No longer a baby...

Is this a boy thing?

Several people have commented recently that Dylan is super active but is not at all aggressive and has a really sweet nature. It's true! He's a wild man (witness photo above whereby he rams his tricycle into things), but he's also loving, caring and sharing. I realize more and more how much he is his own person and not at all putty in my hands. I can't take credit for all of the fantastic qualities he has and can only marvel at the little person I see developing before my eyes. He's happy, mischievous, silly, affectionate and creative.

He's come up with his own game, which is like "extreme peekaboo" meets hide-and-go-seek whereby he calls out "peekaboo" (actually he says "cuckoo," which is what they say in Italian) and then runs to find the craziest place he can hide and jump out of to scare you. He takes it very seriously and as soon as he yells "cuckoo," he gets a determined look on his face and crouches down like a ninja as he sets out to find the perfect hiding place. He usually signals you to crouch down too and go off to hide.

I love how communicative he is and how he can tell me exactly what he wants ("water" or "cookie") or how he is feeling. When he hears a lawn mower, he gets a worried look on his face and says "paura!," which means "scared."

My only major area of frustration as a mamma is sleep. Grr. I will never forgive myself for not having swaddled him as a baby. It's not done here and when I asked about it in the hospital (I don't even think I knew the name for "swaddling" in Italian), people looked at me funny. I am convinced that because I didn't swaddle, we got off to a horrible start with sleep and it will continue to be a struggle. He was a really restless sleeper as a small baby (major understatement - he didn't sleep day or night!), and he continues to be to this day. By the time he was about a year old, we were in a good pattern of getting him to bed at 9 p.m. and he'd sleep through the night. That lasted for a couple of (glorious) months but since we changed the clocks, he is all screwed up.

At 9 p.m. lately he is still usually bouncing off the walls. It doesn't help that just as I'm trying to get him to settle in for bedtime, Cristiano comes home, which gets him all riled up. In any case, I continue to try to put him to bed around 9 p.m., but he doesn't actually get to sleep until around 11 p.m. If I'm lucky. This is after letting him cry-it-out a bit, meaning I don't get to sleep until much later because I'm a bundle of nerves. I know plenty of Italian kids who go to bed at 11 p.m. and then sleep in in the morning. Not Dylan. He has been waking up at 1 a.m. wanting to play! He calls out for us loudly until we come and he's wide awake standing in his crib naming all the toys he can see in his room. We may get him back to sleep. Until 4 a.m. when the pattern repeats and he calls out for us loudly until we come. Then it takes about an hour to get him back to bed and he's up by 7 a.m.! In the scheme of things, it's not a huge problem, but if only he would sleep a bit more...