Yar! Here There Be Treasure

Where have I been all this time? Floating through the days in a daze I suppose. Skyler is doing new things! He has two new words, duck and quack. Coincidence? I think not. He loves to play with his rubber ducks while he sits on the potty, before and after he brushes his teeth. He has several rubber ducks, and we often sing that song about the five litt.le du.cks. You know the one you may remember as the song that made me start sobbing when I was all tripped out on hormones after having him. Haha. Also tonight at the dinner table I kept singing some random melody using only his name over and over and he tried to repeat it and was saying "Kyeh"! That's almost his name. Sort of. Good enough for me anyway.

(Shown here, brushing said teeth. Of which he now has five.)

AND my child is so odd, I love him to bits. We have one of those walking toys (it's a red car that turns into a riding toy, has wheels you push it while you walk, blah blah blah) PT and OT are always asking about that toy because he's not walking on his own yet and it will encourage him. Well I can't get him to use it as a walking toy for the life of me. He will gladly sit and push all the buttons, make it sing all the songs, but the second you try to stand him near it he sits down on his butt. Usually indignant that you would try such a thing. Anyway long story short, I was standing in the kitchen trying to quickly get some dishes done, when he starts ambling over to me, pushing not his toy car but our portable barbeque that we took out of storage the other day. It has a lid with a handle on it and I guess the handle was like the perfect thing because he wouldn't let go of it, even when he kept walking the thing into walls and getting down right p*ssed off about it.

He's really started to become more interested in the world around him in the past week alone. I took him to a play group on Friday with C and normally he would just sit in one spot at these things, clinging to me. But this time he took off, finding every new toy he could, sitting close to new babies/toddlers he'd never met before. He was enthralled. Normally he won't touch anything unfamiliar or even go near it, but now he is all over the place exploring. He also does this weird thing where he moves in a complete circle around an object. I'm thinking he is doing it because he wants to see the entire thing from every angle since he can't see it all at once. He's so smart.

I took him to my mom's on Tuesday and he explored her place like never before, and he found something we don't have at home: stairs. Fortunately we were on the ball and he never got a chance to try them out (or fall down them), maybe next time I'll let him investigate, but for now I'm going with the safer choices. My mom has two cats, one that we've had since I was 14 and one that I got when I lived with my ex. Skyler normally could care less about said creatures, but this time he saw something moving.. he felt something furry, and those cats were not safe. He crawled faster than I'd ever seen him crawl trying to get a hold of those cats. They're pretty calm so they mostly laid there while he petted them gently (and possibly pulled a tail a couple times).

Now on to the most important part of our week. Yesterday was opthalmology. Dr said he's confident Skyler can see out of both eyes, but the left eye is a dominant. It's not really bad, he is still using both eyes, but as he explained sometimes with nystagmus the person will cross the eyes to look at something up close because it makes their eyes stop wiggling and makes the object easier to see. But the issue here is that he is crossing the right one in a bit more than the left. So you know what that means. Pirate baby! Yesterday was our first day patching. We bought the patches right after the appointment and tried it out. The doctor said he didn't expect Sky to let us patch him for the full two hours a day at first, he said not to worry if we started out with 15-30 mins a day for the first while.

Skyler surprised us though. He was mad when we put the patch on (who wouldn't be? we're putting something sticky on his face, and taking away the sight in his better eye) but he calmed down after 5 minutes (and possibly some milk :) and was fine for the entire two hours. Both yesterday and today when we patched him. The only problem so far is the patches (nex.tech or whatever they're called) stuck to him really bad when we went to take it off. Yesterday it was awful, worse than ripping off a bandaid and he had glue on his face even after his bath. Today it wasn't as bad. I'm looking into other brands. So far I've seen a few that interest me, but I may have to order them in because our local stores don't seem to carry too many options for toddler size eye patches.

And that's how my week has been going (in as brief a synopsis as I can manage.) how about you?