His favorite foods are apple sauce and avocados and beans and broccoli. He has suddenly started eating lots of things he wouldn't eat before: asparagus, mushrooms, cucumbers, green beans and tomatoes. At the same time, he is a whole lot less interested in cheese and bread products. He eats a lot.
His favorite thing without contest is "the ball." He says and differentiates between basketballs (#1 favorite), footballs (#2 favorite), soccer balls, and ping-pong balls. The most dramatic and epic tantrums have come over leaving his balls. Last night he slept all night with a full size basketball. When I went in to get him this morning he was standing there in his crib holding his basket ball. He is learning to catch after months of holding his hands out and letting balls bounce off of them. He is just starting to react and hug the ball to him, so a well-aimed throw might be caught.
Another favorite thing is puzzles, which he has quite a collection of. One of his newer words is "pieces" since he is always looking for the missing pieces. And there are always missing pieces since he throws them all over the house. This morning we were working on an alphabet puzzle and when I came back it was gone - no board, no pieces. When I asked him where it was, he climbed on the couch and pointed behind it. Sure enough he had thrown every bit of that puzzle behind the couch. I guess he was tired of that one.
His favorite books right now are Gloria and Officer Buckle (#1) and Counting Cockatoos, though he likes make books. I'm excited about his interest in Gloria since it is really the first longer book that he has demonstrated the attention span for. I was getting a bit tired of Sandra Boynton books, though he loved them.
As I mentioned before, his language has grown by leaps and bounds suddenly. Bob, the dad of the kids I babysit for, pointed out that all of his kids had language explosions after being sick, which coincidentally has also been the case for us. His list of words is pretty long now, and grows every day. Some of his favorite new words are wet, bike, box, basket, all the ball types (he said ball at least 64 times as I was putting him down for a nap the other day. I counted.), pieces, Jack (which refers to Jack and Sam - the boys I babysit), and bus. We also now understand that "me" actually means "you." When he wants you to do something, he points to you and says "me." He frequently puts more than one word together, particularly when things pertain to Raph. "Daddy's shoe?" he asks or "Daddy outside" when he wants Daddy to take him outside. Everyday more and more. It is really fun!
He continues to climb on everything and do really dangerous stuff all the time, though at other times, he won't try anything without holding our hands. He won't walk on even slightly deep snow without holding our hands, for example, but he'll happily get out his little riding car and stand on it while holding the handle bars and then rock back and forth trying to get it to move. He has gone over the handle bars a few times doing this. He has been jumping for a few months and now will jump/lean off of the changing table to me (I'm hoping this translates to the pool in a few months!) He can easily manuever one normal size stair by himself, or a whole flight with a railing.
He sleeps pretty well - roughly 8:00pm to 5:45 on the dot. It is actually uncanny how predictably he wakes up each morning at 5:45. Sometimes he'll lay in bed with me after that for up to an hour, but often not. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night, and I just go to the door, tell him to lay down, and he is fine. Otherwise he'll cry for at least 1.5 hours. I know because we tried that method, until I decided enough was enough.
He likes other kids, though we are entering the "difficulty in sharing" age. He loves to watch the boys I babysit jump around outside in the snow. But inside, he gets upset with them a lot because sharing isn't always something they do well together. He is very proud of himself when he does share, and will have a huge smile on his face that is damn cute.
