Ethan William Alexander: 20 Months

20 Months We’ve had a fun month. Ethan has been growing so fast. It is unbelievable how quickly a month flies by. I feel like I don’t have enough pictures to do this month any justice, I guess that is partly because I misplaced my camera’s battery charger so I had no camera for a while. One day, Ethan and Daddy thought it would be a great idea to put stickers all over each other, I was still peeling stickers off Ethan in the bath tub.

We try to have a lot of fun during the short period we have between after work and Ethan’s bedtime. Sometimes we run out of fun ideas, but luckily our daycare has started sending ideas home every Friday. I look forward to these suggestions because not only are they fun family activities, but they are sensory enhancing too. One of the new games we play is “Dance Party” (I named it myself). What we’ve been doing is turning on music and we all dance around the living room, to add some extra fun we wave scarves or tea towels around for extra movement. It’s been a fun way to get us all involved in playtime. We’ve started giving Ethan cereal for breakfast. He loves Cheerios with milk. Somdays it goes really well…

Other days it turns out like this…

He just has too much fun eating sometimes. In January we brought Ethan to Monster Jam. For the last few months he has had a fascination with vehicles, trucks, “big trucks”, cars, fire trucks, police cars , helicopters, airplanes, you name it he loves it. So when Jonathan came home with a newspaper clipping for Monster Jam in Toronto, it wasn’t a question that we were going bring Ethan. And are we glad we did. He had a ball. The event lasted almost 3 hours and Ethan was content and entertained the entire time. We snacked on popcorn and drank pop, it was a fun treat for us all. I think we have started a new tradition, and a couple of our friends with kids want to join us next year, I can’t wait.

Ethan went to a birthday party in January too. Unfortunately it was during the time when my camera battery was dead so I couldn’t take pictures. But we had a blast. Ethan loves playing with other kids, and it’s nice to be able to watch him interact because we didn’t get to see that when he is at daycare. Speaking of daycare, Ethan had been “Mr. Pushy Pants” lately. He is vary aggressive towards other kids and pushes them or pulls them around. Michelle at the daycare mentioned that after nap time he seemed like a different kid and suggested that maybe he hasn’t been getting enough sleep at night. Which was probably true, since Ethan’s been in his new bed (a big boy bed) he is in and out of bed and although bedtime is 8pm it is often 9:30pm before he is actually sleeping. So this week we started everything an hour earlier. Now we bath him at 6:30pm, read him two stories (Robert Munsch of course) and then by 8:00pm he is asleep. This seems to be working out better, unfortunately this means we lose an hour of playtime. We’ve started giving Ethan bubble baths. He loves it, and it helps to get him excited about bath time on days when he is resisting. Although, I am trying to teach him that bubbles are not a snack. It is so funny, as the bath is filling he’ll dip his finger in the bubbles and taste it as if he is sampling cake batter. Hopefully we can kick that habit soon.

The daycare has been a helpful parenting resource. Another thing we are practicing with Ethan is the way we ask/tell him to do things. As most 20 month olds, when you ask them “Go get your coat” chances are they would rather keep playing, which is the case everyday trying to get Ethan to come home after daycare. SO they suggest that rather than saying “Ethan, let’s go get your coat” repeatedly we are to ask once, if he refuses, or doesn’t show interest we then say “Is Ethan going to get his coat or does mommy have to use her hands to help you?” Ethan, being the independent boy he is, usually takes the bait and says “No, Ethan do it” and goes to his coat. Now this doesn’t work every time, but it has definitely been a useful tool. We are learning a lot. Boy did we get a surprise the other day. As I was attempting to do the “1,2,3” count to give Ethan trouble I was shocked when he started counting along! I would say “1” he’d say “2”. Then I’d say “4” and he’d holler “5” from the other room. This went all the way to 10. I was so impressed. We went from giving him trouble to praising his counting skills, and of course laughing every time he’d say the next number because we were so shocked. An exciting announcement, the other day Michelle at Ethan’s daycare told me that Ethan is ahead of most of the kids with his vocabulary, and he is one of the youngest in the class. We are so proud to hear that. When Daddy was in Ottawa for the weekend, we had a “Mommy & Son” date with our friend in the building. Danijella and her little boy Santiago came over for supper, a movie and then we couldn’t resist giving then a bath together, we had a fun day! So fun.

When Daddy was away Ethan and I did some early Valentines Day baking. While Ethan napped I baked 48 cookies! So when he woke up we had a lot of decorating to do. I did the icing and he did the sprinkles.

And of course, if you make a mess you have to clean it up… I walked into the kitchen and Ethan was pushing the chair over to the sink, he wanted to wash the dishes. SO he played in the sink while I washed the dishes.