My son is huge now. He's so tall. Things he couldn't reach even a month ago are now within easy grasp. Everything on the counter now is in jeopardy now. At the gym he can reach up and press the elevator buttons without a boost. He can open the gate in the yard. He can open the back door. Stacy was folding socks yesterday and said she kept mixing his socks up with ours, not being able to tell them apart (this is, I'm pretty sure, an exaggeration, but you get the point. Soon his socks will be much, much bigger than ours and we'll be doing entire loads of laundry that consist of two pairs of boxers and a dozen giant sweat socks).
Dude just stole my Japanese housewife shoes and ran away with them. He's putting them into an empty clothes basket and climbing in after them. Now he's abandoned that pursuit and he's putting the shoes on and walking around. "On," he just said to me smiling. And from the smell of it he's filled his pants. Mommy's on the case, though, luckily for me.
Gavin's biggest development is in language. He's stringing sentences together. Two or three words instead of just one. Like at lunch he wanted more raspberries so he was just saying, "Mas" and then "please." And so I encouraged him to say what it was he wanted more of. The result was a very halting but complete sentence: "Mas rasp, please." There's a pause in between each word where you can hear the gears cranking in his head.
He also puts his own dishes into the dishwasher after we eat. If you don't have your kids -- or your wife or your husband or anyone else who regularly eats at your house -- do this you totally should. Granted, it's easier with a toddler, I think. Gavin is in a "likes to help" stage and we encourage that as much as we can, even when his "helping" makes a task take twice or ten times as long (like when he helps sweep and uses his little broom to scatter whatever pile you're about to sweep into the dust pan all over the floor again). One thing I've always hated about dinner is the cleaning up. When everyone takes his or her own dish to the sink or dishwasher it really makes a big difference. He also has to clean up any messes he's made on purpose. Like yesterday he was eating tofu scramble with peas in it and he'd picked out and eaten most of the tofu leaving a couple dozen peas behind. When he'd decided he was done he spiked the bowl onto the floor. "Looks like you've got a mess to clean up," I said. And so after getting his hands and face wiped he got down on the floor and Stacy showed him that he needed to pick each and every pea up and put it back in the bowl. Since it was nap time he wasn't in a mental state where he could do this. He was getting really hyper and couldn't focus on a task like this, especially one he didn't want to do. So we said okay, let's take a nap. You can finish this when you wake up. And that's what we did. He wanted to go outside and play and we were all, "Sure, no problem. As soon as those peas are picked up we can go play." I helped him pick the peas up, but not unless he was actively participating. I mean, he is after all not even two years old. He has definite attention limits. But he was really good about cleaning up and got the job done (it was not, of course, perfect. When he was outside with Stacy I swept up the little pieces of tofu shrapnel and such). This whole thing is something else from Ain't Misbehavin' by Alyson Schafer. Seriously good book. It's also in line with the main point I took away from The Baby Whisperer, which is start how you'd like to end up. Meaning, if you don't want your kid to sleep in bed with you when he's two years, don't start having him sleep in bed with you when he's two weeks. In Gavin's case now, my hope is that by making cleaning up a routine thing he makes a habit of it and it just becomes something he does automatically. Not that I'm delusional. I realize that there will be times where there's going to be a battle of wills). It makes a lot more sense than waiting until some undetermined age and then saying, "I know you've been living a life of careless leisure where your moms do everything for you, but that life is over now, Buddy." That's just begging for resentment. So, yeah, we're basically training him to be our slave.
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