Half Birthday :)

Baby Leon just turned 18 months. We could say that he has now reached the "toddler adulthood" and can vote, fight for his country, and drive (in Europe...). He thinks so.

On voting, he has been getting much more vocal in voicing his opinions. Sometimes I offer him some snack or a sippy cup and he will walk up from across the room only to push it aside and say "no!" very decisively. Because, you know, just saying it from where he was might not make the vote count ;). These days he can also be very picky about the books we read, emphasizing any disapproval with a well-practiced "no!" Finally, Leon has some strong preferences about the clothes he likes to wear. Whenever I put a shirt on him, he checks the sleeves right away to examine the pattern, partly to approve and partly to just come up with something he could comment on (like "lions" "cars" or "stripes!"). The other night, he made me pull out the jammies with fire trucks and put them on him, even though officially they are labeled 9-12 months and are more than a tad small - I just did not get around to reorganizing his drawer. In a related story, once we got his winter shoes in the mail and tried them on, he would NOT let me take them off. I even had to put them back over the same footed firetruck pajamas after changing him at bed time. It took some serious maneuvering to avoid having him wear them to bed too. The next morning, the FIRST thing he said when I walked in his room was "shoes, shoes" and I had to put them back on. At that point I had to take these pictures :). In the last one he is asking to check out the camera, which
he calls "cheese" :).

 
On battles, his personality just does is not very combative, which is great for playing with Dari. However, he will fight pretty fiercely for his right to stay awake or sit on the surface of his choice, no matter how high up and potentially dangerous. To be fair, he sees Dari break non-climbing rules periodically and it is just too tempting. Unfortunately, he is also expanding his arsenal of weapons and although we have yet to enter full out tantrum territory, he now takes careful note of all (to him) favorable precedents and will remind everyone of what it is he wants, often quite loudly and persistently.

On driving, Leon has diverse preferences when it comes to vehicles. Last week his daycare organized a fundraiser "Trike-a-thon," where the kids circled around a park riding their bikes. Leon opted for pushing a toy baby stroller (sans baby) that time. However, he is also into pushing our big stroller and Dari is more than happy to switch roles with his baby brother on that. In an entertaining display of some serious resourcefulness, Leon tipped over the office trash can the other day and rode it like a horse (complete with horse sounds)!

Finally, to celebrate his 18-month birthday, we repeated the "Cheerio test" that we did with Dari when he was about this age. Here is the video capturing Leon's effort to get to a cereal puff, the desired cognitive leap resting in turning the bottle over, rather than just shaking it or trying to fish the puff out (amazingly, for Leon this unfolded in precisely the three steps it took Dari to figure it out - see here: http://babydarian.blogspot.sk/2012/02/valentines-and-cheerios.html). Homo Sapiens test passed ;). Happy half birthday to our favorite baby human!

http://youtu.be/i1PfdUJuSNo

Learning

Leon has been making strides in learning about the world. These are very visible and often hilarious. First of all, we are learning a couple of new words every day, and I know that his vocabulary (or rather the ability to pronounce all the language he already understands and processes) is about to explode. So far, we are mostly at one-word observations. For example, Leon has learned to say "WOW!" and it can be pretty funny to see what impresses him. So far, the winner in general impressiveness is breakfast, specifically the Slovak variety of cream of wheat (decorated with a smiley face ;). He'll keep saying wow until he finally can't because he has to start eating it. Leon also has a few key phrases. One such phrase is "no more" which he basically uses to fine tune his use of "all done." He pronounces it as either a toddler or a rapper would: "No mo' " - if that is how you spell it. Leon also uses "no mo' " to inform me that there is no more (breast)milk - which alone is entertaining because he says it kind of matter of factly but with a tone of surprise and expectation. Yes, he can pack a lot of expression into his little voice. The other night he took the no-more-milk thought a step further and when he saw a toy cow, complete with udders, he pointed at her and said "no mo' " - so apparently there is not enough milk anywhere in this world ;).

Leon is doing great at his daycare and really enjoying all the fun the teachers plan for them. We get a biweekly schedule of everything they do and I found the most recent one especially entertaining and even inspiring when I saw the "inclement weather activities." It went like this: Rocking back and forth on the rocking chair - Pretend picnic on carpet area - Glittery sand with big bugs in sensory table - Draw with wet chalk on butcher paper - Walk on bubble wrap (What do you hear?) Sounds pretty awesome to me! Regardless of the weather, Leon is always having a good time there.

He is also getting better at associating situations and routines with actions to be taken. While he is still quite clingy with separation anxiety and prefers my arms to anyone else's, this magically reverses at bedtime, when he is eager to go look up Bimba, only so that she can hold him and so that I don't put him down. In a similar attempt at avoiding the inevitable, yesterday, when we were done reading books and he knew it was almost time to turn off the light, he walked up to his dresser pulled out his swimsuit, sat down, and demanded I put the shorts on him. Time for pool, Mommy... Too funny! It the picture below you see Leon delaying bedtime by sneaking a story with Dari, who graciously tolerates him pointing out every single cat in the Busytown books with a "nau" (and if you haven't seen those, there are a LOT ;).

Nice Boys and Small Spaces

Leon and Dari have been very excited to check out new places to show Bimba during her visit here. Amazingly, we have not made it to the ZOO yet but there are a number of fun things we already checked off the list. We have been trying to spend as much time as we can enjoying the lovely early fall weather outside and took a couple of trips to the mall and the surrounding museums. Often the walks are a bit long for Dari and it is a big help that Leon is just so mellow and basically does not care about having Dari sit directly in his lap (not on top of him, just RIGHT in front). For longer trips, I fold back the seat and put Dari behind Leon. That, thankfully, elicits the same non-reaction. I think it's great, in addition to plain practical. There's a saying in Slovak that you can fit a lot of good people is a small space, and I keep telling the boys that it is doubly true for nice little brothers. Fingers crossed that it sticks...

On another sunny weekend we drove out to the National Arboretum, where we checked out the "dwarf" trees (bonsais). This was definitely a highlight for Bimba but I think Leon enjoyed it also. He later decided to be more "hands on" in exploring the plant specimens they had there and sneaked a (to me) unknown berry in his mouth. I noticed right away and a quick internet query (thanks, Facebook friends) assured me that he was going to be fine. However, the episode forced me to update my calculations of risks facing 18-month-olds - Dari STILL would not even contemplate tasting a berry (including the tame, fridge kind) and it's just something I never had to worry about. Well, lesson learned. Maybe we need to feed Leon more still, or he will go scavenging for potentially dangerous desserts ;)

In case you did not notice, Dari is sharing a ride in the above picture as well. It is kind of funny to imagine Leon's legs being the bigger pair, though. The boys also hitch a shared ride whenever we go to Target - a quick stop at the dollar aisle and some milk from Starbucks easily get us through our monthly shopping list.

All these outings are also logistically easier now that Leon sleeps only once a day. That is the schedule he's been on at school for some time now but I took the plunge and switched him completely. With this, too, he kind of just went with the flow. 

End of Summer Fun

The days after our return from Europe were wonderfully warm and Leon took advantage of the trips to the pool that Bimba took him on. He is not a swimmer yet. In fact, he prefers to only walk around the pool and experiment with the floatation characteristics of various objects ranging from shoes to food containers and only rarely actual pool toys. Leon's always been a cautious observer (rather than enthusiastic adventurer), so we just let him take it all in.

Other activities with Bimba include regular walks around the neighborhood, including a stop at Starbucks where I go work - he now assumes that is what we do, and is not even surprised to see me there. We check in for a little bit and then they are off again to check out the birds and helicopters, both Leon's favorites. Commonly, they end the walk at the nearby playground and just looking through the pictures on Bimba's phone, I thought you could see Leon visibly grow between such visits.

Overall, Leon is doing much better with being away from me and although it is still too much of a cognitive / emotional challenge for him to happily wave bye bye, he will "see me off" (literally) whenever I have to leave. That is a considerable improvement over the first couple of weeks at daycare, for example, when he insisted on getting picked up when he thought I might be leaving and started waving and sending kisses to the teachers to inform them that he is going with me. When that did not work, he got very upset - didn't he make himself clear?? These days, though, he makes a bee line for the snack table or books, usually. There is also a window in the wall to the adjacent classroom, which happens to be Dari's and Leon LOVES to peek in there and look for his big brother, saying :"Duh, Duh" = his word for Dari. And every time at pick-up, he can't wait to go in with me and check out all the big kid toys. Here he is playing with one of my favorites, this super inclusive toy-people set -  I think he might have thought the child in the wheelchair was just fun to push around, but whatever. Their daycare rocks.