Finally, that Christmas 2013 post... in 2014

It was recently brought to my attention that not only did I wait to write the Christmas 2013 post until February 2014, I promised a Part 2 that never came. Well, it's Christmas Eve 2014 (on the day I start writing this), so let's not hold our breath, shall we?

Still, I do feel a little bad about that, so a quick recap of last year.

Starting last year, we changed things up a bit in order to spend Christmas morning at our own house instead of traveling. Thus, my parents'/grandparents' Christmas Eve/Morning celebrations were moved up a couple of days, and we traveled the weekend before the holiday. This had the added benefit of allowing the kids to see Santa the way I used to: in a tiny cabin on my hometown's square.

It was unseasonably warm.

Note the lack of a line to see Santa. I swear this is a popular thing, but last year, we were the only people visiting at that moment.

So here's how it went down. LG was just fine with the big guy in the red suit, despite the fact that the year before, we had to bribe her with a cookie.

Though she may have realized she was getting potato chips when it was all over.

G2, on the other hand... better to let the pictures tell the story.

These two shots were snapped within a half-second of one another.

This was probably the height of G2's stranger danger phase. He was scared of strangers for about one week in December, and it happened to fall over Christmas. Frankly, I don't think it could've gone better. These days, he's as likely as not to walk up to someone he's never met and demand to be picked up.

The rest of G2's Christmas Eve can best be summed up as follows:

He never met a present he didn't like... to eat.

As for Christmas morning, to reiterate, this was the first holiday we spent waking up in our own home as a family. This meant we could start our own traditions. For instance, we left cookies for Santa, but we also made "sparkle bread" for the big guy's reindeer. This is important, as it helps the reindeer fly.

So for all the rest of you NOT leaving sparkle bread for the reindeer, you're welcome.

We also decided that Santa wraps his gifts in fabric, which we mail back to the North Pole so he can use it again the following year. Santa delivers a lot of presents, so he's doing his part to save the planet by recycling.

Santa also leaves dinosaurs. Rawr.

All in all, 2013 was a great Christmas. If you're all very good, maybe Santa will bring a Christmas 2014 post some time before Christmas 2015.

Incidentally, this was the best picture we could get of the two of them together.
Their cooperation hasn't gotten better in that last 12 months.

Butts and Boobies, or How I Learned to Love Toddler-ese

G2's vocabulary has exploded in recent weeks. Our vacation in early September coincided with rapid development on his part, and he just started picking up words left and right. Three days at the beach, and he very clearly knew how and when to deploy "sea shell," "sea gull," and "shore." Since then, it's been one word right after another.

This isn't dissimilar to the way LG developed, either, with big developmental leaps forward. The crucial difference, however, is that G2 is a lazy talker. If he can distill a longer word into a shorter form that he knows you understand, he won't make the effort to say the whole thing.

As you might expect, this is hilarious. Yesterday after breakfast, he was running around shouting "boobies! boobies!" Once I recalibrated my Babel fish for toddler-speak, I realized he was telling me about the BLUEBERRIES he had for breakfast. Later, he handed me a small Minion toy, pointed to the front and said, "Butt." I started to correct him with "belly," when I realized he wanted me to push a BUTTON located on the figure's stomach.

I'd love to better understand how these short word forms develop. One of his very first words was banana, but these days he can hardly be bother to muster much more than "bann," "bana," or "nana." Clementine is another fun one. Most often it comes out "cline-tine," which is, admittedly, closer to the real thing than "boobies" is to blueberries. Meanwhile, he has no problem saying "cupcake."

Before he regularly said "Dada," G2 briefly and inexplicably referred to me as "Nya-Nya." LG loved this, though I was somewhat less than enthusiastic. He refers to his sister as "Mimi," which is the best kind of endearing.

Anyone who knows Hollie well knows that there is no shortage of Peanuts memorabilia around the house, especially at holidays. We decorated for Halloween over the weekend, and re-introduced G2 to an animatronic Snoopy mummy. While I certainly get tired of him pushing the "butt" to activate the toy for the 37th time, I very much enjoy his repeated, failed attempts at saying Snoopy. So far, we have "Poofny," "Foofny," and "Poopsny," which is somehow the closest he's gotten.

LG had similar trouble with the word "pretzel." For a long time, she only called them "pencils." That was amazing and confusing, and I loved it. Then it became "prentzel" and it weirdly remains so, despite the fact that this child regular uses "simultaneous" and "similar" in regular conversation. Today, she told me the difference between her right and left hand, and noted that "right" means two things. "Right means this side of my body, and it also means you did something the way you're supposed to. You can do something right." She understands homophones, but pretzel still eludes her. 

Never change, LG. Never change.

They are pretty cute.

Words, words, words and trouble

G2 is a talker. I don't mean to suggest that he has a large vocabulary, because it's not that. But the little guy just doesn't stop babbling, and it's been this way since he first started making noise. For a while, it didn't seem like he was going to turn those babbles into actual words, but in the last month or so, language has begun to coalesce. As it did with LG, it started with animal noises, but we've come a long way. When LG was about the age that G2 is now, I tracked her words for 36 hours. And since we pretty much compare the two kids constantly, I decided to do the same thing with him.

And here we go!

baby
banana (sometimes "nana," sometimes "ba nana")
ball
bear
beep-beep (cars, trucks & buses all go beep-beep, or sometimes wee-ooo-wee-ooo)
bird
boat
bowl (almost always in reference to the dog bowls, which he knows he's not supposed to touch, but does anyway.)
bus
button (usually on my iPhone, but any button will do.)
car
cup
Dada
dog
eagle (Why eagle? He has a tiny stuffed eagle. Weirdly, he has an entire stuffed menagerie, but eagle is the only one he picked up on.)
Mama
night-night (this is adorable, and is usually combined with laying his head down.)
shoes
seat (Different from sit, below, because it refers to the place where he gets his food.)
sit (Which he knows from how many times we shout it at him while he stands on his sister's bed.)
this (this is a typical response when you ask him what he's holding.)
truck
up
water

Three things of note. I'm surprised how many of these are "B" words. It just seems a little odd. Also, he has fewer abstract concepts in his word list than LG had. He doesn't say "yes" or "no" or "me" or "more." But he has more concrete nouns, like "bear," "boat," and "eagle."Additionally, he has a book of shapes and whenever we turn to the page with the triangle, he shouts, "ker-rangle!" It seems deliberate and he's done it multiple times. To paraphrase Perd Hapley, "I don't know what it means, but it has the cadence of a word."

Tracking words with G2 has been harder, because it's not uncommon for him to point at something, say what appears to be a deliberate word, and THEN NEVER USE IT AGAIN. Case in point: He usually refers to the dog as "dog" or occasionally "uf-uf." But the other day, he looked at the dog, looked at me, pointed at the dog, and clear as day said, "Lola." He has never repeated this.

But then, he expends effort in other ways, like getting into trouble.

This is all perfectly safe, except for the height and the hand mixer and the cheese grater.

Ugh.

15 Months: State of the G2

An unspoken truth about our son is that he's a big kid. It shouldn't be surprising, given how much he weighed when he showed up, but there it is. Although I still contend he never looked quite as big as his weight implied, then or now, the reality is that he's just darn heavy. We've never done anything to promote or control his weight, preferring to let it work itself out.

That's why I was excited to go to his 15-month checkup; in the last two months, G2 went from barely crawling to walking to running, while at the same time, his appetite has leveled off. He actually chooses to stop eating, rather than continuing to eat his food, your food and everything in between. Throw in the obvious vertical growth he's added since the 12-month mark, and he's noticeably trimmer. Given his status in the high 90-percentile over the last few months, the data nerd in me just wanted to know where we stood.

The result? 100 percent of his growth since the one-year mark has been vertical. Back in April, he was 30 inches, or 55th percentile. Yesterday, he measured 32 inches, for 75th percentile. And his weight is unchanged, dropping him into the low 90s. I cannot stress enough that I've never been terribly worried about his growth, as he's always been healthy (give or take a bout of RSV). But it's still nice to know that he's balancing out.

Data aside, the most exciting stuff over the last three months has been developmental. He could stand and sort-of cruise at 12 months, though he didn't really show much interest in it. At 13.5 months, he took some cautious steps. The day after that, he very clearly thought to himself, "Screw caution! I'm a runner!" By 14 months, he was essentially on par with LG at the same point her in development, despite the fact that she had been walking for three months at that time.

He's also taken big strides forward verbally. He had three to five words (mostly animal noises) at 12 months, and now he's got dozens. The only problem is that he refuses to do most of them on cue. He turned to Hollie a few weeks back, pointed at the fruit bowl and clearly said, "Banana." He's maybe said it twice since then. Likewise with "duck" and "dog". These were two of his first words, but now he just laughs at you when you try to get him to say either.

And therein lies the significant difference between G2 and LG at this stage of development. LG wanted to please. You could get her to say or do any of her words or actions with minimal prompting. G2, on the other hand, does things on his time. If he wants to let you know that he knows something, he'll tell you or show you. Otherwise, good luck, buddy.

As ever, there are so many things he does that amuse and irritate. I've recently considered what such a list will look like in 15 years, but by the time my brain got to visions of cars and curfews, the thought was too terrifying to continue.

Let's just stick to the present.

Night Night. Despite the fact that he doesn't sleep on a pillow, he knows what pillows are for. So when he wants to make us smile, he grabs the nearest pillow, lays his head down and says "Night night!" But because he wants you to know that he has no intention of going to sleep, he'll then proceed to make other things go "Night night!"

All of the things.

He thinks he's dog people. As noted earlier, G2 loves the dog bowls. He's faster now, which makes it harder to snag him before he starts splashing in Lola's water dish. He also loves the dog's beds, which is why our bedroom door stays closed and we have to be super vigilant when he's in the living room. There are few things more annoying that having to run a lint roller over your toddler twice a day because you weren't fast enough to catch him before he covered himself in two pounds of dog hair. That why there's a pillow on the floor of the living room in the first place. We thought it might be a substitute for the dog bed. (We were wrong.)

He's a better alarm clock than we are. Despite sharing a room, G2 usually gets up well before LG. So at some point, we get to say, "Go wake up your sister!", at which time G2 scurries down the hall, busts through the bedroom door like Kool-Aid Man, and throws himself onto LG's bed. It is as hilarious as it is effective. The best part is that LG does not mind, and she greets her brother with a warm "Good Moooooorning!" Yet if I quietly and gently attempt to rouse her from sleep, she moans, rolls over and complains that it's too early to get up.

Apple has his number. Yes, we have iPhones. Yes, we have iPads. I'm not going to get into a big thing about whether kids should or should not play with these things. G2 occasionally gets his hands on one. My phone is locked, so the only thing G2 can do is smash the home button over and over. I usually discover this when I hear Siri complaining she can't understand what he wants. However, I recently discovered this series of pictures in my Camera Roll.

Evidently he also figured out how to take a screenshot.

Sharing is caring. With two kids, we knew sharing would be high on the list of necessary lessons. So far, so good. G2 usually wants to share his things with you, though he'd prefer you share it right back after 1.25 seconds. His preferred method of sharing is to smoosh an object in your face. This is largely fine for his sister; it's somewhat less fine for his one-month-old cousin. Let's applaud the sentiment, and work on the methodology.

Animal farm. Kids like animal noises, and G2 is no different. But if you want him to make those noises, you have to ask in the right way. "What does a sheep say?" won't work. "Are you a sheep?" usually does the trick. It's at this point that I have to wonder, "Who's training who?"



Hi-oh! Before he had a great number of words or sounds at his disposal, G2's favorite refrain was "Hi-oh!" Think of it like "Aloha." It meant "Hello," "Goodbye," "Nice to see you," or "I'm going to take a run at the dog bed now. See ya!" It was the cutest thing ever, and he doesn't do it anymore. Tear.

Hips don't lie, but they do groove. I do not have much in the way of rhythm. When called upon to dance, I'm as likely as not to start rocking a white man's overbite. My son was not cursed in this way.



Since there's no way to top that dance, I'll just say this: kids are amazing. Mine, doubly so.

And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

Many things happen in a typical day when you have kids. You wake them up (or they wake you up), feed them, clean them, take them to school, play with them, and sometime near the end of the day, you put them to bed. Some of these things happen once, some multiple times. But in between these things--the necessities--other stuff fills up the space. When people talk about the challenges and rewards of parenting, this unnamed, unquantifiable stuff is what they're talking about.

For instance, here are bunch of things that happened yesterday.

G2 and I read this book… 15.62 times. Why the .62? Because after the 15th time, he only wants to close the book and open it to the Chewbacca page and bark like a dog.

The Wookie/X-Wing spread is one of only three spreads not tainted by the prequels.

G2 loves lamp. Carefully squeezed between the entertainment center, firewood carrier and dog bed in our living room, we have a very skinny floor lamp. G2 has discovered he can move this lamp. So he tried to knock it onto the dog five or six times before I put a toy bin in front of it. He has yet to discover he can walk around this.

LG and I finished a tower. Her LEGO play hasn't yet developed into the full-blown obsession I was hoping for. In fact, I think we've been working on this tower for almost two months. A buddy of mine and his son assembled the Millennium Falcon in less time. But it's a start.

Now we just have to hope G2 doesn't get his hands on it.

LG became a dog for about half an hour. At some point in the afternoon, she decided she was a dog, and refused to pick up anything with her hands or say anything other than "Bark." The whole incident lasted longer than I would've liked, but I appreciate her commitment to the bit.

G2 follows suit. One of his three primary animal sounds is an insistent "Uf! Uf!!" So he barked at his sister, then insisted on staring at a picture of my cousin's dog in a family calendar my aunt made us for Christmas.

LG made unprompted art. While I was giving G2 a snack, LG asked for a paint brush and water. A few minutes later, she came back with this. I'll be honest; the kid paints and colors a lot of stuff, but this is the first time I was really impressed. To paraphrase a well-known quote, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

And I like it. I like it a lot.

At some point, I realized LG was wearing rain boots, and they were on the wrong feet. Note: we had not been outside.

LG does not like hummus and bread. LG likes hummus. LG likes bread. DO NOT PUT HUMMUS ON HER BREAD. Evidently these two things do not go together, and you should really know this by now, Daddy.

Upon returning to the living room after dinner, I found this. Yes, those are stencils. Of dinosaurs. Markers were not involved, thankfully.

LG swears she has no idea how they got there.

G2 loves dog bowls. Unrelated to the other dog-based shenanigans, I probably stopped G2 from tipping the dog bowls at least three dozen times. On Facebook yesterday, I noted, "Saying 'NO' in firm, loud voice briefly had the intended effect of stopping my son in his tracks. Now it just makes him move faster." This is what I was talking about.

LG changed G2's name. And he's a girl now. They are so close to being able to play with each other in a meaningful way. But right now, they're dependent on LG's imagination and capacity for inventing nonsense to get any enjoyment from one another. For example, yesterday she decided G2's name and gender should be changed. "Daddy, his name is Comma. Comma is a girl. Come here Comma. Comma…  Comma…  Comma… You're a girl, Comma. Comma, come play! Comma! Comma! Hey, Comma! Hey, Comma! Hey, Comma! Hey, Comma! His name is Comma. His name is Comma. Comma."

G2 discovered lint. While I was making dinner, G2 cruised around the kitchen and discovered the laundry room. He cruised back and forth in front of the washer and dryer. He inspected the shoe bin. He examined the double stroller. He was quiet for a while, and when I checked on him, he was just out of my eye line, sitting next to the dryer and the wastebasket with a small pile of lint next him and his slightly sticky face covered in the stuff. Did he eat lint? It's altogether possible.

And thus it was that the dog gate became a baby gate.

After all of this, the kids go to bed. There's still work to be done, adult dinner to eat, dishes to clean, and then mercifully, a sitcom or two to watch. But then you look down on the floor in the living room, and you discover this.

What is this? It's a silk belt, stuffed into a plastic sandwich bag, stuffed into a tissue box.

Why? Because you have kids. That's why.

G2: The Year in Review

Today, my second child completes his first trip around the sun. He's traveled 585 million miles through space, yet traveled to only three states (and the District of Columbia). His worldview is limited to what he can hold or shove in his mouth, but, like the rest of us, he's hurtling through an inconceivably large universe, one body in a sea of near infinite possibility. And that's just his first 12 months. What's he going to do for an encore?

As we do around here, I'm recapping G2's first year in pictures. By a rough count, we took 8,986 pictures this year (compared to 5,024 for LG's first year). The major difference? Hollie has an iPhone now.

Reminder: each of these pictures was taken on or around the 29th of the month.

Here's where we started, one year ago today. We were presented with the customary baby burrito, grande, in this case.

Who you callin' grande?

Even in his first month, he showed signs of the very expressive person he would become. This first month was pretty good. At this stage, he was a better sleeper than his sister. We thought we had hit the easy baby jackpot.

April: See? Even tummy time isn't so bad.

As we cleared month number two, he was starting to play, though this picture doesn't really show that so much.

May: As soon as I get some arm strength, that frog is mine.

June came and went, and he started to class up the joint. Right around this time, he decided he'd had enough of being an easy baby, and it was time to cause some trouble. We have never been as tired as we were in June.

June: Note the rakish angle of my tie, suggested the devil-may-care way I approach life.

Hey, he's four months old! Time for solid food! Maybe he'll sleep better when he's got some rice cereal in his belly!

July: Naaaaaah!

This is far from G2's first smile, but it shows just how happy he can be, even when he's a pain in the butt.

August: I am a joy to be around! And don't you forget it!

Never had a child so resembled a pumpkin at the appropriate time of year.

September: The hat helps.

As the product of a Bucknell union, we feel compelled to point out other, similar unions.

October: Orange is their color.

I know it may seem like we are a month off with these pictures, what with the November picture featuring a Santa hat, but since his birthday is the 29th, he's practically in the next month every time we take one of these pictures.

November: Is there something on my head?

See? A December picture, and there are Christmas decorations! Sometimes the timing works.

December: And you thought I was trouble before. Watch out, sister!

Since this was the winter of never-melting snow, he spent far more time in the white stuff than his sister did in her first year. Crucially, he didn't typically mind, despite being stuffed into his snow pants like Randy in A Christmas Story.

January: A smile, or has my face frozen this way?

Full disclosure: this next picture is definitely the first day or two of March. But to be fair, February only had 28 days this year.

February-ish: But it's a rocking chicken! Surely we are forgiven.

And on the morning of his first birthday, he sat at my computer and... good God, what is he doing?

March 2014: This is what I have wrought, father. And, lo, I was super pleased with myself.

Bonus pic from DC vacation!

Hop in, Dad. I'ma fly us outta here!

Come on, baby! Do the Locomotion!

I'll be honest, for a time we were slightly concerned that G2 was falling behind in his physical development. Gross motor skills, like sitting up on his own, pulling to stand, crawling or cruising? These did not come easily or early. As ever, our only other point of reference is his sister, and by 10.5 months, she was taking her first steps. At 10.5 months, he could barely get himself into a seated position on his own.

Let's be clear. He's healthy, happy, inquisitive, and he could pick up a speck of lint off the floor between two fingers faster than you could say, "STOP! DON'T EAT THAT!" But getting from place to place? Not his strong suit.

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Because this kid is trucking and getting into everything.

There was something comforting about sitting him on the floor in the middle of the room and knowing you could get a glass of water and he'd be where you left him when you got back. No longer!

Though he's still not walking on his own, he does have numerous ways of getting around that don't involve begging to be picked up. As I remarked on Facebook a few weeks ago, it's not always elegant.

There's the ever popular drop-to-your-butt-then-zombie-crawl-across-the-floor maneuver.


Or, recently discovered at our hotel in DC, the-round-and-round-we-go.

This went on for some time.

If his tunnel is in play, you can count on the ever-popular recede-into-the-distance gambit.

It helps if he can chase his sister.

Lately, however, it's cruising. Everywhere. All the time. Initially this was limiting for him, because he would only cruise around or along objects. Put him next to the TV console, and he'll move back and forth. Put him next to the refrigerator, and he'll make his way along the cabinets, across the dishwasher, pass the corner cabinet, stop at the stove to turn on a burner, finish at the trashcan, then reverse.

That lasted about three days, and now he drops to the ground, army crawls to the dog bowls, tips them over, then uses the wall to stand back up before he moves into the hallway or living room. Gaps used to  stop him, then he realized that gaps weren't gaps, just an opportunity to find a wall and take the long way around.

Except for spilling the dog's water, that's all sort of charming.

A month ago, I didn't think he'd ever get to the point he's at now. A month from now, he'll be walking freely, and I'll just want him to sit down for a dang minute. And as I dive to insert myself between his finger and the electrical outlet he's managed to yank the cover off of, I'll think about how great a video of our adventures would look if I sped it up by 800% and set it to a Yakety Sax knockoff.

G2's Favorite Things (Part 2)

LG has a favorite movie, dessert, color (or litany of colors at the moment), sandwich, book, toy, shirt, fruit, stuffed animal, song, cookie, cup, etc. These favorites may change minute to minute, but she can tell you what she likes and why in detail. Sometimes her explanations make sense and oftentimes they don't, but there is always an answer. Each answer as to "Why do you like that?" is a trip down a rabbit hole that is always entertaining.

We've already looked at some of G2's current favorites. For the most part, the reasoning behind each favorite was pretty obvious. Lions=awesome and who doesn't like blinking lights and swings?  As he gets older, I'm excited to see the kinds of things that will be important to G2, and more interestingly, I am very much looking forward to his explanations of why he likes one thing over another. In the meantime, we make our best guesses as to why he likes what he likes.  The one basis for liking something that we can pretty much count on?  "It's hella dangerous and could possible injure himself and/or compromise the safety and wellbeing of others" is the most obvious reason for most of the things he currently likes. But let's take a quick look at some (mostly) not dangerous things. Why does he like these things?  I guess we'll never know, but that will not stop us from speculating.

• Pointing- The real fun is when he points at you and you point right back. Every meal is seriously like The Creation of Adam. 

They call them fingers, but I've never seen them fing.

• Sleeping in the Mei Tie baby carrier- Bonus- he is very heavy.  Wait, that's not a bonus.   

I get to sleep, and you get a sore back.  It's win-win.

• Whisks- Babies and kitchen utensils are a match made in heaven.

Help a baby out. Dip this in icing?

• Books- He's just getting to the age where he can sit still for multiple books with multiple pages. We're going deeper into the kiddie lit wilderness- send a search party in a few years.   

Delicious, delicious literature

• His Ikea tent- Man, those swedes know what american babies want. 

Hej!

• His sister- This one we really don't have to speculate about. He loves her so much because she really is an amazing big sister. She sings him to sleep at night ("Tomorrow" from Annie), shares her toys (most of the time) and gives him great hugs and kisses. If only we could get her to stop poking his cheeks so much, they'd be perfect together. Who are we kidding? Those cheeks are begging to be poked.  

Bring it, big sis. 

• Sitting atop the washing machine- I started plopping him up here to save my back from carrying him around. He likes the dials and the fact that he can see out the window. I like to imagine how startling it is to the people walking their dogs to see a disembodied baby head peeking out of the curtains.

So tell me what this thing is for again?
Nah, save your breath, I'm not going to do laundry. 

• Being freshly bathed- I'm not going to post any bathtub shots here (though they do exist), but honestly bathtime with G2 is like Baywatch. Matt is a less hairy David Hasslehoff trying to keep G2 from slipping under the soapy waves. Post-bath is much less stressful.

I tried to scald myself with hot water, climb out of the too-tall tub on my own,
dunked my face into the water, and ate some soap.
Same time tomorrow?

• This chipped baseboard under the kitchen cabinets- I dropped an iPod behind the kitchen cabinets a few years back and we thought we could get it back through the baseboards. We were wrong, and the kitchen bears the scars of our ignorance. G2 is drawn to our failure like a moth to a flame.

I need a paper clip and a piece of gum and I can get your ipod back. 

• His musical farm- This is a hand-me-down from LG. It's a weird toy that lets you make Dr. Moreau-esque animals like a sheep-cow and a duck-pig. G2 mostly likes smacking the buttons so that it only ever plays the first three notes of Old McDonald. Why won't he let the song finish? Why? 

Should we listen to the first 3 notes of "The Farmer in the Dell?"
What about the first three notes of "BINGO?"
Eh, I think I'll turn the whole thing off
and get annoyed that it doesn't play the first three notes of any song. 

• Mud- Who doesn't like mud? Mud is way fun. 

I have .4 seconds to get this muddy stick into my mouth before Mom catches me.
I'ma risk it. 

• Messes- I love a good mess. LG loves a good mess. Matt does not love a good mess, but he loves photos of a good mess that is good and cleaned up by the time he gets home. G2 seems to be in the "loves a good mess" camp. The jury's still out as to whether or not he cares if they get cleaned up.

This. Is. Awesome.

When G2 was first born, LG was quick to try to tell us what he wanted. Pretty soon, he'll be able to tell us himself. Until then, his smile is proof enough that life is pretty good for this little dude. 

I say to-MAY-to, he says YAY!

As Hollie said on Facebook yesterday, part of the reason for this weeklong series of posts on G2 is to make sure the documentation of his development isn't neglected. Though I scrupulously detailed all sorts of minutia related to LG's first year, I've been somewhat lax with her brother. And you can understand why. Two kids means more work, split focus and less time to think of creative ways to tell you about his latest escapades. But sometimes you just need to grit your teeth and bear down and get the job done.

SO, with that said, let's run down G2's vocal abilities. Make no mistake, he is more vocal than his sister was, and he's always been that way. As an infant, he was easier to smile, easier to laugh, and easier to babble than LG. (Though they were both as likely as not to talk to themselves in their crib when they should be sleeping.)

Babbling aside, the kid is a mimic. Sure, that's how all kids learn, but he was mimicking sounds well before we were trying to teach him Mama and Dada. The first time we noticed it was during a typical play session, and he performed some action we were trying to encourage. I think it was throwing a ball or passing a toy back and forth from person to person. Each time he'd do it successfully, we'd shout, "YAY!" Not too long after that, he would immediately shout "YAY!" right back at us. And then he just started celebrating everything. Throw a ball? "YAY!" Dump out a bin of toys? "YAY!" Smack his sister in the face? "YAY! YAY!"

This got out of hand quickly.

The first distinct, animal noise he ever made was in response to a cheap-o plastic lion. Somewhere along the line, one of us (Me, Hollie, or LG) made that lion roar. Then one day Hollie pulls out the lion, and G2 grabs it, opens his mouth as wide as he can, and says quietly, "rawr." I don't have video, so you have to take my word for it, but the wind up suggests he's going to scream, but instead what comes out is a strained, breathy, strange approximation of a lion's call. It is never not hilarious. It's also the same sound made by any large animal, be it a big cat or a dinosaur. The funniest thing to me: he seeks out specific animals just so he can do it. On a recent evening, close to bedtime, Hollie read LG a story about dinosaurs. G2 was on the opposite end of the couch with me, and the second Hollie finished the book and put it down, G2 kamikazes off my lap, lands facedown on the book, lifts his head, points to the cover and whispers, "rawr."

LG's first animal sound was "quack," (more specifically: "kack") and there must be something about that noise that grabs small kids' attention, because it wasn't too long after "rawr" that G2 starting "kack, kack, kack"ing all over the place. He's scaled it back a bit now, and he never reached LG's heights of assuming that all animals whose vocalizations she didn't know must quack, but it's still fun.

As we've noted, we have a dog, and despite the fact that she barks maybe three times per year, G2, like LG before him, has discovered his dog bark, though it's a bit abbreviated. Still, when he points at Lola and exclaims, "FF, uFF, uFF!" there can be little doubt what he's trying to say.

But the funniest sounds aren't animals or words, but mimicked exclamations. We all say things we don't realize we're saying, but when your son starts dropping food off his tray and dropping a plaintive, "uh-oh!" you realize he had to have picked it up from you. "Uh-oh" is just a funny, purposeful sound, and he usually uses it in the right context. Until LG hears him do it, and eggs him on to repeat it ad nauseam, just so she can reply, "Spaghetti-Os!" (To the best of my knowledge, she's never had Spaghetti-Os, so I have no idea where she learned that one.) And when she really gets him going, she starts laughing hysterically, which in turn makes him laugh hysterically. The laugh cycle is a lot of fun, but more interesting is the fact that he starts repeating the rhythm of her giggle. I have no idea if it's intentional or a natural phenomenon, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it's just the tiniest bit creepy.

For Christmas, LG got a miniature oven/stove. The four burners each have a button, which causes them to light up and make a noise either like a boiling pot of water or a sizzling pan. When they burner shuts off automatically, it makes a loud "DING DING DING!" And when G2 pushes these buttons (which he does, for what seems like hours on end), he waits for this noise and shouts "Dee Dee DEE!" I don't know when this child is going to start talking, but until that time, I'll content myself with the thought that he's perfectly happy to converse with a toy stovetop.

I prefer this to him playing with the actual stove, which he still attempts regularly.

G2 also delights in repeating your physical actions, as you'd expect, since I assume that's how he learned to turn the stove on. But it's more fun when you loudly tell him "NO" and shake your head in response to doing something he shouldn't (like trying to overturn Lola's water dish or turn on the stove), and he responds by shaking his head right back at you. And by fun, I mean equal parts fun and frustrating. Good job copying my head motions; now stop rubbing peanut butter in your sister's hair!

G2's Favorite Things (Part 1)

Mama here. As we get closer to G2's first birthday, he's becoming a very funny little dude with very distinct (and often baffling) preferences. Here in no particular order are some of things G2 likes (and pictures I like).

Favorite Animal
I'm going to have to go with lion on this one. This was one of the first animal noises he made (more on that in a later post), and every time we bring out the toy bin, he will dig out this rather mangy looking lion toy we picked up in a dollar bin somewhere. He desperately wanted to pet the one that was lounging near the glass at the zoo. 

Hey. Hey. Hey. Lion. Hey. Lion. Lion. Lion. Hey.

Favorite Song

It's a sad truth that I sing fewer kiddie songs to G2 than I did to LG. When LG was little, I was constantly singing about spiders and lambs and doggies in the window. (By the way, totally conflicted about that song.  It's short and punctuated with the kind of doggie noises that speak to discerning baby sensibilities. Though the whole puppy mill angle makes me a little uneasy.  Don't even get me started on "The Cat Came Back.") G2's world is filled with no less music, it just happens to be dominated by less Wee Sing and Mama-led-melodies and more by Spotify, Frozen and Laurie Berkner.

There are still a few songs that can stop a meltdown in its tracks. When he spent some time in the hospital, "5 Little Monkeys" kept him calm.  Better yet, he acts out the whole song. He bounces when the monkeys bounce, he's got the finger-waggling of the disapproving monkey doctor  down (A monkey doctor or a doctor for monkeys? You decide.) and shakes his head furiously and cracks up when the well meaning physician tries to help some concussed primates.

However, the current favorite is "The Wheels on the Bus." This is a fine choice for an almost one year old. Classic. Hand motions. Public transportation. Wonderful. Unfortunately, this has ruined the song for me. Seriously. Why was this made? And yes, that is Roger Daltrey as the dragon bus driver. We happened upon this before G2 was born, and when LG was sick before he was born we watched that. A lot.

Though nothing gets him grooving like the ABCs. 

Favorite Pet
This is a tie. He loves Lola. I think. If the amount of food he tosses her while he's eating is any indication, he loves her a lot. Though, typically, when you love an animal you don't try to grab fistfuls of fur, or poke your fingers in her eye, or flick her paws. I choose to blame this behavior on a lack of fine motor skills. Lola, who is very old at this point and is generally not fond of wee people, is very patient and has yet to eat him. Win.

Our long-suffering dog.  We don't have any pictures of G2 and Lola interacting. We're usually on heightened alert when they get close to each other so photos take a backseat to making sure he doesn't get eaten.

And there's the fish. I like having fish, though as Matt has mentioned in the past, he's indifferent to our fish wards. We recently restarted our tank with six very pretty guppies. LG seems to to take after her father in her disregard for the fish. G2, however, loves the fish. Mainly, he likes to try to poke his fingers through the hood of the tank and yell nonsense at them. The fish, who are thankfully behind some very thick glass and are always expecting to get fed, are very patient and have yet to eat him. Win.

He's only knocked the hood off once.  Poor fish.

Favorite Toy

He likes just about any toy that blinks and makes music. (I like the ones with volume control. This is not a post about what I like, but I thought that was important to note.) There's the singing guitar, the singing turtle storybook, the various singing phones, and his (singing) office.

You mean your office doesn't also contain a piano?

He equally likes anything with wheels- motorcycles, trucks, cars, shopping carts, baby carriages. He particularly likes a set of cars he has that move via a spinning ball at the center. He does spend some time moving these various vehicles back and forth, however, his favorite pastime is flipping them over spinning the wheels.

By far, the cutest favorite toy he has is his dolly. He got the doll from Santa in his stocking for Christmas. I started putting it in his crib without really thinking about it. I wanted LG to have a lovey when she was a baby to help her sleep, but she never took to the stuffed animals until she was older (and now she sleeps with a rotating entourage of about 4 stuffed animals). G2 didn't seem to care one way or another about the dolly until I started to notice a trend.

He holds her hand while he sleeps. Have you ever seen anything so amazingly cute in your entire life?

NO, YOU HAVEN'T.

Favorite Food

Blueberries. Hands down. Kid would eat his weight in blueberries if we would let him.

There are no blueberries on his tray you say? He ate them all. Come on, it's a cute picture.  Work with me.

Favorite Leisure Activity

It's hard to choose a leisure activity for a little person who sleeps about 15 hours a day. But when G2 wants to relax after a hard day of pseudo-crawling (more on that later), putting peanut butter in his sister's hair (true story), and shouting at fish, he engages in some serious swinging.

His partner in crime.

Unfortunately the buckle on the swing got stuck and I had to cut him out of it. It was all very dramatic; bonus, now he can fling himself out of at will.

With spring on its way (in theory), there will be much swinging!

Ah, the feeling of the wind through his hairs.

So much joy. 

More G2-approved stuff later this week!