Oli… the boss??

What a little man!

He’s running the house almost, he’s such a confident little Rigby, it’s hard to believe that he’s the same little money that I’d get home from work to see, but instead he’d scream until he slept each night!

He’s talking quite a lot too – admittedly, there’s still a level of pronunciation to learn, but his vocabulary is already quite large.

Oli is simply not bothered by bigger brother Jack either – Jack wants to be near Oliver and show signs of big-brotherly love (namely teasing) but Oli just doesn’t bat an eyelid, until he’s interested. Bit like Cats and Dogs really.

Much thicker-set than Jack is or ever was, I think Oli will grow and grow and end up being physically bigger than Jack, but it’s actually quite hard to tell Jack that at the moment!!

We’ve been taking him to nursery twice a week, to get him socially interacting with other children. This is something that we probably did too late with Jack, hence his defiance in going, whereas Oli was being taken prior to being able to vocalise those opinions!  To begin with, he’d cry at the idea of being left somewhere, but the repetition of attending, coupled with the same faces at the nursery has meant that he’s now going in really well, sometimes even forgetting to say goodbye to us! As he’s able to talk, he refers to nursery as playing at ‘Nickies house’, which is good, as at in my mind, that means that he’s found a more affectionate or personalised way of thinking about it.  He goes in, wearing his Thomas the Tank Engine bag, which is probably larger in appearance that is proportional to his body, making him look like a little Ghostbuster as we walk down the street!

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.

Walking, Talking; Shouting and Fighting!

I think the title pretty much says it all, young Master Oliver is pulling no punches when it comes to fighting with his older brother, Jack.  

Jack might think its funny to wind up Oliver, whether he's teasing him with toys that he wants, or generally applying 'brotherly love' (arguing, pushing or fighting), Oli will more than rise to the challenge and won't back down. In fact, we quite often have to drag Oli off of Jack and at least Jack knows where and when to stop, but Oli still needs to learn that!, as well as the terms of engagement - his teeth are a powerful weapon that we're all finding out about!!

Oli has grown up so fast and is a lovely, bubbly and playful little man when he's not sinking teeth, that is! He jabbers away all day to himself or to anyone that will listen.

He's discovered the wonderful world of Justin Fletcher - for those of you don't know, Justin is a God to any kid under the age of 7... look him up on Wikipedia or something, the man's a legend.  But anyway, Oliver sings along to the title music, joins in with calling for Mr Tumble (again, if you don't know, look him up!) with such excited-ness and passion. I really need to catch him on video camera, as its really funny.

His speaking has progressed massively in the past few weeks. We've been talking to him in much of the same way, that I can remember, that we did for Jack and he's learning more words all of the time and is getting better each day or week at pronouncing them.

We started taking Oliver to nursery at an earlier age than we did for Jack - we found that Jack wasn't used to being looked after by anyone else than ourselves or immediate family and it made it bad for many weeks or months, as he'd kick off on being left. It took a long while for him to get used to it, and we knew that we couldn't go through that again with Oli, especially as he's got more of his mum's temper than Jack, shall we say!

They do get on well, though. There's times when they're playing really nicely by themselves, when we sneak into find out what they're doing, as their silence is *really* disconcerting..! Jack is still trying to find out the invisible boundaries in terms of Oli, as Oli doesn't care about who's pens or pencils they are, what they're for, or whatever - he knows that throwing them across the room gets Jack's attention enough for him to react. You can imagine the rest.

Sleep-wise though, Oliver is nearly two, and only now is learning to sleep for a whole night. There must be an invisible alarm clock in his room, as no matter what time he goes to bed, he's awake at 5am, almost to the dot. But we'll get there.

Distractions

I don’t know where I’ve heard or read about this, so I’m not trying to take the credit here; instead, I’m trying to explain our approach on this.

From practical experience with our two boys, distracting them from doing something ahead of time is much more beneficial than suffering the consequences of letting a situation brew.

For instance: Nappy changing is a nightmare at the best of times when these kids are strong enough to mimic a crocodile rolling over to kill it’s food.  But if there’s a poo-filled nappy involved and the kiddo decides to roll onto their fronts, instead of lying calmly and patiently on their backs like they do on the TV, there’s then another angle to the problem that I’ll leave you to ponder upon. Rather than allow our boys to get up to no-good during this very frequent, surgical-like, procedure we try our best to distract them, by getting them to do something or look at something to get them thinking otherwise. Such things could be, trying to find the fire engine on the big poster stuck on the opposing wall. Or the digger that is part of the lamp shade. “Where’s your hair?” tactics, basically, anything that will interest them into concentrating on something other than death-rolls, making the poo-nappy situation a little easier to deal with.

This works in other walks of life too. We’ve subconsciously been doing this in the car too, to alleviate boredom during our travels, such as trying to find the tractors on the fields, or point out buses, police cars, big lorries, and so on. 

The dog. Ah, the dog. Many-a-time during a tantrum or crying session, we’ll say to the boys (particularly when they were young), “Ssh, can you hear Alfie barking? Quick, lets go and find him!” and it suddenly gives them something different to think about, other than the situation at hand.

Another example, is that we’ve still got 6”x4” photos of vehicles and animals around the room in the kitchen, ready for when Oliver is beginning to flag in terms of eating. At any time, we can get him to find the lorry, the double-decker bus or even the pig – this gives us something to give him to think about, such that we can keep his head still long enough to shovel more food in.

There’s even a tactfully placed helicopter photograph stuck to the ceiling, directly above where the high-chair is, for those emergencies when you need the physiology of the human body to help out and physically ease off the muscles of the face that’s force-holding a jaw closed, such that a spoon fits nicely into their mouths. (100% my idea that! Patent pending.)

It’s amazing how distracting them ahead of a problem is so much easier to deal with, rather than trying to get them back from the brink of a major disaster.

The boys: update

Where do I start? It’s weird, but it feels like a lifetime ago when it was just Claire and myself in our own little world. Makes me wonder what we used to do when we had spare time, as it’s something that we dream of right now!

Oliver is a year old already; Jack is four.

Oliver is walking around this week like he’s always been able to, and likes to do what he likes to do. If that means hitting Jack on the head with a toy car, then so be it. Jack is taking it all though, which I’m quite surprised about. He’s been a lot better than I expected him to have been, considering that he’s having to shave everything he’s ever known with Oliver, like parents, toys, general attention, etc etc.

Oliver is learning ‘stuff’ already – we’ve got the same flash-cards that we used for Jack all that time ago, and have pinned them up in the kitchen. During lunch, we try to encourage Oliver to find the photo of the tractor, the fire engine, and so on, which he’s picking up really well.

Jack is… well, fantastic. He’s at the age now, or realistically has been for a while now, that we can trust him to do things. If we need to attend to Oliver, I feel happy telling Jack where we’ll be, and know that he’s safe enough and happy enough to hang on in there by himself, doing whatever he’s doing. Little star, really.

Claire’s been taking Oliver to baby-signing (with my sister and her two young kids), as she did before with Jack. He’s starting to try to say some things, whilst at the same time trying to mumble something, mostly about the dog. “Where,o-where, o-where is Al-fie dog-dog-dog?”…. is a phrase well versed in our house of late.

The boys: update

Where do I start? It’s weird, but it feels like a lifetime ago when it was just Claire and myself in our own little world. Makes me wonder what we used to do when we had spare time, as it’s something that we dream of right now!

Oliver is a year old already; Jack is four.

Oliver is walking around this week like he’s always been able to, and likes to do what he likes to do. If that means hitting Jack on the head with a toy car, then so be it. Jack is taking it all though, which I’m quite surprised about. He’s been a lot better than I expected him to have been, considering that he’s having to shave everything he’s ever known with Oliver, like parents, toys, general attention, etc etc.

Oliver is learning ‘stuff’ already – we’ve got the same flash-cards that we used for Jack all that time ago, and have pinned them up in the kitchen. During lunch, we try to encourage Oliver to find the photo of the tractor, the fire engine, and so on, which he’s picking up really well.

Jack is… well, fantastic. He’s at the age now, or realistically has been for a while now, that we can trust him to do things. If we need to attend to Oliver, I feel happy telling Jack where we’ll be, and know that he’s safe enough and happy enough to hang on in there by himself, doing whatever he’s doing. Little star, really.

Claire’s been taking Oliver to baby-signing (with my sister and her two young kids), as she did before with Jack. He’s starting to try to say some things, whilst at the same time trying to mumble something, mostly about the dog. “Where,o-where, o-where is Al-fie dog-dog-dog?”…. is a phrase well versed in our house of late.