I am not a puppy...

Of course you all agree with his assessment, right? What a cute puppy!

This post is something of a milestone checklist, just to try and go over various things I’ve noticed or we’ve been tracking.

Lessee, first off he’s above 30 lbs and holding! Around the holidays he was around 31.2lbs and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t slipped much below it, despite his peculiar eating habits (or lack thereof). No real news on the eating front: he’s a good eater in WHAT he eats but it can sure be a hassle to keep him focused long enough to actually eat. I’m trying to keep myself from feeding him, but after forty minutes or an hour something it can be tough not to move a spoon the five inches from plate to mouth.

He likes to snuggle, or at least use that as an excuse to be with and crawl all over his dad. Sometimes when I work in my home office he’ll sneak into my office. It’s also the guest room and it’s kind of cute that he calls the bed in that room the “office bed.” So he comes in to “snuggle” and after a brief snuggle he’s all “what’s that?” “can I have that?” “daddy give me that?” and so on.

He’s both becoming more independent and less so at the same time. Of course eating is the prime example of less so, but on the other side of the coin he no longer wants a hug/kiss/good-night unless, of course, he has specifically asked for it. He also feels it is up to him whether daddy can sing a song, make a voice, or any number of other things. For our part we are at least trying to make him say please, as in, “please shut up.” (I jest … sort of) I went to the grocery store the other day and on my way out the door I asked Faith if she wanted anything else. She had a couple of things and then Zane perked up with his list (little marshmallows, grapes, cherries, pears).

Language is still blossoming, but not nearly as fast as comprehension and reasoning. He’ll sometimes get stuck trying to say something, cycling through a bunch of little words to start a sentence but not being able to find the right word to continue. If you wait long enough and/or help him along, when possible, he’ll get something out. He has concepts like distance down, as in when we are driving to the Grandparents he knew our house was “in the distance.” But on the other hand he sees stuff in books, machines or places, and say he wants to go in there as if I can whisk him away right then. Oh, and repeating. He repeats stuff a LOT, as if just a few more times will get it to sink into his numb parent’s head. And, to be honest, we are a bit numb at times. Part of it I think is we simply don’t expect some of the things he says. We think he’s trying to say some cute, simple little thing when in the end it’s a complex concept that we just couldn’t fathom him coming up with.

Of course he’s still very mechanically orientated, often in creative ways. We had him picking up old “baby Zane” toys in preparation for getting out “toddler/big boy Zane toys” (i.e. we need less stuff!) and he did a really good job of helping do that. At one point he came across an old, wooden tower of babel toy and a few minutes later when I went upstairs I’d found that he’d arranged the pieces, in order, going up the stairs. Along those same lines while at the Grandparents he did a great job with stacking and ordering toys.