Linnaeus 18.1

New in Linnaeus-land this week:

Crawling is finally losing favour to walking & speed-walking. I'd say Sprout walks at least 90% of the time now. The walking is a double-edged sword: now he can walk around in the park or on the sidewalk without scraping his knees & getting totally filthy, but now he wants to go places like the middle of the road to follow the pigeons.

He's finally grown out of size five shoes. Luckily, between the stockpile of larger sizes I've got plus some big cousin Jonah hand-me-downs, we're covered until next Christmas, probably. We'll definitely need some sandals for the summer, however, as this kid has hot little feet.

No more stroller naps! Due to lots of naps on the go when he was younger, Linnaeus developed a strong sleep association with the Uppababy, so we needed to put him in it for naps, even when we were at home. Now that he's older & so much more interested in his surroundings, he won't sleep in the stroller when we're out. Wheeling his stroller into his bedroom & strapping him in for naps for months just got a bit silly, so I decided to change that. I had no classes this week (reading week) & I decided to devote every afternoon to transitioning Sprout to napping in his crib & not the stroller. 

Since I stopped keeping track of Sprout's vocabulary, he's started using many more words: finger, hare, slide, water, play, monkey, oops, as well as quite a few more food-related words: pear, avocado, food, cracker, meat & orange. I still get the urge to write every one of them down, but I've restrained myself & not added to the list.

El cheapo beach ball = hours of fun &
walking practise

We're also seeing more two- & three-word sentences. Most often heard is: I'm no or I'm done. Sprout has been using I'm to refer to himself for a while, I just didn't realize exactly what he was saying until this week. When he falls & bumps his head or something, I'll pick him up right away & I often say, "I know, I know," as he cries. I think when he says I'm no he's copying what I say when I'm comforting him. It's funny that he's trying to comfort himself with it when he's unhappy too. Though when he bumped his head on a plastic slide at the play gym Friday he didn't cry, he just said, "I'm slide bump". His word order is still pretty random. 

Sprout's favourite toy this week is probably his beach ball. As soon as we get in the house he can usually see it & starts saying, bee ball again & again until he can go grab it. It's often one of the first things he talks about when he wakes up too. He likes to carry it around the house & is starting to play catch with us.

Sprout's favourite food this week is probably not a food at all, really, but tea. He tried some of my rooibos tea when we were out a few weeks ago & has kept requesting it with meals. He likes it plain, but I often give it to him with a lot of milk. He actually ate some grapefruit (but just a little) & has decided oranges are not poisonous, eating a few mini mandarins this week. I find it especially interesting that he's started to like more tart foods in the last month or so. Until he was about 16 months old, he would get a terrible diaper rash after eating things like blueberries, tomato or kiwi. He would refuse most fruits that were the slightest bit sour, like raspberries or citrus. But since then, I guess his digestive system has matured a bit, he can break that stuff down properly. Not long after, he's developed a taste for the more acidic foods like oranges. Is it a coincidence that he avoided them before? I wonder...