This just in

Pants!  E has finally changed his mind about pants.  Back in September, he got two nice pairs of pajamas for his birthday from Grandma and Grandpa, but he wasn't too keen on them right away (he really liked his summer pajamas).  I pulled them out again a few days ago, and he was over the moon for the pair with a little monster on them.

The pants have stripes that match the monsters tummy, so I called them "monster stripes" and made sure not to say the p-word when I put them on for the first time.  E does sometimes call them his monster pants himself now.  It was a little touch and go at first.  He said they were too tight - they are the "snug fitting" kind, but two sizes too big in order to fit over the big cloth diaper - but now he doesn't want to take them off.

He still likes to mix and match his socks.  He also discovered cutting paper - holding the safety scissors with two hands while Mommy or Daddy holds the paper.

Happy Birthday, little buddy!

E is two today! Yesterday, I asked him if there was anywhere special he would like to go for his birthday, and he said, "Farm!"

Our park district runs a 1930's dairy farm, and sometimes E and I go there to buy eggs.

His favorite animal at the farm is the chickens!

We watched them for quite awhile.

Still watching chickens.

Watching with Daddy.

For his birthday, E wanted to wear his red socks.  We put one on, and then he saw his orange socks and wanted to wear those too.  So he's wearing two red socks and two orange socks here.

He also liked the sheep and the geese, but the cows were a bit too loud.

We stopped on the way out to check out the giant sunflowers!

At two, E knows all the colors of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  Red was his favorite for a long time, but orange has been popular lately.  That may be because he likes the orange tomatoes from the garden the most (me too).  He can also get down from his learning tower by himself now.  He knows "one" and "two" very solidly.  And today for the first time, he was interested in the letters on my shirt!  (It happened to say Illinois Engineering...)

Zoom zoom zoom

What's going on here...?

Driving already?!  Or really sitting in the parking lot at a forest preserve that I just realized is only about five minutes from home.  And that is really saying something because there is almost nothing within five minutes of our house.  We had a couple of unusually cool days (highs in the low 70s!) lately, and today the whole family took a short trip to the forest preserve.

View from the parking lot

This preserve has several trails, including two that are about one mile loops, just right for us these days.  These trails are shared with horses, and a horse trailer happened to arrive right after we did.  Watching the horses (from a distance) was one of the highlights of the trip for E.  Also pushing the buttons in the car, ahem.

In other news, one of E's favorite things is playing peek-a-boo!  He likes to hide or cover his eyes and then call out the name of the person he wants to "look" for him.  He just discovered that he can get the same effect by scrunching his eyes closed to hide.  Then I scrunch mine back at him and ask him questions about where he's hiding.  When he's ready to be found, he tells me, "Open!"

Watermelon

Watermelon is definitely E's favorite food right now. He calls it "wawa", just like water. We have a bowl of mixed watermelon and pineapple, and he likes to give all the pineapples to me, and eat all the watermelon himself! With all of this interest in watermelon, we're also trying pickled watermelon rinds.  They're just the rinds, water, salt, and a few days out on the counter.  We'll find out how they are in another couple of days.

Here's the cooking assistant just after we finished measuring out the salt.  He's in his learning tower which *drumroll* ... he can get in to by himself now - a big step in motor skills!  E is quite pleased that he can get in to the tower on his own too.

Mr. Muffin learned how to make the "sh" sound just recently, and right away added new words to his vocabulary, like "shoes" and "shirt."  He's also been really interested in lining up objects lately, especially his block crayons (they're small rectangles).  He arranges them more than he colors with them these days.

Update: Those watermelon rinds didn't turn out so tasty afterall - the texture was a bit odd...

The big 2-2 months

A busy guy is 22 months old today! Let's have an update on what he's up to.

Laundry.  E is an experienced laundry assistant now, pushing and pulling the basket to the laundry room and putting wet clothes in the dryer.  Once it's clean, his favorite thing to do is bring it to his room, empty the basket, and pile it on himself as high as he can.  After making a mound on his legs, sometimes he asks mama to cover up his head or back too.

Mr. Muffin also knows "wait" very well.  It sounds a bit like "red" when he says it, and red is his favorite color, so the hand gesture helps to make his meaning clear.  E loves to point out anything red, and prefers the red anything when there's a choice, like the muffin in the red muffin cup.  He also runs to the fridge and says, "Red!" which means he'd like some (red) grapes.  Or he runs to the pantry and says it, meaning he'd like his (orange) vitamin.  Red currently covers pink, sometimes purple, orange, once in a while yellow, and of course, red!

E is getting closer every day to being able to get in and out of his learning tower by himself.  At grandparents' house for the 4th of July, he even climbed all the way in to his highchair.  Here he was helping me take pictures of my very first Blythe doll (woohoo!).

One of the best:

I lost count awhile ago of all E's words, but I have a few current favorites.  Huge ("uggggge") - E learned this word when the pond behind our house had frequent visits from a crane and I called it the "huge bird."  I'm glad E prefers "huge" to "big", because nothing else he says sounds like it!  He does have a lot of B words though that can be tricky to tell apart.

Backward - he's been saying this one awhile, but "boo-bah" is just too cute.

Regular ("reg-da") - This one is usually in the context of doing something the regular way, as opposed to the silly way or "boo-bah".  Like, walking reg-da, sitting reg-da.

Parade + Complete: Waldorf Doll!

A couple of weeks ago, E said his first two word phrase, "No more!"  He's also gotten to be quite the stair climber these days, he's getting proficient at walking down them instead of crawling.

We went to a (short) Memorial Day parade on Monday with my parents, and Mr. Muffin was very keen on the marching band.  They even were wearing their raincoats - I don't remember ever wearing those raincoats in four years of marching band!  All of the people and noise were a bit much for the little guy by the end, so it's a good thing the parade was only about fifteen minutes.

This week I wrapped up the Waldorf doll too!  It was quite the project, and I think he came out nicely.  My favorite part was the embroidery for the face.  My least favorite part was setting the sleeves in the shirt.  And the scariest part was trimming the doll's hair!  The instructions had you put in hair that was too long, and then trim, I imagine so that you could cut it to look even regardless of whether the head itself was a perfect sphere.  But the hair took hours upon untold hours to put on, so a mistake in the trimming would have been almost too much to bear.  The hardest part has been getting a nice picture of E with the doll...

A busy bee + Work in progress: Waldorf Doll

Mr. Tiny Muffin is doing all kinds of new things these days!  Here he is sticking his tongue out at dinner:

He's also climbing on to furniture on his own now and working on taking steps standing rather than crawling.  There are many teeth in there now, with new ones coming in all the time.  E's vocabulary has really expanded with new words, in fact his latest one is "new."

 I've been busy making a Waldorf doll for E as well.  As Wikipedia says, "its appearance is intentionally simple in order to allow the child playing with it to improve or strengthen imagination and creativity."  I'm using a pattern from the book Growing Up Sew Liberated and the instructions are very clear.  Even though this guy's arms look rather long, if you put them over his head, they  barely touch - just like E!

 

 I got this great new mug recently too!  It's Corelle, so if anything should happen to it, it seems easily replaceable, whew.

One and a half years

Mr. E turned one and a half last week!  He had a cold at the time, but he's just about back at one hundred percent now.

Fun facts about 18 months - E is

• 25 pounds
• 34 inches tall
• loving pouring, and hence bathtime
• just starting to climb up on to furniture
• very fond of the learning tower
• quite good at saying "no"
• beginning to talk beyond mama/dada/no, such as "mana" for banana and "no" for snow
• getting molars
• tons o' fun!

Fine motor skills, the Ikea edition

Now that we've gotten our new carpeting - thank you previous owners who could not housetrain your pets - I've been starting to set up the loft area. While I was putting the Ikea bookshelf back together, Mr. Muffin wanted to help put some of the pegs in.

He put in a few extra too!  This was a great unplanned every-day-life-as-learning activity, à la Waldorf style.  After putting in all of these pegs, and a few more, E had really improved his technique, realizing how to hold the pegs in order to put them in.

I also recently finished this book sling for the playroom (a.k.a. dining room) from this tutorial.  With the books displayed this way, the cover art is visible to E, so he can see which book he's picking up.  Hopefully the book sling decreases the pull-every-book-off-the-shelf-to-find-one mess and frustration. 

The plan is to only keep about four books in it at once and to rotate them periodically.  It's a bit too tall for the small boardbooks we have, so those are kept somewhere else (not as neatly...).

Close up

Side view

E helped me make cookies this morning too.  He's keen to watch the stand mixer mix, and lately he's been in to other noise-making kitchen gadgets like the coffee grinder and food processor.  When he sees them, he says "RrrRrrRrr!"

Cubbie cap

It seems to me that baseball cap + small child = cute overload.

You can see E's teething necklace very clearly here.  It's made of amber and I got it from Inspired by Finn back when he was about six months old or so at the recommendation of mamas I met at my local LLL and babywearing groups. I'm not sure if it really helps with teething, but it definitely doesn't hurt.

We had our biggest snowfall of the year so far overnight, all of 3 or 4 inches, I'd say, and E was out helping me shovel again this morning.  With snow boots!

I started knitting a pair of these socks for myself last weekend. I'm making them in to knee socks and don't expect them to be finished before the fall. I've wanted to make them forever - or at least since the pattern came out in 2006 - and I'm glad they're underway, size 0 needles and all.

One more picture of a cutie in a cap!

This picture was totally back-lit when I took it, but through an editing menu in my camera itself that I don't fully understand, I was able to improve it quite a bit.

Little shoveler

Lots of news! Teeth #7 and 8 have come in, now E has 4 on top and 4 on bottom. He's also become fond of Daddy recently, good news for Mommy :)

Here the little guy is reading a book by himself (that's also a new development, instead of always bringing his books over to us to hold them for him).

It finally snowed (a little), and Mr. Muffin helped me shovel today. He was even entirely bundled up - hat, winter coat, socks, shoes, and MITTENS.

E is eating with a combination of hands and silverware these days.  Some meals he's keen to use his fork or spoon, and sometimes he's not.  The spoon is especially tricky, because of course the food tends to fall off if he turns it upside down, but the past few days a lot more of the food has been making it to his mouth on the silverware!  It's fascinating to watch him learn to do these kinds of things that are so easy to take for granted.

Happy New Year!

Hello there! Mr. E is getting closer to really talking every day now. He says "mama" and "dada" quite often, although he doesn't always seem to mean mommy or daddy when he says it. E will also make the first sound of a lot of words, like "m" for mail or mouth. He also has the two baby sign language signs that we taught him down pat - "milk" and "more."

In the four months since he got it for his birthday, E has become an expert at Hammerballs:

He's also still really in to buttons (this toy has a button on top where his finger is):

We've been playing inside a lot lately since it's winter and the little guy really doesn't like to wear his winter coat or mittens.  We did make it outside this afternoon to watch our first real snowfall though!  E liked it, at least until his hands got cold, ahem.

A busy day, E also met my Pullip doll, Bubbles, and he was fascinated!

Bubbles

She's the first doll I think he's seen, at least up close.  He would touch her nose, then my nose, her mouth, then mine.  I showed him how her eyes close, but he didn't care for that at all.

Fifteen months and settling in

Wow, E is fifteen months old today!

It's now almost a month after we moved to our new home, and we're slowing settling in. I took this picture awhile back from the kitchen table. (I do have to admit it was rather strategically framed and timed - we're not living in nearly as remote a location as it might appear.)

E is in the midst of a put-things-in-and-take-them-out phase.  For a long time, he has been helping me empty the silverware out of the dishwasher, but recently after we finished he wanted to put it all back in the dishwasher basket!  Here is his work of modern art: every piece of our silverware (minus the knives) fit into one of the baskets.

We spent a little while drawing together this morning.  Well, I doodled and he mostly moved the block crayons in and out of their tin.  It was fun for both of us!

He is also really in to walking backwards now, especially if he can sit down on something behind him when he bumps in to it.

Fall-tastic times

Around here, everyone is saying that the leaves are falling early this year - they sure are falling fast. I took this picture a few days ago, and now the vines are nearly bare.

 

I see these vines climbing over our neighbor's fence from the kitchen window of our little rental house, they're always pretty in the fall.

In other fall news, E is currently showing a lot of interest in using silverware at meals. I've been using his little wooden bowl a lot, and giving him mini spoons and forks to practice with.

Chewing on the toothbrush feels good when you're teething!

Mr. Muffin is also keen on "giving five" - taught to him by Grandpa. Today he turned a light switch on for the first time too!

Big Changes and Quick Change Trousers

I mentioned that I thought E was starting to say "mama," and now I really think he is.  He will say, "Mamamamamama" when he wants to give me something, when he wants me to give him something, or when he really wants my attention on something.  Once in awhile he says "Dada" too!

Some other changes are in the air: Mr. Tiny walks more often with his arms at his sides now, rather than up in the air for balance.  I've noticed him picking up things, especially food, with his whole hand when he needs to, instead of always using thumb and index finger.

 

What cute pants you have there, Mr. Muffin!  We have been having a little bit of a tough time finding pants that fit over the cloth diapers, so I sewed this pair for E.  The pattern is Quick Change Trousers, from the book Handmade Beginnings.  I'd read a lot of blogs saying that these pants are great for cloth diapers.  While they are super cute (and reverseable - although the reverse side is a little busy with that circle pattern fabric making up most of it), they are definitely not the answer to our fit dilemma.  The improvement in fit over store-bought sweat-style pants is negligible.

I have another pattern in mind to try, and although I don't think it's as cute as this one, I have higher hopes for it actually fitting.  I might also try making this pattern in knits, I think it would fit well then.

1-3

Thirteen months (and a day)! I had every intention of writing this post last night, but I fell asleep immediately after putting E to bed, oops.

1-3 month day was a busy one.  It was pretty chilly in the morning when we went to the farmers' market to pick up some eggs.

Stay tuned for details on the pixie hat

Then we went to the Spunky Dunkers doughnut shop.  It was packed, as you might expect a doughnut shop to be at 10 on a Saturday morning.  They had a lot of seasonal (like pumpkin) doughnuts, but we stuck with tried-and-true favorites.  Overall, I think they were pretty average.  Glad we went once, but we probably won't go again before moving day.

 

Fun facts about 13 months:

• You weight 22 pounds and 15 ounces
• You are 31" tall
• You might be starting to say "mama" (when you give me things)
• Roasted butternut squash is about the only thing you don't like to eat
• You've gotten really good at standing up on your own

Baby's First Drawing

Today was a busy day for E. This morning, he learned how to flip a light switch! (But only down, flipping up is a bit trickier.) Most of the switches at our house are old-school (original from the 50's?) hard-to-flip and very loud. The bathroom, however, was remodeled recently and has "normal" switches, so we practiced in there and he was able to turn off the lights by himself.  He can't reach the light switches yet when he's standing on the ground, so I'm not worried about him playing with them and turning the house into a disco party.

For E's birthday, my parents gave him these way cool beeswax block crayons.  Unfortunately, the first thing he did with them was try to eat them.  So I put them away for awhile.  This morning, however, I was writing with a pen, and E kept trying to take it and write, but he couldn't hold it quite correctly to get it to make a mark.  I got his crayons back out, and he made this drawing!

 

I followed my dad's advice to try giving him the blue crayon instead of the red, in hopes that he wouldn't eat it because there isn't too much food that's blue, while he loves some red foods, like strawberries. It worked - there was no eating of the crayon!

I had chosen red originally because I remember reading that the Montessori approach to painting and drawing is to start with a single color, and they start with red. We might as well start with blue, if you ask me.

What do you want with my drawing?!

The drawing is on the back of a recipe for butternut squash soup.  I really like this soup, but it's a project to make, so I generally only have it once a year, in the fall.  This time I spread it out, I made the stock (since I had some bones in the freezer) a few days ahead, and I diced the squash a day or two in advance too.  I roasted it in the morning, and then just the actual cooking of the soup had to take place in the afternoon/evening.  I added black beans too, yum.

 

Baby in a hood, too cute.