Interactive

It's a funny thing with a kid this age.  He's old enough to obviously have his own agenda, but not old enough to articulate what exactly that is.  Seeing him acting out his interior thoughts is comedy because, as an adult, we ascribe certain thoughts to his actions, like he's a kid from Look Who's Talking Now.  Which he obviously isn't, but we just put these thoughts in his head in an effort to make sense of what he's doing.  He's starting to talk a lot more now, so this era of thought bubbles is coming to a close, but his attempts at speech are funny in a totally different way.  And adorable.

He has maybe a dozen or fifteen words that he uses regularly, though he understands more than that.  In a family with a toddler, it's a kind of backwards logic that the kid teaches the family his words and the family adopts the kid's vocabulary.  One such word we've taken on is ChiCha, which we believe means "sister," though for him it's a little more broad.  He definitely uses it for Huelan, but also sometimes points to other people and himself as says ChiCha. So far, he doesn't yet have a name for himself, but he can name pretty much everyone he sees regularly.

This is a vid I got one recent morning, and it's pretty much the story of every morning.  At least the good ones (of which there are more, since he's been waiting til after 7AM to wake- Hallelujah!).  He gets a bottle then we play around a bit - here we're in the kitchen getting a morning snack.  As he's trying to convince me to get him some more, he hears his ChiCha in her room.  In his mind, the fact that she's kind of awake is permission to enter.



He's matured so much just in the past week or two.  He's definitely trying to communicate with words and he is super playful.  Kissing and hugging are huge with him right now- everyone gets a goodnight kiss and he kisses Elmo every time he sees him.  Big, demonstrative, smoochy kisses.  It's pretty much the best.  Here's something he picked up- the stinky feet game:



Speaking of Elmo, I have no idea how Sesame Street does it, but they are terrific at creating these addicting characters for kids.  Vansen met Elmo for the first time at a cousin's birthday last month, and he's been obsessed with him ever since.  Vansen is a pretty big and feisty kid, and he is particularly ornery on the changing table.  When he has to be on there for an extended period of time, we've taken to showing him a YouTube clip of Elmo.  It's gotten to the point now that when he loads up his diaper, he makes us aware of it by pointing to his butt and saying, "Elmo!"