For a couple months now, Cam's temper has been developing and evolving. At first, he would simply give a cry and pout for a few seconds, then he started to get into larger physical actions, where he'd flop down onto the ground and roll a bit before recovering. Now, when he doesn't get his way, he'll actually run a few steps away before diving onto the ground and crying. Very dramatic stuff. If you're holding him or restraining him, he'll thrash his arms around, knocking things over, or worse, he'll reach out for stuff to grab and throw them around. If no objects are within arms' reach, he'll end up hitting you instead. He also recognizes when you are speaking ill of him - if you are holding him and talk bad about him, he'll furrow his brow, give you a semi-evil look and swing his arm at you. He'll hit you and then sort of look at you with a half-mad, half-curious expression. He's unsure if he's allowed to hit us, and he's probing the boundaries of what he can do. Sneaky and slightly evil... do all kids go through this? He hit me a couple times but I grabbed his arm, looked him in the eyes, and told him very sternly that he cannot do that. Now, if I'm holding him and he gets mad at me, he'll sort of swing his arm half-heartedly at me, but never actually hits me. I'm hoping that's enough of a scolding to get him to stop, but really I think I'd better start brushing up on timeouts and other disciplining techniques.
Cam's only a year and a half old yet he's displaying behaviour of a Terrible Two year old. Do they call this the Ornery Ones?
Despite his anger management issues, Cam is insanely fun to play with now. He's doing some funny stuff now, like bending over and balancing on his head while sticking his butt up in the air. He'll look at you while doing this and giggle up a storm. He's also learned to sort of row with his arms when we sing 'Row row row your boat', but the best thing is we start to make chomping sounds and he squeals with laughter and runs away. We'll chase him around the dining room table, with him laughing uncontrollably the whole time.
He got a lightsaber-type toy for Christmas, and he loves to wield it properly, like a sword, and run around making loud sounds as though he's making sound effects for the sword itself. He also received train tracks and a wooden building block train and makes not-quite choo choo sounds as he pushes the train around. Fun fun fun.
We went to the new California Academy of Science on Family Day a couple Sundays back, but the free admission had thousands of families flocking to the site and the line extended off into the distance. We couldn't see the end of the line and decided not to waste our day by standing in line. The weather was fantastically beautiful and we ended up just playing in the grassy park-like area in front of the museum. Living in a downtown condo, we don't get a ton of exposure to green space so Cam loved just walking around and exploring the grass and trees and even chasing after the birds. After wards, we sat on one of the park benches and enjoyed our mini-picnic lunch. It was a very nice Sunday afternoon.
Sara and I completely forgot about Chinese New Year last year, and we would have also let it pass this year without celebrations, but Cam had a fantastic Chinese New Year outfit so Sara decreed that we must somehow celebrate just so we can throw Cam into the outfit.
We ended up going for a Chinese New Year dinner with Brian, Sooji, their kids, and Laomi. We went for Malaysian food, which was awesome, but the great part was seeing Cam and Haiden happily wave when they saw each other. They really exhibited signs of friendship during dinner, with Haiden coming over to Cam's high chair and the two of them having fun and hamming it up a bit. It was very endearing to watch, and we got some great pics of the two of them together, including this shot which looks like Cam is holding the camera and snapping a self-portrait style shot of him and his buddy Haiden. I absolutely love this pic:
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I've posted a bunch of new pictures of some of our recent activities.
Note that I've not finished sorting through the pictures from our holiday visit back to Toronto yet so none of those pictures have been posted. Soon, soon, be patient young one...