Images
of Matthew
Tuesday 2 May, 2000
One night last week he woke, screaming, around 1am. It seemed he'd been having a nightmare. Deb went and got him, and brought him back into our bed, cuddled up between us and drinking a bottle of warm milk. We asked him what was wrong. All we could get were the horror-filled words, "noisy bee, noisy bee." Twice more he woke up that night scared of the noisy bee.
It wasn't until the next day, when he woke again screaming from his nap during the day that I discovered a fly trapped between the curtain in his room and the window. It must have been flying about during the night and woken him. It made more sense, but it wasn't quite as funny as the thought of a nightmare about a noisy bee!
He's still remembering the noisy bee, but I've told him that if it comes back again, what he needs to do is say "Out!" in a really loud voice, like I use when the cats bring mice in the house. He walks around the house practising, "Out!, Out!"
Deb took him to the library in the weekend. They read a book called "Oi!, get off our train." He then walked around the library saying "Oi!" to people. The other patrons in the library all glared at Deb as she ran around behind him calling, "Matthew, that was just in a book, we don't say that to people …" "Oi!"
He sat on my lap at the computer desk. We went through the QWERTY keyboard. Fully half of the letters and numbers he could recognise, and some letters he knows words that start with that letter. "Mum", "Matt", "Max" all start with "M."
Today when I dropped him at his caregiver, he went straight up to his friend Max (3 months older than Matthew) to greet him as he normally does. This time he held out his red plastic lunchbox he was carrying to Max, "here-ah Max, here-ah." As Max went to take it, Matthew snatched it away, "No, Max, no." Max's Mum, Karen, said Max does exactly the same thing to Matthew, so I've put it down to a little toddler ritual rather than really poor parenting on our part! But I guess time will tell …
This morning, when I got him up from bed, there was a sliver of crescent moon still showing in the sky before the sunrise. I pointed it out to him. He loves the moon, and each night it's part of the bedtime ritual that we go outside and say goodnight to the stars and the moon in the sky. He was quite tickled that the moon was there in the morning, and kept looking out the window at it. Each day I ask him what day it's going to be today. A Maxy-day is when he stays with Max and Karen. A Daddy-day is when I look after him. A Nana-and-Grandad-day is when he visits them. Today when I asked him, he said it was going to be a Moon-day!
Tonight, in that frantic energy time before a bath, he was standing in the middle of the living room floor with a big plastic container over his head. He'd lift it up and shout, "Boo!" at us, then giggle away. After awhile he started spinning round in circles with the container still on his head until he collapsed on the ground from dizziness.
Oh, and he's started dipping. Whenever we have a cup of tea, or a glass of wine or beer, he'll come up to us saying, "Dip, dip." He'll dip his finger into the cup or glass and then suck the liquid off. It's quite disconcerting that he already knows the difference between beer, wine and tea. As soon as he spies me getting a bottle of beer from the fridge, "Beer, beer, … dip, dip." It's starting to become one of those toddler habits that was awfully cute to start with, but in rapidly becoming a pain in the ass! Except for him though. He enjoys it.
He's a delight to be with though. We wouldn't have it any other way!