Some Mal Anecdotes

Gosh, Mal is still nursing a lot. So that hasn't changed. But you know what? He IS growing up. Here are a couple of cute stories from the past few days:

Two nights ago, Mal was watching his videos and started shaking his head. I thought it was because he wanted a different song, so I was looking for another one. He shook his head again, closed the laptop, latched on, and nursed himself to sleep.

Yesterday, I was making dinner and Mal had pulled out some of the dishes. He was clanking around in the living room, and I was going to ask him to stop smacking glass together, but first I looked around the bar to see what he was doing. He was skiing around the living room with each foot in one of our two Pyrex loaf pans.

Also yesterday, Mal had gotten his dad's battery-operated metronome. It's been in storage a long time, and is on the verge of dying. It kept slowing down and shutting off, so I opened up the battery casing and found that the battery expired in 2005, and that it was a 9-volt, which we don't have sitting around here. I told Mal, "It's not working; it needs a battery, and we don't have this kind of battery, so it's like it's broken right now. We'll fix it, though." Mal walked over and opened a drawer. I thought he was looking for batteries, so reminded him that we don't have 9Vs. Instead, though, he pulled out the packing tape and brought it to me, I guess because that's how we "fix" most of his things (books).

Mal is singing when he plays his ukulele, he talks on his plastic phone a lot, and he reads to himself. Suffice it to say, he sounds completely ridiculous when he does any of these things (except the singing is actually kind of cute), and it makes me feel self-conscious about how I must sound doing those things if that is how he thinks I sound.

He knows that there is a giant dish of Jolly Ranchers up at the apartment office, which is approximately 1/4 mile from our place. Any time we're outside, he either signs "eat" (he adds a smacking with it, and it's precious!) or "water" (which he signs like "mother" for now) -- because of the pool -- and takes off up the hill. We seriously walk up to the office every single day... for a Jolly Rancher. I think the staff is sick of us, but they're about to raise our rent by $100 a month, so we're going to take them for all of the penny candy, Starbucks coffee, and mandarin oranges we can.

It's been too cool to swim -- for us adults -- but Mal always wants to play around and maybe in the pool. Yesterday, I told him we couldn't get in but could put our feet in, and sat him down first on my lap at the steps of the pool, then let him sit on the concrete himself with just his shins-down in the water and my arm around him. He seemed to enjoy kicking for about ten minutes, then was ready to go. Hope that takes care of things, because I get really stressed when he makes a bee-line for the main part of the pool. He totally doesn't get that it's deep, he can't swim, etc.

There is more... Always more. But I think he's waking from his nap. So this is going live now!