SPL's Blog

SPL’s had another busy month.  Not sure if I’ll get a video done so if I don’t, I’m claiming the Walk video as representative of this month’s development :-).

Books — he’s really into Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go now.  John suggested that we take it with us on the plane to TX (brilliant idea!) and it worked on multiple levels, not the least of which were 1) entertaining SPL and 2) using it to block his feet so they won’t tap/kick the chair in front of him :-).  And by the middle to end of this month, he started getting interested in finding Goldbug :-).

He also loves this book called You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum (thanks Peggy!) which is a fun, picture-only story of a girl’s trip to the Met with her grandma and her yellow balloon and the adventures they each have in parallel during the day (as she couldn’t take the balloon inside).  SPL really digs it which is curious as its target age group is 4-8.  But it’s like Scarry’s books in that there’s a lot of action and things to notice.

A fun addition to our reading together has been SPL’s filling in the end of the sentence (can you tell we read the same books over and over and over again?  🙂 i.e. inside outside "upside down", the rooster "struts" (he says the quoted part).

John’s been teaching SPL to catch a beach ball and he’s been getting much more coordinated as they practice.  The key thing is moving arms to get the timing right which he has variable success with.

Along with filling in lines to books, SPL started singing the Wheels on the Bus song and can reliably fill in "up and down" for the people, "beep beep beep" for the horn and "i love you" for what the mommies say (the funny thing is John taught him that the daddies say "i love you" so SPL always corrects me when I sing it "my way" :-).

He continues to be into wearing our shoes and even likes putting my shoes in the warmer (below the oven).  Thankfully we don’t use it so don’t accidentally find "toasty" shoes :-).

We continued our periodic visits to John’s office and SPL *loves* it there.  They have all sorts of blow up and bean bag seats that are at SPL’s level so he just runs from one to the next.  Plus, there are bananas to eat — perfect!

As for play, SPL’s still into pouring his toys from one big bucket to the next.  We moved the empty bins to the garage so he doesn’t have as many options as he did last month (but that hasn’t slowed him down at all 🙂

and the big development for this month was on the teeth front: 6 filled in his lower and upper jaw completing the set of 16 that toddlers are supposed to have (he was missing the lower 2nd set of incisors and all 4 canines).

And before I close, a couple of interesting language notes:
— he learned the word "hiding" while we were visiting a park in San Jose.  The background story is this: We were playing in this statue park that’s part of a larger park in San Jose.  [Sidebar: ever since the "Out to Lunch" statue that sits on the bench outside our local library, SPL has been fascinated with statues and notices them everywhere].  He was particularly interested in the eagle statue that is perched on a tree — and then he noticed, upon closer inspection, that there was a rodent hiding in the base of the tree :-).  What a great way to learn a concept!
— "daddy" "gym" "exercise": we’d trekked over to Mozilla to drop off John’s gym clothes so he could work out over lunch and on the drive home, I hear SPL say to himself, "daddy" and then "gym" and then "exercise" (a new word).  I looked in the rear view mirror and said "did you say `exercise’?" and he smiled really big :-).  And now, weeks later, anytime he hears that one of us is going to the gym, he’ll reply "exercise?"

Happy 19 months!