Growing Up Fast

I should confess to messing things up last week. See we were all going along with our normal day-to-day lives and routines: happy and content. Wake up, eat, maybe some curious george or pre-school or dumping toys everywhere, lunch, resist a nap as long as possible, maybe some curious george, dinner, play with daddy and raz, then off to bed. And then I brought home a DVD from the library: I DIG DIRT. Morning, Noon, and Night was filled with either the sound of I DIG DIRT or young Zane saying it over and over and over again to breakdown your willpower and show it to him again.

So Saturday we took the video back to the library.

Funny thing, that. Did you know two year olds have no concept of “took it back to the library?” It doesn’t fit into their worldview. In other words there’s no room in the world for the lack of I DIG DIRT. So for the past four days we’ve been fending off I DIG DIRT demands with “sorry, it’s back at the library” or “we don’t have it” or “I think I’ll put these earplugs in.” I’d picked up a few replacement dvds, but two of them are horrible (over acting doesn’t even begin to describe them) and while the third one is all about making school buses it isn’t I DIG DIRT.

So, instead of watching I DIG DIRT he’s been practicing death-defying acts of balance and scaring of the parents.

Yesterday I was sitting at the table with my legs crossed when Zane stood on my foot. That would be the foot on the leg crossed over the other leg and floating about eight inches off of the ground. One hand on the table and one on my knee for balance he managed to scale up and stand on this foot, wobbling in the air. We didn’t manage to get a photo of it.

Getting ready for yesterday’s nap, while Faith was reading, I saw him trying to do something similar on the top of the race car bed railing. But as you can see he does stop to sleep from time to time.

Zane’s really talking up a storm these days. He’s regularly identifying people and things around him. During dinner he goes around pointing at and saying the name of mommy, daddy, grandma, raz, tink, and Zane. During piano lessons yesterday we went outside and he pointed at the three cars and identified them: daddy’s car, mommy’s car, and ben’s car (well ben’s dad, but hey). Whenever we read a book he can pretty much identify everything he sees, sometimes even breaking it down further. In one book about shapes I pointed and he identified the object as a clock. He then pointed to the cuckoo clock’s top and said “triangle” and the face as “circle” and the body as “square” without any prompting.

He can also count into the twenties, although sometimes missing fourteen and fifteen for some reason. We were counting the trucks on a car transport in a book last night and he kept counting beyond the number of actual trucks all the way to twenty. I’ve been trying to teach him the concept of starting at one end and counting to the other end so you don’t lose track, but he’s not really interested in that yet.