Silas at 2

This morning I asked Silas if he'd like to take a walk in the hiking pack to the museum.  For whatever reason, a fit of toddler obstructionism overcame him, and he shouted "NO!" at me over and over, including saying "no" in response to any and all questions.  I decided to take a little break in the bedroom while Brian played with Silas. After about 10 minutes Brian suggested to Silas that he might feel better if he apologized to me.  Without any further prompting, Silas came into the bedroom and said "I'm sorry Mama I was yelling no at you."

I was impressed.

Silas has been impressing us a lot lately.  (And for the record, it turns out he DID want to take a walk in the hiking pack to the museum, and we went, and had a nice time.)  He thanks us for cooking dinner and for fixing him snacks and for handing him things.  He says "I missed you when I was at school".  He says "excuse me" if he burps at the dinner table and puts a napkin on his lap.  He likes to teach things to younger children (at the museum he told a 22-month-old "It's a bunny rabbit and it hops like this!") and he's very gentle with others, never grabbing things or hitting.  I think he's old enough now that we're starting to see him mimic the social behaviors we have been modeling for him, and for those to be such positive, thoughtful, compassionate behaviors is very rewarding.  The other day, after a night when he had some nightmares, he was playing with a stuffed mother fox and a stuffed baby fox.  The baby fox had a nightmare, and Silas had the mother fox run over and say, "It's OK.  Close your eyes.  I love you.  I'll stay right here with you."  I love that this is what he has learned about parenting.

Others have nice things to say about him too - in a rare pocket of time one morning when Silas had been dropped off early and no other students were around, one of his teachers told me that she thinks he has an unusually strong character, with a lot of integrity, and that he uses humor to great effect in the classroom.  His report card stated that he has positive relationships with all his peers and excellent social awareness.  Brian saw one little girl carefully prepare a wooden "pizza" and then hand every single slice to Silas, one by one, even though there were several other children around.  Silas dutifully pretended to eat every piece. And last week, Silas apparently overheard one of his classmates telling the teacher that she wanted a snack, and he prepared one and served it to her, unasked.  (The teacher was so taken with this that she made quite a fuss, and when I brought it up at home, Silas said, in a high squeaky voice, "That's so cuuuuuute".)

I don't mean to suggest that he's some kind of placid angel - he's not.  He cannot STAND being controlled, and regularly becomes extremely uncooperative and stubborn if he gets even the faintest whiff of coercion.  Unfortunately this sometimes extends to resisting any preparatory steps of any kind that have been suggested to him, even for activities HE has just chosen.  It can be absolutely maddening - he'll ask to go outside; we'll agree and begin to get ready, and then when it comes time to put on his shoes or find his coat or whatever the snag may be, he will refuse, as if protesting his most fundamental human rights, and then vacillate between irritation that we are not yet outside and irritation that we are asking him to do something.  When this happens we often have to take parent time outs because it is so infuriating and self-defeating it makes a person's eyes cross.  Also, he may know all kinds of advanced table manners but he still stuffs food in his face with his fists if the fork is too slow and he thinks chewing with his mouth open is hilarious.  Not that we're surprised.

Oddly enough, or at least I thought it was odd based on how I expected a 2-year-old to act, these difficulties virtually never pop up when we're in a genuine hurry or when we're out and about.  Silas has been perfectly behaved at the emergency room* (for 8 HOURS), the doctor's office, the grocery store, friends' houses, and at school.  We have only rarely had trouble leaving the house in the morning for school, or leaving on a family trip.  But if just one parent is taking Silas for an outing of his choice, at no particular time, the heels dig in.  I guess it's his stage for assertion of independence.

Our strategies in response to this stubbornness have been to avoid directing him as much as humanly possible.  Instead of telling him to get his coat once he's decided to go outside, we'll ask him what he needs to do to get ready.  We also invented a game called "Whatever You Do", where we act like overblown idiots as we tell him to ABSOLUTELY NOT TOUCH THAT BLOCK and then fall all over ourselves in mock outrage when he does, giggling madly.  It really seems to help.

The ER incident:  Silas woke up at school one afternoon with a fever, and the teacher thought he was breathing "funny".  I picked him up right away, and also noted his breathing - much too fast.  The pediatrician thought it was probably due to fever, but by the next morning we had managed to get his fever down and he was still breathing far too fast (65/min instead of 25/min).  I took him to the doctor and they agreed he had respiratory distress and off we went to the ER.  Silas's fever spiked up again while we were there, and he had to nap in my arms in a noisy, chaotic environment (which I wasn't enjoying either due to all the barfing people within a 10-foot radius).  We also didn't have enough food or drink so poor feverish Silas had to walk while I dragged all our packed stuff to the Au Bon Pain across the hallway to get some snacks.  Despite all this, he was an ANGEL.  Perfectly behaved, cooperative, funny and uplifting even.  He made his own fun through 8 hours of waiting with just a 20 minute nap.  Ultimately he was diagnosed with a small pneumonia and given antibiotics (amoxicillin) which he got an allergic reaction to 4 days later - another wrinkle.  But he was already all better by that point.

Anyhow he's a real 2-year-old, with some frustrating 2-year-old habits, but he's also amazingly mature and big-hearted and sensitive and thoughtful.  He has a TERRIFIC imagination.  It seems like every 5 minutes he comes up with some new kind of game, and these days he requires no props at all - he'll imagine a pond in the middle of the floor, pretend to be a lizard, use a shred of cardboard as a car or a person or anything else he imagines.  He loves to build cities and enact all kinds of city dramas, usually involving firefighters and doctors at the hospital.  He takes care of stuffed animals and dolls very sweetly.  He plays "store" and "buys" us diapers and wipes when he needs a chance.  I can't possibly catalog everything he gets up to; he really does come up with something new every 5 minutes.  I hardly ever worry about entertaining him these days.  The last time there was a lull at a restaurant, he made Maybelle the Cable Car out of a plastic cup and a straw wrapper and was surprised when the food showed up.

A few changes in his play habits:  he wants us to play with him much more often than he did between ~15-21 months.  He wants us to play various roles, usually.  And although we still read probably 5-10 books a day he isn't quite as obsessed as he used to be.  His attention span is even longer than it was, though.  He sat through an entire chapter of Little House in the Big Woods, listened to Peter and the Wolf twice in a row (25 minutes), and just generally doesn't seem to get bored easily.

In terms of development:  his language development seems to be in Brown's Morphological Development stage IV (late) as of his birthday or maybe a week afterwards.  He uses mostly complete sentences, although he gets monosyllabic pretty fast on video or when he's feeling shy, which makes it VERY hard to document.  I did make some measurements based on a 12-minute secret recording I took of me interacting with him. His mean length utterance (MLU) was 4.28 (counting one-word "yes" and "no" which I have since realized I shouldn't count).  He has recently added "didn't", "doesn't" and some related words.  He joins clauses with "and" and is starting to use "because" as well.  He uses first, second and third person pronouns very well, but notably can't use "who" in non-interrogative sentences, leading to some funny statements like "firefighters help people have to go to hospital".  At 22 months I estimated his vocabulary size at 2,500 using an online child development tool, but I don't know how accurate that is.  Silas has an excellent memory for phrases from books and will often use complete sentences or even paragraphs lifted from books while narrating his play.  He can "read" many of his story books, sometimes absolutely word-for-word, and other times with the gist of the story in mostly complete sentences, if not actually word-for-word.  He is starting to get initial sounds of words, although curiously does not seem to understand what we mean at all when we ask him "how does the word 'library' start"?  But if we demonstrate a few times, he'll join in and demonstrate initial sounds correctly on his own.  He unquestionably understands that written words represent spoken words, but is prone to thinking that lots of things say "Silas Kardon" ;)  When he's focused he recognizes about half the alphabet but we haven't really tried or practiced in months.  Just recently he figured out how to pronounce R very nicely, but still cannot say L at all.  He also cannot pronounce any consonant combinations including the S sound, so he says "nake", "noh",  and "nuggle" for snake, snow and snuggle, for example.  Between those two issues (which are of course developmentally appropriate), I still do a lot of translating for him.

He can count to 20 (with the last couple teens getting jumbled sometimes) but doesn't understand the meaning of numbers larger than 2.  He also doesn't really hold fingers for "two" very consistently.

I don't think he understands "same" and "different", though it can be hard to tell.

He knows yellow, blue, red/orange, black and white.  Seems baffled by green, pink, brown, and pretty much anything else.

He has an excellent memory for details, and easily remembers what we tell him about our plans.  He often thinks several steps ahead and has no trouble with instructions with several steps. He frequently makes plans with several steps on his own, saying he wants to read THIS book and then THAT book afterwards, or he'll plan what we will do after nap time, or after we finish a chore.

He runs backwards, balances briefly on one foot, kicks around a ball quite well, hops, jumps off stairs, and goes up stairs with alternating feet (though only if he's holding a railing; without a railing he uses two feet on each stair).  He is terrible at catching balls; almost never succeeds.  He is very strong and almost never seems to get tired.  He's happy to ride his scooter for a couple miles.

He does not seem to have any firm ideas about boys vs girls.  He says he's a boy most of the time though.  Does not seem to have internalized gender stereotypes yet - the dollhouse dolls wearing dresses are boys, he still likes pink things, etc.  Let's see how long we can keep it that way.

He's 25 pounds and 34 inches; a bit skinny.  Doctor advised us not to switch to low-fat stuff.

He's waking up from his nap, so here are all the things I was going to write about before I ran out of time:  Dinosaur Train (his beloved PBS show), nursing, all the many activities we do on the weekend, music...