Twenty-Three Months

Good God. Is he really going to be two next month? I’m not sure I can handle that.

At 23 months, Riley weighs 29.8 lbs and stands about 36 inches tall.

Here’s what I want to remember from this past month:

• He tried a few new foods, including sesame sticks, hush puppies, fried mozzarella-prosciutto bites, cottage cheese, and mango and raspberry sorbets (has also tried choocolate and coconut gelato). He also became very adamant this month about removing any skins from his food, like bell peppers and edamame.
• He is saying a few new phrases, and he is still constantly impressing us with how well he speaks: wash all the germy-germs off, just rock-rock a little minute more, noodle….kinda like toodles!, whatever that means, know what that is (instead of siss-ah), you little dickens, do you know?, do we hit/bite/kick/throw?
• He’s still napping well once a day, usually for two hours or more. And he’s sleeping well at night, although Kenny and I have both heard him talking in his sleep a couple of times!
• He started requesting we sing “Hey Fightin’ Tigers” very late this month. Kenny and I are so proud.
• He has started to ask to be changed. Very interesting. We have also started sitting him on the potty every night before his bath with no success as of yet.
• He is very demanding lately and more whiny too, especially when he doesn’t get his way. Super fun for me.
• He’s very concerned with bugs these days, and he especially hates when gnats fly near his eyes.
• He is pretending more and more. I observed him doing “up the hill, around the curve, down the hill” on his arm while eating his lunch one day. He also pretended that the back of his highchair was a slide. And he is still seeing crazy shapes in his food, most recently a birdhouse.
• He’s still doing a great job with climbing up into his highchair by himself before meals, but he has the strangest little ritual: he almost always closes the doors between the kitchen (where I am preparing his food) and the dining room and then climbs up into his chair. So I inevitably have to open the doors and find him grinning, pleased with himself, on the other side. Odd, but very cute.
• He is starting to have little conversations with his toys: “Come on guys; we got work to do!” and “Let’s see. Where does this piece go? I don’t know!”
• He knows the {complicated} names of all of his toy dinosaurs: brachiosaurus, styracosaurus, ceratosaurus, plateosaurus, and ankylosaurus. Whatever happened to good ole T-Rex, stegosaurus, and triceratops???
• He saw a real walrus on tv and, after he got over being a little scared by him, called it a snuffleupagus. We don’t even watch Sesame Street regularly!
• My sweet boy kisses Jesus on the cover of his prayer book every night now.
• He can count to 7.
• I found an old mickey doll of daddy’s a couple of weeks ago and showed it to Riley, asking him who it was. He said, “Mickey! He needs his mouseketools!”
• A lot of times when he’s watching tv and I’m leaning over typing on the laptop, he’ll put his little hand on my leg, just to let me know he’s there and to make sure I’m not going anywhere. So sweet.
• He likes watching videos of himself and will often request “’nother video.”

Twenty-three months old!