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.

Lil Pumpkin

This year was the first year that E was really aware of Halloween. He was a chubby little pumpkin!

He helped pass out candy and made sure the trick or treaters all rang out doorbell.

We also did a corn maze just down the road from our house.

E's current favorite game is Connect Four.  He likes to put the pieces in to make patterns, usually a row along the bottom, but sometimes columns.  Some favorite phrases are, "Mommy tell" (Mommy tell me what something is) and "Hate pants."  Yesterday he seems to have started saying yes, instead of "mmm"!

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...