Week 45 of the Living Arrows project and I can’t believe we are only seven weeks from the end of the year.

It’s been a mixed week this week. It started off with daily tantrums from Toby, mostly for no apparent reason, and a few nights of broken sleep for all of us. On Thursday he fell at nursery and banged his ear of the edge of a table causing a bit of a cut and a nasty bruise and then on Friday he crawled forehead first in to a door stop! More worrying though is that I noticed on Friday he wasn’t putting the heel of his right foot down and has stopped walking altogether. He’s still standing and walking when he’s holding on to something but seems to have completely lost his balance when trying to stand unaided. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t broken anything when he fell so we spent Saturday afternoon at our local Minor Injuries department. They did an x-ray but nothing showed up so we’ve been told just to give him painkillers and take him to our GP if it doesn’t improve in a couple of days. He was doing so well with his walking too – I really hope whatever it is clears up soon. There’s a chance he’s sprained or strained something or it could be ‘irritable hip’ which is inflammation of the fluid and membranes around the hip which can follow a virus. There’s also the possibility that he has sustained a ‘toddler fracture’ which hasn’t shown up on the x-ray. However, all these things usually get better without treatment so keeping an eye on it is really the only thing we can do at the moment.

Of course this all had to happen while Barry was away for the weekend so I had to deal with it all myself. Toby’s been brilliant all weekend though. No sign of a tantrum and he’s even slept pretty well too. I think part of his tantruming is frustration at not being able to talk and tell us what he wants. He really wants his independence now more than ever as well. This is particularly evident in his eating – he’s been perfectly happy for us to feed him anything that needs a spoon up until recently. Now he wants to do it all himself so it’s time for him to start learning to use a spoon and fork himself. My plan is just to give him things that he can pick up with his hands without making too much mess but give him a spoon or fork too and see how he gets on. We started with porridge this morning and he did actually manage to get some on the spoon and into his mouth, which as you can see in this week’s photo he was enormously pleased about!