Oliver update: 19 Months

Spring finally arrived in Minnesota with a week of gloriously sunny days with highs in the high 50s/low 60s and Oliver got a good dose of the outdoors and decided he liked it. Now that Oliver walks really well and there isn't too much snow on the ground, we can easily pop outside for a half an hour of pre-dinner exercise or stop at the playground at the end of a walk. So far he's been good about staying away from the street and he finally learned to hold my hand, well, only when he has to. He prefers walking on his own. When I realized he could walk to our Monday evening early childhood education class on his own two legs, I stopped lugging him in the Ergo. He'll hold my hand to cross the street, but then he toddles on behind me as I coax him to keep walking so we won't be late, because he constantly distracts himself with something during the two-block walk - a car drives by, he passes by a grassy incline by the sidewalk that he wants to walk up and down and so on.

Clearly it doesn't take much to entertain Oliver when he's outside. He likes cruising up and down the sidewalk in front of our house and practicing stepping up and down on our neighbor's one-step stoop. He points at every car, truck or school bus that goes by, notices every neighborhood dog that barks and bird that chirps and even points out airplanes way up in the sky. We happen to live down the street from a school, so a special treat is walk down there when school is letting out so that Oliver can oogle the buses that line up on three sides of the school. (Yes, life with a toddler is that exciting.) We started going to the playground every day it's dry enough, something we didn't even do back in the fall because he wasn't old enough to do more than sit in the bucket swing. But swinging is still one of his favorite activities and he'll swing until I get tired of pushing him. Like most kids his age, he wants to try to climb up the slide, but once he surprised me by climbing up the platforms that lead to slide and sent himself down on his tummy head first. The scraped lip and mouth full of sad made him howl, but once he'd recovered, he went right back and tried it again! (And I made sure I was actually at the bottom this time to catch him.)

Unfortunately spring wasn't here for good, as the next week and a half was full of cloudy days, rain and even snow. Oliver had started bringing me his shoes whenever he wanted to go out and would throw a tantrum, or at least whine, if I didn't comply. I really upset him one day when I agreed to take him out even though it was drizzling, but by the time we got our coats, hats and shoes on, and walked out onto the porch, I saw that it was raining steadily. He doesn't own a rain jacket or boots yet and since we both had colds, we weren't going out.

There aren't a lot of options for places to take a kid whose up and at 'em so early in the morning - even the library doesn't open until 10:00 a.m. As winter dragged on, went away and then came back again, I found myself taking at least weekly trips to the coop, a small grocery store with wide aisles, few customers on a weekday morning and a staff who has the patience for a toddler cruising around. They have kid-sized carts, which Oliver likes to push and if anything on our grocery list is on a low shelf, he gets to pick it up off the shelf and put in his own cart. He does reasonably well with leaving the rest of the merchandise alone (with a lot of reminders) and he's only plowed into one person with his cart. Luckily, she thought he was so adorable, like a little man doing his morning errands, that she wasn't mad.

Oliver came down with another ear infection this month after the most minor of colds. I found it frustrating how few symptoms I had to go on. He had trouble falling asleep some nights, but he never cried and I didn't know if was just because his bedtime wasn't always consistent. And then, of course, he was particularly cranky. But when I finally did bring him in to pediatrician's office, the nurse asked when his crankiness began, and I replied, "When he became a toddler."

I was actually kind of relieved when the doctor gave the ear infection verdict, because it was validation that not only was there "reason" for Oliver's crankiness, but that I hadn't been going out of my mind by imagining it.

One area where tantrums have finally stopped is during bath time. I thought I had the only kid in the world who hated baths! Oliver cried from the moment I started to fill the tub, through the quickest scrub down I could do and until he was plucked from the tub and toweled off. My only consolation prize was that right after recovering from the horror that was his bath, he was in a particular mood to cuddle. Still wrapped in his towel and with his damp, tear-streaked face pressed against my shoulder, he heaved big sighs of relief and my heart melted.

I'd hashed out every possible reason and solution for Oliver's dislike of baths with friends and talked the problem over with the doctor. My mom friends were as much out of ideas as I was and the doctor just left it at Oliver's fears being normal. Then one night, after he'd wiped spaghetti sauce in his hair, I started excitedly talking about the fun bath he was going to take (one of those parenting moments I'm glad I don't have on video - my promotion of baths was cringe-worthy). He cried when I started running the bath water, but did follow me into the bathroom. I let him put his hands under the running water while he stood outside the tub and then....he stopped crying. I put him in the tub and let him keep playing with the running water and still no tears. By the second tear-free bath, I was considering it a "trend," and by the fourth, he was dumping his toys in the tub as soon as I started running the water.

Oliver still cries when I leave the room, (but will tear down the sidewalk without as much of a glance back toward me despite how loudly I yell his name) but I've actually had moments where I've run down to the basement to change the laundry or run upstairs to get something and he hasn't stood at the gate shaking it violently and crying as if he was being abandoned. I still haven't seen a pattern to the will-he-cry or will-he-not-cry when I leave, but there's some hope.

The best progress we've seen has been with his grandparents and most recently during his early childhood education class. He seems pretty comfortable staying with his grandparents and even during the worst of his separation anxiety, he cried hard right when I left, but usually stopped crying minutes later and was the fine the rest of his visit.

I've seen similar signs during our early childhood education class of (possibly) dissipating separation anxiety. We start the class playing together and then the parents leave the kids with their teachers so we can attend an hour-long parent discussion. Oliver, not surprisingly, cried hard every time I left. It was worse the second and third time we attended, because he recognized where we were going and started crying as soon as we walked into the school building or he saw one of the teachers. (Thankfully, they don't take it personally!) We have a phone in the parent room that the children's teachers can call if there's a problem and every time it rings, I freeze, because I assume my precious adult time is about to end. It's actually only happened once, though, that Oliver remained so upset by my departure that his teachers had to call me back.

Then this past week, I left Oliver with a quick goodbye and he didn't cry. Although he seemed calm and aware that I really was leaving, I was hesitant to go, because I couldn't believe that he wasn't going to cry. His teacher told me after class that not only did he not cry, or even look like he was going to, as soon as I left, he handed her his pacifier and got on with the business of playing.

I've still got a kid who thankfully likes to sleep. My friends are very generous about including Oliver when they host gatherings, but they don't understand how much his sleep schedule inhibits his social life. He's in bed with the lights out by 6:30 p.m. and awake around 6:30 a.m. Throw in a nap that's at least two and a half hours starting at 11:30 a.m. and he gets nearly 15 hours of sleep a day. This much sleep is totally normal for his age, but the schedule is also non-negotiable or you end up with a very, very cranky baby. So Oliver doesn't make many social appearances and I have friends who haven't seen him since he was an infant, but he's a happy kid.