Gentle wake? No chance

I DON’T think I’ll ever get used to Harry’s ability to go from being fast asleep to wide awake within seconds. Honestly, it’s as if someone flicks a switch and he’s off, causing mischief while we’re still trying to come round.

The other morning, Harry woke up about six and a sleepy Melissa carried him into our bed. I was still dozing – well, pretending to be asleep might be more accurate – but Harry was having none of it.

He grabbed my chin, put his face millimetres from mine and said book, meaning that he wanted me to read with him. Of course, I did the decent thing and turned over, mumbling something about his mum wanting to read. Melissa, by now pretending to have gone back to sleep, was also turned away from Harry which didn’t please him one bit.

After a few minutes of trying to get a response, though, Harry gave up with Melissa and clambered on to my head. “Dad-da, book,” was all I could hear. Eventually I gave in and leaned over to turn the light on, whereupon Harry dived out of bed and started fiddling with the alarm clock.

Within seconds we were listening to heavy metal – Harry, it seems, has a knack of tuning in to the loudest radio stations. Melissa, incidentally, tried to sleep through all of this. Harry responded by grabbing her feet to pull her out of bed.

I’d like to say these events are unusual; they’re not. I once had an alarm clock that had a ‘gentle wake’ setting – the idea was a buzzer that started off quietly and got progressively louder so it didn’t startle you. Unfortunately, the days of a ‘gentle wake’ are long gone now.

Harry the chatterbox

HARRY is turning into a right little chatterbox. This is a big change because he was a pretty slow starter when it came to talking.

He did have a couple of essential words – apart from mummy and daddy – such as juice, dinner and no, but generally he preferred to grunt and point to get his message across.

However, a couple of months before Christmas, his vocabulary suddenly started to expand at a quite remarkable rate.

Having done a bit of research (well, using Google to look up ‘babies talking’), it seems that toddlers can learn up to 10 words a day by the time they’re two, and I can quite believe it.

Every day he’s using new words and new sounds, while his pronunciation is improving rapidly as well. He’s also starting to string one or two words together, which I find very exciting. It also makes car journeys much more interesting – when I pick him up from my mum and dad’s, he talks all the way home about what he’s been doing.

Although he still gets frustrated when I don’t understand him, having a conversation with Harry is definitely one of those ‘wow’ moments that you experience as a first time parent.

Of course, there are one or two downsides to Harry’s ever expanding vocabulary. While we were at the checkout in the supermarket last weekend, Harry kept saying ‘beer’ to the cashier, which was a little bit embarrassing.

The following day we took him to a restaurant which had a large mirror behind our table. When Harry spotted the mirror, he stood up, turned to face it, shouted ‘mirror’ at the top of his voice, and then kissed his reflection. He did make up for it though, saying ‘please’ when the waiter asked if he wanted ice cream. I was a very proud dad.

Splash mats

When Harry was about eight or nine months old, a colleague asked me if we’d invested in a splash mat to sit underneath Harry’s high chair. At the time, there didn’t seem much point but now I can see the logic behind such an investment.

Harry has a very good appetite and is now quite happy to feed himself. However, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, he will no longer sit in his high chair, preferring instead to sit at the kitchen table.

On the one hand, this is real progress and makes meal times much more relaxed for Melissa and myself. On the other, it also creates a fair bit of mess. Harry’s coordination is generally very good but – on occasion – he loses concentration while his fork or spoon is in transition from his plate to his mouth.

This can make things really messy – and it sometimes takes a fair amount of restraint on my part not to intervene. As you can imagine, some foods are better than others; soup is a particular problem, and about half of it normally ends up down Harry or on the floor.

The other frustrating habit Harry has developed at mealtimes is pushing his plate away when he’s finished eating. Most of the time, this is not a problem; occasionally, though, he pushes it a bit hard and it ends up on the floor.

We’re then left frantically trying to clean up the mess before it stains the walls, floor and so on. A splash mat might well be the way forward.

I shouldn’t complain though. Harry has a fantastic appetite and he certainly isn’t fussy when it comes to food, although he does have his favourites. At the moment, honey has replaced ham as his food of choice, although I’m pleased to say that from time to time he now asks for ‘mar mar’ (Marmite) on his toast. That’s my boy.

Under siege

OUR house is under siege - courtesy of Harry and his toys. A few years ago a friend of mine told me he had banned his children and their toys from their front room because, he said, it was being taken over by toys. At the time, I remember thinking it seemed a bit harsh; now I can understand his sentiment.

A combination of Christmas and Harry's birthday have left us surrounded by toys. Our front room is an ever-changing obstacle course, with crayons, trains and trucks all waiting to trip you up at the slightest lapse in concentration.
I've lost count of the number of times I've stepped on something by accident, leaving me hopping around the room in agony, much to Harry's obvious delight. And if I'm not falling over the toys, I'm having to be build or fix them.

Harry's favourite at the moment is his wooden train. Now I must admit, I love the train set and we've bought him a couple of expansion sets to make it a bit more interesting - for Harry and for me. The upside is that we are now able to build some pretty elaborate railways, complete with viaducts and crossings; the downside is that it takes up most of our sitting room which, consequently, generally looks a bit like a building site.I can live with the railway, though.

What I find much more difficult to deal with is Harry's constant desire to tip everything out. I blame Melissa for this. She has, from a very early age, encouraged Harry to tip up his toy box and get all of his toys out to play with.

It wasn't so bad when we were only dealing with a handful of them but now he has so many, I can’t resist trying to tidy up after him. This is a game in itself because, if Harry catches you, he immediately empties everything out again and you're back to square one.Speaking of games, Harry is very keen on hide and seek. When he wants to play, he tells you to count, then scurries off before shouting ready, or 'eddie', at the top of his voice and giggling hysterically as you look for him.

To start with, Harry struggled with the concept of hiding but he's definitely getting better. On Wednesday, I lost him for a full five minutes when we were playing upstairs. I was getting a bit worried until I heard a giggle coming from the wardrobe in the spare room.

Harry turns two...

Harry was two this week and I can hardly believe it’s been that long since I was pacing around The Maelor anxiously awaiting the arrival of our first child.

Although we’d been to the antenatal classes, nothing could have prepared us for the changes that were about to happen in our life.

And while the panic of those first few days has subsided – remembering to sterilise everything and trying to work out how to fasten a nappy successfully – our life has changed beyond recognition.

On Tuesday Melissa, with me helping out, spent the evening baking a train-shaped birthday cake. Then we had to decorate it – another first for me.

It was worth the effort though. Watching Harry blow out the candles before jumping up and down and applauding was magical, as was his cheeky grin after he’d managed to grab a chocolate wheel off the cake before we’d had chance to put it out of reach.

In fact, the whole of his birthday saw Harry in a state of high excitement. From the moment he opened his first present until the departure of the last visitor at about 6pm he hardly stopped – with the exception of an hour-long nap in the morning.

We took him to an indoor play area in the afternoon where he played happily for a couple of hours, climbing, jumping, and flying down the slide as fast as he could.

As if to emphasise just how grown up he is now, he didn’t need any help climbing the play equipment, although he did want one of us to wait for him at the bottom of the slide.

Watching him interact with the other children reinforced the impression that he’s now a little boy rather than a toddler. There was one particularly cute moment when he took a little girl’s hand and tried to persuade her to race him down the slide. She refused, which prompted a brief frown from Harry, before he hurled himself down the slide again, squealing at the top of his voice.

Harry and the quest for chaos

Life with Harry is never dull. If I’m not chasing him around the house, he’s chasing me. It’s great but there are plenty of challenges along the way.

Last week Melissa called me at work to ask what time I would be home. She sounded stressed. Very stressed.

It’s Harry, she said, he’s being a monkey. It later transpired that Harry had given Melissa a taste of the terrible twos a few weeks early. After emptying her make up draw on to the bedroom floor, he’d gone into the bathroom and started throwing toys down the toilet.

While Melissa was trying to stop him, he’d somehow managed to get his hands in the toilet bowl, and was trying to fish out the aforementioned toys. It sounded chaotic, although I must admit I had to stifle a giggle when she told me what had happened.
Needless to say, when I arrived home an hour or so later, Melissa handed Harry over to me and – would you believe it – he was a little angel, playing happily with his train set until bed time.

It is surprising how quickly things can descend into chaos, though. I’ve been caught out a few times recently, most memorably when I was trying to get Harry’s dinner and he decided to empty the kitchen cupboards. By the time I’d mashed the potatoes, our kitchen floor was strewn with pots, pans, tins and jars. To make matters worse, every time I tried to put something away, Harry simply took it out again. Melissa, when she arrived on the scene, was not impressed.

Speaking of Harry running riot, we finally took down the travel cot in our bedroom this week. It had proved very useful in keeping Harry under control while we got ready in a morning, but once he’d mastered climbing out of the cot we were always fighting a losing battle.

So we’re now busy rearranging our bedroom to make sure all the lotions and potions are out of Harry’s reach. I’m sure, however, that he’ll soon find new, more inventive ways to make mischief – he seems to have a knack for it.

The difference between Momma and Mummy

I can’t believe how quickly Harry is growing up. I know I’ve said this before but lately the pace of change seems to be increasing all the time. Of course the fact that he’s talking makes a big difference. Hearing him ask for ‘mummy’ rather than ‘momma’ may not sound much but to Melissa and I, it’s worlds apart.

In other ways he’s becoming more and more of a little boy, rather than a toddler. He is, for instance, quite happy to sit or lie on the floor playing with his train set quite happily for half an hour or more on his own. The only sound he makes is the choo-chooing of the trains.

Boxing Day was a bit of a watershed moment for me though. I took Harry downstairs after his bath to get him tea. We walked into the kitchen and Harry asked to sit on a seat at the table, rather than eat in his high chair.

Normally I would have insisted on the high chair but Harry had been full of cold and hadn’t been eating very well for a couple of days, so I relented. He sat at the table, spoon in hand, waiting for his tea and when I put it on the table, he told me to go away. Again, I would normally be reluctant to do so (if only for the sake of minimising the mess!) but I made another exception.So while I did the washing up, Harry sat with his back to me and cleared his plate. There was very little spillage and Harry was quiet as a mouse the whole time. I kept taking sneaky glances to make sure he was alright but I needn’t have worried.

As you might expect, Harry remembered this the next day and he duly ate his breakfast sat at the table. Since then, he’s not been in his high chair and, barring one or two slightly messy moments, it’s going remarkably smoothly.

Of course there’s plenty of time for that to change but, whatever happens, I can’t see Harry getting into his high chair ever again.