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So I seem to be on time with this update – though I did miss his last one due to my blogging break but I thought I’d just skip straight to this one!
His behaviour has improved so much in the last couple of months. We do still have our moments but nothing like it was before. I no longer go to collect him from nursery dreading what they are going to feed back to me that he has done this time. It feels a bit strange saying it as I obviously didn’t condone it before, but I’m glad he has had no reports of hitting for such a long time; I’m very proud of him! He has learned now to tell somebody what is wrong instead of just lashing out straight away, though he does get incredibly upset and a couple of times he has hit himself instead (though now I have that to worry about). His behaviour at home has improved significantly too. He does still have his moments with N, but now N has started giving as good as he gets (argh!). He knows straight away now when he has done wrong and will say sorry, and give a kiss and a cuddle. In fact, he loves giving kisses and cuddles these days and is always showering his brother with them!
We are almost there with toilet training. He has gone through a phase recently where he won’t go into the toilet as apparently there is a monster in there…no idea where he has got that idea from! I think we’re getting over that now though. At nursery he spends all day in big boy pants but when at home he often wants a pull up on; we’re trying to deal with this at the minute as he is doing so well now and I don’t want him to have a huge regression. Plus, his Uncle says that when J can go to the toilet by himself he can stay overnight! 😉
He is memorising and learning so much these days. He can now almost count to twenty; he knows the alphabet; he knows so many rhymes and lullabies and often sings them to N; and we now have proper conversations, I love my mini adult! Some of the things he comes out with are hilarious and he often has us in fits of laughter! Though everybody at the minute is Mr Tumble, or Mrs Tumble, or Baby Tumble… He also calls me ‘Mrs’ at the minute, cheeky monkey! Compared to this time last year when he was only just learning how to say his name, he has come on in leaps & bounds.
Yet again I’m late with this update as yet again it’s almost time for the next one, in another week. J & his brother are totally siphoning my energy at the moment so I just can’t keep up. Never mind!
I’ve posted before how he had behavioural problems at nursery but recently he has been getting a good report when I collect him; I’m thinking maybe the Pitstop we have been attending has done some magic on him, but then I think well he is pretty much still just the same at home! Maybe they are dealing better with him than I am, after all they are trained in dealing with children whereas I just make it up as I go along, ha!
One of the issues that started recently is at bedtime. It literally takes two of us to get him to bed as he just does not want to go and becomes violent toward us. On one of the worst nights it took over an hour and in that time he kicked, screamed, pulled my hair, poked our eyes, continually demanded food just to waste time, and asked to go live with other family members; other times we have also been bitten and punched. In all honesty, it really has started to take its toll on me and I sometimes wish I was somewhere else during one of these episodes. Despite all of this, he is still a brilliant little helper! He is just like Jekyll & Hyde sometimes…
I mentioned last time that we’d had a little progress with potty/toilet training and in fact there has been a little more progression since then. At the beginning of last month, he started doing most of his wee’s on the toilet both at nursery and home – still no poo though! I was very proud of him that day he decided to go to the toilet at home without any prompting from me.
His conversational skills are also progressing brilliantly and I have to share one of the conversations we had on the walk home from nursery recently:
Me: “Come on baby, let’s go home”
J: “I’m a baby”
Me: “Well no, you’re not really a baby, but you’ll always be Mummy’s baby”
J: “You’re my baby Mummy”
Adorable!
He has also started calling his brother “My Noah” and will hold his hand, although sometimes N just doesn’t want to!
Over J’s last few updates (well over the last year or so in fact, on & off) I have written about his potty training progress. He started potty training last year when we thought he was showing an interest but he was really sporadic with it and so we just left it. Just before Christmas he had started showing an interest again and so Nanna bought him a Thomas Tank musical potty which seemed to do the trick, and he finally had his first wee on it just before he turned three!
Ever since then we have really encouraged him with using the ‘big boy’ toilet and though he isn’t completely consistent yet, he does a lot of his wee’s on there. He has a step and a toilet seat which I think helps as he can do it himself and it makes him feel more grown up. He mostly wears pants during the day; he still has the occasional accident but we don’t make a huge fuss about it when he does.
Previously, I was adamant that I wasn’t going to use pull up pants with him as I believed that it would just confuse him, but wearing a nappy wasn’t really helping with him going to the toilet so we started on them and now he wears them at night and if we’re going on a journey where there won’t be a toilet for while. We could take his potty but he still has occasions when he forgets that he has pants on until it’s too late, and I don’t fancy washing his car seat cover that often!
We had really been encouraging him to do a poo on the toilet as well but we weren’t really getting anywhere. Now I’m not sure if this was a fluke also, but on the last day of our recent holiday he did it! I got really excited, everyone really praised him, and he was so proud of himself, but he hasn’t done one on there since. I do ask him regularly if he needs the loo but sometimes he will say no or just refuses. I think I need to see if there is any time pattern as to when he poo’s so we can try and get him to sit on the toilet.
I must admit, I thought he would be toilet, or at least potty trained by now as most of his peers are; but I’m not putting too much pressure on it and you never know, we might be fully there by his fourth birthday! (I hope it’s easier with N!)