Sunday, January 27, 2008
The Biter
Next week Carson will reach the 16 month mark and it may be appropriate that he is beginning to leave more marks on the people that care for him. For some reason, Carson has taken a liking to chomping on his mom and dad. Now legend has it that Carson's dad was at one time a notorious biter as a young child, but there appears to be little evidence to support this claim. However, when Carson's granddad was informed of the fact that Carson was biting his dad he responded, "There is a God." Anyway, yesterday Carson took a good little bite out of my shoulder and when I told him, "No biting," and sat him down by himself and walked away from him, he began to wail. So, the little dude knows that something went wrong for him. For a while he only bit his mom, but now there appears to be no limits on his chomps. Hopefully this behavior will not spread to daycare although I suspect he may have learned some of it from there anyway.
The biting is not his only development, there have of course been some fun ones too. As mentioned in a previous post, he continues to work on his vocabulary. I would say that Carson has added 'dog, bye-bye, and up' to his vocab. I may have already credited these words to him in another post, but I don't remember. Of course these words only have the first sound of each word, but the 'bye-bye' is almost a complete sound. The stairs are a constant source of interest for the youngster. He alternates between crawling up the stairs and climbing them by holding on to the side of the wall. He descends the stairs through alternate means as well by either sliding extremely fast on his belly, scooting on his bottom, or the scarier option of just standing up and taking a step which amounts to a leap of faith. Luckily, he only takes that leap of faith on one of the last carpeted stairs and we are always there to catch him. In the past week or so, Carson figured out the names of his farm animals. There are four of them (sheep, horse, cow, and pig) in his toy farm set. If you line them up and ask him for any of the four animals, he will either point to it or bring it to you. We are pretty impressed with that.
There has been one unsettling develpment with Carson in recent weeks and that is the appearance of some true toddler temper tantrums. Carson can no longer be easily distracted and redirected when he wants something and if he doesn't get the something that he wants, he may drop to the floor, lay on his belly, kick his feet, and throw a fit. Now this is not occurring every time he is denied, but it is not a rare occurrence. I got a feeling that this is just a glimpse of what is ahead.
Finally, we met with an ENT (ears nose throat) specialist a couple weeks ago to discuss the ever persistent redness and fluid behind one or both of Carson's ears. The persistence of these two factors coupled with the number of times that Carson has been on antibiotics has led us to decide to follow the ENT's advice and have ear tubes inserted for the little guy. This will hopefully resolve the ear infections and make him a generally more healthy guy. We'll keep the site updated with that development. Carson is scheduled to undergo this procedure at the end of February.
Next week Carson will reach the 16 month mark and it may be appropriate that he is beginning to leave more marks on the people that care for him. For some reason, Carson has taken a liking to chomping on his mom and dad. Now legend has it that Carson's dad was at one time a notorious biter as a young child, but there appears to be little evidence to support this claim. However, when Carson's granddad was informed of the fact that Carson was biting his dad he responded, "There is a God." Anyway, yesterday Carson took a good little bite out of my shoulder and when I told him, "No biting," and sat him down by himself and walked away from him, he began to wail. So, the little dude knows that something went wrong for him. For a while he only bit his mom, but now there appears to be no limits on his chomps. Hopefully this behavior will not spread to daycare although I suspect he may have learned some of it from there anyway.
The biting is not his only development, there have of course been some fun ones too. As mentioned in a previous post, he continues to work on his vocabulary. I would say that Carson has added 'dog, bye-bye, and up' to his vocab. I may have already credited these words to him in another post, but I don't remember. Of course these words only have the first sound of each word, but the 'bye-bye' is almost a complete sound. The stairs are a constant source of interest for the youngster. He alternates between crawling up the stairs and climbing them by holding on to the side of the wall. He descends the stairs through alternate means as well by either sliding extremely fast on his belly, scooting on his bottom, or the scarier option of just standing up and taking a step which amounts to a leap of faith. Luckily, he only takes that leap of faith on one of the last carpeted stairs and we are always there to catch him. In the past week or so, Carson figured out the names of his farm animals. There are four of them (sheep, horse, cow, and pig) in his toy farm set. If you line them up and ask him for any of the four animals, he will either point to it or bring it to you. We are pretty impressed with that.
There has been one unsettling develpment with Carson in recent weeks and that is the appearance of some true toddler temper tantrums. Carson can no longer be easily distracted and redirected when he wants something and if he doesn't get the something that he wants, he may drop to the floor, lay on his belly, kick his feet, and throw a fit. Now this is not occurring every time he is denied, but it is not a rare occurrence. I got a feeling that this is just a glimpse of what is ahead.
Finally, we met with an ENT (ears nose throat) specialist a couple weeks ago to discuss the ever persistent redness and fluid behind one or both of Carson's ears. The persistence of these two factors coupled with the number of times that Carson has been on antibiotics has led us to decide to follow the ENT's advice and have ear tubes inserted for the little guy. This will hopefully resolve the ear infections and make him a generally more healthy guy. We'll keep the site updated with that development. Carson is scheduled to undergo this procedure at the end of February.
# posted by Charles @ 10:12 AM 
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