Rugby Tackles Galore

This weekend, we went down to Bath for a 1 year old birthday party, for Claire’s friend’s daughter, Lara.

The whole day was great and Jack was being very well behaved for most of it, until the man with the bouncy-castle appeared…!  When they were first allowed onto it, all the children went into shy-mode, not wanting to be the first.  Except Jack.

Not bothered by things like shyness, Jack (with me shortly behind him) went bounding towards this inflatable land.  I didn’t know what he would make of it and so I climbed onto the bouncy castle too, just to help, of course.  We started to bounce around and then one tumble after another and suddenly, it was filled with children that arrived from nowhere.

To put things into a little context, Jack was certainly one of the smaller children there that day, and was easily knocked around by the bounces that the other kids were putting out. He spent most of the time on the floor, struggling to regain his footing, and this is where he decided that he needed a little help.

So, the most logical thing for a 19 month old child to do, is to hold something that might appear stable and secure. Namely, another child by the scruff of their neck! Needless to say that the other child, an older girl in the first instance, didn’t appreciate this and began crying by the time I made it over to them.

Jack didn’t see the problem in this, and although it did seem quite funny in a naughty sort of way, I knew the girl’s parents would be on-looking and so I had to do the ‘say sorry, Jack’ bit.  The girl looked at Jack as if to say that Justice had been done and that he really saw sorry for his actions, especially as Claire’s standing at the foot of the castle telling me to tell Jack to say ‘sorry’.

In reality, Jack is 19 months old and has no concept of ‘sorry’ or other people’s pain, as kids of that age don’t.  All the while that I am ‘telling him off’, he’s got a big cheesy grin plastered across his face, as throughout this little chat, he’s being bounced all over the place and is quite enjoying it.

Sadly, this wasn’t a one-off, and it soon evolved into Jack taking a dive into a little boy as a result of a bounce from another older boy, taking them both to the ground.  Once on the deck, Jack remained clinging to his new buddy, holding firm for whatever reason.  Again, I had to step in, but by this point, I had already retired to the sidelines because of the amount of kiddies throwing themselves around like loons on there. 

Again, I had to go through the motions of ‘telling Jack off’ for his actions, but he didn’t really get it, and wasn’t ‘sorry’.

I’d like to think that the other children got motion sickness, or simply bored, of the bouncy castle and retired one by one, but I think Jack’s assaults on them may have had an impact. But he was like a little hit-man, taking a different child down each time, so it wasn’t like he was bullying any one child in particular…

Garden sprinkler + baby = very wet baby!

Simple maths, I know, but a combination that was very funny to watch!

We’ve had grass put down in the garden and so we’ve got the garden hose out to water it (lots) and last night after I got back from work, Claire had let Jack outside to play before his bath-time and he had wandered over to where the sprinkler was spraying water.  It’s probably worth noting here that he was only wearing his white baby vest and a nappy (of course, as Naked Toddlers Make a Mess!)

As he’d be poking around with the sprinkler, the direction of it changed and he caught a bit of the spray.  As I mentioned in the Confidence++ post, he’s getting more and more brave and so kept going back for more, despite being ‘bitten’ by the sprinkler!

At one point, he was leaning almost directly over it looking downwards at it whilst the sprinkler sprayed off to one side, and then as it came back, he copped a real eye-full and was almost instantly drenched.

At this point, Claire was sitting on the doorstep laughing whilst I was trying to get a £250 prize by capturing it all on the video camera! (Hmm, one day maybe I should actually submit that to ‘You’ve Been Framed’!)

The end result was a very soggy Jack – standing there in his now see-through vest, dripping from head to toe in cold tap water!

Although the weather outside was still quite warm, he started shivering until we wrapped him up in a big bath towel and whisked him off inside.  But, you can see that he was absolutely enjoying himself by the big beaming smile plastered all across his little face.  And that he whined when we brought him in! Kids, eh?

Confidence++

Jack is getting more and more confident as time goes on. I know that’s pretty much a given, but it’s the effect on him that makes us both smile.

For example, before, he could crawl - but if we were to hold his hands, he’d walk.  Then, as he got a bit more sure of himself and obviously a little stronger too, he started to walk and realised that it’s an improvement on crawling and so gained more confidence in himself and his abilities.

Now, not only is he running, but he’s also walking backwards and playing on it too.  When Claire or I chase him around the house, he’ll respond more like a little boy by trying to duck  or dodge the attack.  Sounds like an obvious thing to say, but I think it shows that he’s learning to use these new fangled ‘muscles’ in different ways.

Not only the walking/running thing, but also in his general being – him being more confident means that he’s developing more and more of his own character, expressing himself to others about what he does and doesn’t like and more importantly, what he does and doesn’t want to do.

It’s a bit difficult, as able to tell us what he wants, possibly as a result of the baby-sign classes that Claire has been taking him to, but he’s not at that point whereby you can argue with him or bribe him properly, which is what I’m looking forward to next.

Jack and Alfie (the resident Westie) are also getting on a bit too well as a result of Jack’s confidence; possibly, that should be ‘over-confidence’ in that respect, as Jack is happy to play with Alfie (and vice versa) but Jack doesn’t yet understand that there’s a currently-unreached limit with any animal, that has certain consequences. 

To be entirely fair to him, Alfie is absolutely brilliant with Jack.  Sometimes Alfie doesn’t want to be around him, which is fine, but then other times, he does and can sometimes get a bit boisterous with his playing.  He can grumble and growl a bit whilst doing it, but the intention is not to bit or anything, but little hands coupled with very soft skin against the dog’s teeth is going to make marks one day.  We’ll see. All good fun though.

The New House!

So, we’re in!

Jack was pretty much oblivious to the whole moving process as he stayed over at each of his Grandparents house the day before and after the move, which bought us enough time to get his bedroom furniture all assembled again.  

I think that the first day that he was here, he wasn’t aware that this would be where we’d be living, as he was throwing those sorts of tantrums that he would when he was tired and wanted to go home to bed. 

He’s got much more space to put his toys now – not that it mattered before, as Claire and I have become used to having a small bundle of his toys in each room of the house. Some were intentional, like the toy cars in our bedroom that he could play with whilst we got dressed, or made the bed, but others were of Jack’s doing; he’d slowly distribute stuff that would marked his territory.  Who knows where it would stop, maybe with the taking over of the world, one bedroom at a time.

We’re running on 10 year old internet connections at the moment (56k dial-up) and have only just got that, so the uploading of photos, videos and even blog posts have been heavily restricted.

A new world

Well, maybe not quite a new ‘world’, but we are on the cusp of moving house, at least.  We have a buyer for our house and have put our dibs on a new house and things are very close now to exchange/completion, etc.

The reason I mention this, is probably my reason for have not posted anything recently, as each night after work and weekend days have been spent packing another area of life in the Rigby household into boxes.

So – back to the topic of the overall blog, Mr Rigby Junior. Here’s a bit of an update. 

He’s changed so much recently. So much, that it’s only when looking at pictures and videos of him from just a few months ago, that to us, it’s really noticeable as we’re seeing him day by day, little by little growing up.

He’s running circles around (literally) as he’s totally mobile now, which is good,  although a probably to keep track of him each minute.  He’s also found that the world isn’t flat, and want to climb up on absolutely everything, from the stairs to boxes, shelves, sides, in the bath, out of the bath.  Things just don’t seem to appear to him as a problem – just things that are in the way and need climbing over.  He will even climb directly over the top of me, if I am laying on his playroom floor and there’s something that he ‘needs’ the other side of me, whereas a couple of months ago, although he could walk, he would have walked around me to get where he wanted.

Little things like that make you smile at the time.

Talking – well, he’s getting better at that! He’s able to repeat words when you fire them back to him, mostly 1 syllable words like mum, dad, Jack, dog, car, truck, train, shoes, and so on, occasionally daring to begin with the 2 syllable words, like tractor, as he does seem to like tractors.  

Years ago, when we used to go and baby-sit Claire’s god-daughter Bethany, she must have been at the slightly older age where she could (and would) repeat pretty much anything you liked. So, over the course of the evening that we were there, I got her to say words from a Chinese takeaway menu, such as ‘egg fried rice’ as at the time, I thought it was hilarious in a very sad way, simply for the reason that she had no idea what egg fried rice was.  Obviously, I wasn’t thinking very creatively at the time, so, bringing this idea to my own child, my plan is to get him to say something like ‘Intel Pentium 4 Quad-Core Processor’, simply for geek comedy value. Claire’s not so sure though.  But time will tell…!

He’s also been taught (we don’t know entirely by whom as yet!) to yell for the dog, which is actually really funny.  Here’s what I mean:

Jack will pick up one of the dog’s chewie bone-shaped thing and to start with, we thought that he wanted to eat it, or play with it, etc and stopped him.  When we stood back and watched, he picked up the toy and then wanted to give it to Alfie, our Westie dog. With Alfie just out of sight on the stairs, Jack stood there at the foot of the stairs and, in incrementing volumes, started to yell…

“Dog’

‘Doooog!’

‘Doooooooog!’

‘Doooooooooooooooog!’

Of course, Alfie was far to lazy clever for this nonsense and simply ignored him. When Jack found him laying on the stairs, he started to climb the stairs with this dog toy in hand and when he got to him, he offered it out to him, expecting Alfie to take it.  (The reason why this dog toy is still around, is probably because we bought it ages ago for Alfie and he’s not bothered with it, meaning he doesn’t like those sort, but we didn’t have the heart to tell Jack this.)

Naked toddlers make a mess…

Yeah… I’ll bet you know what I’m going to say here.

Sometimes we let Jack run around in the nod normally after a bath, before he goes to bed. I think that we think that it’s ‘airing’ his bum and bits, as they’re cooped up in a nappy all day and night.  This hasn’t been a major problem until now. The last ‘incident’ that we had in this situation, was where Young Mr. Rigby decided to let out a little wee on the carpet, stopping and standing still to do so.

This morning, however, he took things to the next level.

After a shower first thing, he was standing butt-naked at the baby-gate in the doorway of his playroom and, in the blink of a grown-up’s eye, several large chunks of soft-looking brown poo appeared on the carpet. It was my eye that is the blinking benchmark here, as I saw him standing there looking all innocent in his birthday suit, glanced away, glanced back and had to double-take on what I saw.

By the time I had chance to rush and grab his, he stood in it and had begun smearing it on his legs and into the carpet.

Taking his straight to bathroom and into the bath, Claire came over and we began hosing down the little poo-maker. Sitting there all chirpy in the bath, whilst he looks up at us with them big blue eyes, it was a bit difficult to keep a straight face. We washed him all over again and then began the process of getting a nappy on him and quick, although it did feel like a case of the closing the barn door after the horse had bolted.

Aside: Claire just came in to where I’m writing this blog post and has read it before I had finished it – she instantly ‘fessed-up to already having picked up a bit of Jack’s poo from the carpet in his bedroom and cleaned up the minor mess before I even knew anything about it, thinking that she had got away with it, and that Jack wasn’t going to do any more. Well, she was wrong!!

High Pitch Screaming

We just had to go up there to see Jack, as he was literally screaming his back teeth out.

He did this before about a month ago, but we couldn't work out then as to why he was doing it.  Our first thoughts were, and are tonight, that he has a tooth coming through, but the effort that he’s putting into it, makes me hope that there’s five coming through!

The problem is not only that he’s screaming at top volume, full bore, etc, he gets himself so wound up, that he’s an effort to calm down again.

We tried to give him some medicine that will help things, as well as help him to sleep, but he ended up throwing it all back up again.

Of course, having just been sick, he’s then a bit grouchy too.

He eventually calmed down, thanks entirely to Claire, but not before he needed a whole new set of pyjamas and bed clothes, replacing the sick-covered ones.  And in case you think it’s only baby-sick and not too bad, this is the same sick as you and I would produce! Smell included!

The joys of parenthood, I suppose!