This guy...
...is 21 months old! That means he's only 3 months from being a 2-year-old. I find it mind-boggling. We took him upstairs to his "bedroom" (as in the room we decorated before he arrived in which he has never slept) to take his 21-month-old photos. Traditionally, this has meant sitting him in the chair in his room to be photographed the same way he was once a month for his first year and every 3 months since turning 1. It was...difficult...
In the end, I decided this is his 21-month-old photo.
I think it accurately portrays the likelihood of success when you're trying to get an almost-two-year-old to sit in a chair. It pairs perfectly with his 18-month-old photo, in which he is wearing a bicycle helmet...
So update-y things. It's hard to put things into categories, even though I'm a librarian and categorizing things is one of my all-time, absolute, most favorite things to do, ever. It seems like every part of his personality is so wrapped up in the rest of it that I have a hard time talking about one thing without jumbling in the rest!
We'll start with all the things Lukie likes right now. His favorite thing in the world being outside. We have an epic meltdown every evening when it's time to go in the house. We are outside from the moment it is warm enough to the moment darkness falls, and even that wouldn't be enough for him. He loves bugs (particularly flying bugs, particularly bees and wasps, but he knows not to touch them), birds, his play equipment which looks like a castle, the lawn mower (the LAWN MOWER OH MY GOD THE LAWN MOWER), running back and forth to Daddy's wood shop, and bubbles. He dislikes being told to come inside and being forced to stay in the side yard.
Lukie is a copycat right now. The other day, he was spinning around and laughing at a bumble bee, and Peter realized he was pretending to be Shaun the Sheep, a character in his favorite TV show, who does the same thing when the Farmer is attacked by a bee. He likes to pretend to scoop dog poop out of the yard and throw it over the fence. He sniffs flowers like I do, even though instead of sniffing, he blows through his nose. It amazes me every day when he has picked up on something Pete does or I do.
Eating-wise, well, Lukie is still a super picky eater. He loves peanut butter sandwiches, cottage cheese, applesauce, bananas, grapes, strawberries, sweet potato puffs, french fries, pancakes, French toast, anything sweet, and apparently (though I haven't been able to replicate this at home), the meat sauce pasta they give him at daycare. He eats few foods other than those, but that doesn't mean I don't keep trying. He's Peter's child; someday, he'll eat anything and everything.
Lukie weaned two weeks ago-- after nursing for 21 months to the day. All along, I have hoped that Lukie and I could go as long as we needed to for him to just stop on his own. That was, until my co-worker and I got accepted to speak at the Tennessee Library Association meeting next week in Memphis. I'll be gone for 2 nights and 3 days, and Peter will be alone with Lukas. We had thought that we would wean him this week, but two weeks ago, he went all night without asking to nurse. Oh, he still woke up, but instead of grabbing his pillow and handing it to me, he just cuddled into me and went back to sleep (that's pretty much how we sleep now). I decided it was time, and for the next two nights, I gently told him "nursies were sleeping" when he asked to nurse. There was a little crying, but not as much as I had feared. He hasn't nursed since the 3rd or 4th of April. I'm a weird combination of relieved and sad. Relieved that my body is mine again, sad because it kind of felt like the last thing that I could do for him that Peter couldn't. I know I'm the mommy. I get that. But telling him "nursies are sleeping" felt a bit like saying "Mommy can't love you right now." Irrational, I know, and holding him while he fell back to sleep says the opposite of that. But it's certainly bittersweet. He's growing up, and it was the last connection to that time when he and I were one working unit.
Ah, well. On to speaking.
Lukie still doesn't talk much. To be truthful, he wasn't a very babble-y baby, and it was something I noticed before he was a year old. He has a few words: juice, weeee (for swinging or playing with something), yay, Dada, shoes. Those are all new developments, though. At his 18-month appointment, he still had no words, and the doctor recommended we see the speech therapist. She assessed him and said that he was behind on his expression (using words) and reception (understanding words). Both were things she felt he needed to work on, and she recommended speech therapy.
Lukie goes once a week for half an hour. The therapy is play-based. He and the speech therapy assistant, whom he really loves, play and do tasks- a lot of them have to do with teaching him to pay attention and listen when she's speaking. Lukas is a focused child, and because of that, he often tunes out the world in order to really focus on the toy he's playing with or the activity he's doing. He wasn't listening when Pete or I would speak to him, so we work on making sure he stops what he's doing and listens to us.
Lukie's therapist says he's doing really well. He will now mimic her when she does something with a toy, respond with increasingly varied babble (both the sounds he's making and the inflection he uses while making them), and pays attention a little better every time. I know his reception is better; the other night, I asked him if he was ready to watch Shaun the Sheep, part of our bedtime routine as he's still not great with books, though we're working on it, and he ran directly to the bedroom and wanted help onto the bed. We don't know how long he'll be in therapy, but it is really nice to see him making some serious leaps in the speech department.
So that's it; that's our life with Lukie right now. He's developing a personality, which we can't wait to find out more about once he's talking to us, and we're watching and enjoying. We're slowing being able to do more and more fun things with him, and that is such a welcome development. As he grows older, it's so fun to watch as our family settles into a life where Lukie is interested in the things we're doing, learning from us, and teaching us to be patient and creative.
Oh, and here's my first tiny bouquet of cuttings from my garden. :)
