Little Oli isn’t so… little!

He’s growing ever so much, its crazy.

It was Oliver’s two year old birthday at the beginning of January. TWO YEARS OLD!

He’s not only walking and talking, he’s singing, dancing and running circles around us all. He’s fixated with Mr Tumble and loves his ‘spotty bag’ and his Tumble Tap (an electronic game similar to that which Justin Fletcher uses on the Something Special TV programme on Cbeebies).

Oliver is much more interested in the sign language from the Something Special TV programme, joining in as or when it comes on telly. 

Physically, he’s made of a lot thicker stuff than Jack ever was – I don’t mean that horribly at all, but he’s got a lot more meat on him. And taking cues from Jack, he’s ever so confident too. But as he’s still quite young, he loves to be ticked and rolled about, or jumping all over the bed.

Little monster.

But as I said in the last blog post, he’s not as good at sleeping as Jack (and their mum!!) is.  We’ve taken to sleeping on the floor beside his cot, to keep him in his bed at night time, which is not the most comfortable but needs must, I guess.  We have been sleeping on triple-folder duvets to pad-out the floor, but last night was quite bad, especially as he started waking at 23:00 and then peaked at 01:30 this morning when singing along to the Mr Tumble teddy in his cot. (Not a good idea that one!)

But when he’s awake, he’s so funny – he takes no stick from Jack or the dog, or from Claire and I, come to think about it!!  He can talk enough to tell us exactly what he wants to do, and when he wants it.

Little monster.

He’s FOUR years old!

\An obvious thing to say, but yes, I’m starting to comprehend this.

I think I have been comparing Jack to Oliver, and have probably been expecting a little too much of Jack.

Maybe it was around when Oliver was born, I think that we started to treat Jack like he was a bit older than he was, as you could converse with him, play games with him and get him to do the odd menial task, too.

As Oliver hasn’t really mastered the art of sleeping yet, the wife and I are sort of struggling to survive of late. I, certainly, have been probably putting a little too much on Jack, expecting him to understand the problems that we’re dealing with, and then get disappointed with Jack when he acts… like a four year old.

This morning was pretty bad. I had little sleep, and was fairly grumpy to Jack when he comes into the spare room where I had been sleeping, saying that his Lego-man torch had strangely had an arm amputation in the night. It wasn’t that he came in and woke me, as I’m a fairly light sleeper and heard him clamber out of bed. It was more that it was 05:30 in the morning and we had agreed just the other night that he wouldn’t get out of bed before 06:10.

Again, I must have assuming that Jack had a) remembered our conversation, b) thought to check the time before leaving his room and c) joined the dots together enough to think about what I had been doing during the night.  Never going to happen really, was it?

Because…. he’s four.

And being four, he didn’t respond in the most positive reaction to my miserable state of mind. We ended up arguing, resulting in me threatening to stop Jack from going to swimming or to his beloved Karate lessons.

Again, I was reminded that he is just four years old,by my conscience (Claire), leaving me feeling quite bad about it all. And yes, I was the bigger man and apologised to him as best I could.

I’ve spent the day thinking about it and made sure that he was in a happy mood this evening before going to bed, as he doesn’t need to care about anything other than being a four year old boy.

Because he’s four.