Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Phases

Ewok is going through a mega-dribble can't-keep-water-in-his-mouth phase at the moment. The trrouble is that I can't work out if it's deliberate (i.e. he's just being perverse in a baby kind of way) or whether it's being caused by something beyond his control.

What happens is that he takes a swig from his sippy cup and then promptly spits most of it back out of the sides of his mouth and all down his front. I have found him utterly saturated after he's managed to empty an almost full cup (250ml) in this way. One day I had three changes of his clothes strewn around various radiators drying.

He could be doing it deliberately, for whatever reason seems good to a 16 month old. However there are several other things that have changed recently that could also be causing it. The primary one is that he's got two new teeth, and they're the back ones at the top (at least I think they're the back ones, they're molars anyway) so he's jumped from getting the four at the front to having ones at the back and missing out the ones in between. They could be more sensitive and the cold water hitting them is hurting and causing the spit/dribble phenomenon. It could be that we've started cleaning his teeth in the mornings (about a week ago now), or it could be that I've bought new spouts for his sippy cup.

Frankly I'm not really bothered what's causing it if it's not deliberate, there's not a lot I could do about any one of those causes, I'd just like to know if it is, or isn't deliberate, because if it is then I won't feel so bad about getting upset with him for doing it.