Lately you've been walking around with your hands on your hips. It cracks us up.
You are such a fun little boy. You are spirited and determined. You are also extreme - either happy or sad, very rarely in between. The only time you become quiet is when you are around new people or very tired. Otherwise you are happy and full of grins or screaming your head off because you’re upset. You’ve been this way your whole life, and I’ve always wondered if it’s just a stage you’ll grow out of or if it’s your personality. I’m starting to think it’s actually the real you.
You pull cereal off the shelves in the grocery store when I'm not looking.
You love to run now and tend to throw caution to the wind and have gotten many bloody knees as a result. You also still love to climb, and you’re working on learning how to jump. You can go up and down the stairs on your own now, but I still get a little nervous about you going down and like to walk in front of you.
You love to swim right now.
Your vocabulary has exploded and you talk, talk, talk. I would guesstimate that you know a few hundred words, if not more, and you’re now stringing them together into short sentences. You love to narrate and comment on everything that’s going on around you. “I running! I run hard! Airplane! Daddy go? Whaswong? (What’s wrong?) Whadoin? (What are you doing?) I eat. I hungry. Hi Krew. I do it! Oh no! I get da balls!” One of your favorite things right now is to run up to me (or your daddy) and say, “Mommy, mommy, (or daddy), come eah [here], I see sumting,” and then you grab our hand and pull us away. It’s pretty darn adorable and we have a hard time resisting you when you do it. You also demand to be independent and do everything on your own now, with a defiant, “I do it!!”, and it of course makes everything take ten times as long as it should.
You go through phases of being a daddy’s boy like your older brother, but you still choose me sometimes and I’m so, so glad. For example, if I ask you to go to the store with me, you’ll usually gladly agree without bribing. Your older brother would never (and still won’t) do that.
You love shoes and daily state your preferences between your crocs, flip flops, or other shoes. You also request to wear socks on a daily basis. I usually tell you no given that it’s summertime and hot everywhere right now, but your daddy occasionally gives in and sticks them on your feet. :)
You are wearing anywhere from size 5 to size 7 shoes, depending on the brand, size 3 diapers during the day and size 4 at night, size 18- or 24-month shirts, and size 18- or 24-month shorts. You have a very long torso and so shirts are a bit more difficult to fit on you than shorts. Your bottom incisors came in and so you now have 16 teeth. Your birth mark on your nose is still there, although very small, and your hair varies between looking light brown and blonde depending on how much you’ve been in the sun, the lighting, and the last time I cut it.
You are still obsessed with electronics and it still drives your daddy and me batty. It is a daily fight. We’ve now put all the kids DVDs high up in a cabinet in the kitchen so you can’t reach them (you were bringing them to us all day long and having tantrums when we said no), and we frequently have to hide the iPad, our phones, and the iPod touch.
You go to bed fairly easily without much fuss. Even if you’re not tired, you’ll usually just lay quietly in your bed until you fall asleep, sometimes reading books. You typically take one nap per day, and I can put you down anywhere between 10am and 2pm and you’ll sleep anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. You go to bed between 8 and 9pm and wake up anywhere between 6:30am and 8:30am.
You are a picky eater and will eat very few fruits or vegetables. You love bananas and apples, and about 50% of the time you chow down green beans, but every other fruit and veggie is hit or miss. We’re still letting you have a lot of fruit packs (pureed fruit and veggie pouches) because you love them and it means you’re getting fruits and vegetables in your body.
You still suck both of your thumbs, and your daddy and I have decided to start trying to wean you from them since we can see that your teeth are starting to buck a little. It’s going to be a hard habit to break, though. You sure love your thumbs.
You trail behind your older brother almost everywhere he goes, and you absolutely adore him. I love the way you say his name, and you call him both “Krew” and “Krewson.” You and he have actually started to play together some now that you can copy what he does, and it makes me soooooo excited to see you interacting. Despite your very different personalities, I really hope you can grow to be best friends.
Discipline is starting to show more results now that you can communicate well. If you’re throwing a fit I’ll say, “Do you want to go to your crib?” and you’ll wail, “No cwib!!!” Then I’ll say, “Ok, then stop crying right now,” and immediately you’ll pull yourself together and stop the sobs. Also, when we tell you to start doing or stop doing some behavior, we know that you can understand us. Although you respond to discipline in terms of your behavior (you’ll stop the forbidden behavior, or obey, or do what I said after certain consquences), training your heart is going to be a whole different issue. You very rarely act remorseful for anything you do that upsets anyone. Many times you grin through the entire discipline session. Hopefully this is something that will change with time as you mature and learn that other people have feelings, too.
Little trouble maker.
Alright that’s all for today. The next post about you will be your two-year birthday post! Wow!
To finish up, here are some pictures with your new haircut that I gave you last Friday. :)
Love you little man!