Tales from the Treviños: Miscellaneous May

Well hello! I just squeaked in and got this thing updated in under a month (whew!). Clearly I'm a terrible blog-post-keep-up-wither (technical name for "blogger"). Unfortunately for you, my precious son still does not sleep quietly through the night, so I generally favor sleep over booting up the ol' computer and writing about life. Notice that I say does not sleep quietly. We have finally crossed the threshold (I hope) of sleeping through the night on our own. However, he still does wake up, root around for his binky and/or duck, sometimes make unhappy noises, etc., all of which wake me up for at least a few minutes and usually longer. Then he wakes up between 5:00 and 6:00, takes a bottle (the only one of the day now) and goes back to sleep for at least an hour. Crazy kid. It's a good thing he's cute.

As you can see from the short sleeping update, we've had some progress since turning one. I wanted to catch up on the little things that are going on...he's getting to be such a big boy!

Baby Talk
Perhaps three weeks ago or so Nathan started exploring new vowel sounds, including "g," and that contributed to some interesting verbalization of Nathan's trains of thought. Something like, "Da-da-garbladadamlgah." Jimmy said it sounded like we were getting extra long titles attached to our names. For example, "Daddy-keeper-of-books-and-pusher-of-truck." Unfortunately the little rascal seems to have forgotten how to say "mama" lately, but he has picked up quite a few new words. Of course you need context clues or just to "know" what he is trying to say, but I count them as words if he uses the same sound consistently to "mean" the same thing. Right now we have: hiiiii (hi-eeee), bye bye (buh bye), truck (tuck), duck, bath (ba), keys, hola (ah-ya), shoe (too), and farm animal sounds. Animals he consistently knows right now are cow (mmmmmmooee), horse (eeeeehe), sheep (baba) and pig (unk). The last week or more he's been walking around repeating "ah-tee" over and over again...and we have no idea what it means yet (neither do his teachers). He temporarily learned 'Ashley' but it isn't as clear as when he first learned it. Also....all cats are now ducks. He used to say 'cat,' but after learning 'duck,' all cats are now ducks. Not sure why. The only time he will say cat is when he's going after their food...to put in his mouth...rotten child.

The duck, in tow. Nathan is here drawing attention to the picture frames that have been sitting against the wall for months now and still do not have pictures of our family in them. Shame on mommy.

So Cute
Daddy, Grammy and Lolo have been teaching Nathan some new tricks. Others he's picked up on his own. To protect the not-so-innocent I won't name names here, and will let you decide for yourself who could be the guilty party.
- Pretty eyes: If you tell Nathan to "make pretty eyes" he'll deliberately do several long blinks in a row.
- Bad cough: If you tell Nathan that he has a "bad cough" he'll look at you and do a few fake coughs and smile really big.
- Walks around with a mirror saying "hi-eeee" to the baby in the mirror. My attempts to catch this on picture or film have been mostly unsuccessful.

- Puts his toy phone up to his ear (or head....or shoulder) and says "hi-eee."

- Makes his toys play whatever music they have then sits or stands "dancing" (involving mostly shaking of the head). This can go on for anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes, with him re-starting the music over and over.

Favorite Things
We are so lucky to have such a good baby. He plays really well by himself but loooves to play with his daddy or Popo. Recently he's started playing more in his tunnel, and sometimes even Joule will get in on the action. She'll paw at him from outside the tunnel while he is moving on the inside. They'll also go from end to end looking for/at each other (he also does this with Daddy, who sometimes can be mistaken for a cat...or duck, depending on who you ask).

Nathan also is still enjoying daily constitutionals in his truck and stroller. Sometimes he wants to be the one doing the pushing and will push his big truck (with help) around the downstairs in laps (around and around and around).

Three generations. Love this picture!

When he's ready to relax for a while he'll go to his bookshelf, pull out at least half the books, spread them around himself, and start paging through them at random. Sometimes he "reads" them (i.e. talks to himself) or makes the noise of the animal on the page. Other times he just turns pages back and forth as if he's looking for something specific and can't quite find it.

As far as food goes, he loves yogurt and is getting better at drinking his milk at home and at school. He also really likes string cheese and any kind of cookie (especially Nilla Wafers) or cracker (animal and graham).

Mmmmm, cheese!

Why yes, I do have dinner in both eyebrows and my hair. Want to try some???
Not pictured: yogurt on the carpet, carrots on the tile and milk on the tray.

Trying Daddy's smoothie.

I guess we could say he also loves the cats, but from their perspective I'm sure it would be described as loves-to-torture. Biggles runs away from him or looks really uncomfortable as Nathan approaches, then slinks away slowly (nothing-to-see-here-I-am-the-wall). This could have something to do with Nathan squealing at the top of his lungs as he walks/runs up to the cats. Joule sometimes tolerates him and sometimes wants to nip (we have to watch closely when he's near her) and Jeze lets him do whatever he wants. So we also have to watch when he's by Jeze because he hasn't quite mastered the 'pet' and prefers the 'pull.' I've seen him drag her by the tail across the kitchen chair before I can get close enough to make him let go and stop. Poor kitty, I think she's so desperate for attention she'll take whatever she can get.

Other Stuff
This is where I put the boring stuff that I care about and you don't. To keep you entertained I'll post a string of cute pictures.

Cardboard box fun. This was taken after we displaced Jeze from the same spot.

Nathan is still wearing size 4 diapers, size 18 month shirts and size 12/18 month pants. Most of his length is in his torso, so his shirts fit great, but his pants are either too big in the waist or way too long.

This shirt claims to be size 2T....surely not. I was counting on it to last into football season!

He is still in a size 4 shoe, but should probably move up a size soon. But I don't think he's quite ready to fit into Daddy's shoes yet...

For bedtime, our new routine (that works great) is brush the teeth, take a bath, put on jammies and sleep sack, rock and read 2 or 3 bedtime books (with the duck) then night night. He has started taking one 2 hour nap a day and is typically asleep between 7:00-7:30pm.