Gus at 17 Months

Lately I watch A walk over to a door, reach up and pull the handle and let himself out of a room, and I think about the 4 lb baby I brought home from the hospital, and then my head explodes because he's just grown and learned so much since then.

 


He's collecting new words all the time, and I'm losing track these days. He repeats new words a lot now, though he may or may not say the word again. Mouth ("mou") and obey ("bay") are two I've recently noticed. But definitely the word of the month is "book."


When he was very young, I read to him and felt like such a good mama. We read through the Jesus Storybook Bible five or six times. We read Golden books and nice long stories, and he sat contentedly on my lap. Around five or six months, he started grabbing at the pages, and there were many casualties. Around nine or ten months, he completely lost his "attention span" (read, inability to get away from Mama), and by the time he was a year, I could only read to him right when he woke up from a nap and was too groggy to run from me.

I started to worry that we weren't reading enough.

I'm not worried now.

Now he is obsessed with books. If Mama sits down for one second to collect her thoughts, he appears with a book. "Book?" he pleads. When he wakes up from a nap he used to ask for the dog, but now he wants a book. He follows me into the bathroom with books. He drops them on my foot when I'm cooking dinner. If I sit down to read with him, he will eventually bring me every book on his shelf if I stay in place long enough. And he "reads" to himself as well, which is super cute.

And I'm so glad. But we really need to get to the library because I am so. sick. of every book we own now.


He's also started trying to sing. Some Aussie friends gave us some Colin Buchanan CDs when we left--he's an Australian singer who does bible verse songs for kids. A few weeks ago Adam noticed that when one in particular was playing, A would try to repeat the chorus "feed on the word of God." He does the "feed on" part and repeats it every time the song does. He also sings it to himself occasionally. Then when I picked him up from childcare at BSF, the teacher told me he was singing "Jesus loves me." I sang it to him in the car a few times, and he started to sing along with me ("eee-uhh uhv me"). Clearly we have a real life August Rush on our hands. ;-)


Perhaps from all of the book reading, he's starting to learn different animals now. For months he's called every animal "dog." So I got him a couple of books with different animals in them so I could show him those; he persisted in calling all of them "dog." So then I got some dog books so that at least he'd be right some of time... he occasionally says cat now, and he does know the other animal names and points to hippos, elephants, giraffes, etc. He tries to "baah" for the sheep and "moo" for the cow. But dogs are still his favorite.

Speaking of, he has this funny way of saying "Hi dog" to Kona. He lowers his voice and says it over and over. I couldn't figure out where this came from until one day I was doing my "dog voice"--the one I use when I'm talking to Kona. "Hi Kona, hi Kona," I said--and then it hit me. A still won't say "Kona;" he always substitutes "dog," but he's picked up my dog voice.

This last month he sprouted his first molar! I can see the one on the other side is about to make an appearance as well.

He's a busy little guy these days!

The kids in our apartment complex's playgroup show up in some cool rides. A's favorite thing to do is to commandeer the coolest ride available.