Mommy's Little Smarty Pants

Lately I have been working with Andrew on some of his letters during bath time.  We have the foam letters and numbers that float and stick to the wall.  I haven't been drilling them into him or anything, just saying what letter it is and what color it is when he picks one up  I didn't know if he was even paying attention, until he started doing this:

It takes him until the 0:25 mark to get going, but it's worth the wait (at least to me!).

I kinda love how "U" is "oooo" and I absolutely love that he says "W". I mean really, that has to be one of the hardest letters to say, right?

We need to continue working on these every night and add in the rest of the letters and the numbers, but for right now I am basking in pride that my little munchkin is learning so many new things. This mommy gig really is amazing.

Wordless Wednesday ~ Too Cool for Breakfast

20 Months!

Seriously - could time go any faster?  I swear I was just planning Andrew's 1st birthday party and now here we are, four months from his 2nd birthday. Yeesh.  Whoever set time to warp speed, could you kindly slow it back down???

Stats: I assume he is around 32" and 26ish lbs.  We don't have another appt with his pedi until 2 years and getting him to stand still long enough to weigh him is like trying to nail jello to a tree.

Clothes:  He wears a variety at the moment.  For the most part he is in 18 month shirts, but he does wear some 24 month size. Those ones run big so he has some time to grow in to them.  Most of his pants are 18 month size although he fits into some 12-18 month size jeans. He has some 18-24 month jeans that are huge on him so again, he has some growing to do.  He's in size 4 diapers still, but we may move to size 5 with the next box. He doesn't leak out of the 4's, but I assume we should move up soon.

New Words:  His latest favorite word is "star".  He has a star wand from a birthday party a few months ago, a little yellow plastic ball with blue stars, a star bubble wand, and countless books that have stars in them.  Anytime he sees one he yells "stars" and he is constantly carrying one of these items around.  He also learned "pizza" (pee-zaa), "basketball" (bah-di-ball), "bubble" (booboo), "baby",  and the letter "U".  He also moos when he sees a cow, which is one of the funniest things ever. I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones that I can think of right now.

Latest Tricks:  This kid is a freaking daredevil.  I posted recently about his penchant for climbing on anything and everything.  Well, his latest is also hopping down off of things frontwards, and doing diving somersaults over my legs when I'm sitting on the couch with my feet up on the ottoman.

I have to catch him before he hits the ground and make sure he lands softly on his back instead of directly on his head (which has happened a few times so far).

Favorite Toys:  He is obsessed with a couple of bubble wands that he has and will carry them around everywhere.  Even down to the farmer's market this weekend:

He still loves his Dut (and his Tigger that he's holding above) and he has finally gotten into books.  He loves to go in his tent in the living room and look at his books.  Lately he is loving his little glowing seahorse that he's had forever, too.

Favorite Foods:  Sad to say, but it's still hot dogs.  I give him turkey dogs and he only gets one a week (sometimes two), but I still feed bad giving him hot dogs.  He also loves homemade mac n' cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, fruit bites, those little fruit pouch things (especially applesauce), mashed potatoes, greek yogurt, pancakes, french toast and anything with peanut butter.  Getting him to eat is still a challenge, but we're getting there.

20 months of fun down and a lifetime to go!

One Word Wednesday ~ "Pizza!"

The Climber

If there is one thing that has become apparent over the last few months with Andrew it would be that he loves to climb.  On everything.

If there is something that he can get his little leg up on he will climb it.  The couch is easy peasy nowadays. He gets up on it in two seconds flat (and of course hops back down just as fast).  We made the mistake of buying him this little yellow stool at IKEA a few weeks ago and now it's one of his favorite things to climb on:

(Yes, I grabbed him down as soon as I took the pictures - I don't need him busting his head open!)

Outside he likes to crawl up on the chairs on the deck and the bench:

Pretty much anything he can get on top of is fair game.

I can only imagine that in the near future he is going to try to climb on Baxter (yellow lab in the background) and go for a ride.  Maybe we should buy a saddle?  :)

So yeah, this kid is a climber - and possibly a little daredevil.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we don't have any ER visits in store in the near future.  Oh, and I'm hiding that stool.

Oh the toys...

Christmas is coming (although I'm trying not to think about it until after Thanksgiving next week).  And with Christmas comes presents, which means that Andrew will more than likely be getting a slew of new toys.  Because, you know, he doesn't already have enough of them:

(Disclaimer: we did NOT buy all of these toys - there are a lot of hand me downs from my sister)

This is the current scene in our living room.  We don't have a separate play room to put all of his toys in, so they are spread between our living room and his room.  We have four of those bins filled with little toys and then all the ones that don't fit in are lined up every night after he goes to bed.  There's another bin in his room as well as the ones on the bookshelves.  Nothing stays in them for very long because as soon as Hurricane Andrew gets close they're spread around the room.

We do have my grandmother's cedar chest in our back room that is currently empty. We've been debating refinishing it and moving it to the living room as his toy chest. It should hold the bulk of his toys with no problem.  Of course before we do that I think we need to start weeding out the toys that he no longer uses and/or is too old for now.

It'll make me sad to pack away his toys, just like it makes me sad to pack away more and more of his clothes as he grows out of them.  I could donate them/take them to a consignment shop since we clearly do not need this many toys, but I can't bring myself to part with them just now.  Plus who knows, maybe there will be another munchkin down the line who wants to play with them.

So yeah, we have an overabundance of toys and it's only going to get worse.  Of course this year he is still too young to really understand the whole Christmas present thing, so maybe we can just get him clothes.  Nah - where's the fun in that??

"Where's your cheese?"

This is a statement that was repeated over and over again last night as I learned a very valuable lesson.  That lesson is:  Don't hand your kid a string cheese and then not watch him eat it.

Last night while I was making dinner Andrew was underfoot and whining. To shut him up appease him I gave him a string cheese as a snack.  He scampered off into the living room to be enthralled by Sesame Street while snacking on his cheese.  While he sat there I quickly ran out to let the dogs out.  When I came back in (seriously less than 5 mins later) Andrew was sitting in the living room playing, with not a piece of cheese in sight.

I glanced around to see where he threw it. Normally when he's done with something he just drops it.  It's not uncommon to find a snack or sippy just laying in the middle of the floor.  So I fully expected to find his string cheese tossed aside.

Nope.

I spent the next 15 minutes alternating between checking on dinner and walking around the house saying "Andrew, where's your cheese?" while searching his tent, toy bins, the couch cushions, the bathtub, the garbage, his hamper and a dozen other places he could have shoved it.

I know it's possible that he did actually eat it all, but I'm having a hard time believing that.  Of course the speed with which he can down a hot dog proves to me that he is capable of inhaling a food if he likes it.  So yeah, it's possible that it ended up where it was supposed to (his belly), but something tells me a week from now I'm going to find a piece of petrified string cheese tucked away somewhere. I just hope I can find it before he does!

"What cheese, mommy?"

Wordless Wednesday ~ Andrew's Reading Nook

First Haircut

This past weekend Andrew was referred to as a girl a couple times.  I guess people couldn't believe the cute little blond curls wouldn't be on a boy, even though he was clearly dressed as a boy.

Anyway, I decided that maybe he could use a little trim. That is easier said than done on a squirmy wiggly 19 month old that doesn't sit still for more than 2.5 seconds.  I trimmed up his bangs and the sides while he was eating breakfast yesterday. He was distracted by Timmy Time on Disney Jr (yes, we sometimes let him watch cartoons during breakfast - gasp) so I got in a couple snips.  I knew there was no way he was sitting still for me to do the back, so he went to daycare with a nice little mullet (He was also wearing camouflage pants so we were in full redneck mode yesterday).

Last night while we had him in the tub I called J in to hold/distract him so I could snip the back. I didn't want to cut too much because I adore his soft curls, but I needed to make it less mullet-y.  Two snips and we were done.  I almost teared up looking at the curls in my hands (which I quickly put in a ziploc bag to save - yeah I'm weird).  We got him out and dried him off so we could take a look at my handiwork.  It's probably very uneven and we probably should have taken him somewhere to have it done, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $20 for 4 or 5 snips of the scissors.

He happily ran around after his bath looking like a little dutch boy. He still looks cute, but I already miss his adorable curls.  They'll grow back, right??

These are the best pictures I could get of him this morning. This kid does not sit still.

A Visit to the Grandparents

Last week J had a work conference up in Myrtle Beach.  I decided to tag along with the munchkin so we could spend some time with my parents. Fortunately I work for a very flexible company so I took my laptop with me and logged a few hours while we were there so I didn't have to burn too much PTO.

We headed up Wednesday afternoon and got there just in time to do a little trick or treating around their neighborhood.  Luckily Andrew had gotten more comfortable with his costume during the day, so he didn't totally lose it when we put the duck head on.  He was such a cute little duck and did a great job at the 6 or 7 houses we went to:

When the people would offer him the bowl of candy he would take one piece and put it in his little pumpkin. It was adorable.

After a half dozen houses or so we headed back to my parent's house and he was content to sit in the foyer and dig in to his goodies.  He bit through a tootsie roll (paper and all) before we could react and sucked on that thing forever.

We had a little trouble getting him to sleep that night and I don't know if it was the late nap on the drive up, the excitement of being in a different place, or the sugar rush from the tootsie roll. Eventually he gave up and went to sleep and made it all the way through the night.

Thursday morning I drove my  mom to work so I would have my car and be able to go meet her for lunch.  To pass the time until lunchtime we played outside in the yard and Andrew had a blast playing peek a boo:

Mauling the flowers in the flower bed:

And discovering my dad's wiffle golf balls that are all over the back yard:

At noon I packed him up and we drove over to my mom's office to pick her up. We went in so everyone could meet Andrew and he busied himself by running all over the place and exploring. He charmed everyone of course and then we headed to a little mexican place for lunch.  I wasn't sure if he was going to actually eat, but was pleasantly surprised when he went to town on his quesadilla:

When I got him home he napped for a few hours so I was able to get some hours in for work. We had a little better luck getting him to sleep that night (no candy that night!).

Friday morning we had a little breakfast together:

Then we played outside since the weather was absolutely perfect.  I took the Dora the Explorer little trike out with us so he could ride it out there instead of trying to maneuver around inside the house.  He didn't seem to mind that it was pink and purple  :)

At 11:00 J came home since he had a three hour break. We decided to head up to Cherry Grove so J could show me where his grandma's beach house was and where he used to spend time as a kid.  We decided to take a walk out on the pier and let Andrew run around to burn off some more energy.  He had a blast watching the birds and even let me put his little fox hat on him (after I gave him a pretzel):

That night we went to dinner with my parents, sister, brother-in-law and nieces at Outback.  I could not believe the amount of food that Andrew was able to pack away.  I seriously thought his little belly was going to burst when we went to put him back in the car seat. Bread, mac'n'cheese, sweet potato, all his milk and peanut butter pie. Oh my!

His full belly knocked him out that night and he slept like a log.  My parents had to be at a yard sale at 6:00 Saturday morning so they weren't there when we got up.  We got everything packed up and stopped at the yard sale to say goodbye before heading home.  All in all is was a good little trip and it was nice to spend some extra time with the munchkin. I love getting bonus days with him to make up for the time I don't get to spend with him during a normal work week.  He's growing and changing so much I feel like I need this extra time to catch up on everything.  Now I can't wait until our next long weekend together...