I’m not quite sure how it’s happened but my little baby, Gabey-goo is two years old! In a lot of ways the time has flown since he was born but at the same time we seem to have been waiting for a long time to well and truly put the baby days behind us. I love both my boys to pieces but it is safe to say I am not a big fan of little babies. Give me a walking, talking toddler any day!

So what can I tell you about Gabe at two years old? He seems to have had a bit of a growth spurt recently – he is now 89 cm tall which puts him on the 75th centile for height. He’s mostly wearing 2-3 clothes now, but he’s no where near as tall as Toby was at this age, I think he wore 2-3 from about 18 months! He weighs 12.2 kg which is almost 27 lb. He’s still not got much hair, although I have now trimmed the top once and the back a couple of times.

He’s such a little character now. His speech has really come on in the last month – he knows lots of words now and is starting to put them together too. He loves to say ‘I did it’ and give himself a clap whenever he does something. He is still rather clingy and ‘my duddle’ is a regular phrase – especially if his brother is getting a cuddle at the time. He is getting better though and will happily play on his own, or with Toby a lot more, without always needing me to be right next to him. He’s a real adventurer when we’re out too, and is always running off without a care in the world. He’s great at climbing and balancing and has just learnt to jump with two feet off the ground so he likes practising that too.

He’s just started counting in the last couple of days too, and can count up to four so far. I love that he’s talking now, it makes life so much easier – yesterday we were at my friend’s house and he came over to me with a plastic golf club and said ‘where ball?’, which is an awful lot easier than when he just used to cry at me until I eventually worked out what he wanted.

He loves pirates, which for some reason he calls ‘up-pie’, and he does a great ‘ah-har’! He likes dinosaurs too – he calls them all ‘roar’, and he’s a big fan of playing with the choo-choos on our wooden train track. He loves to look at books, and will now quite happily sit and look at books by himself as well as bringing them to us to read to him. He especially likes lift the flap books, although there have been a few casualties to his eagerness to look under the flaps!

He likes sorting and stacking games and is starting to learn some of his colours too. He knows our car is red, and perhaps unsurprisingly given how much Toby loves it, one of the other colours he knows is purple.

He is a good eater on the whole – he has a few peculiarities though. He won’t eat fruit at lunch time even though he has it as a snack. Although saying that he only really likes bananas and apples (which I have to peel or he chokes on it). He loves yogurt and is currently requesting it at every meal. I think that might be to do with the fact the first of his back molars is coming through at the moment – more on the other effects that is having in a minute though.

Although he eats most things, he will sometimes decide he just doesn’t want to eat at all. Usually though pretending to eat his food will lead to cries of ‘mine’ and suddenly he does want to eat after all! He loves cake and crisps and chocolate raisins – all the unhealthy stuff, and he probably has more of it than Toby did at his age. I think his diet is pretty balanced over all though.

He is still on ranitidine and omeprazole for his reflux – we are slowly trying to reduce the dosage of his ranitidine before stopping it completely and then starting to reduce the omeprazole too. The big thing that has happened recently though is that Gabe has finally started sleeping through the night and so I am reluctant to rock the boat too much and end going back to sleepless nights.

There have been a few not entirely welcome changes as far as sleep goes in the last week. Up until this week Gabe was having a nap every afternoon, and if we were at home then it was usually a couple of hours in his cot. He was taking ages to fall asleep at night but we had gone from him lying in my lap, to going in his cot and me just sitting in the chair next to him until he fell asleep. It was getting a bit ridiculous when some nights it was almost 9 pm before he fell asleep but at least he would lie there quietly until he drifted off. He was still having a bottle of milk at bedtime too, and he still has a dummy to sleep as well.

But then on Monday, he refused to nap. I tried for an hour but he just wasn’t having it. He did end up falling asleep on my knee watching TV but only for 10 minutes. That night’s bedtime though was horrendous – he was screaming and crying, and then when he calmed down he was just rolling around on our bed giggling (I’d taken him out of his room so Toby could go to sleep). He eventually gave in and fell asleep at 8:45 pm but then was awake again at 2:30 am and ended up in bed with us. He did nap at nursery on Tuesday but bedtime was just as bad with the wailing starting as soon as we went near the bedroom. He’s been the same all week – he had a nap yesterday but only because we were in the car, and has refused to nap again today. But, we didn’t have too much crying at bedtime and he was asleep by 7:20 pm.

He has been refusing his bedtime bottle too, and I know he doesn’t really need it anyway so I think we’re going to take the opportunity just to get rid of it all together.

I’m convinced most of this is to do with his molar coming through but I think it might be the beginning of the end for the regular nap. We actually stopped Toby napping at about the same age because he was taking so long to fall asleep at night and it looks like Gabe might be heading the same way. Everything is going to change in a couple of weeks though with Toby at school and Gabe starting his new preschool so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it all pans out. I was really hoping we could hold on to the naps for a bit longer but if stopping them means earlier nights and still sleeping through then I’ll take it!

I think that’s probably everything for now. I know this is a long post but I love reading back on Toby’s updates from this age, there’s so much we forget so I want to cram is as much as I can.

We had a little BBQ for family and a few friends at my mum and dad’s house last weekend (because they’ve got a better garden than us for that kind of thing) and Toby and Gabe both had a fab time. Gabe’s cake wasn’t anywhere near as complicated as Toby’s Numberblocks cake was but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out and it was really easy to make too – just a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and a load of extra chocolate bits and pieces stuck on! It was yummy though…