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A Happy Fannish Birthday to rozk.

Miles-blogging #26

Miles was 23 months old this week. It's been a month of two successes: firstly, getting Miles swimming alone in the deep end of a pool, with armbands. He loves the shallow parts of a pool anyway, but this took some trust on his part and it was a slow process in getting him to detach from whoever was holding him up in the water. Now he realises the freedom those armbands can gave him and he's jumping in and swimming around on his own the whole time. Thankfully I think he also realises it's not a good idea to jump in without armbands, as he's already had a few unpleasant surprises when falling unexpectedly even into shallow water.

The second success was to get him properly potty-trained, which he's taken to very quickly. As usual we employed the 'it's cool' method of persuasion by sitting his Gruffalo and Wild Thing on it first and trying to make it resemble something like fun, even when it might get a bit messy at first. We need to get him properly trained up relatively early as when he starts pre-school next year we want him completely au fait with the routine, as pre-school teachers shouldn't be expected to have to change nappies too.

I think he's also entering that phase known as the 'terrible twos' – being a slightly hyperactive and headstrong kid anyway he doesn't take kindly to something not going exactly the way he anticipates or wants, and he can sometimes get himself quite worked up about rather minor things especially when the surrounding environment is not right. If he's got plenty of distractions he's better, but if he's focussed on one thing only that he wants to do he'll flatly refuse to cooperate unless he gets what he wants, so this in turn involves us anticipating his reactions and steering him in the desired direction with as little conflict as possible. So there's an upside to him watching all those kids' TV shows he loves: he stays still and slows down physically, instead engaging his mind and imagination. He hasn't progressed much in terms of talking during the last month, except that on Skype this week I've noticed he likes to tell me things such as what he did today at the park, sometimes by just volunteering a word or two and making lots of wild hand gestures.

We also appear to have acquired a second dog, Buddy, who's a Pomeranian/Samoyed puppy crossbreed not yet house-trained. I didn't agree to this at first and we weren't looking for another dog in the family – he was to belong to my slacker brother-in-law who was more into the idea of owning a dog than actually being able to meet the responsibilities, and he decided after less than a week that he couldn't take on a dog of his own after all. As Buddy's already latched onto Benji and follows her everywhere it looks like he's probably ours now. Or rather Miles' – although he's still way too young to know about caring for animals he enjoys playing with Buddy as he's a far better companion to Miles than my wife's vicious poodle, who's very highly strung and now rather elderly. Buddy came to us already named, but that's okay – keeping up with the jazz/blues/reggae* tradition of naming our family members I'll just have to tell everyone he's named after Buddy Guy.

* A story: the reggae connection was with an injured barn owl that we rescued a few months ago, after it broke its wing while getting stuck in a palm tree. Named Bob because I happened to be wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt at the time, we had an offer of care from a local English guy who specialises in looking after birds of prey, but Bob died while recovering at the vet's hospital where they had never cared for an owl before, and where Bob was probably fed incorrectly. They said Bob just died overnight but I suspect it was a compassionate euthanasia for a bird who would never fly again. She's buried in our garden – that's right, Bob turned out to be female.