For some reason when I pictured him having preferences, I assumed he would have a favourite colour, but he still can't tell colours apart. He points at blocks of colour and says "colour!" and, often, "blue!" (regardless of actual colour).

That was so two days ago. Now he can identify blue, red and yellow correctly.

He's also entered that phase of toddlerdom that I didn't really actually believe: he's consuming pretty much an adult amount of calories right now. Example meals are things like naan+English muffins+bowl of yoghurt+3 bananas.

I expect him to have 25 word sentences or to be 180cm tall by the end of the week.

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I am sick upstairs and he is shouting downstairs while playing with his train track.

"TUNNEL TUNNEL"

"I wanna fixed it"

"Help please"

"I want Daddy fixed it" (over and over) "Daddy fixed it, Daddy"

"TUNNEL this way this way this way"

"Right! Right!"

I can only hear the loud frustrated ones though, I think longer sentences are being uttered at a lower volume.

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I wanted so much to find out what his preferences were, I had better note them!

V likes tunnels, trains, trains going through tunnels, crawling through tunnels, going to the pool, running on the beach (he hasn't been to the beach since Easter but he proposes a run on the beach about every third day), running in general, Thomas the Tank Engine, his Thomas shoes, babies, babies sleeping, one of the Mo Willems illustrations of a pigeon where the pigeon is open-beaked and cranky, hugs, books, fish, crackers, circles, painting, dogs as long as he isn't on the ground with them, sandpits, "paybounds" (playgrounds) and saying the word "scary".

Stuff he used to like but is no longer fixated on: pigeons, planes, going on the swings all the time.t

"Scary" is one of his newest words, and he knows what it means. Actual scary things (all animals, nightmares) are "scare-RAY", but sometimes he will also just say "scare-RAY scare-RAY" for the fun of it.

For some reason when I pictured him having preferences, I assumed he would have a favourite colour, but he still can't tell colours apart. He points at blocks of colour and says "colour!" and, often, "blue!" (regardless of actual colour).

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V hates wearing things to bed. And bed covers. Always has. Recall for example the winter of our discontent (2010) when he had bronchitis for a month. Threw the sheets off every night. Lay there skin to the cold Sydney air (5 to 10 degrees or so, Australians aren't much for artificial heating at night).

Last year I got all clever and bought him two beautiful Jolly Beans sleeping bags. Unfortuately they fasten with press studs on the shoulders, and within a week or so he'd figured out how to brace himself in the sleeping bag so as to pop the shoulders open. By morning, cold.

So far this year we've just let him indulge his taste for skyclad sleeping but it's now getting too cold. So the latest attempt is all-in-one pyjamas, which will be difficult to escape from until he learns to undo zips. I cunningly chose one with dogs on it.

We tried about a week ago, he was enchanted by the dogs until he realised he was meant to wear it and then he cried until it was gone. But finally tonight I got him in it still smiling — look at the doggies, look, Daddy loves your pyjamas, look at V's lovely pyjamas etc etc. He asked for them to be removed periodically for the next half an hour ("NEED garmas OFF") but it was in between asking for songs ("sing donald's farm! cow! rooster!") and he's fallen asleep with them on. Hopefully this will be like shoes, where if we can convince him to wear them for about 45 minutes, he will agree that they are not instruments of torture thereafter.

I forget if I've mentioned, but he sleeps in an adult-sized single bed now, and has done for quite a while. This happened organically: we were lying down with him to get him to sleep there. Since he didn't fall out (actually, he did, but only once) he has kept sleeping there. We fall short on observance of milestones like "big boy bed".

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A quick note that appearances do suggest that I am in the final weeks of my PhD, with submission in late May. I am reluctant to say this because I've been wrong before, but this time my supervisor agrees. So.

I probably will be pretty absent for several weeks. And if I am not, I may be very tired.

Also an explanation of how this works in Australia, because it's quite different to North America. Mostly writing this so that people don't start addressing me as 'Doctor' in June.

Short version: this work is me preparing my thesis for initial examination, and this is hopefully the hardest bit. But I won't graduate for at least six months.

First, I finalise my thesis document (we don't call it a dissertation). I submit this to the university where it is examined by three external examiners: ideally at least one from an Australian university. At this point my work on it is in deep freeze.

Unlike in North America in general, these examiners are anonymous to me (chosen by my supervisor) and were not involved in my PhD studies prior to this point. This means in theory that they might not like it: in practice I am told that around 99% of students who submit at all eventually graduate.

Examination in theory takes six weeks, it could take as long as six months (since appointing a whole new examiner might be slower than waiting for a late one). They submit reports which my supervisor reads and makes recommendations on (most commonly I agree, Mary should indeed fix all these things, followed by I almost entirely agree, Mary should indeed fix all but a few of these things). This is fed into the higher degree research committee (who usually agree with the supervisor, but they might come up with a different answer if the examiners' recommendations varied a lot) and then there's a huge range of possible decisions that come out of the HDR committee:

1. pass as is
2. make minor amendations to the Library copy and pass
3. minor revisions to be checked by supervisor (for which I'd be allocated a month) and then pass
4. major revisions to be checked by supervisor (for which I'd be allocated two months) and then pass
5. revise and resubmit to examiners a second time
6. only award a Masters degree (possibly in combination with revisions): recall that in the Australian system I don't already have a Masters degree
7. fail

The most likely decision by far in my research group is minor or major revisions: I've never heard of anyone avoiding them. Some people in fact prefer major just because you get a bit more time to revise. (In other faculties, it isn't unheard of to pass without revision.) No one wants to be re-examined: this usually means re-enrolling and re-doing experimental work and similar.

Unless re-examination is needed, after any required revisions it is pure administrivia: the HDR committee must pass it, and then the university Senate. I submit a bound copy of my thesis to the university library and (far more importantly now) put it on my website and submit to the university's digital collection.

I think at that point I am finally a graduand and can use the title 'Dr' in academia and so on. Actual graduation would take place in either September/October or April/May, so in the pathological case it could be a while between finalising the thesis and actually graduating.

I do not do an oral defence (a three hour or so session where my examiners ask me questions in person).

Click through for pictures.

Good lord, this kid... twitter.com/weirdturnedpro…

— weirdturnedpro (@weirdturnedpro) April 22, 2012

Sir named this one 'Vincent Eats a Banana': twitter.com/weirdturnedpro…

— weirdturnedpro (@weirdturnedpro) April 22, 2012

And this one is called "Oh no!" aka 'Vincent has a mustache': twitter.com/weirdturnedpro…

— weirdturnedpro (@weirdturnedpro) April 22, 2012

14kg of snooze: twitter.com/weirdturnedpro…

— weirdturnedpro (@weirdturnedpro) April 22, 2012

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He can recognise solid blocks of colour, but not which colour. He points at all solid blocks of colour and announces "blue! blue!" He can recognise some shapes now (circle, maybe rectangle) and he's seemingly edging towards being able to really count small sets of things (ie, two, three and four) as opposed to simply reciting numbers like a poem.

Today he said "Book! Book!" and when that didn't work he said "Mummy read the book! Read the book!"

His oddest word to the casual hearer is "monorail". This is entirely prosaic in origin: we live fairly close to Sydney's (soon to disappear) monorail, and it often goes by us when we catch the tram to the pool. Because he is highly interested in trains and subcategorisations thereof, he picked up the word after we mentioned it a few times. He's also fairly good at identifying types of bird.

For a long time I used to stymie him if he said "no" to too many things. "No tickles? No breakfast? No hugs? What do you want?" That would thoroughly stump him. But now he answers, and the answer is always "cupcake".

He is experimenting with "big" and "little". He seems to have a fairly good understanding of their more metaphorical uses as well as literal ones: "big hug! little hug! big hug!" (except he says "hoog", like my mother does). His other big adjective is "loud", which usually applies to traffic, especially "loud bike" which means motorbike.

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People wonder why parents don't do stuff. Like, they could be having so much fun, and having kids too! But they get all weird and smug and spend all their time at home. Why is that anyway?

Well, yesterday Andrew and I went kayaking for four hours. That was fun, and I'll probably write about it somewhere. But once we got home, Andrew got gastro for the second time in two weeks! And then I was up with him for an hour finding medication and cleaning things and calling Health Direct because it sounded a little like appendicitis (they said no), and trying to figure out how on earth one gets to the emergency department at 2 in the morning on Good Friday when one has a sleeping toddler and doesn't own a car. (I guess ambulance? And if it's not ambulance-worthy, one cries until a taxi takes you all, which would probably be a fair wait for a sick person, because they're assumed to be drunk? I still don't actually know, since we didn't have to go. But we need to work this out.)

Vincent woke up once already during all that fuss. Then at 3am he woke up and demanded breakfast, and then threw a 45 minute tantrum because I wouldn't give him breakfast. 45 minutes of screaming in my ear. And every time he'd wind down, which was about every 15 minutes, he'd realise anew that he was hungry, and put in gentle considered request for breakfast and then throw another tantrum when I refused.

Anyway. That's why I don't do much adventurous stuff. Because I think "hey, wouldn't it be terrible if someone got sick tonight when we're already tired and sore?" and reality is even worse. Someone got sick and then V screamed in my ear for 45 minutes and then I was up until 6 because I was stressed out and then I was up at 7:45 because V was and now we have a 4 day car share booking that can't be cancelled and that we probably aren't going to use. So we can't even have a make-up long weekend, because we can't afford the car a second time. Nor can I work on my PhD, since Andrew is too sick to look after V.

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"Go 'way Mummy!"

[I go to the Buddha Board, which is the best toy in the world bar none, and paint on it.]

"Mama painting! Mama big boy!"

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Look! We dressed him to blend in with the playground!



There's another neighbourhood kid who has a toddler sized fire truck toy, of which V duly had a turn:
( Fire truck )

We went to Tumbalong again with Joel and Steph:
( Tumbalong )

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This seems to be a thing he enjoys.

QUITE A LOT.



( Sunglasses joy within )

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By Jeff:

First, second.

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We still feel like it's the January that never ended, around here. January involved me having a medical scan and having Valerie visit in the same week, then moving house that same week, flying to Melbourne, running an event and giving a couple of talks in Ballarat, flying back, driving up the coast for a beach holiday that was cut short (only by a night), driving back, and facing indefinite todo list to do with unpacking and making arrangements for our flat and car.

Much of that went exactly as I feared it would, that is, it dragged on and on and on because there was no deadline to hold our nose against. Perhaps it there had been we would have collapsed under it, because it was also just plain a lot of work to fit around our daily lives.

It's actually pretty much all done now. We sold our car a fortnight ago, after a sequence of hilarious and expensive failures in its last few weeks of ownership, most notably the battery (cheap as car parts go, but more urgent in terms of replacement once it goes than some), and the barrel of the bonnet lock (some models of Ford Focus have a lock on the bonnet), which was very expensive because it's designed to be very hard to break into, so we paid someone several hours of labour to get in without smashing the grille. Every single time we were convinced that this had to be the last failure, but no.

In any event, we sold it.

The flat turned out to be much easier, once we caught our breath and had energy to throw money at it. And half days off work to meet with the people doing the work. It got repainted and cleaned and new blinds ordered within a couple of weeks. And it appears from the ads that a tenant has paid a deposit on it now. Perhaps it had its time being expensive a few years ago when the hot water pipe that had probably been leaking away in the wall for months finally caused enough water damage to get noticed. (And actually, except for the painting that took place a few months ago—which is hard to account for in the water damage because we had the entire flat painted—I think the tiling and plumbing work we had done to fix that ended up being cheaper than what we had to do to the car.)

Anyway, it's all in the realm of “things could be much worse”—and have been, see also our slough of despond in the winter of 2009 when I was pregnant, and the second half of 2010 where we were all ill week after week after week, but it means we're running on about three-quarters of a tank, and there's always something else preventing refuelling.

Forgive me, perhaps the car metaphors will go away soon.

This week, it's plain old illness. V was sick all Tuesday night. I was sick Friday night and spent all day yesterday in bed. Andrew is sick today. While in a way being sick on the weekend is good (if I'd been sick Thursday night and Friday, I would have been sick and solo caring for V as well, because Friday is his day off childcare) it does mean that tomorrow is Monday and we didn't, for all intents and purposes, have a weekend.

That's the big picture. In the small one, moving to Glebe hasn't been quite as much of a social whirl as I had hoped. Probably this is because the last time I lived very near a lot of friends I was in my early twenties, and being in one's early twenties and centrally located without housemates who must be tiptoed around, precarious living situations, weird shifts, or parents, is unusual enough that you tend to end up with a pretty social house. We even have a spare room! Luxury!

But not living with housemates, parents or night shift is now the default condition of my friends, and our two-year-old son comprises our difficult to deal with housemate too.

This was one of the coolest, wettest summers Sydney has ever had (every so often, the ritualistic taunts about our summers have issued from Melbourne and it's been strange: I bet you're all steaming to death up there in your… 22 degrees and steady rain, interrupted for the occasional flash flood). We did get to the beach twice in February, once for Alice's birthday picnic and once to scatter my grandmother's ashes at Freshwater.

The weirdness of the flooding on March 8 from here can hardly be overstated. We woke, and it was pouring with rain. From the inside, it sounded heavy but not excessive, but looking at it pouring down I decided that I'd do what it takes a lot to bring us to do: drive V to his childcare, all of four blocks away. We still had a car at that point but it was right in the middle of its battery uncertainty, so I got one of the car-share cars, and zipped Andrew to the light rail stop (2 blocks) and then V to childcare.

I spent the rest of the morning inside, occasionally having a picture of floods thrust at me online, one of them only another block downhill from the aforementioned light rail stop. Made me glad for once of the steep uphill walk from there.

By the afternoon, the skies were clear and I was comfortable enough with the weather to attempt to take out the car's battery in order to drop it off for an overnight charge. In theory this is very easy: undo a few nuts, disconnect the terminals in the correct order, remove battery. Given that it took the mechanic in the video 3 minutes I allowed 15 to 30.

A haha. The differences between our battery and his were:

1. the battery was not easily accessible with an open bonnet, it was wedged up under the windscreen
2. several of the bolts were in a small inset in their mount, meaning that an open ended spanner wouldn't fit around them, because they needed a tool that fit over the top (looking this up, a ring spanner or box spanner looks right, neither of which we have, except due to being under the windscreen that still would have sucked due to lack of vertical as well as horizontal room)
3. one bolt was additionally obscured by the battery leads, which were pretty taut and therefore difficult to get around
4. the leads obscured all the positive/negative markings on the battery, leaving us to rely primarily on the texta minus sign that someone had marked on one terminal (the positive one, it emerged, thanks whoever you were)
5. all the bolts were machine-fastened

Andrew had to come home from work and it collectively took us over an hour and a half. Then the battery turned out to be dead anyway, contra roadside assistance's advice, who had twice told us it tested as flat but sound. And we left the swim gear we had intended to use that day in the car share car, which then got taken away for that whole weekend.

A couple of nights later, Andrew went and bought a new car battery from the 24 hour Kmart at about 11pm and carried it home in his arms, which is about a one kilometre walk. Painful!

We've managed to get back into swimming reasonably well, although not yet into yoga. Let's get the car and the flat out of the way, was the decision, which state was only achieved last weekend to be followed by the Week of Ill. Perhaps soon.

Finally, we visited Andrew's mother last weekend for three days. With a couple of urgent playground runs for V we had a nice weekend. Coming into Easter we won't be free on weekends for a while, I'm wondering if I should ignore my own earlier complaints about socialising and refuse to do any at all in April and see how we feel then.

I figure one of the hardest things to teach children is that activities should be mutually pleasurable. I figure this is hard to teach because I can clearly remember not giving a toss about what my parents might think is un-fun.

Some of the things V does in this category:

1. stroking and twiddling the moles on my skin. I didn't see this one coming because I'm socially conditioned to find them unappealing little pre-melanoma blights. V thinks they are entrancing knobs.

2. placing a pillow on my stomach and jumping so that he lands on his belly on it. Enough said on that one. (This invites the question of why I let him get that far: I was expecting him to lie his head down on it sweetly. Why I expected that is unclear.)

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As narrated by Andrew:

Just explained to V that you'll be home late. He said "A big kiss. Big hug."

"Yes I'm sure you'll get those when Mum comes home."

"How about Daddy?"

"You want a big hug and kiss from Daddy now?"

"Yeah!"

And so we did.

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An event I remember from my childhood that's been turned into The Difficulty of Parenting was the night that Julia and either Steph or I had a ( Childhood sickness and effluvia within! )

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On Monday or so, V ate a green crayon. Yesterday, give or take, a red one.

Ask us how we know!

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V is not quite 26 months old and here's how stuff is going!

Six weeks in, he's finally settled into his new childcare (Amigoss) well enough to not cry when we leave. He's still not exactly thrilled about it, but he was actually never really excited to be left at Bright Horizons either. His face used to go blank like he was watching us leave on TV. TV-face is back. More positively, when we arrive in the afternoon he is usually in the middle of playing (yesterday with an elephant costume he is apparently passionately attached to, today with a baseball cap with rabbit decorations) rather than having gone and got his bag and being completely ready for us in cargo cult style.

His vocabulary continues to increase apace. He seems to know all the food in the world: "pea butter", "yoh-get", "mussy" (muffins), "nana" (banana), "apple", "ricey". He's picked up "yummy" and "yucky" somewhere. He still has many of his own pronunciations, most notably "gump" for "jump" and "Kingle" for "Kindle".

His sentences are still rather formulaic. There's a lot of "big THING" and "PERSON come MODE-OF-TRANSPORT" and not much innovation of his own. He's learned about possessions, particularly of gadgets: "Mummy Kingle", "Mummy phone". He refers to himself in the third person at the moment, and usually pronounces his name something like "EN-cent" in a failed attempt to force the V sound.

His separation anxiety melted away really quite suddenly. Now he's very social again. He is clearly interested in having conversations with strangers, and knows there are patterns to it, but can only produce the "hello" and "goodbye" patterns, together with liking to tell people about what Daddy is doing. During the week "Daddy wokking, Daddy come tram", and on the weekend, when we leave Andrew napping at home the entire suburb was told about "Daddy seeping".

His speech isn't really comprehensible to strangers yet: they can understand he wants to tell them about Daddy but not much beyond that.

He gets attached to anthropomorphic toys: right now it's a Thomas the Tank Engine toy, but each passion is short lived. He was very difficult during the swimming lesson induction because he wanted to hold the baby doll that the demo was being performed on. He also points out all babies in his line of sight (where "baby" is a category that includes children who are noticeably older than he himself).

He is pretty interested in other children: a few weeks into Amigoss we started to hear about T— and A— doing things (mostly sleeping, other people sleeping is apparently very interesting). We checked the roll and T— and A— are indeed names of children at the centre. We don't know if they are V's friends or simply have unusually easy to pronounce names. He talked about Z— for a week after they went to the Olympic Park water playground.

He's very physically fearless. At the water playground he is right into the dump of the big bucket, which has enough force that even teenagers find it interesting, and which would knock V right off his feet if he got into it by himself, and he loves to run around and go down the water slides by himself. He's enjoying his swim classes and has progressed to being glided under the water. The only time I see him fearful is of animals: this has actually got worse recently. Now he cries and scrambles away from birds that are walking towards him.

He's very sensory seeking. He likes to shake his head and roll his eyes and turn upside down. He's the only person I've ever known who likes being tickled enough to ask for it. We taught him to blow raspberries on us and now we hear about "rahsies" a lot.

I had originally intended to have the first try at toilet training around now, but the idea was to have some naked time in the yard to get him started. Then it rained all summer. Really. But perhaps we'll have time before it gets cool.

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Scene: V dances around the room and sings tunelessly because Mummy has come to take him home.

Childcarer D: Is he always this happy?

Me: [sympathetic tone] Ahahaha, no, not for us either.

D: No, I really mean it. Is he always this happy?

Me: Ahaha? No?

D: Oh. I did wonder. But he's always this happy here!

Me: Always this happy?

D: Yes, it really struck me.

Actually I felt a little bit sorry for them, because the dancing kind of happy is not effortless, for carers. Still, I am struck by him being apparently 100% happy at childcare.

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Quick tooth update: dentist reports that it's fine, from a health point of view, unless it becomes clear that V is in pain or can't eat hard food. (Right now this seems fine.) Otherwise it's a cosmetic issue, and we can have the chips repaired if that bugs us or him, but they don't want to do it until he's at least three, and ideally three and a half or older.

Anyway, moving on.

V's first swimming lesson was today, and he is a Minnow in the great and complicated scheme of children's swimming classes. (That is, he is 2 years old, and all 2 year olds are Minnows initially. A 2.5 year old who is doing well as a Minnow may become a Starfish instead. A 3.5 year old becomes either a Tadpole or Goldfish depending on skill. And so on.)

The big focus of the lessons up to age 3 or so is getting the children to have their head briefly submerged and hold their breath. That's what all this tipping water on his head in the bath is about. Once he holds his breath while water is tipped on his head, in the lessons he will be pushed along very briefly under the water. And that's pretty much the big Minnow skill, I gather. Well that and turning around to grab the wall, if they fall in water.

Of the three children in his class (there can be up to eight, but as they've just opened the timeslot it's only up to three) one is an old hand at the Minnow business and the other is also new.

V seemed to be the biggest handful, but then, since I didn't have to care for the other two maybe I didn't notice. The class is several short activities: singing and splashing, singing and kicking, collecting balls strewn across the surface, having water poured on his head, singing and dropping into the water, racing on pool noodles, singing and floating on a foam mat, singing goodbye.

The trouble for him is that he either wants to be doing what is clearly coming up, or what is just finished with. He begged for "ballie ballie" until we got to the ball part, and then wanted to cuddle them rather than put them away, then after the water pouring he begged for more "bucket bucket" (which I think surprised the teacher a bit, but we told him it's a game and who is he to argue?). Luckily the singing tends to reset him: if the present activity involves singing that is the best activity by far!

He's clearly not a prodigy of Minnow-ness. The nearest he came to being submerged was gliding along with, supposedly, his mouth closed and breathing through his nose. In reality his mouth was wide open for squealing with glee and got full of water.

Anyway, it's a fun enough way to pass half an hour and always interesting to see other people's kids. I really don't know any kids very close to V's own age.

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When I said "bit his tongue", I should have said "bit his tongue, we assume". There was a hit to the jaw or mouth and tears. Sounds like a tongue bite right? One might assume so.

Until Andrew noticed tonight a big chip out of one of his front teeth: he's lost the whole bottom of it. So, let the amended record show: "But it all fell apart in the third act, when he wanted to be the one to pour a cup of water on my head, stood up in the bath, slipped over, and seriously damaged a tooth."

However, the upside of this is that he doesn't seem to be in pain, although I did wonder why he was struggling to bite into a big apple all of a sudden. (He can still eat quite hard things, he ate the apple when I cut it up.) So there's an upper limit on how bad it is. We'll see a dentist as soon as we can get him in and find out if they want to do a repair or wait until he is old enough to hold still (right now he'd need sedation) or just wait on the adult tooth.

Obviously he had a bath tonight too, and he had not learned his lesson: he tried to clamber to his feet and gump more than once ("gump" is how he says "jump"). He and Andrew played the conditioning game too, except with a plastic frog getting a drenching instead of Andrew. Clever. V himself does not hold his breath as he is meant to: he covers his eyes with his hands and giggles and giggles. His first swimming lesson should be good copy, unless it happens to coincide with his first dental appointment.

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So, the "1 2 3 go" [pour water on child's head] demonstration for swimming was on a doll about the size of a newborn, and I can see how it works well on a child up to about one year of age when they don't have much idea that a cup full of water near their head wielded by a nervous looking adult is only going to end one way.

But V knows exactly what is happening with that cup of water. He doesn't really mind, but he sort of minds, in so far as it is his body and face and he would like more control over when it gets wet. Fair enough. So soon I said "all done game" and he agreed "all done game!".

After a while he said "goooo goooo game" and tried to fill the cup himself. So I asked him "Mummy game?" and he agreed "Mummy game" and made it very plain that he now expected me to repeatedly pour a cup of water over my own head. Which is fair enough, really. But it all fell apart in the third act, when he wanted to be the one to pour a cup of water on my head, stood up in the bath, slipped over, and bit his tongue hard.

And that was submersion conditioning, day one.

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V starts swimming lessons on Friday. This is all very regimented: at the pool where his lessons will be, five thousand children are enrolled in classes. I had to attend an induction session to learn about how classes work. In particular, they are very keen on telling parents not to badger them all the time about promoting their child to the next level up; although I imagine this is more of a problem for the over fives, where class assignment is on skills rather than age.

There were admittedly several useful things about the induction. For example, now I know that in addition to fun, the idea of toddler swim classes is that the toddler can (hopefully) learn to self-rescue if worst comes to worst and they fall in a pool. So the first skill is breath-holding when their face is wet and a later skill is jumping off the edge, and then turning around under water and grabbing the edge. They said not to encourage him to blow bubbles until he's learned to float and get another breath in, because it means blowing out valuable air that could save his life.

The biggest focus was on "triggers", ie, cueing the baby so that they know they're about to be under water. The baby is trained by hearing "1 2 3 GO" and getting water on their face at GO.

So this is all a little tricky for V, partly because it's a regression: at present he actually has showers (closely supervised of course, for starters he has no idea how to wash himself) and decides for himself when to wet his own damned face. And partly because we're just more aggressive about water.

We went to Harbord on the weekend, and Andrew, my mother, my aunt and I took him in the surf, which was friendly as surf goes. As surf, even friendly surf, it had occasional surges of quite tall waves that broke further from shore than expected. So my mother ended up ducking under a couple of them with him. When I told her about the trigger word later she said that the trigger word is "SHIT."

V coped pretty well with the sudden submersions: he didn't quite know whether to be sad or not. Most of the time he spent in the surf he spent squealing ecstatically and calling "wave coming! wave coming!"

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Or that happens to me, at least.

I see him and his Dad walk out the front door, "bye Mummy". And the sun is in his blond baby hair and I think "AWWWWWW" and I'm not even cranky about the three hours he took to go to sleep last night. No, seriously! The awwwww cures all!

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It's not clear from the picture, but the top of this ladder is about six feet off the ground. He can climb all the way but often tries not to have to.



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The other morning, I open my eyes at about 6:30am to find a face inches from mine.

"Wakey up. Wakey up."

We're now into the stage of not being sure how and when he was exposed to some of his language. We don't often try and get him to wakey up.

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Much of the rest is about us coming home.

"Daddy, Daddy come, Daddy coming, Daddy coming tram."

"Mummy coming, Mummy bus, Mummy coming bus."

He can also point accurately, from inside our house, without prompting, at the (opposite) directions of the tram and bus stops.

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He can string more words together singing than talking, although we don't know if he gets the meaning at all. But he can sing "now I know my A B Cs, next time wa wa SING WIT ME".

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First V was poking at us and being painful before we even got up. Then we bundled him out of the house in the assumption that some time in the playground would do him some good.

Within half an hour he was confined to my arms due to constantly removing his hat ("no hat no play"). Then he bit me. Then I asked him to hug Andrew, and I think he tried, but he ended up head-butting him and Andrew bit his lip and it split.

Then we left the playground with sick Andrew (independently of his bleeding mouth) trailing behind us. We bundled onto a bus then off the bus, and during the bus trip at some point V had lost the last of the three lovely identical Gumboot hats we got him, ie, this (set of) hat(s):







I've been scouting for a fourth copy of that hat for a while on the assumption that he'd lose the last one, but no luck. I know it's by Gumboot, but that's not a lot of help, it was the 2010/2011 summer, and also trying searching for anything involving "gumboot" and not finding actual gumboots.

I will check with the lost and found office of the buses tomorrow (instead of, eg, spending that hour getting to work selling our car), but most likely it is gone.

This afternoon has not being any better, with constant nursing tantrums and attempts to take apart our oven and dishwasher, etc. (No jokes, we're all in really bad moods.)

ETA: during final edits to this entry he tried to hit Andrew over the head with a broom.

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Since he now speaks fairly readily, we can capture it. Unfortunately it was captured in a pretty dark room!

( V-dio )

Mary: Who is it buddy?

V: [referring to the button on the camera, I think] Beep beep yah beep beep yah beep beep

[fade to black]

V: VIN cent VIN cent yeah [giggles]

Mary: Can you say hello?

V: Hello yeah hello [fade to black] hee

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Of course, one often only realises how truly tired one was in retrospect.

Yesterday I walked, without really noticing let alone struggling, from Pyrmont to the Australian Museum and back, and then up the steep hill from the tram to our place. After V's nap we walked down to go shopping. That's not so very remarkable by some of my past efforts, but it is compared to the grey depths of fatigue we felt just after moving here a few weeks ago, when V's carrying or pushing fell to whichever of us was slightly less tired at whichever time. Urgh.

Of course, V and Andrew both have a cold right now so I am the only one who is experiencing this. I would have to say that the hardest part of parenting, so far, has been how seldom both Andrew and I both have energy and spirit at the same time. Most of the time one of us, if not both, is worn out, cranky, tired or sick.

Part of this is that we have done absolutely nothing about shifting our house or our car since I last wrote. But probably the rest has been worth its weight in interest and opportunity cost. And both tasks look far more approachable now than they did before.

February is astoundingly quiet for us, really. We've got, I think, four social engagements for the rest of the month, plus breakfast this morning with Mark and Tim and family. (V seems to adapt nicely to the youngest child's role in chasing, dancing and yelling games.) I'm quite happy to coast nicely until July, when I will probably be travelling to the US, but I doubt that I will.

This is the fairly new adventure playground in Darling Harbour. It's pretty great! Much of it is too old for V: the five metre high rope pyramids linked together, the giant slippery dip that requires simple rock climbing skills to get on it. But the water park with SURPRISE fountain timing, is good for him.

We first went in early Jan, and since I had no idea Tumbalong Park had fountains, I didn't take him in swimmers:



We went back after the holidays, and V was more interested in the area with water gates that allow children to construct small dams and direct the water flow:

( Damming )

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