And Then I Stepped in Gum . . .

Ian Update

Hallelujah! After a week of waking up for an hour and a half in the middle of the night, Ian finally slept through the night again last night. He fussed a couple of times, but didn't require us to go in to get him back to sleep. I almost feel like a normal person again, although it meant I had no excuse not to go to the gym this morning.

I've been wanting to get some things written down about Ian. I mean, it's not like he really has a baby book -- heck, Katie doesn't even have a baby book. So since my blog is sort of a diary/snapshot in time for me, I thought I'd put it here.

First off, there's his vocabulary, which is not as big as I'd like it to be. At 21.5 months, he has three categories of "words": actual words that people other than us can understand; words that consistently mean something, but which bear little relation to the word they're supposed to be; and sounds. The last category is probably his biggest; he is onomatopoeia boy.

Actual words: all over, mama, dada, bye, uh-oh, bowl, towel, ball, yeah, up (although this sometimes means down), bubble, pop, door, stop (dop), Boo (when he's pretending to be the girl from Monsters Inc.), other

Ian words: oh-low (color, yellow), Dah (Katie), I-na (I wanna), eth (yes), duh (done), dar (star), nuh (no), ba-ba (baby or bottle), bah (Wiggles), nap (map -- thanks, Dora), mah-mah (grandma, sounds different than mama), bup (butt), nuh (nurse), zzzz (Pez)

Sounds: He makes sounds for cat (yow), monkey (ee-ee-ee), dog (woof, woof), car/truck/bus (brrrm, brrm), horse (pretty authentic neigh), bird (tweeting sound), donkey (ha-ha), owl (ooh, ooh), train (ch-ch), airplane (engine noise), rocket (engine noise, but different than that of an airplane), shark (like the Jaws theme -- doo-DOO, doo-DOO), fish ("popping" his lips), cold (shivers and says "ohhh, ohhh"), hot (blows), monster (growls "bah-BAH"), bug (same as monster; I don't know why), bee (zzzzz)

I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Dave, feel free to add whatever you can think of.

The funny thing is that he'll imitate sounds right away, and be really proud of himself for it, but I can't get him to copy our words. I don't know what that's all about.

He knows all his body parts (though he still mixes up his cheek and his chin), and this week he learned to identify all of the planets on Katie's model of the solar system. I wouldn't believe this, either, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

He's in a phase of lining things up -- rocks from a gravel yard, blocks, squares of cork -- and making them trains. He lines them up and then stands back, proudly pointing and saying "ch-ch." He also likes to stack his blocks, and is building rockets out of his bristle blocks.

This morning we had a moment that crystallized why I had two kids. Katie has made two paper bag puppets over the last week in kindergarten, a cow and an alligator. She had them both out this morning, and Ian wanted to see them. First she put on a brief puppet show for him, then she actually gave him one without a fuss. Then they ran around the house in circles, shrieking with hysterical laughter, as his alligator chased her cow, trying to eat it. No crying, no fighting, just playing together. It was really, really nice -- if a little loud. It made me smile, which isn't all that easy at 6:30 a.m.

posted by Jennifer Morgan, at 2:47 PM