Back!

It's been a long hiatus, but no, we have NOT abandoned this blog!

Jolly is getting bigger and doing new things every day.

He's started to get really excited about putting things into other things. A week or two ago discovered the intended use for his block sorter. The green cylinder can be sorted all of the time, the other shapes make it through trial and error. (To be fair, I think it would be cool if the square shape were the right size to allow the triangular prism and cylinder to go through as well, not just the cube!)

Before then, he'd been driving the block sorter around upside down and putting other things into that. Driving things around has been his favorite activity since his first birthday, where he got a toy ferry and quickly expanded that game to toy cars, books, shoes, blocks, chairs and the ottoman (sometimes with a passenger of the cat). Also his potty, which is not being used for its intended purpose at all, is definitely a great cargo ship for bathroom toiletries.

We're occasionally able to channel the "putting things into other things" enthusiasm into cleaning up, but more often he "puts away" things in rather perplexing locations. His favorite block of all time (a pale aqua piece from his toolbox) got sorted into the bathroom trash, and I only located it because Jolyon was trying to reach into the trash (which he usually doesn't do). I suspect his yellow screw from the same toolbox might have met its demise via a similar mechanism.

Best of all, though, is that when it comes to putting things into containers, by "containers", Jolly frequently means "shoes". When I was looking everywhere for my cellphone, we decided to have a look through all the shoes, and turned up not only some blocks but also a carrot. We generally have a "food only at the table" rule, but had broken it for the carrot because he was using it to massage his gums as his new molars are coming in. Ephiny was very glad that I lost my phone (it turned up in the car, not Jolly's fault) because they were shoes she doesn't wear that often and it could have been a very moldy affair by the time she noticed.

Otherwise, we've had an exciting couple of months with Jolly's first trip to the doctor for a self-inflicted injury (he had learned how to crawl onto the sofa, and even figured out how to get down from the front of the sofa, but was still learning about dismounting from the sides/back). All was well with the nosedive off the sofa in the end, but we've now programmed the triage nurse line for our health insurance into our phones. I think the "hard parts of parenting" are pretty exclusively the ones that involve profuse bleeding! (This time, both nose and mouth... very unnerving.) I suspect that this will just be the first in a series of doctor visits. The doctor we saw said, "So, has he learned how to climb onto the refrigerator yet?" and while the answer is currently no, I suspect that is a pretty accurate picture of our future!

Jolly is continuing to be jolly, and he's getting more fun each day. We're even starting to see signs of sharing, which is a welcome development after Baby's First Schadenfreude surfaced one week before his first birthday. (He would pretend to feed us food, then yank it away at the last minute and shove it gleefully into his own mouth.) He demonstrated this with toys when we signed up for a research study at the childhood cognitive developent labs... the point of the study was to investigate sharing, and it was very, very hard not to laugh.

He continues to be an adventurous eater. The other day he grabbed an onion off the cutting board and started eating it like an apple and was really upset when I tried to take it away from him. He also goes wild for leeks, and has a great fondness for chard stems, and seems to love the taste of (decaf) tea and (decaf) coffee when he's had sips from our cups. I fervently hope his palate continues to be this open-minded, because he's now eating everything we're eating without any additional separately prepared foods, and that is absolute perfection. I think weaning (first from the breast, then from the bottle) deserves its own post, but it happened smoothly and he's now eating meals with us, only drinking a bit more cow's milk after meals and demolishing a bit more fruit as snacks in between meals. (He recently ate an entire 1 lb container of blueberries in less than 24 hours. I had maybe 10 blueberries, Ephiny had 3.)

Verbal development is currently at saying "S-das?" and pointing at everything, presumably "Was ist das?", German for "What is that?", which is a phrase I had been uttering often. His first word was "cat" and then "Katze" (German word for the same), and then maybe also "Toast" (same in both languages). Our kid has his priorities, for sure. He also points at things and says "Da!" (German for "there!") a lot.

No walking yet, though he's stood a few times, and loves walking around when we're holding his hands, so I think we might be getting there eventually!