New vocabulary

I feel like living with Aaron is teaching us a whole new language. As his vocabulary expands, so does ours. We used to call pretzels "pretzels". Now we call them "setzels". Salami is "MAMI" (it sounds just like "mommy" but you can tell it is salami by the emphasis - he loves salami). Drink is "geet". Coffee is "coffeeeeeeeee". Giraffe is "raff". Even when Aaron is not around, we tend to use his words for things. Open is "o-o". Up is now "uppa". Car and star are both pronounced with a Boston accent.

Now I understand why my mom reminds me that lotion is "blotion" and why my sister reminds me that I used to say "trelve" and "trenty" instead of "twelve" or "twenty". Those first mispronunciations are so precious. I still say "flowder" in my head when I see flowers as my niece used to call them 8 years ago. And we still say "Ubba" Thom or "Ubba" Jim even though she long ago learned how to say "uncle".

Aaron used to say "mooo" when he saw a picture of a cow. Now he says "cow" clear as a bell. I'm going to miss all his animal sounds he substitutes for animal names. And I'm going to miss all his mispronunciations some day. So we hold onto them by repeating them and using them in our own speech. Fortunately we still have many more words to learn from him before he masters the English language. And I'm sure when he is grown up we will still call pretzels "setzels" and remember when Aaron was an adorable toddler.

Aaron gets a little silly at the end of the day

Talking on the phone

Thom gave Aaron an old phone we found while cleaning out the office. He babbled on it while walking around his room which has more space now that we moved the guest bed from his room into the office.

In the next one, notice how he pauses his conversation to check out the hamper.

Football with Daddy

For some reason, my husband is a Steelers fan, and even then, he only watches them in the playoffs, so last Sunday, he was watching football. Aaron watched part of it with him (although mostly he played nearby as he doesn't like to sit still for long, even for television)

Here is Aaron and Daddy watching football.

Here is Daddy trying to put football back on after thinking he had put the remote into a mode that would make it difficult for Aaron to change the channel.

Imitation

Our friends Aaryn and Dustin visited us from LA two weeks ago and took advantage of our guest room/office to avoid driving back up late at night. The morning of their departure, Dustin was sitting on the steps and Aaron sat down (in his jammies) to imitate him, including tapping his foot on the floor. He was quite amused.

Because sometimes one pacifier is not enough

Fat Lip

Aaron got his first fat lip today. (You can barely see it in this photo, although you can see graham cracker residue I didn't clean off his mouth since it's still sore.)

He had a cow in one hand and a horse in the other when he fell and with no free hand to break his fall, he hit his face. I had my back turned and Thom just saw him at the last second. When we realized he was bleeding, we laid him down and tried to see how bad it was, but he was crying and didn't want us to touch his lip. I could see enough to know he'd cut his lip and was worried he might have knocked his front teeth loose. We decided to take him to Urgent Care.

The Urgent Care facility is at the same location as his pediatricians and is pretty close, but we arrived at 12:40 to discover it doesn't open until 1pm on weekends. Aaron had stopped crying before we left home and his lip stopped bleeding not long after we arrived at the parking lot for Urgent Care. There were 3 parents already waiting. Later, when we all milled around by the door, a woman came out explaining that she couldn't let us in before 1pm, but she gave us the sign in sheet to get started. On the honor system, we all signed in in the order we had arrived.

Aaron seemed to be the only kid who was injured rather than coughing. Even after they opened (and the waiting room seats nearly filled up), Thom mostly kept Aaron outside while we waited, partly to keep him entertained, partly to avoid excess germs. One of the parents outside with 2 kids said that whenever they went to Urgent Care, it seemed to take hours. Not what I wanted to hear when I was worried Aaron's lip was fusing to his front teeth or that he was going to swallow a loose tooth (I was too scared to check them myself).

But in reality, we were called in within 40 minutes of them opening and we were out by 2:10. The good news was that his teeth are fine and the frenelum (the skin that connects the lip to the gum, were were told) was intact (sometimes it gets cut), so no stitches. She said it would heal on its own and we could give Motrin if he has trouble eating, but he was doing fine without pain meds so far. In fact, when the doctor came in, he gave her the two Visitor stickers that Thom and I had been given to wear (and which he had been playing with for 5 minutes) and then gave her the cow and horse he had brought. He was in a good mood and thought she was a new playmate. And even though he was very unhappy when she actually examined him, he didn't hold a grudge and gave her five afterwards when she asked.

After a good nap, he had some graham cracker and milk, his normal post nap snack, and despite some initial discomfort and crying, he finished off 1 1/2 sheets of graham cracker and a decent amount of milk. He's a trooper.

Old Friend Bear

I've had this step stool in the bathroom lately since sometimes we have friends over with older kids that might be potty trained and need help reaching the sink afterwards. The bottom step is just the right height for Aaron to sit on, so sometimes, he goes into the bathroom and just sits on the stool.

One day, he sat down on the stool, and then starting say "bear, bear". He got up, went out to the dining room, found bear and returned to his seat. Not doing anything, but just enjoying a moment with Bear on his own little seat.

And yes, those are Aaron's socks on Bear. Kim will sometimes put Aaron's pants or socks on Bear before naptime (because she is taking them off Aaron, not because Bear needs clothes at naptime) and Aaron has come to think that his socks should be put on Bear.

Actually, that phase might even be over. Aaron's big thing now is to want to put his clothes in the hamper (or as he calls it "hummer"). So as soon as he pulls his socks off, he picks them up and says "hummer" and off he goes. He has recently begun putting Oo-ah (his monkey) and other things into his hamper. Usually he is obvious about it, making sure you see and laughing hysterically because he put something in there he knows doesn't belong, and that's pretty funny apparently (almost as funny as sticking your hand in the Diaper Champ - another activity he likes to make sure he is caught doing). I'm just dreading the day he decides it is funny to put things in the toilet.

Visit from Ohio

Our friend Linda's mom, "Grandma Jane", was in town over the holidays and we had her and Linda and Leo and Linda's brother John over for game night on New Year's Eve. We got to play a new game called The Downfall of Pompei which involves throwing people into a volcano and is a lot of fun. Then, after dinner, we played Settlers of Catan, a favorite game of ours that we learned from Linda's family.

In between games, Linda enjoyed some Duplo time with Aaron, who was happy to have a new playmate.

Before bed, Aaron's guest story tellers read him a few books. I think Linda and Jane enjoyed "Sheep in a Jeep" as much as Aaron did.

Seed catalog

This post is a little out of order (still have photos from 2008 I need to post), but I have a couple of videos that I want to put him since it won't take much time.

Aaron has been looking at catalogs in his high chair. It was Pottery Barn Kids for awhile and then we got a seed catalog. Thom apparently has fond memories of looking at seed catalogs in the dead of winter. When it was cold and snowy out, he'd look at all the wonderful things they'd be able to plant for summer. When he first gave Aaron the catalog, I thought it wouldn't keep his attention as well as the PBK catalog since it doesnt' have kids or babies or toys. But I was wrong. Somehow they got to the page that has an ornamental type of grass called Festuca Glauca, and Aaron thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. So he always wants to go to that page and have us say the name and eventually he learned to identify the pictures of most of the plants on the page.

When he wants the PBK catalog, he says "baby" since it has a baby (doll) on the cover. When he wants the newer PBK catalog, he says "hat" since it has the Cat in the Hat on the cover. When he wants the seed catalog, he says "rah rah", the closest he can get to "Festuca Glauca".

He calls "Variegated Liriope" "ee-oh" for the vowel sounds in Liriope. He calls "Hardy Verbena" "bee bee" for the b sound in Verbena. But for some reason, "Lily of the Valley" confounds him. If I ask him to say "Lily", he blinks his eyes and does something with his mouth that looks like he just tasted a lemon (and I know because I gave him lemon on Christmas morning when my sister put it out for the German pancakes).

Snapping

So it may have taken Aaron nearly 19 months to walk, but he seems to be ahead of the curve on his fine motor skills. How many toddlers his age do you know that can snap?

Lion Towel

If only you could hear him roar when he's wrapped in his lion towel .

Christmas

OK, so I'm a little late with this post. Here is the face of Christmas morning: Aaron was fussy and crying before he even got out of bed. (The spot on his nose was from a plastic container he was covering his face with and pretending to drink from. He was walking around with it for a long time and the edge rubbed his nose pretty good.)

After getting some coffee, we went to the living room to open gifts. Usually we spend mornings in the dining room and since he was already out of sorts, maybe this wasn't such a good idea. He hwanted nothing to do with opening presents. I think He was upset because the gifts were scattered on the coffee table where his "floor" puzzle normally is (that's the puzzle box he's holding onto.) We didn't have many gifts to open - Thom and I didn't really exchange gifts this year, although he did buy a set of books for Aaron and a food book for us to share. But I had bought 4 gifts for Aaron and he had gifts from our friends Biriz, Lon and Melissa and Aaron's Aunt Janine and Uncle Bruce.

I opened one gift for him - a clacking pull alligator toy that I had gotten him - thinking once he understood the whole gift thing, he'd come around. Nope. He was so whiney and unpleasant, we decided to leave his gifts until later. It just wasn't any fun.

Fortunately, it wasn't a big deal to me. Somewhere along the line, Christmas went from being fun to being a chore. I loved Christmas when I was a kid and I know my parents went to a lot of trouble, putting up a tree, decorating, baking, buying gifts for 5 kids, then cleaning it all up afterwards. I only found out after college that my mom found the whole ordeal stressful. And I can understand why. We only put up a smal tree, and I only made two kinds of cookies, but I did buy gifts for 9 nieces and nephews, both of my parents, plus Aaron and I made gifts for my brother-in-law and it took a lot of time and effort. I was stressed out the days before Christmas finishing up everything. When you are a kid, Christmas is just about opening presents and eating cookies, so no wonder kids love it. For adults, it is a lot of work.

So I've decided that Christmas will be low-key for us, especially these early years when Aaron doesn't really care. I don't see any point in pushing it on him - he'll come around to it some day and we'll enjoy it when he does. I don't think Christmas should be stressful. Aaron will get toys and someday we'll do a stocking for him, but it won't be the boatloads of toys some kids get. I'm not doing Santa and there won't be 8 kinds of cookies or special towels just for Christmas or decorations in every room. Not that I don't like those things when I go to other people's houses. I love all the sights and sounds and smells of Christmas. But for me, it's not worth it.

My favorite part of Christmas is spending time with my family. I feel so fortunate to have my parents and all my siblings close by and to get to spend Christmas with them. And that's what I want Aaron's memories of Christmas to be - memories of spending time with his grandparents, his aunts and uncles, and his cousins.

My best memories of Christmas past are of my siblings and I waking each other up and then sitting at the top of the stairs being antsy since we weren't allowed to go down until my parents woke up. It was probably only 15 minutes, but it felt like hours.

After our unfortunate Christmas morning, we went over to my sister Theresa's for breakfast with her family. Once there, Aaron was fine, playing with his cousins and their toys. Theresa and Ernie make wonderful German pancakes served with lemon and powered sugar and Thom cooks up some applewood smoked bacon to go with it. After breakfast, we took Aaron home and put him down for a nap around noon. He was so tired, he went right to sleep.

When we woke up, we drove down to Grandma and Grandpa's. While we waited for everyone to arrive to open presents, we kept Aaron entertained with the piano and with some puzzles I found in their garage.

We managed to have all the siblings and kids there this year. Usually someone is with in-laws or Larissa and Christopher are with their mom, but this year we had all 21 of us. Once the gift opening started, it was pure chaos and I didn't manage to get any pictures after that. I will leave you with this family photo my dad took.

>

P.S. The next morning, we finished opening Aaron's presents. In the dining room. He was in a much better mood, although still not that interested. We took some photos, but I'm in mismatched PJs with hair all over the place and didn't find any I was willing to post online.

Photos from Holiday Party

I finally got a chance to post pictures from the holiday gathering we had here in early December. (Some of the photos had red-eye that I couldn't fix, so I didn't post them.)

Bridget and Daddy

Big Sister Ruby

Story time with Jessica

Audrey and Bridget enjoyed the Duplos:

Time for the book gift exchange:

Family Photos:

Aaron and a paper bag

Aaron decided a paper bag is a good toy. (This is from December, finally getting caught up.)