Linnaeus 2.1

After over a year of weekly updates, dialling it back to monthly is interesting. More to talk about but it's harder to remember 30 days or so, compared to a week. Here's the first month past his second birthday for you:

Feeding celery to the bunnies at Maplewood Farm

Appetite: here today, gone tomorrow.
When talking to other parents of toddlers, I kept hearing about how they couldn't get their kids to eat for most of their third year, or the kid refused everything but one food, etc. I (smugly) figured this would never happen to my child, the un-picky champion eater that he is. Then the week he turned two, it all changed. Sprout seemed to think breakfast is for chumps & wouldn't actually eat more than a couple of bites of toast. He still ate copious quantities of most fruits & cheese, but not much of anything else. His appetite during other meals of the day was also iffy, with the exception of fruit & meat. Now, a month later, his appetite seems back to normal. Maybe he just wasn't as hungry because of the bad cold he came down with mid month?

New foods this month: pupusas, barfi, chai, Krakus with milk, yellow watermelon, blackberries.

Poo or snot, which is worse?
Sprout's cold made him a snot factory for weeks. Ugh. I'm not sure why, but I hate wiping his nose when he's sick more than changing diapers. Ew, ew, ew.

Hair today, more tomorrow.
Though wiping food & snot out of it is icky, I'm going to let Sprout's hair grow longer. I'm enjoying Sprout's scruffy blond mop at the moment & it still isn't in his eyes yet. I've decided that we're both growing our hair out, actually. It's been a while since mine was longer than my shoulders.

♪♫ I hear the secrets that you keep... ♪♫
On the sleep front, there were a few days here & there with pretty restless sleep & late night/early morning wakings. We still deal with the wake-ups by just bringing him to bed with us & 99% of the time, he just goes right back to sleep once he's nestled between us. Interestingly enough, Sprout's started doing a lot of talking in his sleep lately. Sometimes it's a short sentence that makes sense, often it's random words or unintelligible. I find the first word he says upon waking is funny too. I should keep a list somewhere. 

Chatty Cathy.
A not-so-cute new-ish habit is shouting/screeching when he's slightly bored. This might happen when he's finished eating & still strapped into the high chair, or it might just be midday when I'm blogging. I need to keep on top of entertaining/occupying him throughout the day or he'll just start screaming at the top of his lungs. Even when he's playing & happy, he's a very vocal kid--I would not call him quiet. He has ongoing conversations with his toys & babbles on as he's playing around with the things he prefers to toys.

When he's talking & not screeching, Sprout's sentences are getting longer. Four & five word-sentences are becoming the norm, sounding a lot like ours. Things like, "Put it back up there" or "It's too high up". Now that he's been talking about a year, I'm still fascinated by his language development. He has such a wide vocabulary, but he still overgeneralizes, referring to men & women in general as "Papa" & "Mama". He doesn't use these terms as names for other people though & he knows the names of most people we see regularly, though he does have difficulty with his twin cousins, who he recently referred to in a photo as "Kiki & Kiki". Heh. They are identical & I can't tell them apart either except by clothing (Kira nearly always wears pink & Natalie doesn't).

Evil Eye.
Sprout has lately been perfecting his angry face. Last week as I was telling his papa a funny story about something he'd done earlier that day, I glanced over to receive The Look. He had his chin tucked & was glaring at me from under his little blond eyebrows. Eek, he's gotten good at glaring.

Running with the goats at Maplewood Farm

Time to minimize the toy collection?
I think we need to weed out a large number of his toys because he just doesn't play with them. A lot of the time he plays with pieces of paper, plastic or cardboard he drags out of the recycling bin. He loves putting his hand through toilet rolls & wearing them on his wrist. As his hands are not that little, the rolls inevitably get stuck & he starts waving his hand around, producing his 'I'm-stuck-in-something-somehow' alarm screech. (Of course, just as I'm writing this, he's taken his bin of toy tools off the shelf & is now 'fixing' the floor with a hammer after having played with his hacksaw, plane & pliers.)

To my chagrin, the one toy that he's really taken to is cars. He likes pretty much anything with wheels & will drive them around on an surface he can get, including the cross bar on the iBert seat as we're riding. Is it just me, or do you find it ironic that he loves playing with a toy car while we're riding a bike somewhere?