One Balinese Year
It is Maya’s second otonan today, meaning she is one year old according to the Balinese calendar. There are 12 months in a year here but each month is 5 weeks, making each year 420 days long. According to the standard calender, Maya will be 14 months on Christmas day. Anyway, I thought it made a good opportunity for an update.
Hellooo toddler tantrums! We have had a few complete meltdowns over the last few weeks over silly things. She is also very quickly angry if we don’t let her do something she wants to do and she’s taken to either hitting us or slamming her hands down on the floor and screaming. I know I shouldn’t laugh but it is terribly amusing at the moment.
She’s coming out with all sorts of new words all the time now, although they’re nearly all indonesian (the only words she says in English are mama, papa, apple (which is the same in Indonesian anyway), cat and poo! Oh and “gee” for her ‘cuddly’ comforter and her latests one “wee wee” = DVD). She usually only says the last syllable so she’s still not really talking properly but we usually know what she means. in indonesian she can say makan (eat), nasi (rice), kapal (plane), buka (open), kupu kupu (butterfly), takut (scared), pekak (grandad in balinese), bubuk (balinese baby talk for sleep), Duta (my nephew and probably a few others that I’ve forgotten.
She’s still obsessed with “brrm brrm” (motorbike) and will have a fit if anyone goes out without her. we tease her by pretending to take her back into the house when she’s already on the motorbike which is very mean but it’s so funny to see her get angry. the other day made’s dad said ‘come on we’ll go out on the brrm brrm” but then obviously didn’t think she was coming so he left without her while she was putting her shoes on and she ran outside to try and get him and slipped in a muddy puddle and fell over so i was left with a very sad muddy baby and had to get made to take her out instead :p
every time she bangs her head now she’ll say “boo!” and hit her head with her palm to show us where it hurts. also she’ll sometimes pretend to hurt her hand or her leg and run over to us pointing out where it hurts so we can kiss it better.
Sleep has become a bit of a nightmare with her really fighting it the last couple of weeks. Made’s started putting her down for her morning nap as she’ll actually go to sleep faster with him now but night time is still really hard – she’ll be really sleepy and already closing her eyes when she’ll suddenly get up and start cryign. if i try and lie her down again she just cries more and it can take 2 hours or more to get her to sleep on a particularly difficult night. On the plus side she’s pretty much sleeping through apart from waking for a minute a couple of times a night to drink water (and it is hot here so i’m not going to deny her that). She’s had one of her mega 3 hour naps this morning which is good as we rarely get an afternoon nap these days.
Her appetite has dropped a lot since she turned one and sometimes she hardly eats atall but I’m not worried because I know she eats when she’s hungry unless she’s gradually turned neurotic about food by the inlaws shoving handfuls of rice in her mouth when she’s distracted (as is the balinese way of feeding children) and constantly going “ah ah ah” like she’s 3 months old and doesn’t know how to eat yet and being obsessed with getting her to eat more rice even though it’s the least nutricious thing on the plate. GRRRR! I try and avoid leaving them to supervise while she’s eating but it’s unavoidable sometimes. We’ve given up on using the high chair as she climbs out after a couple of minutes and she will tend to focus on one particular food each meal time – some times she’ll eat nothing but rice, the next meal she’ll only eat chicken. Her favourites at the moment are chicken, peas, green beans, cream crackers and most fruit. She’s also obsessed with these balinese cracker cake things that look like popadoms and will ignore all the rest of the cake and fruit from the offerings to get at them.
The last few weeks we’ve been leaving her out of nappies during the day and she’s started saying “poo!” and grabbing at herself when she needs the toilet. I think this goes to prove that everything i’ve read about children not being ready for toilet training before the age of 2 because they’re not aware of their bodily functions is rubbish spread by the nappy manufacturers to sell more nappies. They don’t seem to sell potties here so i’m getting one brought over from the uk in a few weeks and for now I’m just doing a little extra laundry.
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