Friday, April 9, 2010

Stating His Intentions

A very new development is that Gabriel can explain his needs/wants/intentions pretty clearly now. If he wants to read, he says "book." (He also said this when he just wants to delay naptime-- tonight, as I put him to bed far too late at 9 PM, even as I carried him to the crib he was pointing at the bookshelf saying "book!"

Not quite so new, but very predictable, is "juice." First thing he asks for every morning, after "mama." He gets a mix of OJ and water.
This is mildly worrisome because he seems about as dependent on this as part of his morning as we are on coffee.

In terms of word combinations, he's still working on two-word sentences. "Blue truck" remains ubiquitous, and it's a brush with which he tars too many things. Lots of red cars are being labelled "blue truck" by G. Sometimes he appears to be using it describe things that don't even have wheels, and that aren't blue at all. It's an argument we have a lot.

He's always spoken in sentences-- it's just that they're generally gibberish. But now he's getting closer. When he first wakes up, he expresses his desire to see Alison by saying "Na na MAMA." And pointing me to the bedroom.

When Alison was in San Francisco without us last week, the first morning he made that request and of course I had to bring him into an empty bedroom. He wasn't happy about that at all.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Roosevelt Island

Home with Gabriel this afternoon: we took a bike expedition to Roosevelt Island, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. This is a small island nestled between two fairly busy roads, I-66 as it crosses the Potomac and the G-W Parkway in Rosslyn. And it's directly in the last stages of the flightpath into National Airport. But the island itself is unspoiled, in that swampy way that much of the Potomac banks seem to be. And there's a very nice bike path that gets you there. You can hop on a path at the front of the Kennedy Center and be safe as houses until you reach the Island-- where you have to leave bicycles on the mainland and walk across.

Gabriel didn't seem especially impressed. The statue of Roosevelt, which has a bit of socialist realism to it, seemed to scare him a bit, and he wasn't so interested in walking around.
But he really does enjoy being in the bicycle. I have to be careful about leaving his bicycle trailer too prominently in the backyard, because he'll sometimes insist on going for a ride.

On the way home we stopped at a nice small park that I'd never seen before, at Virginia and 21st. We sat on the ground and ate his entire supply of edamame.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

More new words from Gabriel

Gabriel's now at a point where if you ask him to repeat a word, he will take a crack at it-- and will generally do pretty well. But it's quite different when you haven't solicited the word and he blurts it out in the proper context.
Examples from this evening:
1) "pizza." Gabriel and I rode our bike up to Cleveland Park to get pizza from Vace. I got a few slices; they put the slices in a paper bag and I threw the bag in the back of the Burley trailer, and we went home. When I got him inside the house, I asked Gabriel if he wanted dinner. He said "pizza" and nodded. He really likes pizza.
2) "paci" (short for pacifier). As I was taking him upstairs tonight to put on pajamas, we passed the kitchen island, and he pointed at something on it and said "paci". And he was pointing at his pacifier.
3) "bath". While tonight was scheduled bath night (every other day, is his current schedule), we got in late enough that i was ready to let it slide. But as I was taking off his clothes and his old diaper, getting set to put on the nighttime diaper and his pajamas, he got up and said "bath." And headed for the bathroom.
4) "milk". He's said it before, but tonight I asked him whether he wanted water or milk, and he emphatically said "milk."
This is a clever lesson Alison taught me, by the way-- when he's fixated on a thing he wants to do, that I don't want him to do (like staying outside in the front yard endlessly, as was the case tonight), you don't tell him he can't stay outside anymore. You ask him to choose between two different options, each of which preclude staying outside. Hence my milk v. water choice. And it worked great-- meltdown averted.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Richard Scarry, Hack Writer

It's got no plot. It's got recurring characters (namely "Goldbug") that are as cloying as the Brady Bunch's Oliver.
But it's got lots and lots of cars. So it's OK with Gabriel.

Richard Scarry's books seems a lot less compelling to me now than they did to me as a youngster, and "Cars and Trucks and Things that Go" is no exception. In the end, it's just a mechanism for learning what different kinds of internal combustion engines look like-- and most of them date to the 1970s anyway.

But Gabriel loves it, so it's OK.

This was his book du jour for a while, starting at the age of 18 months or so. It's no longer his first choice very frequently, but he still comes back to it.

And it's a hard one to show much sympathy for.

No More Sippy Cup?

There was a time when I laughed at people who said "sippy cup."
And that time may come again, as Gabriel now shows growing interest in drinking things our way-- from a glass.

Last week he drank successfully from a regular straw for the first time. This was at Open City Diner. He did it several times, and was so pleased each time that he smiled broadly. You can tell when he's pleased with himself, as opposed to just pleased.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Pots and Pans

We moved back into our house on Labor Day 2009, and Gabriel warmed up to his new surroundings pretty quickly. But in a couple of areas, he seems to disapprove of the way we've arranged things. As you see here, it turns out that we arranged the pots and pans in a completely unsuitable way. Here he takes them all out and rearranges in his preferred way. He's done this half a dozen times, and always puts things back-- just in a different way.