It was a nice warm day today so we had to get outside. The pollution levels almost ruined that as the particulate measure started to climb. Luckily, it didn’t get too high and we were able to enjoy the day.
After a morning at home he took a shortish nap and woke up in time to go to his music class.
From there we walked to Toys R Us to buy more bubble mix. While there we sat in the food court and ate his lunch. He drew quite a crowd. Made worse by the fact that he keeps waving to everyone.
We walked back to Home PLus to do some grocery stopping and then stopped at the playground on our way home to do some sliding.
I had PT and while on the way home August sent me his first Skype video message (presumably with Carly’s help). We then Skyped as I did part of my walk home.
A couple observations today:
He is quickly picking up the Head to Toes book. In addition to the ‘bend my neck’ instruction that he started to so yesterday, today he started to pick up on ‘pound my chest’ and ‘clap my hands’. He would first help me pound my own chest, much as he would previously hold one of my hands and help me clap my hands, but wouldn’t clap his own hands. But then he started pounding his own chest. He then, at the end of the book, started to actually clap. Unfortunately, we needed to leave to make it to his class so we couldn’t further practice these.
He hasn’t been into clapping yet, but he also started to do a better high five today, repeatedly clapping my hand hard enough to make noise.
While at music class we had these buckets with foam disks in them (see video below). The first time he had one filled with the foam disks he picked it up with two hands, dumped it on his own head, then put the bucket on his own head for a few seconds. The teacher had just demonstrated this. Alas, he didn’t do it again, so no evidence.
He has an ‘In the Garden’ book that shows different types of gardens and the plants and animals in them. Each garden has a bird in it, and I started pointing them out this morning. By this evening he was doing a good job of pointing out the bird on each page, often without any help or prompting. This was impressive as children this age, and particularly boys, are much better at seeing motion and objects in high contrast environments. So objects like the birds in these realistic paintings are often difficult to distinguish (it is kind of like and I Spy book). We’ve been focusing a lot on identifying objects in books like Where the Wild Things Are and that seems to be paying off.
Music: when he was tired this morning but not taking a nap, I put on his first playlist of songs. He cuddled on my shoulder for four songs. We then played for a few songs and he heard a Jason Webley song that I sing to him as a lullaby. He recognized it and stopped playing and wanted to go on my shoulder again. That lasted two songs and then he went back to playing. It was another hour or two before he took a nap.
Books: On the it-was-cute-the-first-couple-times side of things, he has decided that the best way to get my attention when he wants to read a book is to hit me in the face with it. This has replaced the ‘look at me, I am putting the book in my mouth’ method, probably because it is more effective. If I am looking away (cleaning up toys, doing something on my phone, reading a different book) , I could miss the book in mouth attention getter. The book upside the face, not so much.
Breakfast:
Music class:
Notice how he likes to set the drum stick on top. Also, his use of a foot:
Lunch in the Toys R Us food court:
His favorite spot at the playground:
Sending a Skype message to dada:
