Caleb (Monthly Update)

Today is Caleb's half-birthday...he is 3 1/2 years old today. Years before I was a parent, I remember hearing (and believing) that children learn most of what they are going to learn from their parents by the time they are three. Wow, do I ever hope that is not true. But it makes me take a hard look at the things that I have succeeded in impressing upon Caleb's little psyche, and they seem very paltry compared to where I thought we would be by now. Fortunately, I'm not seriously discouraged because I no longer believe that age three is a magic number. I expect that Caleb and I will continue to learn from each other for many, many years to come.

Anyway, on to Caleb's monthly update... All of the pretending he was doing last month has dropped off quite a bit. He still pretends sometimes, but most of the time he "dust wants to be CA-leb" (he always puts extra emphasis on the first syllable of his name). I think this is a change for the better since he almost never wanted to "be Caleb" before :) His favorite thing this month has been coloring with markers or crayons. I'm still using http://www.educationalcoloringpages.com/ to print out just about any kids-themed coloring page. (Caleb's favorites are Nemo, Spiderman and Peter Pan pictures.) He colors 3 or 4 pictures every day, and he has even started coloring in the lines on his own. I haven't encouraged him to do this because I don't want to add to his genetic proclivity to OCD, but I haven't discouraged him either.

As to the pre-reading stuff, Caleb definitely knows all of his phonic sounds now. He can tell me what most words start with when prompted a little with the sound: like if I ask him what "u-u-umbrella" starts with, he takes the "uh" sound and connects it to "U" in his mind. Of course he has no idea with words that don't follow the most basic phonetic rules. A couple of days ago, Marcus even had him sounding out 3-letter words ending in "-an" (Pan, ran, fan, can), and he did really well. I'm going to hold off a while longer before doing much sounding-out, but it's neat to see that he can do it a little already.

Behaviorally, a new whining stage has descended and is being complicated by the emergence of a rebellious streak. We still have more good days than bad, but I have been surprised by some of his behavior this month (not the least of these is the book incident). At the same time, there have been some changes for the better. He is much better at playing with Ethan now than ever before. He lets Ethan contribute what he can and is actually very good at explaining things to Ethan. It's funny to hear and see my words and gestures coming from him to his brother. He has no patience for Ethan being "wrong", though. For example, Ethan loves the phonetic sounds, but he does not know the letters nearly as well as Caleb does, so he often spots a letter somewhere and labels it with the wrong sound. This drives Caleb nuts. He argues with Ethan about it and gets angrier and angrier, while Ethan just thinks its funny. I think we will be working on that for a long time.

This may be TMI for the casual reader, but for posterity I want to record that we started Caleb on a daily dose of MiraLax this month. For the first time in his life, he is having a bowel movement every day. We probably should have done this earlier (Marcus wanted to), but I resisted daily meds of any kind. Even so, I'm very glad that we've made this change because he is eating better and his stomach is rarely bloated/distended anymore. A friend/pediatrician told us that when the bowel gets used to being stretched out all the time, using laxatives for a couple of months can help the muscles contract back to a more normal size and begin working properly on their own again. I think what happened with Caleb was that the dairy products we introduced when he turned one started causing some constipation, and he has remained stuck in that cycle ever since then (despite the fact that we greatly limit his dairy now and only give him Lactaid milk). Hopefully, another month of MiraLax will allow his system to reset, and we can handle his contistipation issues with diet control.