A good day of daddy-son time

posted by Jeff | Saturday, June 11, 2011, 11:14 PM | comments: 0

Simon has been somewhat of a mess lately, mostly around sleep and eating issues, though we've got solid information from Dr. Cargo Pants about those issues now. He's also starting to get into the tantrum phase when he doesn't get his way. Things really came to a head yesterday when he started thrashing around in Diana's lap and clocked his head hard into Diana's cheek bone. She's got serious bruising around her right eye right now.

Diana spent much of the morning at a parenting seminar that explored how to deal with behavioral issues, focusing in part about the level of emotional and logical development a child Simon's age has. The long and short of it is that being angry and trying to reason with him doesn't work, so you have to operate more at his level. That's probably not news to us or anyone else, but parents are emotional beings as well, and it's hard.

Through some miracle, Simon managed to sleep in a bit, until 7 or so. I got up with him, made him some breakfast, and we hung out all morning. It was kind of awesome to get some one-on-one time with him, something that is sorely lacking most of the time. It also helps that he was pretty even all day. His lunch consumption wasn't strong, but we had some good bonding times. I spent a lot of time just watching him. Watching him work things out never stops being fascinating to me.

Sometimes he does stuff that brings back memories I wasn't sure I even had. The simple act of him going from walking to a fast crawl reminds me so much of doing the same thing, remembering the feeling that while crawling was faster sometimes, it hurt my knees or gave me rug burn. It's more feeling memory than visual, but neat regardless.

The doctor suggested we have him screened for any developmental deficiencies, because there are a few things that he should likely be doing that puts him slightly behind. One is the number of words, though wouldn't you know it, he seemed to use "out" in the right context today when battling me at the patio door. He should also be climbing up on furniture, though I'm not sure he's tall enough. But even with that, today we noticed him trying to pull his leg up at the couch. Just the suggestions that he should do one thing or another leads us to helping him, and he seems to get it.

Sometimes I look at him, and he seems to big. Not that he isn't still this fragile little thing, but he's just less fragile than he once seemed. Before you know it, we'll be coloring, riding a bike and talking about politics soon.

I'm so thankful for days like today.


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