Year 2 - AprilApril 2006 Emma's Entry
As the weather has now started to improve and Evan is "Mr Confident" on his feet we've started to take Evan outdoors much more this month. We decided our first outdoor trip would be a fairly close one and it would last only the morning. I'd already highlighted a few places that I wanted to visit this year with Evan so we chose Odds Farm Park. It's baby season in the animal kingdom and at Odds Farm they had lots of baby lambs, piglets and goats, some literally hours old for Evan to look at. He liked looking at all the animals (but at a distant). He didn't go to close to the rams as they were being extremely rough with people feeding them and I would have been nervous had he wanted to go over to them. The bunny rabbits were really cute and they had lots of different breeds for us to see. Watching Evan checking out some of the larger animals (pigs in particular), he would bend down a little, pull this little "oh" look and say "ooh" pointing at the animal. He managed to walk most of the way round the park himself, strapped into his new walking harness. Odds farm had lots of other things for children to do from all ages, so it was an enjoyable day out, though probably more expensive than I would have like to have paid, so it's not a trip we would do often as there is really only so many sheep and goats that you want to look at. Caroline has been teaching Evan some new tricks! We have a weight training bench in one of our rooms and Evan is always running in there when we turn our backs as it's not really baby proofed and as a result he becomes attracted to various things in there-the weights being one of them. He likes to lift the half pound discs off the ground and hands them to us. We also have a dumbbell bar with no weights on it and Evan likes to lift it as if he were doing exercises. It is rather amusing and I was quite surprised to see that he could indeed lift such a thing. The working out doesn't end there, we've got Evan's swing securely into the ground now and we were just messing around out there one day, when we attempted to do some pull-ups using the top of the swing bar. Evan thought this was rather a good idea and he ran over to the swing where the bars go across at my waist height. He can just about reach them and he tried to copy our pull-ups using those bars. Clever boy!
Evan absolutely loves the garden and every day when he is at home, we go outside and play whenever it's not raining. Evan actually lets me know when he wants to go outside, he'll stand by the patio door and start pointing out to the garden whilst jabbering away to me. If I don't initiate the getting ready, he then wanders off and finds his shoes, brings them to me and shoves them into my lap. If I don't get the hint then, he gets a little upset! He's such a good little boy when he knows we're going outside, he'll sit down when I ask him so that I can put on his shoes. He'll also get his coat (if it's not hung up) and when we are all ready he stands by the door eagerly running on the spot because he can't get out. The long Easter weekend that we had this month was great for garden play and the weather was really nice for it. We could do with some more outdoor type toys though! We taught Evan how to kick a football, you never know, he might actually like to play it one day ;). He does like to copy us a lot at the moment, one example was watching him and Caroline playing on the grass. She got tired and flopped down onto her back on the grass. Evan started to giggle, he the ran over to her and did exactly the same! It was so funny, I couldn't get the camera out in time to get a picture, it would have been a great one. We took half a day off this month so that I could meet up with the girls and babies that I spent a lot of time with whilst on maternity leave. We hadn't seen each other since the New Year, so it was great to catch up. It was nice to see how different each child was and interesting to see that only Megan was really into her talking. I will miss Evan's baby babble (because it's just the cutest thing!) but I can't wait to actually be able to communicate properly with him. We manage, but at times I just know he is getting frustrated because I haven't understood what he was trying to get me to do. Evan is still the shortest so it was interesting to see what sort of things I have to look forward to. Alex can now open doors! That's going to be a nightmare when Evan can do that because I use the doors to stop him from going into rooms that I don't want him in. Our door handles seem to be located a little higher than most so hopefully we'll be able to reason with him by the time he can start to open them (fingers crossed). They did play nicely together and Rachel got some great pictures of them all playing. Evan has had an obsession with the Sky viewing card this month and it's driving us crazy. We lost it this month and I heard Caroline telling him off when she realised where he had put it, he'd managed to shove it in the video player!
We managed to get a weekend when we were all free of germs and illnesses this month so we decided to get down the swimming pool. Unfortunately it has been 5 months since we last went swimming and as a result Evan had forgotten the experience and most of all he'd lost the baby reflexes that he had in the water. He spent the first 15 minutes crying and it was really traumatising for us. He did eventually settle but spent most of the time clinging onto our necks as we carried him through the water. He didn't try to swim like he did all those months ago with the kicking and the flapping. I thought he might object a little bit, but I was not prepared for this. We left the pool in a happier state but I still don't think Evan liked it that much. We're planning to pay regular visits to try and get him used to it again so *fingers crossed*. Evan's block stacking is coming on leaps and bounds, he can stack loads. We managed to capture on film Evan stacking 8 blocks. It was interesting to watch because he knows that he can get away with stacking the blocks hard and rough when there are only a couple but as the tower grows, he starts to place them gently instead of roughly as he now knows that the tower will collapse under too much force. There is one incident that happened this month that I'm sure Caroline would like to forget about. She was doing his evening bath one day and I could hear them playing happily when I suddenly heard her calling my name. I was outside at the time, so I raced back in and up the stairs and to my surprise I found Evan standing in the bath surrounded by his poo. Apparently, he just decided to squat down and do his poo right there! :) I wondered if this would ever happen to us as I have heard so many poo in the bath incidents from friends with children. We didn't really know what to do, so we just used the shower to clean him up, his bath time being cut short that day. He hated the shower going on him that close, it didn't help that it wasn't the warmest as we'd run out of hot water. He jumped up out of the bath as I held him whilst Caroline had the shower and the poor little boy was just suspended there whilst we cleaned him up (such strength he has!). Let's hope that's the first and last time that happens hehe. Finally, we've kind of sussed "cat" and "car" out on the speech front, "duck" is still more of a "dat" but we made real progress this month with a new word. Evan said mummy properly and it wasn't a mum mum mama that he sometimes says when crying. He was just standing next to me and he said mama. To test the theory, later on I was standing by the sink doing some washing up and Caroline asked Evan "Who is mummy?" and he pointed to me :). Emma |
