February Barrett Update

So, here it is, February 3 and I've not written really anything in way too long. I'll start by doing a Barrett update and then go back in a few other posts and update the rest of our life!

Barrett does not stop talking! Sometimes all he wants to say is a two-word statement, but he will precede it with about fifteen syllables and then say something like "shoes on!". He can and does say complete sentences, like on New Year's Eve when he said, "I need a fork." It's just so much fun for us to listen to him talk because he tries so hard to tell us exactly what he wants to say. And, it's fun because Harrison just wasn't talking like this at this age, so we aren't used to a little guy running around shouting at us.

His vocabulary is just exploding right now. Up until today, he has always called a train a "choo choo". Tonight at dinner he decided to start saying "train" instead. As we were reading books before bed instead of calling a dog a "woof woof" he called it a "dog". He also loves to repeat what Harrison says. So when Harrison says he wants to do artwork, Barrett will spew out 10-15 incoherent syllables punctuated with "do artwork".

Barrett went through a phase where all he wanted to watch was Daniel Tiger, a new show on PBS this fall. He called it "Grrr" and would ask for it all the time. He still loves it, but really only requests one of the episodes, which he calls "potty Grrr" because it's about Daniel learning to potty. In it they sing a song about "sitting on the potty" and he will sit on anything, anywhere and just start to sing "sitting on the potty" and laugh. Whenever one of us goes to the potty, he comes running and says he has to potty also. Harrison still loves to pee outside, and as soon as Barrett sees him doing that he says he has to potty too, runs to where Harrison is, pulls up his shirt and pretends he's peeing. It really is funny, and hopefully it will mean that soon he will be easy to potty train!

Barrett currently has two things that he loves to do. Truly, other than eating and sleeping he could do these two things pretty much all day long. Upon waking, he greets whoever goes in to get him out of his crib with a smile and then says "choo choos!" He starts every day in the playroom with his trains, and will play there until we coax him down for breakfast. After that he's ready to either play trains again or go outside and push "rocky" around. Rocky is what we have named the giant dump truck he got for Christmas, because he loves to fill it with rocks. He pushes it all over the cul-de-sac, through the yard, and to the park. We have to work on sharing, because when he brings it to the park he is the envy of all of the other little boys, but freaks out if he walks away from it and someone else tries to play with it.

Finally his last four teeth are coming in, it seems to have taken forever for his incisors to break through. They have been really swollen and painful and we are hoping that now that things look a little better his biting will come to an end...he hasn't been too bad about it lately but there were a couple of months there where he was chomping on anything and anyone he could get his teeth into. Let's hope that his two-year molars don't bring back the vampire in him!

He is such a funny little boy and makes us laugh many times each day!! It seems like he knows when he is being funny, and does things just so we will laugh at him. He is also still amazingly stubborn, and when he is not happy about something he lets us know.

I'll get some pictures posted shortly!