violent pregnancy headache I've been sporting since last night. Also, Jude in my bed means I can't have the lie down I so desperately need.

Oh well, who has time for a lie down? There's poo to clean.

The best advice about feeding

Long long ago, in a galaxy far away (or so it seems) I was witness to a piece of advice from a child nutritionist who spoke at one of the meetings held at the community health centre when Jude was 3 months old. At the time the advice was premature as Jude was not eating solids at that stage, but I stored the information away and I have always adhered to it since food was introduced.

Very young children have very little control over anything in their lives, and so from an early age they will cling to any tiny thing they can control. Eating being the simplest and first thing they learn they have a say in.

Many many parents struggle with feeding their babies and toddlers. The struggle to feed them can go on for years with children refusing to eat breakfast, lunch or dinner. A woman I know still feeds her 2 year old predominantly formula in a bottle because that's the only thing of any nutritional value he will eat... at home. Apparently he eats voraciously at child care.

The advice given by the nutritionist was to remain in charge of what you offer your child and when, but let them choose how much they eat of what you offer. Don't make it a struggle and don't offer them something else. If they choose not to eat a meal, offer them a healthy snack a couple of hours later and proceed with the day's meal plan.

The only way this works, of course, is if you begin the adventure of food with these "rules" in place from the start. I'm very glad I heard this advice when Jude was 3 months old, I was able to work it into our daily lives and while Jude has often eaten very little of what I've served him, I certainly don't struggle all day fighting over food and trying to get him to eat anything I offer. Tonight, for example, he had 3 bites of dinner and is now practicing swimming in the bath with his daddy. He will go to bed, sleep happily, and wake up in the morning ready for breakfast.

Jude sprouts wings.

Now that all my photos reside on my phone, I figure it's time to start blogging from my phone. This means my posts should be full of sometimes entertaining, usually confusing, auto-completions. And here we go:

While we wait for the countdown to our 19 week scan, the one where we learn the gender of the bun in the oven, Jude is currently going through an amazing learning spurt that I find so exciting to witness.

The other day he made, unmade and remade dinosaur figures out of megablocks. The exact same figures each time. At an age where he can draw blobs and paint stripes, suddenly creating 4-legged dinosaurs out of blocks has really surprised me.

He has stated using the toilet and potty with little trouble, his speech is developing in leaps and bounds, and he had suddenly become very social when he was such a shy little boy before Christmas.

On the slightly negative side, in the last 2 weeks he suddenly became afraid of the dark and needs a lamp in his room, a night-light isn't enough. He also insisted we took the posters off his walls because he was scared of them. At night he points out the window and says it's too dark. Clearly his imagination has run wild.

Whatever is happening, I'd love to be able to see the synapses forming in his beautiful, fascinating brain.

Toilet Time

It's so hard to find a moment to sit at my PC and write something down. I'll steal this moment or 2 just to document Jude's latest development (not forgetting I have a beautiful 2 year old as well as being pregnant).

Having worn cloth nappies his entire life, Jude became aware of his bowel movements at a young age. He was telling us "wee wee poo" from about the age of 18-months. However, at that time we lived in a rented apartment and it was winter. The prospect of attempting to potty train just seemed impossible. We would never be able to explain why the rented carpet smelled of pee and was covered in yellow stains.

When we finally bought a place and moved in, we waited a while to make sure Jude was settled. But we bought a potty and introduced him to the concept of sitting on it. The result was that Jude would tell us "wee wee poo" and then sit quite happily on the potty for a good hour without actually doing anything.

The challenge was for him to learn how to release and let go, and I had no idea how to teach him that skill. Running water didn't seem to make any difference, so we just continued allowing him to sit there doing nothing without any pressure to perform.

Then one morning a few weeks back we heard a noise and recognised the tell-tale sound of the toilet seat being raised and dropped. When we went to investigate we found Jude sans nappy, wee-filled potty in his hands, trying to empty the contents in the toilet as he had seen on a video once.

This was a bit mind-boggling that he would suddenly decide to start using his potty, but also completely like Jude who has a strong independent streak.

We haven't really potty-trained him, as such. We merely introduced him to the idea and gave him the facts. It was entirely up to him to decide to actually go ahead and start using the potty. Now we can sit him on a toilet and he'll go. He happily wears underpants around the house and every couple of hours I sit him on the potty and he empties his bladder. I do that just to make sure he doesn't get distracted and forget. It's been very easy and we've had no accidents ever since he decided it was time.

I haven't been brave enough to take him out in public in his undies, because I'm not 100% convinced he'd tell me he needed to pee. My biggest concern is that he would wet his car seat and that's something I don't fancy attempting to clean, and nor do I want to drive around in a car that smells like pee.

Eventually, though, I guess I will have to take the chance because he can't wear nappies out in public forever.