Andrew at 21 Months

We're rounding the bend toward Andrew's second birthday and, my, how he has been a-changin'!

He's grown up a good bit over the last few months, but especially once we brought the baby home.  I've been so proud of him for assuming the big brother role so gracefully.  He loves to hold John Fletcher several times a day, find his passy when he cries (or just suggest that JF needs "mo' milk"), and put his diapers in the trash.  He always asks to kiss baby goodnight, includes him in all rounds of high-five's, and bends deeply at the waist to hug and kiss John Fletcher in his bouncy seat.  Makes me smile!

He's actually allowing us to read books to him now, rather than just flip frantically through the pages.  He especially loves books about animals, and ever since he received Curious George from our cousins, he's been pretty much obsessed with that little 'monk.'  I think it's fitting.

He plays in his toy kitchen a lot and builds many a Lego tower.  He also makes frequent requests to watch videos on youtube...among his favorites are baby sign language and nursery rhyme videos, as well as one 9 minute video of garbage trucks.  Just real garbage trucks doing real stuff...you know, driving down the road, stopping at dumpsters, dumping trash and the like.  No music, no words, no great cinematic effects.  Just garbage trucks.  I have to cut it off at about 3 minutes, but he loves it.

Andrew's vocabulary has skyrocketed.  All the time now, he just picks up new words without our teaching them to him and will try to repeat almost anything.  Still not really stringing words together in sentence-fashion, but talking all the time.  He's started to tell stories.  His favorite right now is about an apparently life-changing moment when he was accompanying Jacob to the trash chute and a paper cup fell out of the trash bag, so Jacob picked it up.  Andrew says many, many times a day, "trash...hup (cup)...uh-oh...up...Dada."  He says it when we leave the apartment, when he talks on the phone with Gr'mama, when the doorman asks how he's doing, when he sees a paper cup, or just any other ol' time it strikes him as a good story to tell.

He refers to all letters as "B" and all numbers as "2," but if pressed, he can identify A,B,C, and sometimes O and S, and...um...not a single number.  He loves to ride the Metro ("choo-choo") and as we stroll the city, he points to all the elevators and escalators to the underground and asks to go down them.  He continues to be intrigued by anything on wheels--taxis, firetrucks, motorcycles, Segways (herds of Segways tour the city each day), bikes, tractors--each one is exclaimed over.  And we do not leave the house without a ball of some sort.

The little guy wants to be just like his daddy.  In the mornings, he'll drag Jacob's briefacse up the stairs and tell us he's going to work.  He wants to talk on Jacob's cell phone and type on his BlackBerry and listen to his music.  He asks all day long where Daddy is and squeals with delight when he gets home.  His favorite activity is going on weekend morning runs with Daddy, but anything done with Daddy is done gleefully (except maybe diaper changes--he hates those, no matter what).

He's pretty good with colors.  Blue's his favorite, but red, green, yellow, orange, gold, peach, pink, brown, and white are also in his repertoire.  And, no, I didn't teach him to identify things as gold or peach.  He just started doing it (based on the color of Goldfish and peaches, I think?).  Guess he likes that part of the spectrum.

Coloring has also become a happy pastime. And when we've colored a page all up, we fold it into a paper airplane and he tries to fly it into the (vaulted) ceiling.  Not much success on that front.

It's been so much fun to see Andrew begin to grow into a little boy. While I'm still holding on tight to his "littleness," I now realize that each of his developments mean I get to know him more fully, and that is something to cherish!