Today August turned 18 months old and we made the most of it. August really wanted to make the most of it, as he stayed up until 10pm and only took a 35 minute nap, after waking up a little after 7.
In the morning he carried Marshy around a lot, hugging him and patting his tummy. We made eggs with crab, broccoli, and cheese together. He then carried around and played with his blanket, and got out a few of the books in his room that we’ve never really read. Finally, he got ahold of one of my belts and was walking around the house making ‘ssss’ sounds like it was a snake. He still had a firm hold on it when I put him in the backpack to leave. I took it from him and he got upset, but calmed down when I coiled it up and put it on the couch and said it would be there when we got back.
He acted surprisingly tired on the train ride down, yawning several times. But when we got to the park we headed straight for the zoo and spent the next two and a half hours there. He first wanted to go see the deer. Then we saw the zebras, then the seals, then walked to the children’s zoo. This is where he really started to spend a lot of time, as he walked from the horses to the goats, then on to the meerkats and otters. He spent a good amount of time in the tropical building, then we sat on a bench in the shade out in the square and ate some crab and banana and other snacks. He was also doing a lot of people watching; in fact, on the way down we took the stairs, and at one point he pointed back and forth across the square and said ‘people’, then sat on the stairs and watched for a few minutes.
After 20 or 30 minutes of eating/watching he headed back into the tropical building on his own. There, he proceeded to spend about 15 minutes playing in the entryway, activating the automatic doors, waving to people as they came in, and laying on, crawling, and sliding around on the floor. He then proceeded back to the lizards (he really likes the word ‘gecko’ now), snakes, and fish, then proceeded to walk up and down the indoor ramps several times, stopping occasionally to watch the water monitor, gibbons, or birds.
Finally, he was starting to look tired, and I needed to change him. So we went up to the bathroom I usually use behind the amphitheater and changed him, then he fell asleep after a few minutes of walking. Went to the cafe, where they now have the umbrellas set up outside, and he slept about 35 minutes.
When he woke up, I realized I didn’t have his shoes. We hurried back up to the bathroom, and they were still sitting on the floor (the light hadn’t been working in the changing room, so that didn’t help).
We went back to the cafe and I bought August a strawberry juice and a cinnamon muffin as his 18 month treat. We sat in the comfy chairs he has always liked, but never sat in (usually the table is being used). He started eating the muffin (he loves cinnamon), and quickly said ‘cinnamon’, and kept saying it. I had also told him it was a treat, so he kept saying ‘treat’. Eating and drinking his treat took about 20 minutes, after which we cleaned up, and August helped by throwing away the wipes, muffin wrapper, and napkin. We said and waved goodbye to the woman who works there, and left to go to Adventureland Playground.
We stopped at the water fountains near the playground to take off his shirt and rinse the strawberry juice out. While at the playground, he played without a shirt, and by the time we were ready to go it was dry enough to put back on.
Anyway, as I was doing that, he climbed down the rock step and started walking towards the playground, saying ‘I see it’. I caught up to him, and when we got to the sand area he pointed and said ‘a-ha’. He would later repeat the ‘I see it’ after I took him across the path to throw away a piece of garbage and he watched a crew mowing the grass area.
He played in the sand areas, then we went up to the instruments and played “Baa Baa” a lot. Then he stood on a little ledge and threw his shovel over some bushes to me, and spent time walking up and down the ramps. He then heard “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” playing on the loudspeaker and got really excited. We went and listened to the rest of it, then spent the next half hour singing both the spider and hungry baa baa version over and over. Initially, his signal requesting the song was kind of patting his own head (his motion for the “up came the sun” part, but eventually he was saying “hungry baa baa” to distinguish it from the “baa baa black sheep” song. And at some point he finished off his strawberry juice and played with his camel, making the camel hop (“camel hop”) and saying “camel sleepy”.
We changed him and headed home. From the subway we went and did some grocery shopping (and of course went and saw the lizard and turtle, which was out eating lettuce) and headed home. At about 5:15 we went out to meet Carly and met her walking around the corner from the elevators.
He ate a ton of the spaghetti that Carly made for dinner, then I gave him a bath. He had a ton of energy in the evening, despite looking tired. Carly took him in a couple times, but he wouldn’t go to sleep. At 9, I took over and we read a lot of books. At one point stood up on his stool and we read the Mother Goose book on the counter. Finally, a few minutes before 10 he kind of pinched his finger in a drawer. He calmed down after that, but when I asked if he wanted mama, he started saying ‘nurse’, and he went in and went straight to sleep.
His new song creation today was inserting ‘grampa’ into the ABC song instead of letters, ending with “next time won’t you sing with grampa.” And he was talking a lot about soup and fish through the day. For soup, he would randomly say “all gone soup” or “al gone grampa soup” and the fish are because Carly took down Cherie’s fish picture to hand up someplace else. So he when changing him he’ll look up at the blank wall and say “all gone (fish noise).” Today, he expanded that to “all gone sad (fish noise).” We will get them hung back up this weekend. Oh, and he surprised me while taking a bath, turning to the wall and saying pointing and saying ‘tile’. It is a word that Carly and I have used with him in passing, but hadn’t made a point to teach him.
New words: sad, dada/gaegul hop, bye bye sssss, people elevator, see baboon, dirt (as we walked by a flower bed, kind of surprised me), baby elevator (otter and elevator sound similar, and he was saying them, back and forth, then started saying ‘baby elevator’ for fun), kangaroo (surprised me by pointing at the kangaroos and saying it), hay (picked some off the ground and tried to feed the goats), more hay (different meaning of ‘more’ – previously, he has used more to mean ‘I want more’, this time, it was when he went to the other end of the goat enclosure and saw more hay and was pointing it out), gecko, skip, hungry baa baa, camel hop and camel sleepy, all gone sad (fish sound), tile
On our way:
Zoo:
18 month treat:
Playground:
Reading the Mother Goose book while standing on his stool and looking really tired a few minutes before he finally falls asleep:
