Sandbox

Stanley has finally realized that it is fun to play in the sand. Below he is putting the shovel back together; it kept coming apart. He spent about 15 minutes putting the sand in the sieves and he even figured out how to fix it if a piece of bark clogged the drain. And as a complete aside, we convinced Stanley to wear 'real' shoes. He seems to be pretty happy with these; we are hoping he keeps using them since his leather soled shoes are not ideal on city streets.

And, below is a video of him pushing the huge 'big' kid merry-go-round thing at the park. Apparently he has enjoyed doing this for a while. Halima says he walks around there and shows the other little babies how to move it. I guess at the playground 20 month old children are the big kids.

Wathcing like a hawk

We were in Tahoe for a long weekend. We had a fantastic time...pictures to follow.

One of the evenings we spent with Rylan at his house. We went for an enjoyable bike ride and then Rylan and Steve made burgers. I spent the evening following Stanley around cleaning up after his mess. Rylan's house is far from child proof, so it was a busy evening for me. At one point, I took my eyes off Stanley for all of about 45 seconds. I needed to get myself a bit of food. During that time, Stanley had run to the corner of the living room and found a gigantic blow torch. When I turned around, I saw my dear 20 month old hauling over a very heavy blow torch in my direction. No pictures from this incident. I ran over, thanked Stanley dearly for handing it to me, and did not take my eyes off of him for the rest of the evening.

Words

On Sunday, we were at our neighbors house and Stanley found a kids picture book. He brought Steve and me the book and opened it to the page with the ball on it. Stanley said 'baaal'. He was very proud and so were we. It is probably his favorite word these days and continually points outside to the balls in the backyard. But then, our neighbor standing with us open the book to the page with the fish. He pointed to the fish and asked Stanley what it was...Stanley very loudly and clearly said 'feesh'. Steve and I were both shocked since we had no idea he knew the word for fish.

Then this morning, Stanley brought me a train book and I happen to open it to the page with carrots getting loaded into the train. First Stanley clarified, that the train is a 'choochoo' and then when asked about the carrots, he clearly said 'carrrro'. The 't' was a bit silent, but I was still mighty impressed.

His vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. I will need to list out some of his words that he says at 20 months. I better do it quickly, because it appears to be growing by the minute.

Same song different day

This seems familiar. I guess old habits die hard.

Building

Stanley has started to really enjoy building and stacking things. The other morning he played with his blocks and Legos for about 30 minutes all by himself stacking them up in different ways. I started him off with the wide base you see in the picture, but all the color coordinated stacking was his doing. He seems to be doing things with more if a purpose these days.

Hmm

Guess I left my phone unlocked. I found about 50 photos like this.

Mother's Day Hike

We went on a wonderful hike in Glen Park for Mother's day. Stanley has finally realized that it is OK to have dirty hands and he was very fascinated by the lady bug that we found.

Car port

Lele showed Stanley how to use the Matchbox car lot. Stanley found it very entertaining. 

Airport helper

Coming back from Denver last week, Stanley was a great helper. He enjoyed pushing Steve's suitcase in the airport. He was quite careful even going down the jet bridge. However, he did not like waiting when there was a line as we waited to board the plane.

He even got a great TSA Junior Officer badge and was quite proud of his gold sticker.

Cooking Breakfast

Stanley likes to help out with lots of things. It is fun to teach him stuff about cooking and putting the groceries away, but it sure doesn't speed things along. Here he is helping Julia cook him some breakfast. He likes to help, but then he doesn't quite have the patience to wait for the food to actually cook before he wants to eat it.

Seems like he is only a few months away from being able to make himself breakfast an then we can sleep in. I can't wait ;-).