Just the beginning of toddlerhood

Tristan is your typical active toddler. The only time you can expect to see him fairly still is when he is drinking milk or when he sleeps. When he first started daycare in January, I remembered one of the staff there saying that when the babies start to push the highchair around the room, that is a sign that they are ready to leave the Infant room and go into the Toddler room. I thought that was strange because Tristan was already pushing the highchair at home way before he started daycare.

He has been in the infant room for four months now and I am actually quite anxious for him to leave soon. I think after about 2 months, when he was 15 months old, he must have been pretty bored. The infant room is very small and if the kids don't go outside, I can see how it could be very boring for them to be there all day. I think the main entertainment is the staff and other babies. The toddler room is so much more exciting and once they go into that program, the staff puts them on the potty right away. That is something I'm looking forward to :)

Tristan loves to imitate what people do. Big people and small people. Tristan likes to do what we do and copy us, which is nothing new. Apparently, he does this at daycare too. One of the boys at daycare and Tristan imitate each other. One of them would throw their hands in the air and the other would too. Then they would both laugh. Something like that. Also, one of the girls likes to hug and kiss Tristan. When I first saw her do it, I was a bit uncomfortable. Tristan just stood still the first time but then started to push her away and run away when she tried it again, the second time and the third time. The little girl had a runny nose and she was trying to kiss him on the mouth. I actually took kleenex out of my pocket to wipe his mouth afterwards. Then, when I went to pick him up that same day, I saw the little girl do it again and this time Tristan did it back. Oh my goodness! Tristan is making out with the little blond girl from daycare! At just 17 months? Anyway, when they tried to hug and kiss each other, they ending up knocking each other over. I went to catch them but the little girl hit herself on my knee a bit and cried. Yup. That was a quick end to that make-out session. I wonder how often this goes on at daycare. Or maybe I don't want to know. What kind of surprises me is that the staff don't intervene at all. Should we be encouraging this sort of behavior towards strangers? I don't know.

Our once sweet baby is showing signs of throwing tantrums such as stomping his feet and crying when we don't let him have something. Sometimes he rolls on the floor and has a fit too. We ignore him for the most part. I think we're getting a preview of what people call the "terrible twos." It doesn't happen a lot but we would prefer not to see it at all :)

For the past week or so, he has been picky with his food. I hear this is a toddler phase as well. He wasn't sick or anything else so we can only conclude that he was just picky. We fed him how we had always fed him but some times he would refuse to even try the food. This is all stuff that he has eaten and loved before like broccoli, carrots, peas, noodles, and even some fruit. Actually, there was a day where he basically only wanted to eat cereal, fruit, and milk. What did we do? Well, we just kept trying and if he wouldn't eat, we would just skip that course and move onto fruit. We didn't give him any more fruit than we would normally give him because we didn't want him full on just fruit. We figured once he was hungry, he would want to eat. We packed him the same food again to daycare and he refused to eat it there too. It's the first time he has ever refused to eat his main dish at daycare. They were somewhat shocked too. Anyhow, this went on for 2 days and then he decided to eat again. And then he decided not to. It seemed like almost every other day he would eat a bit more of the main dish. That was Friday.

On the weekend, Tristan ate everything we offered him. Not a lot but he ate some of everything, which was good enough for us. I think new food and alternating between two main dishes helped. Things were even better today. Tonight, I made French veal stew with green olives, mushrooms, onions and served it with rice. It has been awhile since I made that. Tristan ate so much we thought he was starving. His daycare report said that he ate most of his food too. He must have really liked the dish and he is probably still hungry too from not eating too much last week. I don't know if we have our old Tristan back yet but we'll give it a week before introducing plain steamed vegetables to him again. If this week goes well, maybe we'll steam a little something green next week or at the end of this week.