Cool dude

My cool little dude is almost 20 months old! I missed his 18-month and 19-month posts so here is an attempt to catch up a bit.

Height: we measured him a couple weeks ago, and he is now 31 inches - he grew well over an inch in the past two months. Incredible.

Development: He's started talking more, in addition to Mama, Dada, and a few other sort-of-words, he now says very clearly: Sun, Hajde ("come here" in Albanian), Agua, and Nëna (Grandma in Albanian). He says something sort of like "Lar-Lar" for Val-Val, and "Boo" for Pooh. And thanks to his sister's alphabetic orientation, he can identify a couple letters consistently and accurately, especially M and S.

He does adorably cute role plays either remembering things that happened, or telling us what he wants to do. He's currently fascinated by candles (we had a couple power outages recently) and one morning woke up saying "Wow! Wow!" and pointed up at the top of the book-cases, where Terry had put the candles the night before. This morning he burped, then put his hands over his mouth and mimed vomiting - ok not so cute, but here's the cute part: then he said "Nëna," and mimed cleaning the floor, because my mom had cleaned the rug after he threw up last week. He role plays putting toy animals and cars to bed, including trying to diaper a plastic horse, and giving a stuffed piglet a toy and blanket to sleep with.

He loves to dance and jump. One morning I just sat and watched him dance in circles around the kitchen, arms raised and jumping up onto his tiptoes, just brimming over with Life. He's such a delicious little squishy bundle of dimpled fun - I have to remind myself to soak it all in while I can.

Sleep: Sometime in December he dropped his morning nap. This was as the footsteps of doom for Pooh, since we used to use this quiet hour in the morning for some mother-daughter breakfast and craft time. But he just doesn't need it, and won't take it anymore. Then about a month ago he decided that a 7:00-7:30 bedtime is for babies, and oh no he's not a baby anymore! He's a big boy who sleeps in a bed, not in a crib, and not until he's good and readzzzzzz. So we've been trying to find a new equilibrium, one that will work even while Terry's away on work trips. Pray for us!!!!!