1.5 years as a new family

Ronan is 18 months old! I'm starting to get a sense why parents are always so proud of their young kids. Everything they learn to do at this age comes so fast.

Some tidbits:

Earlier this week (on the changing table) Ronan said "stretch" and then did a great big stretch. No idea where he learned that, but he one-upped himself later in the day by doing a respectable downward dog yoga pose. I'd showed him this pose once or maybe twice some days prior (since one of his kid songs is about doing downward dog). Then all of a sudden...

He's starting to understand the word "no" in more complex ways. When I got up with him the other day he said "dada sleeping...no mama sleeping" (he's caught on to the fact that we trade off the early mornings and are rarely both up at the same time). And later at daycare while I put his lunch in the fridge he said "no mama bye-bye." His professions of "poopy" and "not poopy" still bear no resemblance to reality, but maybe he just likes it when we catch him up and sniff his bum?

We had a lovely visit from Grossvater (dotado for now) and Oma this week, and Ro loved having them here. This afternoon he seemed a little confused about where they'd gone (Oma outside?) but seemed placated when we said they'd gone home. We have lots more visits planned for the summer so he'll get more practice with that soon!

At 18 months Ronan loves any instrument he can play with a guitar pick, has started singing to himself, points out the helmets on every bicyclist, and has started issuing commands "mama get it"..."dada bath!" Tonight as David put him to bed reading Yummy Yucky he gleefully pronounced sentence on each potential food (worms: yucky!, mama's coffee: yucky!, bananas: yummy!) with such enthusiasm you could tell how proud he was to sort things. He loves to play hiding games, but is terrible at hiding because he shrieks and hoots from his hiding place (usually a few steps away).

Happy year-and-a-half, kiddo. We love you!

Verbing

Ro finds verbs a mostly unnecessary part of speech. After all, "RoRo maomao treats" is a much more efficient way of saying "would you kindly hand me the cat treats so I can fatten the cats and they will love me". Similarly "mama outside shoes" is easier than "let's go get rained on outside!"

As he does discover verbs, however, they are almost exclusively gerunds. Ro says:

walking (and walking backwards)

swimming

kayaking (!)

running

eating

flying

singing

swinging

reading

With the exception of "do that" (which I think he believes is one word) and eat, all verbs are -ing. Curious. Someone out there probably knows all about this phase of language and what it turns into, but I think I'll just wait and see.

Babies inside and out (classroom potluck at our place)

Baby Biker

First ride on mama's bike - the trail passes by our house and goes most of the way to daycare

It's fully spring now. The trees are blooming (my favorites are the lilacs, pink dogwoods, and tulip magnolias) and all the new leaves and grass are bright, bright green. We've had a couple of lovely warm evenings of eating outside, and mosquitos are just starting to hatch in the last few days. Froggies have gone a courting.

We had another round of fevers last week. Since Ro didn't initially like the ear thermometer we made a game out of it, apparently with some success. Now, totally unprompted, he will stick the thermometer in his ear, hum "nee-nee-nee-nee-nee", then pronounce with utter seriousness "99". We all rejoiced heartily two illnesses ago when his fever dropped that low, and it stuck in his brain as the canonical post-temperature pronouncement. His memory often astonishes me.

No illnesses this week (just a mystery rash and some mosquito bites) but he's evidently forgotten how to sleep through the night. As a visitor to our house put it: can you imagine if every time you woke up you started screaming aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh?

We hosted the classroom potluck for our daycare last night and it was a baby whirlwind (+siblings, parents, teachers, visiting in-laws). Starting after school there were 30-40 people at our house, then two hours later as the kids pooped out they all vanished rapidly. We're not sure what happened in the middle, but between the backyard and indoors somehow everyone fit somewhere, the potluck fare was great, and nobody got stepped on. Win.

No baby. Boy.

The era of Baby Ronan probably ended a while ago to be perfectly honest, but Ro still considered himself a baby, if only because we called him that. Last night that changed.

At bedtime we read Grow up (wherein you learn that puppies turn into dogs and chicks turn into chickens), Goodnight Gorilla (a favorite tale about freeing zoo animals), and finally Ten Seeds (a counting book with few words but beautiful garden pictures). On the final page, there is a kitty-cat*, a doggie, and a boy. Ro learned to say boy, lingering on the Y with a good Southern twang. Then he said "no(t) baby" about the boy in the picture, to which I had to agree. Was Grow Up still floating around in the back of his mind? Has he been noticing how small the little babies at daycare seem now that he's running around?

(*I never actually intended to start calling animals horsies and kitty-cats and piggies, but somehow it happened anyway).

He's been saying that phrase ever since (No baby....Boy!), especially when I had the audacity to sing him lullabys that assumed he's still a baby (hush thee my baby... go to sleep little baby...). I switched to the hobo's lullaby and he seemed to prefer that (the lesson that being a hobo is even tougher than being a baby being far in the future). I asked him today if he was a baby, and guess he said?

When you're old enough to have an opinion about what you get called, you're not a baby any more. So as of today, he's just a little more grown up.

10 months in New England (17 on planet Earth)

Summer............................Fall..........................Winter...................Early Spring

A sweet thing

Ro really loves songs, but he hasn't quite figured out that the CD player in the car plays whole discs. I've got a children's CD in there, and after each song, Ronan says "more!" to prompt another song (like he does when we sing).

A sentence thing

I think Ro's first three word sentence was: Dada milk bottle (a while back). His first four word sentence was yesterday: More horsie water bottle (he likes us to pretend to feed his rocking horse his water or milk bottle). He regularly counts to two now, and announces "two mao-maos" when he sees both cats at the same time (he can also say kitty cats, or an approximation of their names). He has learned all the colors, but the only one he labels correctly so far is orange (which I think is also his favorite color). He mixes up blue, green, and yellow all the time. And lest I believe the concept of ownership is foreign, this kid has picked it right up. He'll bring my sneakers to me saying "mama oshes" followed by "outside." (He also distinguishes between mama mug: the big kind for lattes, dada mug: the little kind for espressos, baby (s)poons, dada (s)poons, and a handful of other objects). Of his early sentences, "mama coffee yucky" is one of my favorites.