New Things

Bud just keeps surprising us with new things! Last week we were playing with his wooden stacking rings and when he pulled the yellow one off he said "purple." Everytime BV and him play with the rings BV tells him what color each ring is, and it's starting to stick in his brain that the colors have names. Also, one night I showed him how he can stack one block on top of another and he did it himself!

He's walking almost full time now and is getting so comfortable with it that he carries stuff around. One day he carried his Fisher Price school bus down the hall and into the kitchen. We bought a package of diapers last night and I set them on the floor at the end of the hallway and he picked them up and carried them all the way down the hall and into his room, then carried them back to the kitchen! When we visited Zach & Nicole last weekend they had a disposable camera that Bud was walking around with and he would put it up to his eye (while walking) and pretend to take pictures. Bud and Colin play really well together now (Bud doesn't hit Colin near as much as he used to). It's really cute because Colin follows Bud around everywhere he goes and watches him very closely.

The best new thing of all happened this morning; I was leaving for work and told Bud goodbye and said I love you - and he said I love you back to me! We've been trying to get him to say love you for awhile now but he doesn't say "l" words very often. He repeats what we say often and I hope this one sticks in his vocabulary! Another of his new words is "pretty;" I had my socks off the other day and my toenails are painted and Bud pointed at my toes and said "pretty." We visited my parents last weekend and my Mom keeps trying to get Bud to say Grandma. Then we asked him to say Grandma T and he now calls her "ah T", like ma T without the "m" sound.

We're also finding it difficult to get Bud to stop doing something that we don't want him to do. We tell him "don't pull Mommy's hair" or "don't touch the VCR" (we have it barricaded but he's tall enough now he can reach it) but he keeps going back to whatever it is we don't want him to do. When we get mad at him he just laughs, which either then makes us more mad or we just chill out because it's hard to take him seriously. One day Bud was resisting his nap and was just chatting away in bed. BV went in and said, "Shhhh!" and Bud just scrunched up his nose and said "Shhhh!" right back at him. We think Bud knows what things he's not supposed to do because as he's reaching for something he'll say, "No, no, no." We try not to use "no" a lot but obviously we said it too many times that he learned the meaning.

I think I have given enough of an update for now. Happy Thanksgiving!