I’m not sure when it happened, but probably sometime during that newborn induced amnesia period. But suddenly I have a full blown kid who can do things, and my tiny toddler is gone!
E shocks me daily with all of the things he can do. He’s gone from kind of humming along when we sing to sort of making sounds similar to what we’re saying, to being able to sing “Twinkle Twinkle” all by himself. He doesn’t crawl up the stairs anymore, but walks while holding the wall (he’d hold the railing, but he’s still too short haha). He’ll bring us a bottle of sunscreen and ask us if we can go outside and play.
He’s gotten really good at putting on his shoes (and has been able to take them off for a while), and recently we’ve realized he can count to 6! (Certainly not something we taught him!) He even sort of understands numbers too, he can look at something and tell me if there’s two of them or three. It blows my mind.
There’s also less academic, but just as cool developments. Like the ability to actually jump and have his feet leave the ground. Or the ability to use a bubble wand to blow his own bubbles. And Tom and I were both blown away the other day when we handed him a large slice of pizza at the carnival, and he sat down and ate it like a normal person. And he ate almost the entire thing!
He loved it way better than the carnival, by the way. I think he would have enjoyed the rides had he been the only one there, but the combination of all the lights, sounds, and people had him clinging to me like a koala. It was not his thing.
So we stayed across the street in the field and ran around in the grass and watched the carnival from afar. It was way more his speed. Also the cookies we bought him probably helped. Baby G got to play in the grass a bit too, so it worked out.
E’s favorite part of the day was when he saw a little girl playing with a balloon and asked us for one. The police department was handing them out, so we headed over to their mobile command unit to get him one. He was psyched! He kept looking up at us and grinning, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. He played with it the entire drive home, and kept telling us that he had a “Boo boo loon!” (It was a blue balloon).
So the carnival wasn’t really our speed this year, but I’m sure in the future we’ll be spending a lot of time there. And while he’s acting amazingly old and big boy lately, he still acted like a little baby who wanted to cling to his mama and be carried around while we were at the carnival. I’ll take it.
