I keep reading online that the customary Christmas gift/bonus for your babysitter is a week’s worth of pay.  Is that true?!!!  We use her on average once a week, so it’s not THAT much…but it would end up being more than we spent on Tyler!  She comes every morning with a Dunkin Donuts coffee (can’t blame her…we ask her to be here at 6 AM) so we were thinking of getting her a Dunkin Donuts gift card.  I already got her daughter two little toys.  Would the gift card be enough?  We love her and we think she’s fantastic, so I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t appreciate what she does for us.

I won’t have time tomorrow to write this, so I’m getting this in during nap time.  14 months old sounds so much older to me than 13 months old for some reason.  13 months sound just barely past the 1 year mark, but 14 month sounds like it’s in true toddler territory.

BB finally learned to stand up on his own without holding onto anything.  I swear, this boy does everything backwards.  Sits up before he rolls….cruises before he crawls…walks before learning how to stand up.  He’s a great walker now.  I’m surprised at how quickly he was able to get used to balancing.  I guess those 5 months of cruising helped with his balance.  He is almost running….it’s more like speedwalking, his feet don’t leave the ground yet.  He’s making attempt to jump, but it looks more like violent squats.  I have to constantly chase after him because he walks away from me in a blink of an eye.  PB wants to get the leash thing.  hahaha.  I don’t know how other parents get their kids to walk next to them or hold their hand.  BB will NOT hold our hands.  He wants to walk all by himself.  If we try, he wrestles his hand away.  Usually, we have to grab him by the forearm and pull him.  It’s like walking a bulldog.

He loves to play with leaves (both on the ground and unfortunately on people’s trees and shrubs).  We tell him to touch only and not to pull, but sometimes we aren’t quick enough to stop him from stripping a branch clean of its leaves.

He understands directions and follows them fairly well (sort of).  If he really really wants to do something after we say no, he’ll take one quick swipe at it before walking away.

He cracks himself up all the time over random things.  He’s developed this fake, “a- HAHA” laugh that he does if you laugh along with him.

He loves all things thrill related.  Being thrown up in the air, spun around in a circle, bounced up and down in the air upside down, flipped and rolled.  He is going to love roller coasters when he’s older.  That’s fine with me because then he can keep Papa company on the roller coasters while I sit out and enjoy the view.

He loves to be chased around and shrieks in fake fear as we come up close behind him.  He usually tries to run at this point, but since his mind moves faster than his feet, he ends up falling down repeatedly.

He loves opening and closing doors.  One of his favorite games is to close a door (none of our doors close all the way without some force, so he can’t get his fingers caught) and wait behind it until we knock.  Then he’ll open the door and we yell, “BOO” and scare the witts out of him (which he loves) and then he’ll close the door and do it again.  If we hide after we knock and he doesn’t see us when he opens the door, he comes out looking for us to scare him.

His favorite thing right now are lights. All day, he just points to the lights or the christmas tree and signs lights lights lights lights lights.  During dinner, he just points to the chandelier and signs “more lights”

He is picking up a few more signs.   I didn’t even teach them to him…I’m not sure how he learned them.  We do have signing picture books with other babies doing the signs…I don’t know if he learned by looking at the pictures.  But he taught himself hat (which I never bothered to teach him because I knew he would never ask to wear a hat), telephone and ball (we’ve been trying to teach him another variation of it, but he uses the one in the book).

In terms of spoken language, we realized now that he has sort of been talking, but his words aren’t exactly words.  He uses the same sound for multiple purposes, like “ba ba” could be dad or bottle.  He says, “da” for car and train.  He repeated “cracker” when I said it, but hasn’t said it on his own.  “Dai der” did turn out to be Tyler.  But that’s about it.  Or at least that’s what we’ve figured out.  There are sounds the he makes repeatedly, but we don’t know what it means.

His tantrums haven’t really gotten worse, which is good.  And I guess he’s not really THAT bad.  I always think he’s so bad until I see other kids, who are just as bad (or worse).  He’s just a normal toddler!

He is transitioning to 1 nap.  There are days when he takes 2 and days when he takes 1.  It depends on what time he wakes up in the morning.

We still haven’t fully figured out the milk situation.  He’s still on soy, which he’s fine with…but we would like to switch him to cow’s milk if we can because it’s so much cheaper and easier to find when we’re out and about.  Now, we have to lug around a container of soy milk just in case they don’t have any where we go.  We tried Lactaid milk and he got constipated pretty badly with that too.  So I don’t think he’s actually lactose intolerant…I’m not sure what it is, but cow’s milk just makes him plugged up.

Most of the kiddos in my weekly playgroup are around the age of 2.  Tyler is one of the youngest ones, aside from the newborns so he’s not quite at that challenging terrible two’s phase.  He’s starting it, but it’s not full blown.  But there are some things I’ve noticed about disciplining styles and how the kids react to other people.  This probably isn’t universal, but it holds true amongst the playgroup kids.  The moms who yell at their kids have kids who yell at other people!

If two kids are fighting over a toy, the one who gets yelled at will be the one releasing bloodcurling screams.  The kids whose moms take a more Supernanny type approach to disciplining (calmly talking to them and explaining why it’s wrong) usually hold onto the toy with a superman grip….silently determined to get that toy.  It’s really interesting to watch. 

It just goes to show how much your kids absorb from watching how you act.  I really try to be a calm discipliner.  I raise my voice slightly when I mean business, but I try not to yell.  Once I get his attention, I shake my head no slowly to let him know I don’t approve.  But now, he will touch the forbidden object once really quickly and then walk away shaking his head no.  I don’t know if it’s a good thing that he knows to walk away and that it’s a no no, or a bad thing that he touches it in the first place.  I’ll see if I can keep this cool demeanor when he gets really challenging.