Those months have been busy and full of big developments. We have had many guests over at our house (more in the last 4 months than in almost 9 years we have lived here). M and I went to Estonia for a week in May (our first trip together!). I finished my training and started a brand new job (or actually two) at the end of May. Therefore I now have a Friday off with M.
M herself is a friendly little real human being, polite, and usually very well-behaving :)
Important events/milestones
- Family first: definitely a big development, namely me \turning down an ideal job with the best profile but an hour drive away. I did take another job, amazing as well, but not with the best profile of patients mentioned earlier. This was a difficult decision to make but one that I am proud of. During the last 4 months of my training at an intense department and with a long commute, I missed M a lot and saw her becoming less close to me. This is not what I wish, therefore we made up the balances and chose this. Me working closer by is a better choice for our family and also for my husband who therefore has more time for his own job. I am afraid that I will maybe never be a mom who wants to spend 120% of their time with their children (we are after all pretty career-oriented), but less travel time definitely helps me to balance this a little.
- Favourite things: she is a big fan of fish, trains, pandas and lions. She is the happiest if she can wear something with one of those items on it and can look at a book with those things.
- M is for the first time scared of things. Her biggest fear are snakes, which started with earthworms in the garden. Now she says she saw a snake and starts crying. But she is very brave and will search for snakes in the forest or in specific books. And then gets comforted when we say that snakes only live outside :)
- We went to the zoo yesterday again (as we now have a yearly pass, it really lowers the threshold to go) and she understood more again. She now says sea-jaja(her own word for lion) and makes the sound.
Language
- M can say over 150 words for sure and it is becoming difficult to count them all, also because I don't know which Dutch words she uses exactly at daycare.
- At 24 months M started referring to past events, such as talking simply about things that had just happened (e.g. falling down, the cat that went outside) or some time ago (visit to the zoo).
- At 24 months M makes almost only 2-word sentences, and just a couple days ago she made her first 3-word sentence (more panda book). Now there are more and more of 3-word sentences.
- At 25 months she started to be able to say "no/nee X" (e.g. nee tuttu (no going to sleep).
- At 25,5 months she started to distinguish a little between the languages based on the context (daycare = Dutch, home = Estonian and English). At daycare she will use Dutch words that she has never used at home. She will still use both Est and Eng with me and my husband but I have caught her switching the language from Est to Eng when speaking to my husband.
- More and more words, repeating all what we say to her!
- She picked up a lot of Estonian during our week stay there and during the time my best friend visited us. Always lovely to see how she catches on so quickly and will switch the English words to Estonian ones (fish -- kala).
- Colors: not distinguishing yet, but repeating and wanting to know which color things are. We often practice outside when we are biking or taking the car. Her favourite is red ("puna") so she asks about everything if it is red. I didn't imagine there are so few red cars around!
- We are all putting a lot of effort into multilingual parenting, also in our monthly Estonian mommy group. And I am due to write a book about this topic of raising a kid in several languages! So excited but also so terrified!
Sleep
- Switch to a big girl bed! We did that when she was 23 months, and the first week went great, but that was maybe because she was a bit sick. So when she got better, she started roaming around, pulling things out, going to other rooms and causing all kinds of mischief. We have removed all the distractions from her room and blocked the door. Now she gets a book or two with her to bed, so she reads those to her bunny for a while and falls asleep in about 30 minutes. Such an improvement compared to about 2 hours what she needed when she had all the distractions!
- We had some harder periods with sleep yet, when she cried at night and wouldn't calm down easily. This overlapped with her going back to daycare after some time off and us having guest over at our place for a week. This problem solved itself.
- Bedtime has shifted to 19:30/20:00 and she wakes up at 6:45 am, consistently.
Eating
- Still pretty picky. Her big-time favourite is peanut butter that she would love to eat for every meal, just with a spoon out of a bowl. She has gotten the taste of fresh berries: strawberries from the store and our own raspberries. She loves them!
Challenges
- Pottytraining is still yet to happen.
- I find it difficult to accept that I do find a full day at home with her a lot and challenging. I love her so much, but she can be very intense. And it all comes down to patience, something I am yet to improve!
- We are travelling to Canada for 4 weeks in a month, so it is all up to me to keep the Estonian language improving during a full English (or Canadian?) immersion. At least I have Tim Hortons coffee accompanying me there!