April 17, 2011
Dear Nicky,
What a new and different month we had! The biggest milestone this month was that we had our first conversation, which went something like this:
Me: Nicky, do you want a yogurt?
You: No!
Me: Do you want a banana?
You: Yeah!
I know, it wasn’t much, but after 16 months of one sided conversations and a couple months of you communicating dislikes via temper tantrums, this felt positively civilized. And the major upside was that you didn’t have to catapult your yogurt all over the dining room to get your point across. Yipee! So now in addition to all your animal noises, you have about 6 words: yes, no, hi, bye, ball and bat (the flying rat, not the baseball stick, go figure). “Mommy” and “daddy” are still coming along, but right now, you’re really just using mommy when you’re annoyed or want something – for example, yelling “mommy mommy mommy mommy!” while pointing at the pacifier on the kitchen counter…but you say it equally to me or daddy so we still have a bit of work to do there before we can officially call it. You love having phone conversations now too, and you can pretty much hold your own on the phone – you know to say “hi” at the beginning, then you answer all the questions you’re asked, and then when you’re bored you say “bye”…it’s precious! The whole time you’re “talking” on the phone you parade around the house with a giant smile on your face and show the person on the other line all of your favorite toys.
You’ve learned some pretty cool tricks this month. My favorite is that you figured out how to whistle. How did you figure that out? For a little bit there you were whistling everywhere you went, it was pretty cute. You also like to blow your nose now. You grab a square of toilet paper, hold it up to your nose and blow the smallest bit of air out of your nose. Then you take the toilet paper and then you squish it up into the tiniest ball until it’s all 100% contained within your fist and you march over to the garbage can and throw it out.
This month it’s warmed up and dried out finally and you’ve been celebrating by practically living outside. If you called all the shots you would spend every waking hour on the front walk. It works out nicely because we have a ton of kids under 5 on the street and everyone tends to come out front after work so you get to play with all your friends, but it sure does make it hard to get dinner on the table! When you’re inside, you’ve developed a love of art projects. We have to get the coloring book and pens out at least once a day. You’ve figured out how to take the caps off your pens and you love putting them back on, but your aim is still a little wobbly and you often end up coloring on yourself. Most of the time it’s accidental but I’ve noticed some intentional self-tattooing going on occasionally as well…hopefully this phase will end before you graduate from washable markers to something more permanent!
Little boy, you are so wonderful. We love you!
Love, Mommy