Evan at 22 months

I have 5 pictures like this and the dog's eyes are closed in all of them.

What is this? An update??? Since I'm hopelessly behind on my 365 right now it seems easier to write an update here than to get caught up there. And I'm feeling lazy this morning. We finally found a TV program that Evan will sit still enough to watch for a few minutes: Waybuloo - and so I bought a DVD with a few episodes on it. Just knowing he's in the living room and not escaping the house or teetering on the edge of something for 15 minutes is so relaxing, I can sit here in the recliner with him watching Waybuloo, and even enjoy a cup of coffee before it gets cold. Waybuloo is very annoying, though - the kids have a theory that the reason they float is that their heads are big and full of air like balloons. Which makes more sense to me than the program's description which is that they do 'yogo' which is like yoga to reach a state of "buloo" so that they float. Uh, I'll take the balloon head theory, thanks. And we worry about exposing kids to drugs, etc. on TV. Try preschool programming. Seriously, I dare you to read the description here: Waybuloo and come to any conclusion other than the developers and writers are high.


I wanted to write down all of Evan's words somewhere because my previous experience says that sometime in the next few months he'll go through some 'language explosion' where he'll know so many new words and learn so many more each day that it will be impossible to keep track. In the past month or so he's started using a lot of the same words regularly and it's surprising how much he can tell you with just the same 10-20 words. I'll try to remember what all of them are.

Mom
Dad
Grandma and Grandpa (gamma, ganpa)
Memere and Pepere (mama, papay)
Madeleine (malala)
Dog, Pup, Beau, Doggy

Notice he has four different words to refer to the dog, and only one word for a sister, even though he has three of them. Even though Madeleine's name should be the hardest to say, he's making an effort and I guess the other two simply don't rate. He knows their names (will point to the right sister if you ask "Where is Annique?" but he's not going to repeat them.

Po-po = potty
caca
peepee


All of the toilet-related words are great, because he's telling us when he has to go, when he's gone already (unfortunately) and has been taking all of the initiative in that department. While I'm not going to get my hopes up that he'll be fully trained anytime soon, I'm glad to see he has an interest in the toilet long before any of my girls did. When he says he wants to go - he usually goes. My big girls had a lot bigger vocabularies when they started training but still seemed unable to tell me before they had to go and it was all a bunch of guessing and waiting. I still have video of Cecily singing her ABC's and other songs while she was sitting on the toilet. I am sure she'll appreciate that as she gets older. Until she was about three, Annique would just stare blankly or ignore any mention of anything toilet-related because she had no intention of using it.

up
bye-bye
dodo (sleep)
la (means EVERYTHING)
shoes
tickle (dee-go, dee-go, dee-go)
peek-a-boo (a-boo-boo)
mine/my
tub
baloo (that stupid show)

and of course - TA-TA. I always said I'd never teach my kids to say ta-ta, because wouldn't it be more polite to just teach them to say "please" if they want something? How hard is that? Please, please, please. For everything. What polite children I'd have. Sometime after the second child I realized, ta-ta is not a parental invention. It's not something you teach your children to say. It's something they teach you. It means I WANT THAT. And when you have a baby like mine who doesn't say anything else that means anything, and the meaning of TA-TA is crystal clear, you don't argue. It is a little bit classier than uh-uh-uh or crying, so I'll take it. Please can wait.