Pasqua

Oggi abbiamo parlato italiano (per festeggiare Pasqua). Quindi, ho detto «Ciao!» invece di "Bye-bye" mentre Eduardo scappava via. Si è arrestato un momento per segnalare Ciao con la mano! Già conosce italiano.

Questa mattina gli ho dato un fischietto (per distrarre mentre cambiavo il pannolino), e lui ha imparato a suonarlo bene! È un vero musicista! Ha anche scoperto come fare cadere latte dal suo "sippy-cup." Che mascalzone!

Eddie ha trovato un cesto di Pasqua

Abbiamo letto un libro a forma di uova!

Che altro c'è?

Libro preferito oggi: Trains Go

Perambulation

Eddie is still a tentative walker, but he's making great strides in his confidence. He enjoys walking when two people hold his hands and had a great time walking this way with Nonno in the Public Garden and around Back Bay. I've been catching him standing sans-hands for longer stretches, then slowly lowering down to the floor. Sometimes I have the feeling that he's walked across the room when my back is turned. He stubbornly refuses to walk when I try to persuade him; the same when we try to make him do anything. It's a mystery where he could have got that.

Strolling through the Public Garden

Pears!

Parks and Recreation

After lunch today we went on a walk to Christopher Columbus Park, which has a cool playground with lots of tunnels to climb through. On the way, Eddie noticed a balloon floating away in the sky, and pointed it out to me. Some birds were circling around it, wondering what to do with it, I suppose. It floated up very slowly, taking a few minutes to become too small to see. One bird kept circling it as it went up.

The playground was packed with kids! Eddie watched intently as they ran and climbed over everything. He also saw another pre-toddler climbing through the tunnels, and made friends. They pointed at each other and smiled a lot and got in each other's way in the tunnel.

After a while at the park, it started to rain, so we packed up and headed back. It stopped raining after a few minutes. We went through a little park in the North End, which had a cool seal!

Seal riding

We continued on our way along the waterfront, where Eddie saw a softball game in progress, which he thought was pretty interesting. Next to that was another playground, and Eddie pointed at it: Apparently he wanted to play some more! He clambered over this play set, and wanted to go down the slide, but I didn't let him (his clothes would be soaked.) We got off, and I helped him walk around. He headed for the swings. It's been a long time, I think—I wonder if he remembered what they were.

He still likes them!

Advances in rascality

Eddie has now learned to climb up on the couch, and from there onto the desk. There's now practically no place to keep things safe from him.

The baby gate on the kitchen can be left closed, but unlatched; it needs to be lifted up to be opened. Sometimes we leave it that way if we're just in the kitchen for a minute. He has now learned how to open the baby gate when it's unlatched, and waltz on in.

He has also been trying to climb up our food storage shelf, and today he got down and unwrapped a chocolate bar which was on the third shelf up (the bottom two shelves are already empty.) So now I guess we'll be using just the top shelf.

Well, he's learning a lot, anyway!

Food

Why would food be unappealing when on the tray table, and even when it's lying on the floor where you've thrown it, but acquire intense interest once it's in a dustpan?

Morning

This morning, I was working on some homework, which was working out surprisingly well because Eddie was being good! He was sitting by his toy table, happily crinkling something.

After he had been doing this for quite a while, it occurred to me to wonder what he was crinkling. I went over and saw him in the middle of a mysterious white mound. When he saw me coming, he made a break for it and started crying—meaning either "I'm in trouble" or "Mean Daddy doesn't let me have any fun," I think. He had gotten a pack of wipes out of the diaper bag and was liberating them.

I assured Eddie that he wasn't in trouble, and he stopped crying. The wipes couldn't really be put back into the pack, so I decided to put them into a zip-lock bag. While I was in the kitchen rummaging around for a bag, Eddie went to the now-open computer to help me with my homework. When I got over, I found that he had somehow opened Paintbrush—a program I barely knew we had—and was tapping away at keys.

I removed Eddie from the computer and went into the nursery to start folding up wipes to fit into the bag. Eddie followed, and turned his humidifier way up so that it looked like a fog machine. I guess he wanted to make sure the wipes didn't dry out. Then he knocked his sound machine off the windowsill and started poking it. I didn't want him to turn on the projector and blind himself (which he is intent upon doing: all day long he turns on lamps so that he can stare into the bulb, and tries to look into the laser on the bottom of the mouse) so I took it away. Then he knocked it down again.

Nap time!

Nonno post

Nonno is visiting this week (and writing this guest post).  Today we went for a nice, long walk to downtown Boston.  It was cold, and Eddie was bundled up in his stroller, but with enough of all his dimples showing to provoke ohs and ahs and "how cute!"s from a lot of folk, including an old gentleman in suit and coat who stopped to make some very good duck sounds at him and exclaim how lovely he is.  On the way back we took the wharf walk and saw sea lions at the aquarium and a crane lifting a tug boat out of the water.

Back home, his dad put some blocks in various pockets.  Eddie crawled around, found one, showed it to us, and then placed it on his tricycle.  He then looked at us again, and started clapping.  Kolya explained that when he does something that he thinks is praiseworthy, he starts the well deserved applause himself.

"Helpful" Eddie

Lately, Eddie has been very helpful. Of course, the problems he helps with are generally of his own creation!

For instance, he knows that we don't like him to eat torn-up paper, so if he finds some he'll offer it to us. Hmm. I wonder how that paper got torn up?

Yesterday, he was drinking milk out of his sippy cup, and when he spilled some I would wipe it up with a paper towel. Then he spilled some while I was doing something else, and grabbed the paper towel to wipe up the spill himself. What a good boy! He wasn't doing a very good job, because he was just swiping the paper back and forth without pressing it down. I showed him how to press on it, and then he did a better job. He even spilled some more milk so that he could help some more.

This morning, Eddie was under the table making mischief, and I noticed that his feet were bare. "What happened to your socks?" I asked. He grabbed his toes and looked surprised. I asked again, "What happened to your socks?" Then he leapt into action, crawling out into the living room at top speed (sometimes, when he gets a bee in his bonnet, he'll "fast-forward" and crawl much faster than usual.) He went right to his socks next to the couch (where he had presumably left them) and held them up for me. I didn't know he knew that word!

Favorite book today: Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

New shoes!

Eddie got brand new shoes today and he finally gets to play outside! He rocked out in the Training Field with his walker.

He was so excited that he pulverized some pedestals. Baby Hercules!

Then he was sent to baby jail.

Making his getaway!

New things

Sometime last week, Eddie became interested in the hair on my arms and legs. He'll get hold of one, then pretend to pull it off (he doesn't grab it hard enough to really pull it off, thankfully), and then offer it back to me. "Oh hey Daddy, I think you dropped this!"

Then I have to take the pretend hair. He holds it out between two pinched fingers. If I grab it similarly, with a pincer motion of two fingers, he often doesn't seem satisfied that I've really taken it. I discovered that if I hold out my open hand, he'll "drop" it into my hand, and then everything is OK. Then he can move on to helping me recover some more of those hairs that I've carelessly left stuck to my limbs.

Our doctor's office gives us books when we go in for physicals, and at the last visit we got a new book, "Dinos on the Move." Eddie loves it! One day I was repeating some of the lines from the book, which have a good rhythm: "Dinos STOMPING, dinos CLOMPING, stepping to the beat!" Whenever I said it, Eddie would look around for the book, and bring it over so that I could read the rest to him! He can pick the right book out from all his other books.

Bathtime blunder

Eddie pooped in the tub today—for the first (and hopefully last) time. :-(

Drawin'

Pointing

Eddie was a little later than some of his friends to start pointing at things. He didn't really start until he was about 14 months, I think. Since then he's been pointing a lot, at anything that interests him. Often he comments "Da" when he points at something. Sometimes he seems to point in a random direction—I think he's just at a loss for something to say.

One thing he likes to do with his pointing finger is poke us in the nose. This is something we've done to him for ages—push his nose button and say "boop!" Now he likes to do that to us, but we are still required to provide the sound effect. He will keep poking until we do. Then he laughs.

Last night, he poked Mommy in the nose, but instead of "boop" she made an elephant sound—"awooga!" He liked that, and he repeated it! "Awoo-ah, awoo-ah," he said. He's repeated it a few more times since then, too. Perhaps a month ago he was repeating more words back to us, but he seems to have lost interest in that lately, so this was a novelty.

Lately, he's started pointing at himself, in the middle of his chest. Often he alternates pointing at something, then himself, then back at the thing, etc. It's not clear what this means: The obvious interpretation, "That is for me" or "I want that" often doesn't make sense, because he's pointing at a wall or something.

Doctor

At naptime, I give Eddie warm milk from a sippy cup while he sits on my lap, and I usually have a cloth ready to wipe drips off his face and clothes and the cup. Today, after he had a long draught, he pointed at the cloth, then grabbed it and wiped off the lip of the cup himself. What a helper!

Eddie went to the doctor today for his 15-month checkup. His ear infection is all cleared up, and he's got a clean bill of health again. He got more upset about the doctor and nurse handling him than I've seen him do before. I wonder if his trip to the emergency room left a bad impression. He really squalled while the nurse tried to measure his length—this is pretty innocuous; she just wanted to stretch his legs out!

Eddie weighs 26 pounds, 6 ounces, and is 34 inches tall. That's 90th percentile for weight and 100th for height (Eddie is taller than 100% of all babies.) Then the poor guy had four shots! He didn't like that, but he cheered up pretty quickly.

Shape sorting

Not much actual sorting going on! Earlier today, though (this video is from Friday) he did two shapes all by himself.

A little before I made this video, Eddie had put in a few shapes with help, and we'd been excited and praised him. So he took off the roof, and put shapes straight in the box, then sat back and smiled and clapped for himself. It was pretty cute! I was hoping he would do that again while I taped, but no dice.

Laughter

Eddie's laughter is getting more complex. First he'd laugh when he'd successfully steal Daddy's glasses. Then he quickly developed a great belly laugh when he got raspberries and tickles. He'll smile and chuckle when things seem incongruous, squeal when we play peekaboo, and guffaw or give us a patient smile when we wear silly things as hats. Now, if Kolya and I have a good laugh at a joke or story, not even as a reaction to what's going on with Eddie, he'll let out a hearty laugh along with us.