Updated Photos

I put new photos up for July and August, just in time for it to be September. :) You can link to all the albums from the link on the right, but here are the photos from August.

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"Do," "Mo," "Ta," Dirty Chicken, "Sowwy" and Shadows

Well Brandon has been a little sponge this summer, learning new words every day and coming in to a sweetly assertive independence.

"Do" and "Mo"
Do and Mo are Brandon's words for Yes and No. A couple months ago he started saying "Do" as an affirmative response to "Do you want to do (something)?" If he did, then "DO!" A few weeks ago he started saying "Mo" for No. Actually, "Mo" started one night when Joby was drawing shapes and cartoons for Brandon on the Magna Doodle pad (every kid who likes to draw must have one... saves crayon markings on walls, plus paper). Brandon very much likes when Joby draws the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ("Shezza" - how he came up with this to describe "clubhouse," we'll never know). So Joby would draw different shapes and ask Brandon "Is this the clubhouse." To which Brandon started replying "Mooooe!" in this cute little singsong voice while shaking his head and tucking his chin. And whenever Joby'd finally draw the clubhouse we'd be met with delighted cries of "there it is!" and clapping. In the past few weeks we've progressed to a more succinct "Mo" in response to our questions, complete with a blank look that states "how can you ask me that?" It's actually very funny and cute and to date, we haven't had the typical toddler tantrum associated with learning that he sometimes has choices and can say "NO" to things. My personal favorite is when I ask him a series of questions that have to have a "Do" response to at least one of them and he just says "Mo" for everything. Like "Do you want to go home to our house?" "Mo." "Do you want to stay here at Grandma's house instead?" "Mo." And tonight the classic "Do you want to get out of the bath?" "Mo." Brandon would take a bath every hour of every day if he were allowed to.

"Ta"
A couple weeks ago we took a day trip to Gainesville and I asked Joby to borrow a couple videos from the library for Brandon to watch in the car. He brought home Blue's Clues (Brandon's favorite cartoon) and Thomas the Train. Well, Thomas is now a favorite too. Brandon went bananas over this video. Before that he never paid attention to the two Thomas books we have nor really noticed that the little child sofa we have had Thomas on it. Well now they are all he can look at. They are the first books he brings to me at story time and every morning he finds his sofa and delightedly yells "Hi Ta!" And since he's getting better at putting words together to form more coherent thoughts - tonight he was watching a 10 minute episode of Thomas with Joby and when it was over he waved at the screen and said "Bye Bye Ta!" and without missing a beat looked at Joby, signed "more" and said "More Ta!?" To which we said no but avoided the tears by suggesting it was time for a bath. Note the last sentence of the above paragraph and understand that baths trump all activities. We're sneaky parents.

"Dirty Chicken"
In order to get Brandon to actually eat meat I started giving him sliced Boar's Head deli meats, chicken or turkey, a long time ago. This week I decided that I would try giving him roast beef as an option. So we put it on his dinner plate last night and he looked at it disdainfully and promptly pointed at it and said "Dirty." He refused to eat it. (Big surprise these days with new foods.) But we could only laugh because the sliced meat we've always given him has been white and this meat was brown. And when his hands are covered with dirt he calls them "dirty." So we could only assume he meant that the chicken was dirty, and therefore not worthy of his acknowledgment. (Note - Brandon absolutely HATES to have his hands get dirty. Even the smallest speck of dust sends him running to us with his hands out asking us to wipe it off. This will need to change! Isn't it some right of passage for children to eat paste? That requires getting your hands dirty at some point.)

"Sowwy"
If you have kids then I'm sure you understand just how difficult it is to teach a child the concept of being sorry for something. Remorse is hard enough for adults to grasp sometimes! So we've been teaching him the sign for sorry as well as saying it when he does something he's not supposed to do, like bang his fork on the table (repeatedly) or throw food on the floor, etc. Well he's finally starting to say "Sowwy" to us and sign it too. We have to insist that he does it and he's starting to realize that saying it sort of implies being in trouble, another thing he can't stand, and sometimes we're met with pathetic (cute really) crying and hugging. A couple of times this week he would bang the table and say "sowwy!" and then bang the table again and say "sowwy" over and over again. And it's really hard not to laugh when he does that but we have to tell him that you can't just do something wrong and say sorry right away to make it better. How come no one ever told us that disciplining our child would be downright hysterical at times? He's so cute and makes the funniest pouty faces at us. But we know we can't laugh if we want him to learn these things. So we laugh later when we recant the stories to our friends.

"Shadows"
Tonight Brandon was playing with Joby in our living room and dining room where the sunshine streams in through the blinds and creates a plethora of shadows on the walls and floor. Well Brandon, through Joby's help, discovered his shadow on the wall too. Well he spent a good deal of time saying "Hi Shadow!" to himself... and then moving out of the sunlight and saying "Bye Bye Shadow!" He repeated this many times. Joby got a bit of it (towards the end) on video and I'll post that to our YouTube channel soon. Quite frankly, it was amazing!

A couple other things to mention. Yesterday Brandon discovered a tree frog on the window next to our front door. And he talked to it for a long time, running to get either Joby or I to show us when he didn't think we remembered that it was still there. Tonight, before discovering his shadow, he went back looking for the frog and was disappointed when it wasn't there anymore. We told him the frog went home to see his Mommy. That must have been an acceptable reason for not clinging to our window because Brandon didn't mention him again tonight.

We're also trying to talk more about the baby with Brandon. I hope to buy a baby doll in another month to put in the swing and crib around the house to get Brandon used to having a baby. He says "Hi Baby" to my stomach now (which is huge by the way) but I'm hoping that he doesn't start calling all tummies "baby." That would be pretty funny but a bit of an embarrassment if he were to point at someone else's belly and say "hi baby" and that person wasn't pregnant... :)

Brandon likes to play the "sleep and wake up" game with us. We'll pretend to be asleep on the floor (pretend snoring, etc) and Brandon will say "night, night" to us. Then he'll decide it's time for us to wake up, usually by grabbing our shirts and pulling, sometimes including chunks of our flesh in the process. (OUCH!) So tonight we taught him to give kisses when he wanted us to wake up because it's much nicer than grabbing us. Well it worked. He thought that was hysterical and we must have played this game for about a half hour. Kind of nice to relax on the floor and have your son tell you it's ok to close your eyes for a bit, only to have him gently give you a kiss to wake you up, laughing and clapping when you open your eyes to look at him and say "hi!"

And finally - this morning as I was about to leave to take Brandon to my mom's and then go to work, Brandon decided he wanted to stomp on some of the dried leaves in our driveway. Well I knew that traffic was bad today (Joby called me from the road to tell me it was at a standstill on 9A) and I really wanted to get going. But Brandon was having so much fun stomping and listening to the crackly leaves that I had to join him for a few minutes. So we stomped all over the driveway, laughing the entire time while my neighbors all drove past and probably wondered what the heck we were doing. But I didn't care. Brandon was laughing and I figured that sometimes you just have to stop and stomp the leaves.

Parenting is hard... but so much fun!

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Email Update

Excerpt from an email I sent earlier this week:

As for our firstborn, Brandon is still amazing. He'll be 18 months old on Saturday. We think he's getting ready to grow taller. For the past five days he's done nothing but sign and say "eat" to us every other hour. We're not sure where he's putting it all either! He absolutely loves to read books, especially ones with Lowly the Worm (he goes around saying "lowly, low-la, low-le, lowly?!" when he wants to read this book), Elmo, Big Bird and anything with animals in it. We find his recall ability quite amazing. We show him a picture in book just a couple times and he can find it for us later if we ask. And someone can tell him something a couple times and he figures out how to say it or sign it. It's been really, really fun watching him learn and apply what he knows. Thank goodness for sign language too. It's been so helpful to know when things hurt or if he's hungry or thirsty or something like that. Please and thank you are also perks at this young age too!

B also loves to sing. Joby got this one children's album by They Might Be Giants called "No!" and has been singing this song about a violin to him. Well in one of Brandon's book there is a picture of a violin and whenever he finds that picture now he'll point to it and look at us and sing "la, la, la" and wait for us to start the song. Another part of that same song talks about a speck of dust and last night and this morning Brandon was trolling around the house singing "da, da, da, ooooooohhhhhh!" (da = dust) just like the song, in tune too. He really makes us laugh.

I think one of my favorite things he does right now is when he's really happy he sort of runs in place and says "Happy!" We obviously call it his happy dance. He's also still really big in to dancing to that farm music magnet set on the fridge. For those of you who've never seen it, there's a clip on my channel on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/colleenmesser) with him dancing to it when he was about 11 months old. I need to post a follow-up to that with what his dance has progressed in to. He basically squats really, really low and bounces in place now. Or he spins in circles and shakes his head. We never taught him any of this either. It's pure Brandon! And very funny.

I posted some recent photos of him last night to my web album. Here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/colleen.messer . There will be more to come in the next few weeks.

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Finally Sick

We knew the day would finally come when Brandon got sick. And this was the week. Tuesday morning my mom called me at work and said she believed Brandon had a fever and was not well. So I took him to the doctor's and it turned out his temp was 102.4. They said he was the happiest child with a 102.4 temperature that they'd ever seen. He was smiling and playing so nicely while we were there. Anyways - they thought it was just a cold but when he woke up on Thursday with a 103.4 temperature they believed it was a type of roto virus that had been going around. Poor Brandon didn't know what he wanted. He was so hot and sweaty and uncomfortable. One minute he'd be playing or watching tv quietly and the next minute he'd just bust out crying. It was so cute and pathetic all at the same time, and of course it broke my heart. There were times when all he could stand to do was sit on our laps and bury his head in to our shoulders. Luckily today Brandon didn't have a fever when he woke up and we're left only the congestion. He's back on the mend.

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Mother's Day

This year for Mother's Day we went to the Jacksonville Zoo with Joby's parents and we decided to let Brandon try to Merry-Go-Round towards the end of the day. Joby went on with him since an adult had to stand next to him. Brandon was fine, grinning from ear to ear while he was sitting on the horse... until the ride started moving. Once it began moving up and down and circling round and round, well Brandon couldn't sign the word "UP!" fast enough. He wanted OFF that ride. It was both really funny and heart-breaking for me!

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Sprinkler Time!

 

Today when I went to pick up Brandon at my mom's house they were, as usual, playing outside waiting for me. Before we left Mom decided to water a section of sod they just put down. Brandon was facinated with the sprinkler. And before long he was soaking wet, loving every minute of the fun!

 

 

 

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Mr. Manners & other updates

So now that Brandon is learning to sign words to us, he's been very cute about saying please and thank you. He signs "please" and says "tank ou" all the time now. He tells us when he is thirsty (signing "drink") and hungry (signing "eat") and can also ask for more now too. We are working on getting him to sign "all done" BEFORE he drops food on the floor, but that's a work in progress. This morning as we were getting ready to leave for work we had to stop and sit for a moment because he signed "book please" to me when we passed a new pop-up book from Aunt Sharon and Uncle Chris. How can I say no to that? We read the book and then left. Actually, that's a funny thing too - Brandon has gotten so good at saying "please" that he thinks he'll get what he wants just because he asks politely. So it's really hard to tell him "Thank you for asking nicely Brandon but you still can't have the (fill-in-the-blank: book, paper, pacifier, phone, remote, stuff you're not supposed to have)." The other day he got SO mad at me for telling him this that he immediately sat down on the floor and pouted - big lip and all. It was all I could do not to laugh.

We're very happy he's picking up the sign language so well. He rarely whines at us because he can communicate most of his necessary needs to us. I'm sure the whining will pick back up some day soon but for now we're doing ok!

A few other cute things:

Last week we went to the zoo and Brandon really enjoyed it. He finally was making connections with the animals. He LOVED the elephants and would sign the word for us while making the elephant sound (something he hasn't done independently since so I'm not recording it as officially learning/signing the word). He also loved the cat animals like the leopards, lions, panthers and jaguars. The funniest part of the day was when Brandon was running around near some giant fish tanks. He wanted to go back to the piranha (or some other fish equally as big and ugly) tank to look at them. So he ran up to it (also running away from Joby at the time), put his hands on the glass and then, suddenly a huge fish swam directly in front of the glass, maybe an inch from his face and just as quickly as he ran away from Joby, he was running back saying "ahhh!". Yeah, the fish startled the heck out of him.

Since the zoo Joby has also taught him the noise/motion the gorilla makes. And that is really funny to watch Brandon running around beating his fists on his chest and grunting. Sometimes he goes up to Joby and beats on Joby's chest too. Which is funny because when he first started signing "please" to us he'd actually come up to us and sign it on our chests, not his. It took him a while to figure out he could sign without using our bodies as the props.

And a final note - As reported a few posts ago, Brandon can open all the doors in our house that have french door handles now. So we had to install child locks on them. A couple weekends ago Joby spent Sat morning installing them on the doors (which involved taking the knobs off completely and putting the contraption on, then putting the knobs back on) and Brandon worked very hard to help Joby do this. But when Brandon realized that what Daddy was doing was preventing him from doing one of his most favorite activities, well, he got mad and sat down and cried. Now he spends his time looking for the doors we forget to lock on him, or opening and closing the laundry room and air handler closet doors. So yes, we need to buy locks for them now too. Especially the laundry room because Brandon also loves all things with buttons (phones, remotes, check out debit card machines, etc) and the fancy washer and dryer we own has the button controls all on the front. And yes, he's actually started the washing machine once. Luckily we can lock the controls... thanks to a genius designer who must have had kids.

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