Water Play

Leon has had a lot or opportunity to play with water lately and he really enjoys it. He has always been a fan of bath time but with the warmer weather we have taken advantage of outdoor water sources as well. The pool in our neighborhood was undergoing some renovations and it took some time for them to open it for the season. In the meantime, the little baby pool especially, but the big one as well, had a lot of tree debris and algae in them. This, for some reason, fascinated Leon. He considered it a a complete treat to "go see the yuckies," to where he would use the potty and send Mommy off easily at daycare drop off if only she promised they could go look at the dirty pool later.

Temporary refugees from our pool privileges, we also ventured into the relative wilderness that is Little Falls Park near our house. Those falls are located on a small creek, which Dari and Leon love playing in, mostly throwing rocks in and uncovering what is under them. Our original objective was to go fishing but we have yet to see any fish.

Leon's daycare also started having the kids do water play for part of their outside time and Leon is a big fan of the sprinklers and hoses. Whereas last year he was a little reluctant to dive in and stayed mostly on the edges of that and of our community pool, he jumped right in this year and is eager to go in the big pool also. He is potty trained enough to where he could do it but the older ladies using the pool were eyeing him with great suspicion, last time he was considering going for a "swim." For now he reconsidered and is satisfied to splash in the baby pool but we might have a neighborhood feud on our hands, should he change his mind.

Birthday

This post comes very very late but I have actually taken notes without publishing them, so it will not be all digging from memory and may capture the amazing growth Leon has been busy with in somewhat real time. Just pretend you are reading this at the end of April ;). The biggest news from April was that Leon turned two. We celebrated in a few installments. Leon had some Mickey Mouse pancakes on the actual day of his birthday and got hooked on blowing out candles and admiring the smoke that followed.

He also celebrated with his friends at school and then we had a big party that we used mainly as an excuse to hang out with all our friends and to celebrate the first year in our new home, which has gone just great. Leon enjoyed the attention and was a big fan of the birthday cake and cupcakes, which big brother Dari helped decorate.

It was right around his birthday that Leon really started putting words together to express more complex thoughts, often surprising us with the sudden accuracy of his expression. The ones that struck me the most were the three below: very caring, very opinionated, and very self-aware, in that order.

Don't cry, Dari.
Too much banana.
MY purple ball (yeah, somewhere along the way he started learning colors too).

Leon is growing into a a very caring little boy, ready to check on anyone who may express any signs of discomfort, like the man who coughed at the other end of the parking garage one day and Leon asked right away if he was okay ("man okay?"). Similarly, whenever I sneeze, I get the inevitable "bless you Mommy" and I have learned not to act too upset when I stump a toe or step on a Lego block (and we all know how painful THAT is) because Leon gets way too worried about my well being.

Finally, we have made some great progress potty training Leon (and this is early June speaking) but even a month ago Leon was very eager to please us by at least attempting to go. Conversely, he would always praise both mommy and Dari whenever they "succeeded" in using the potty appropriately, saying "good job Mommy or Dari" - too funny!

Talking Twos

I never liked the "terrible twos" label. It just seems so unfair for little people trying so hard to figure how the world works. I think a much better name would be "talking twos" that captures the constant amazement, and, yes, occasional frustration, by all involved parties much better :). Leon has always been a "watcher," taking his time before he plunges into something and talking has been just one of those areas. I had written before about how he made do with just a few words in expressing all his needs for the longest time and felt no pressure to branch out. Until, all of a sudden, he decided he was ready, and now he is trying to tell us something all the time, repeating everything he hears very competently. This has become Dari's favorite game, getting Leon to repeat things (including some that he should not ;). So here's the top-hits list (or what I could remember).

Leon is getting better at it now but "s" has not been an easy letter for him and so he would say "moof" instead of moose or "fnow" instead of snow.

Fortunately we are well into spring blooms and snow is a distant memory but I have a video from about that time (when Dari was at Disney), where I captured Leon's deliberately reluctant answer to "are you happy?" which has ALWAYS been a half-teasing "noooo..." :)

https://youtu.be/jeZpC9mvSMc

He, STILL, refuses to say his own name on most occasions, even though he knows how (Ooonik :)), and will instead substitute "baby." I suspect some of this may be caused by how different his name sounds in English (Leon) and Slovak (Onik - which is short for Leonik), so he found a middle ground. This is how a typical exchange goes, between Dari asking him to say something and then Leon "repeating" it back:

D: Dari plays soccer.
L: Socca, Daaa! (update: as of this week, he started calling Dari "Dayi" :)
D: Leon plays soccer
L: Socca, Baby!

Leon celebrated "cosmonauts' day" (it's a thing, look it up!) by singing a song unprompted and all by himself, when he graced us with a(n abbreviated) rendition of the "Wheels on the bus" - he was very pleased when I recognized the "bus bus, and round, all town" as the song it was supposed to be :))

He is also learning A LOT of phrases in their proper grammatical form etc. from Dari, which makes his acquisition of Slovak a little less one-sourced (compared to Dari's, who mostly got it from me). Leon now knows all his different conjugations / language versions of the relevant verbs for wanting me to come/go wherever he needs me (coming, come, idem, ides, chod!, go away...) and when he wakes up, he does not just call my name or cry but he asks if "I'm coming!" (Mami, ides??) - this video shows the urgency with which he usually says it.

https://youtu.be/NJEOskq1bH0

Finally, Leon seems to be learning his colors (he has been, correctly, pointing out everything pink) but I am not sure he quite gets the full concept because whenever I offer him something and it is not the specimen he wanted, he'll say he wants "the blue one," meaning the "other one." This is him and some pink magnolias near our house.

Little Brother Getting Bigger

Lately, the boys have been playing together much more actively, with Leon ready to copy everything that his big brother is doing. He wants to sit exactly where Dari is sitting, do exactly what he is doing, and play in exactly the same way (which is an exercise in patience for everyone). Still, when we went biking on a late winter day, recently (and I mean winter; it just would not go away this year) the dynamic ended up somehow causing them to switch their respective vehicles and be perfectly fine with it all.

We are now working on teaching Leon to assert himself a little more, which should be especially useful when Dari does something he is not supposed to (of course, with the hope that Leon follows suit and it is even MORE fun). The plan is for Leon to sort of discipline Dari by taking some of the fun out of it, while starting to make some independent decisions. For example, he could remind him that we do not walk on the back side of the couch, rather than trying to accomplish the same even more dangerously. This has been successful some of the time and will likely work a little better when Leon can express himself more eloquently.

What has worked much better, has been Leon telling Dari "no thank you!" whenever he does something that displeases Leon, like snatching a toy or playing rough. This is a major improvement over indiscriminate crying, which clearly was not getting Leon anywhere and was adding unnecessary decibels that, as you can imagine add up over the course of a day, or a weekend... Way to go little brother!

The vast majority of time they are getting along very well and can be super sweet together. For some reason, Dari has taken to calling Leon "squishy face" and giving him lots of hugs periodically. I think some of this might have been the unintended effect of one of Dari's classmates being very expressive in her love for "Leon the baby" (to the point where Dari's teachers had to intervene to get her to go easy on the hugs virtually every time we picked Dari up or dropped him off). This, by the way, is Leon ready to go collect big brother at school:

It was kind of interesting to see Dari get very protective, possessive, even, of Leon as this was happening. Thankfully, the happy bond is mutual. When Dari went on this trip to Disney with Daddy, Leon missed him tremendously and was super sweet about always sending him a good-night kiss (via pictures that I then sent along, so we now have this precious collection :).

Christmas and Snow

This past Christmas was the first one that Leon was somewhat aware of, at least in the sense that something else was going on than the usual. He seemed to enjoy trying new foods and was fascinated by the decorated tree, threatening (sometimes fatally) the bauble decorations, especially. Of course, that is what one is supposed to do at his age and fortunately it all went without any injuries :).

Another novel experience for Leon was snow. Actually, there was not much of it at first but that did not stop him from insisting on getting pulled around on the sled in Bimba and Dedo's garden in Slovakia. Eventually there was much much more snow to play with and our main challenge was convincing him that he did, indeed, need to wear all his cold weather accessories.
 

 As always, Leon was closely shadowing Dari in all that he was doing, whether it was poking around the pond to "wake up" fishies or joining forces to pull a(n empty :) sled, once the heaps of snow finally arrived.

While Dari was getting his first skiing lessons, Leon was perfectly content to play a little ski bunny and lounge around, displaying perfect winter weather / ski-resort competence :).

Leon had a lot of fun indoors in Slovakia too. He discovered Dedo's old camera collection and had a lot of fun with before it was safely place out of his reach. My favorite part about the picture below is that he is wearing my old sweater (in case you were wondering about his decidedly 80s look)

He went on a few fun play dates with new friends (kiddies of Mommy's friends) and below you see him hang out with Mas(h)ka. As if there were not entertainment enough, Bimba and Dedo took him and Dari to an indoor gym on one rainy day and he really got into all the mazes and climbing areas there. Although, apparently, Leon is NOT a fan of the ball pit...

Leon has always been best buddies with great-grandma (Starka) and in the pictures below you can see them sharing a laugh and also Leon giving Starka a lesson in using the iPad!

He had a great time in Slovakia and when we were settled in the airport hotel room, Dedo was able to snap this picture of Leon, which would easily find its place in the country's tourism promotion catalog.

You should not, therefore, mistake Leon's excitement on the plane for exultation about leaving Slovakia, he was just happy (as was I) that he scored a free seat yet again!! (that would be 4/4 if we count the Thanksgiving trip to KY as well). We definitely made the most of the lap-child savings!

The Leon Thesaurus

The biggest advances Leon has made lately are in expressing his thoughts and commenting on everything he sees. He has quite a complex system of using only a few words with different intonations to describe a wide range of phenomena. For example:

"Peeh" means what you think it would but also "push" (whether a stroller or a button) and also fork (from the Slovak word "pich," which means poke)

"Amaa" is his name for Grandma but he generously applies it to Grandpa also :). Oddly, that is also his word for helicopter. Actually, it is not that odd, considering that Dari points out the government helicopters we frequently see overhead as having Obama in them, sometimes multiple Obamas, depending on how many helicopters there are. So I think that's where Leon got it. DC baby, what can I say.

"baby" means baby but Leon also refers to all yogurts with that word because the brand he usually gets has a picture of a yogurt-eating baby on it. This results in some interesting statements on my end, such as "Leon, I'm sorry, you can't have a baby, you ate them all already and we have to go to the store to get some more."

"Daah" is what he says for Dari (and Daddy, but that is understandable). Everything was Daah, however, when Dari left for a week in Kentucky and Leon was really missing him. Dari's chair, cup, toys, shoes, everything. He even insisted that the little boy we saw at the airport wearing jammies like Dari's WAS Dari, and he made me walk over there and say hi. Too cute. This is how happy he was to see his big brother again (blurry because Dari was excited too and was rocking him on his knees)!

He also has one word for all opposites. So he says "open" when he wants something both open, and closed. This was a bit of an issue when we were on the plane to Vienna and he wailed about wanting his seatbelt open and open and open, no matter its actual status. The key fact to note here, however, is that Leon had his OWN seat belt. I was feeling adventurous when I was making the flight reservations and did NOT get Leon a ticket, taking advantage of likely the last trip where he could be a lap child. I was not completely oblivious to how difficult this might be and so I very strategically selected / paid to reserve seats on the plane that would make this doable (there is some extra space in economy class, if you know where to look for it). However, a check-in employee who thought he was being helpful moved us from those seats, which left me in a slight state of panic as we were about to board and I realized this. The Lufthansa manager was very nice about this though, and Leon either charmed or scared her into upgrading the lady who was seated next to us to 1st class and so the flight was MUCH more comfortable for all involved. Thank you, Austrian. Here is Leon sleeping in his bonus space, all buckled in with a new glowing baby and stuffed bear that he got for early Christmas from Daddy and my friend Sarah, respectively.

This would be practically impossible on any U.S. airline, as we all know. EXCEPT Southwest, who we flew to KY for Thanksgiving (that was a lot of fun for Leon, see video links at the bottom). Their free seating arrangement let us basically grab an extra seat, after getting a permission at check-in, when it was clear the flight would not be completely full. Nice, right? Ok, those are all the airline endorsements I can offer. Besides these satisfied and / or plain shocked looks from our lucky traveler:

We also tried to take advantage of the high density of humans on the flight to finally nail down the difference between man and woman but Leon is still leaning towards referring to most people as ladies. To be fair, there was a man with a pony tail right across the aisle from us... Leon even got his own lecture from Dari about this, who tried to painstakingly convince his little brother that Mr. Rogers is, indeed, a man (Uyo) and not a lady (teta). It was very funny to watch and also kind of awesome because they were totally having a conversation.

http://youtu.be/G1k7vM1ZKAc

http://youtu.be/RXpeVB6HZ00

Halloween

This was Leon's first Halloween when he was a bit aware of what was going on, although thoroughly perplexed by it all. He was not sure why we were putting bat ears on him (for excessive cuteness, of course), why random people were giving him candy, why some of them were wearing masks and crazy outfits, and why the candy he got had to be in these silly (and seemingly edible) wrappers.We had to do a dry / acclimation run for those ears the night before the school parade because Leon was not a big fan of dress-up at first. Sweeping with a big broom proved to be enough of a distraction to overcome that obstacle.

After trick-or-treating, Leon saw Dari getting into all the candy and got the idea very quickly. He grabbed a package of rolos and basically just took a bite, chewing on the paper infused in chocolate, seemingly very satisfied with the taste :). This is also a fun variation on a Halloween video with did with Dari.

http://youtu.be/QOYBfAs3U44

Leon has been enjoying the outdoors - our day at the pumpking patch was gorgeous.

Outside of Halloween, Leon was going for his daily walks with Bimba while she was here and spent a lot of time at the park. Below you can see him making the sign for "more" - as in, stop taking those pictures and swing me already!

We also got to spend a bonus day with Bimba, because upon arriving at the airport she was offered to volunteer getting bumped of her overbooked flight for about half the price of a ticket. The best of both worlds right? The only catch was that we had to wait for her to go to the plane and back (so they could see if they would actually need her seat - they did ;)), so we entertained ourselves for about an hour and a half at the airport. Both boys were really good about it and even humored me for this photo op! My favorite carry-on and personal item :).