Nutters Grove: Mr Opinionated

Braeden's personality is showing signs of continuing to develop.

Never backward in coming forward with his wants and needs, he's learning to use his facial muscles to convey greater depth to his current mood. I'm surprised his nose (for example) doesn't fall asleep long before the rest of his face, simply from over-exertion. He's learned to wrinkle it up like a little porklet, which is rather endearing when teamed with a volley of facial farts.

Which brings me to the "sound of the day". Often it's the juicy raspberry mentioned above, but can also be a whooply-sounding cough, or a single word, or whatever takes his fancy. That cough thing really had me going there for a bit, as it sounds just like what the books describe as Whooping Cough. Wayne was on to it, however, and pointed out that Braeden was only doing it in "conversation", ie when it was his turn to contribute, he would cough rather than go "bahbahbabble" or similar. This is when we had to put our parrothood training into effect, and pointedly NOT respond to this noise no matter how tempting, and sure enough, without the feedback he retired it to the box marked "Doesn't seem to work for me".

Banging-type games are very popular at the moment, with all three of us playing the 'drum' on the footstool the other day. It evolved into Wayne slapping a rhythm, then me, then Braeden. Everyone waited their turn, which is pretty amazing for an 8 month old, I reckon. He very much enjoyed this game, and I think it might have to become a regular thing.

Another great fave is paper! Both Braeden's parents are addicted to Sudoku; even going so far as to print out a few dozen puzzles at a time and keeping them on a clipboard for easy access. (Don't tell Wayne I told you, but one of his major gripes when we lost power for two days last week was that we didn't do a big printout of Sudoku first!)

Anyhoo, as wannabe conservationists, we reuse the reverse side of the paper for the next round of printouts, and even when both sides are used up there is still life in the paper yet, as Master Braeden has a ripping good time with the discarded sheets.

Still waiting on that top tooth. Darn thing woke Braeden up every 15 minutes the other night, which meant by around 2am neither parent could go back to sleep (37th strike, yerOUT!). Bubs wasn't unhappy as such, just not able to settle into deep sleep for long. He was fine the next day, but we were write-offs. Thank goodness for tag-team-parenting that we could go back to bed in shifts, leaving the other one to mind the baby & make the coffee.

Enjoy the pix :-)