Me and Owen on the boat to Köyceğiz, Turkey.
Hmm, well it’s been a while and I don’t even know where to start. Things happen so fast in Owen-world. One minute he’s an over-grown foetus in nappies, next thing he’s saying ‘Please may I leave the table, mummy?’ and wiping his own nose.
So the summer is behind us, and it was a bit rubbish weather-wise but luckily we had a two-week sojourn in the sunshine in Dalyan, Turkey, which was so godamn beautiful I can’t even bear to think about it now, with the wind whistling through the eaves and rain dripping down the back of my neck… oh to be back by the pool… beer in one hand, lazily hoiking a dripping toddler out of the pool with the other. I was super-impressed with Turkey and especially the beautiful town of Dalyan. Would love to go back one day. Owen was the star attraction there, he got his hair ruffled more times than I can count and every restaurant we went to the waiters would just carry him off to give him a guided tour. It was weird at first, but after a while I felt more relaxed about it and actually felt that it was really nice that Owen was made so welcome everywhere we went. Not like in England. If you take a child to a restaurant in England, everyone looks at them as if to say, “Ewww, what IS that thing you’ve brought with you? Please don’t let it anywhere near ME.”
Owen loved it, had a great time, really got into swimming and by the end of the holiday he was like a fish out of water when he wasn’t in water if that makes any sense. He’s quite a sensitive little boy, cautious (perhaps overly) with anything new. He’s very confident with grown-ups, generally, but not so with children his own age, and that made it a bit difficult sometimes with Freddie, who is completely the opposite to Owen in character – very assured and confident and throws himself into everything without a second thought. Funny how their characters are already so clearly developing in different ways, I wonder how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Owen is really not so much a toddler and more a little boy now. His memory is excellent, amazingly so sometimes. He recalls things that happened only once, and quite some time ago. His language and communication is excellent too. You can have a conversation with him. He remembers and recites passages from his books. Dr. Seuss books are some of his favourites – Cat in the Hat obviously, but also Green Eggs and Ham and There’s a Wocket in My Pocket. He has some books about a zebra called Zigby, which he loves too. They are really good for building vocabulary I think, because they use more descriptive words than a lot of books aimed at his age group. He often just comes out with lines from books, sometimes in context (“No no no I do NOT like this game” if he’s not happy with the way something’s going, for example) and sometimes just out of the blue, (“Who took my fishing net?!”)
Owen has the most vivid imaginative life. He is constantly inventing little games, characters, scenarios. He pretends to be things. Some days he is a dog, some days a rabbit. At the moment he is mainly a snake. Sometimes he is a snake pretending to be a cat. The mind boggles. Yesterday in the bath, he was playing with marbles. He put them all in a boat. One of them was the boat driver. I asked him where the boat was going. “To the mud baths.” This astonished me. A. Because he remembered the fact that when we were in Turkey we got a boat to the mud baths; and B. Because he was actually asleep from just before we got to the mud baths to just after we had left, so he didn’t actually see the mud baths at all. I think that is a very interesting thing happening in his brain – a combination of memory and imagination, as well as perhaps showing a disappointment in not getting to see the mud baths. Connections are firing away ten to the dozen (or ten million to the dozen!) and it’s fascinating to see it happening – a human being growing, developing, getting bigger, doing more, understanding more, thinking more.
I love to just watch him play, see how he makes a toy sword into a hoover and makes all the hoover noises, even the noise as he turns it off, lowering the pitch. He makes his hands into pretend spiders, Sally and Cyril (they used to be glove puppet spiders but now he just makes do with his hands) and they have games and chatter away to each other. He doesn’t make his books into telegraph poles so much anymore, but anything and everything long and thin is prone to being made into a hoover. And since our Turkey holiday, he’s obsessed with air conditioning units, or anything that looks vaguely like an air conditioning unit, or even things that don’t bear ANY resemblance that I can see to air conditioning units, but he obviously does. A pencil, waved frantically in the air, apparently is an air conditioning unit. Or a hairbrush, or a fork, etc. etc. and so on.
Can I just also mention the P word? Potty training. We are deep in the throes of it, and it’s going very well. Just before holiday, I put him into pants. He was doing well with the wees and less well with the poos. In fact, he was a poo refuser for quite a while. But on holiday I had him running around with no pants on most days, and he did start to use the potty much more, as well as the toilet. And we even had a few number twos in the potty. Now we’ve been back about 3 weeks and he’s coming on in big leaps and bounds. He can even pull his pants and trousers down. It will be even better when he can pull them back up again!
There’s a wealth of things my little man can do now, that I just can’t write them all down in one post – the latest thing is jumping, he took ages to work out how to jump with both feet, but now he can do it he wants to jump everywhere. Walking isn’t good enough any more. And climbing – he is SO good at climbing! Probably the one thing he should have fear of, he has no fear of. But actually, climbing suits his careful personality. It’s not like football or something where you throw yourself at a ball. It’s more measured, more careful, you have to look down and up, and watch where you’re putting your hands and feet. So perhaps that’s why he loves it so much. I like climbing too.
I should go now, need to sleep. This weekend is party weekend (as in kids’ parties!) and I need all the energy I can muster to get through them!
