I'm the Mummy!

At last Ewok has finally caught on to the fact that I'm Mummy.

He's been less inclined than a lot of kids to even bother with the proper talking thing, but he's had a word for Wookiee for quite a while now, and a few weeks ago this became a full blown 'Daddy', at which point we could not get him to grasp the fact that everyone else was NOT Daddy.

Wookiee was Daddy, but so was I, and the cats, and the teddies, and the poor bemused chap in the supermarket who just happened to make eye contact with Ewok at the wrong moment.

In some ways it's been a little upsetting for me (when I've been in a low mood anyway) that Wookiee got a special name but I wasn't anything at all. When I was feeling less low, logic kicked in and I realisedthat this was probably down to the fact that I'm here all day every day, so he has no need for a name for me as he has no need to call for me, or greet me in any way.

With the advent of a full recognisable Daddy, however, we've had a big push on getting him to say Mummy, and yesterday, for the first time, he did!

I may have mentioned before that he's a very bright boy (yes I know I'm biased, but he is) and so having grasped the concept of a different designation for Daddy and Mummy he's very quickly grasped who is who. So much so that in just one day he's now getting the right one for each of us most of the time, and he's started saying baby (more of a babbie really) for himself.

I'm sure in a couple of years time I'll rue the day he ever learned to say Mummy (Mummy, mummy, mummymummymummymummymummymummy, muuuuuuuummy!) but for now I'm very happy and a little misty-eyed about it.

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.