November 2019

• Crawling

Daycare commented this week on how Anna's crawling style is interesting. Not content with the regular style she sometimes switches into a style where one leg is moving forward more like walking and pulls the other along. I assume it is because she can get around a lot faster.

Back in October we get her a play pen so she could be left unsupervised without full access to the entire house. While she sometimes doesn't like that she has been put down and left in there she will quickly get distracted by her toys. We bought a fairly heavy duty one so it won't be possible for her to move it or push it over.

• Walking

Anna is enjoying standing up on all different types of furniture. She has been doing this for a month or more and is getting more confident at standing, dropping back to sitting and moving along the furniture. She has started being able to stand without holding onto anything for brief periods. I think she will probably start walking in the next few weeks.

Bath time has become interesting as much of it is now spent standing or trying to stand, not always in the safest positions.

She is determined to be independent and isn't interested in being assisted to stand and walk. If you try and walk along with her she will just bring her legs up and not stand.

With a small bit of assistance such as something to get her leg up on she can climb up onto the couch. She has to be watched fairly closely as while she is aware of how she should try and get off the couch she sometimes throws caution to the wind and throws herself off. I have spent time time with her where she would slide off legs first which works pretty well.

• Sleeping

Anna has generally always been a good sleeper, with occasion regressions where it has been hard to get her to bed and night and with 1 to 2 wakeups during the night. Recently it has been very good, she will go to sleep at around 8.30-9 and wake up at aroudd 7-8 with very few instances of needing to be resettled while going to sleep and almost none during the night.

She doesn't take a dummy but for a long time has been happy to take a bottle and feed herself while going to sleep.

It is particularly surprising that sleep has been so good recently as 3 new teeth are currently coming through. There has been some change in daytime naps where we are at around 2 now but some days struggle to get a proper second nap in.

• Eating/ Drinking

Anna has always been a good eater, there really hasn't been any foods we have given which she has outright rejected. I think it helps that her daycare provides a lot of varied meals with fairly complex flavours for a toddler. The only trouble more recently has been that because flavours have gotten more interesting it has become harder to feed her plain vegetables. She is trying lots of new things, enjoyed her pizza this week.

We are starting a transition from formula to regular cows milk. At first we coupled this with a new kind of sippy cup, she didn't drink a lot but it was hard to tell if it was because of the cup or because of the milk. More recently I have tried regular milk with a bottle and she drank it without issue. For breakfast we have also started on some cereals which can be combined with milk such as muslei and weet-bix as another way to introduce cows milk. Previously I had mostly been giving her toast with jam which she likes.

• Technology/ Media

When raising a child a big question you need to ask yourself now is what devices and media to allow. I see a lot of general guidance online about how screen time should be zero before 1 year, I followed back to the research this is based off and it seemed fairly inconclusive.

We have allowed brief times where she can play with our phones/ ipad which she seems pretty infatuated with. I think it probably helps a little bit with motor skills, the majority of the time she isn't using any one app but just scrolling and tapping.

We have allowed her to watch kids TV shows which she will sometimes interact with, particularly the theme sounds she will dance along to with shows like Hey Duggie, Thomas and Into The Night Garden. Most of the content in the shows don't get much of an interaction and she continues playing with her toys or crawling around.

Without having another kid which I didn't allow this for it is hard to tell the difference. My guess would be unless the child is developing unhealthy habits associated with the screen time that some level is probably fine. At the same time I would be surprised if no screen time was much of a detriment as long as there are other interactions such as reading books or listening to music. In a practical sense I think it is much easier to allow for some screen time than attempt to remove it altogether.

One thing I am avoiding is exposing her to advertising. I find that the ads in childrens TV are particularly insidious and are trying to push that kind of cheap plastic junk that we want to avoid. Streaming services and no ad channels now allow us to avoid this which I think is for the better, I remember growing up and watching morning cartoons that I would have been exposed to a lot of this type of advertising.

• Birthday

Anna's first birthday is coming up in December. It has come around pretty quickly, especially from 6 months to a year as things settled into routines better. She was born in the busy Christmas time of year so we will have to be mindful in future years of her birthday getting lost in Christmas events, this year we have her birthday event on a Saturday with a family event the following day.

Even at this age she is a bit hard to buy for as she already has a lot of things like books and balls and blocks. As mentioned we want to avoid the cheap plastic/ electronic toys that will be quickly discarded and take up space. So far I have got her Hey Duggie books and plush toys for her birthday and Into The Night Garden books and plush toys for Christmas. It could be argued that I enjoy some aspects of these shows as much as Anna does.

• Holiday

Anna has already been off on 2 big trips in her first year to Cairns and Hong Kong. Over the summer break we are renting a house in Mornington with family and then potentially road-tripping to Canberra.