Living and Learning

Mal is adding words to his vocabulary all of the time. He cracks me up so much these days.

One of his favorite things is to walk around saying, "Messy, messy," and actually helping clean up! I guess I'm wearing off on him.

He also says two things when he likes food. When he likes pretend food, he says, "Num nummy!" Then when he likes real food, he says, "deeee-nit-chit!" with the same emphasis on every syllable, as though they are three separate words.

Last night at dinner, he ate 5 leaves of lettuce from my salad. It is the first time in mroe than 15 years of parenting that one of my children has willingly eaten salad like that. It'll be interesting to see whether that was really something he liked, or he was just being entertaining.

Today, Mal figured out two cool things. First, he realized how to ride his tricycle. He'd been practicing for weeks, unbeknownst to me. He likes to climb onto the tricycle when we get home, asking to go for a ride. That's always the worst possible time, because I typically have an arm full of groceries, or I need to use the restroom, or grown-up lame-o excuses. Anyway, today we were waiting for a box to be delivered, anyway, and after I put my stuff up, I went back outside to hang out with him. He was sitting on the tricycle, pedaling forward until the chain stopped him, then backward until the chain stopped him. He was riding his trike!

I unlocked it and moved it out from under the stairwell. He was working on how to get his feet into a position to start pedaling as he was kind of pointed uphill, but once we got him on a flat surface, he took off! It was so cool to watch. We never tried to get him to do it. He did it on his own time and in his own way.

The other thing he figured out was how to turn on the spigot downstairs.

He tried unsucessfully a few times, then he got it. And he got it GOOD. Like full throttle, he turned it on.

"Too loud!" I turned in off for him, and then he was ready to go upstairs and watch Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.

That, by the way, is his favorite television show. He likes Dinosaur Train, too. He thinks any train is a dinosaur train, so I'm not sure how educational it is. Anyway, there are so many things he seems to have learned and retained from watching and re-watching literally every episode in its 7-year run. I just wish kids were as easy to redirect in real life as they are in the show.

Today, I wore a t-shirt tucked in with a flannel shirt over it. I pretty much never ever wear my shirts tucked in. Mal likes to rub my back (if I'm holding him) and my belly (if we're lying down) when he nurses. Well, he'd stick his hand up under my flannel shirt and rub... my other shirt. When he looked and noticed that the pants and shirt annoyingly came together, he tried to pull the waistband away from the fabric of the shirt, and kept saying, "Open. Body. Open."

He has made up his own sign for "broken." When something is broken, he talks about it by holding the fingers of one hand in his other hand and bending them backwards. It's pretty interesting.

There's more, but my brain is fried. It's a busy, exciting, exhausting adventure with this kid!