Sweet Sixteen

My baby is sixteen months old today. My baby. 

It's such a wonder to watch him grow. Wonder as I'm sometimes confused as to how he comes up with some of the things he does.

Finger foods are the biggest thing at the moment. When I hand him a slice of apple he says "key". I've been at a loss to work out where he got this from, so I googled how to say thank you in all of the languages in the world. The closest I could find was in Afrikaans which is dankie.

Luke loves shoes more than his mother. I am the most un-feminine woman in the world when it comes to elegant shoes, having a total collection of about five. I've never got the whole I'm-superficial-I-like-shoes-whatever movement. Luke however, has an obsession with shoes. It's his new favorite word. Shoes mean we are going out. Shoes mean better sounds when I run across the floorboards. The expressions he makes when he talks about shoes make me smile. Shoes! In a high pitched voice. Oh, shoes! In a voice of adoration.

At sixteen months I'm still breastfeeding. There's various reasons for this, one of the main ones being I can't be bothered going through the process of stopping. In Indonesian the children say "nen nen" for a feed (well, the ones old enough), so we have always associated nen nen with feeding. Often Seseme Street seems to be the queue for nen nen. Luke shouting nen nen in desperation and bringing me the purple U-shaped 'nursing' pillow.

Luke is learning to count. I blame this on Seseme Street, Play School and Hendrik. Okay, blame is a strong word, because it's wonderful. Except he only knows the number two. He counts everything. But it's just two, two, two... TWO! (How many is that, Luke?)

We are a bilingual household. Hendrik and I don't notice until someone comes over for dinner that we speak in two, sometimes three languages in one sentence. The main language is English due to us both being lazy. We have a lot of associations with Indonesian in our house, one being mandi which means bath/shower. While Luke doesn't say mandi, whenever I say it he runs to the bath and waits in anticipation for me to turn the tap on.

We love our mandi so much that we just can't wait to jump in!

This kid is the sweetest thing that has ever happened to me. I really struggled in the beginning, and that was based on the fact that I was worried about everybody else around me mothered, and that books told me that I was doing it wrong. One night Hendrik said something that changed everything. He came home after 7 to find me crying on the couch and Luke asleep in my lap after my failed attempts at the cry-it-out method. He said, in this house, it's our rules. And since I have done my own thing, and found my own standard to live up to, all of those strategies are just that. Strategies, not ways of life. He is growing up to be such a marvellous little boy, and many days it is he looking after me as much as it's the other way around.

We've noticed he is starting to do what we do. I think I must cross my arms a lot because he's started to do that a lot. But what I'm hoping is a reflection of how I treat him is found in the incident of the sore knee this morning.

This morning as I had just finished my cup of tea, I spun around on the chair to get up but knocked it really hard on the corner of the desk. I'm sure you can agree that in those first initial seconds the pain is worse than childbirth. I moaned in pain but tried not to make too much of a big deal as Luke was metres away watching Playschool. Seeing that I was distressed, Luke walked over to me and wrapped his arms around me. I can only hope that he did this because of how I treat him.

It's then I realised that our kids will reflect us, even at sixteen months. The truth is in the early days I would struggle to just love. I would let him cry and then have a meltdown coated in guilt. I felt like I'd given in to the un-mindset of if you don't let him cry he'll get too dependent on you. I look at myself on a personal level and see how much has changed in these sixteen months - not only in my own ideas about bringing up a little one, but in my character and attitude too.

So, even when I don't feel like it, I bite my lip and I show him love.

The time to start investing in his character is now.