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