Grandma and Granddougie

Grandma Carla and Granddougie came to visit over Memorial Day weekend (pictures here). Nicky loved playing with his grandparents at all of our favorite parks and at the CAoS. We loved seeing Carla and Doug too, but loved our night away in San Francisco even more! Nicky had so much fun on his night without mommy and daddy that he barely even glanced up when we got home – I’d say that it was a highlight for all of us. What a perfect way to kick off June, which is going to be full of a new job for Sam, work travel for me and a family vacation to the east coast…we needed that night of relaxation! 

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New Developments

Nicky was begging for some water in a big boy cup (i.e. not a sippy cup) yesterday so I gave him a bit of water in a cup, and then promptly got distracted by a conversation with Sam and didn’t notice when Nick walked off.  A minute later, out of the corner of my eye I noticed Nick come back into the kitchen, grab a towel and leave again.  He came back a second later making his noise for “help” and when I went to see what he wanted I discovered all of the water spilled on the floor.  My big, big boy hadn’t uttered a peep when he spilled his water, he had just walked off to get a towel and started cleaning up his mess all by himself. 

*****

Nicky has been picking up lots of new tricks lately and I find myself wondering where he’s learned these things?  I’m sure he’s learning them at daycare, but he still manages to surprise me.  Like when I was taking his picture yesterday and said, “Nicky, look at the camera”, and he turned to me with a big cheese ball grin on and said “cheee” (aka cheese).  Or when I asked him to point to the walrus tusks in his book, fulling expecting to create a teaching moment, but he beat me to it by immediately pointing to the tusks.   Or, the saddest of all, last week when he started puckering up to give us kisses.  Now I know I wouldn’t have taught him that because I loved his open mouthed slobbery baby kisses and I miss them now that he’s learned how to kiss like a big boy!

*****

Nicky has had a language explosion in the past two weeks with about a dozen new words and lots of attempts to repeat words with varying degrees of success.  He tends to drop the second half of syllables so words like ball, bat, bath and bus kind of all sound the same, but in context it’s usually pretty obvious what he’s trying to say.  Today he had his first two word sentence: “hi daddy”.  Talking, here we come!

Thad’s Visit

2011-05-15_08-21-32_455 Fun, fun weekend (pictures here).  Thad visited from New York and the big boys had lots of fun catching up, playing video games and running Bay to Breakers.  Sam beat his goal of finishing in under an hour (yay!) so we got to celebrate that in addition to celebrating Michael finishing school, Sam’s new job and Thad’s visit.   

 

IMG_5054Kellen and Nicky had a blast playing together all weekend long — the two of them were having lots of little conversations (either in English or some combination of Nicky language and English), giving each other high fives, and cracking each other up all weekend.  We took the boys to a tiny little local zoo where the highlight was the bobcat feeding.  Nicky was so excited to see the big kitties that he pressed himself as close as he could get to the cage and meowed at the top of his lungs and waved his little heart out trying to get their attention.  He seemed like such a big boy playing with his big friend Kellen and obviously thinks everything Kellen does is just about the coolest, funniest thing he’s ever seen in the whole world. 
 
Which brings me to Nicky’s first inside joke.  We have no idea what “doe be doe be doe” means, but apparently it’s hilarious.  According to Kellen “that’s from Nicky and I”:
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Aquarium

After a pancake breakfast and park time this morning, we continued the Mother’s Day festivities at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco (pictures here).  As always, Nicky loved the aquarium and we loved watching our little boy exploring.  I couldn’t imagine a better present for Mother’s Day than playing with Nicky all day. 

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Zoo

Today we celebrated Mommy’s Day a day early with a trip to the Oakland Zoo (pictures here).  Nicky enjoyed feeding all the animals, from trying to force the goats to eat hay to trying to feed a piece of dirt to a giraffe.  Fun was had by all.   

We came.

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We saw.

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We conquered.

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