23 Months

Here he is, one month short of two... and believe me it's showing!

He definitely has his own idea of what he wants to do and when I ask him to do something he'll wait until the last second to see how far he can push me. I think I'm going to have to start working on immediate obedience... I'm much more lax with him in that than Brian is.

We've given up keeping him out of the kitchen so now he can go and get the bag of pretzels and bring it to me when he wants a snack. One more way for me to be lazy...

He also likes to take the cans out of our open shelving and try to stack them. When they fall over he then rolls them around the floor. I've been finding cans in odd places the last few weeks!

The scale sits in the kitchen behind our table. I've weighed Cory on it and exclaimed at how big he was and he picked up on that. Now one of his favorite things is to go stand on the scale and exclaim "oh gosh, 32 pounds!" Yes, he really does weigh that much, yikes!

This kid can talk! And he likes to talk...

I've been leaving him with a friend of mine on Friday mornings for a couple of hours while I do some work with the local crisis pregnancy center. She has a boy who's 4 and one who's 2 1/2 and then a 13 month old girl. They are a fairly quiet family and the oldest boy said to her one day, Mommy, make Cory stop talking! or something to that effect while covering his ears! Apparently they had all been playing and Cory was just talking to himself and this boy wasn't used to that!

I guess I barely think about it anymore, but Cory does kind of narrate what he's doing while he plays. Also, when we're all in the car if Brian and I are talking more often than not Cory is talking to himself in the back seat as well!

And most of what he says is quite intelligible. Of course I can interpret pretty well, but most of the time you can understand what he's saying if it's not a new word. Banana has gone from "nana" to "da-nana" to the real word. Spaghetti is still "scap-etti" and his recent cute word is when you ask him a question he will say "yup" or "ye-ah" all drawn out.

When we're driving and he sees a sign with letters big enough he can see them he'll just start spouting out letters. He does know some letters by sight, but not all so he just says random ones. He knows how to spell his name though because we write it out often enough and say the letters. He also has his little name train from Grandma and Grandpa H that helps!

Cory says bits of songs or books that are familiar and if I help him out we can usually get through the whole thing from memory. He loves to do this with Patty Cake (especially while I'm changing his diaper for some reason) and with a farm book about a farmer named AL-BERT! The farmer's wife yells at him and Cory loves to repeat this. It also features a rooster so he has learned to say Cock-a-doodle-doo!

He's learning to sing and loves to dance since I moved the stereo out in the living room so we can have some tunes. Of course I have to dance with him... there goes my being lazy!

Can't wait to see all the things he learns in the next 2 weeks while we're gone.... Saudi Arabia here we come!