So I’m heading into bed and I do my normal check on Ian….and then I saw how he was laying. He was sleeping on his stomach with his arms wrapped around the stuffed elephant that Lori got him for his first visit to the Zoo. It is so adorable, I wish I could find the camera so I could take a picture of it and show you. If I do find it within the next few moments, then I’ll try and take a picture without waking him.
I actually came up with this a couple of months ago, but I just realized I haven’t posted it here. This is a report from Literary Escapism (my book blog), but the same is still true two months later.
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Yes, I read a lot and I’m trying to get my 12 month old son to read as well. At the moment, he has a couple of favorites and I have to say that they are awesome. Here’s a review on some really good boardbooks for toddlers.
Goodnight Baby by Ibaby is a really cute interactive book for Ian. It involves six barnyard animals where you have to put each baby to bed for the night. When we first started this book, he really didn’t do much with it but follow the pictures as I read. However, the more we read it, the more he realized that he could put the babies to bed instead of having me to do it. Now he continually brings the book to either Jesse or myself and sits on our laps so we can read it to him. He doesn’t do this with many books, but he loves this one more than any of the others. There are more books by the Ibaby line and I plan to buy more of them since Ian loves them so much and can interact with them as I read.
Another really good book is called That’s Not My Dragon by Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells. It’s part of the Usborne Touchy-Feely Board Books and every page has something different for Ian to touch and feel. It’s a very simple and repetitive book, which is great for him, and each page is filled with bright vibrant colors that attracts his eye to each character on the page. Each book in this series/collection involves different textures , so you’ll never get the same feeling and that’s great for toddlers. Ian actually picked out this line when he was a lot younger while we were in Borders. I was pushing him around the children’s section and he just zeroed in on That’s Not My Kitty and he’s been hooked ever since.
And one that tends to be everyone’s favorite - Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown & Clement Hurd. I honestly don’t get the draw of this book, but Ian seems to have fun with it. This is probably the only other book that he will bring to either Jesse or I to read. We can go through it four or five times before he gets bored with it. The pages alternate between black/white and color, and every page involves the same image. The first page shows us a bedroom and each page thereafter involves an object that is in that room and we say goodnight to it. The book is cute and, normally, it isn’t one I would have thought to pick up for him, but I think it’s a good thing that we were given a copy of it.
There are a couple others that have his attention right now. For his birthday, he received these six Tiny Play-a-Song books where each is a nursery rhyme and has the corresponding music attached to the book. I’m not sure where my mother-in-law found them, but Ian loves pushing the button to hear the music and he likes to push more than one at a time. We’ve found that if you push all the buttons at once, it sounds like bagpipes.
So those are his favorites at the moment. I came across a list of the Top 50 Children’s books and had posted it on his website. I won’t post it here, but here’s the link to it.
Also reviewed by:
Well Read Child
So we found out that Ian likes sandboxes lsat night. Go figure, a boy that likes to play in the sand. I know, not that big of a surprise. We went to check out the house again last night (hopefully we’ll be hearing something within the next week, but I’m not holding my breath) and there is a horse shoe pit already dug. While Jesse was checking out the inside, Ian and I went outside to play in the backyard and he found the sand. Man did he get dirty.
Since we saw the house again, I went a took a quick look at what would be Ian’s room and decided that the previous color scheme wouldn’t work. There is white molding around the top of his room, so adding another white strip in the middle wouldn’t work as well. Never fear, I’ve already found a new theme I like. I found it at Home Depot, but Behr Paints has Disney themes and one of their themes (My Friends Tigger and Pooh) has a really cute design. Now, I’m not going to decorate Ian’s room in Winnie the Pooh, but the basic idea of it is really doable. The concept is the 100 acre woods, where you have green grass, blue skies, and white clouds with some trees thrown in. All I would have to do is leave off the Pooh characters and it would be a great outdoor theme that is also light and fun. Here’s the sample pic and color palette. If you click on the first picture, it’ll take you to a virtual tour of the room. Now remember, I wouldn’t be adding the Pooh stencils, but the basic design is really cute. So what do you think?
The things a toddler will do. Ian had his first ’shaking my head while laughing hysterically’ moment tonight. Jesse and I are relaxing after dinner and Ian was wandering around doing his thing. It took us a moment, but we realized that Ian was quickly sitting in front of the TV watching Scrubs. That’s when we noticed that he had taken his diaper off and was playing with it. And of course, his diaper couldn’t have only been wet, oh no, it was full. Jesse wasn’t amused, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I know I’ll regret it later, but it’s the first time he’s done that and you have to admit, it was funny. Ian ended up taking his bath a lot earlier than normal, but we got him cleaned up pretty well.
What else has he done lately. Today, I rearranged the kitchen so we could set up the card table and have a semblance of a dining room table. As I was getting lunch ready, Ian went to his chair and wanted up. He didn’t want to eat in his high chair today, he wanted to eat at the table. So we actually had a civilized meal for a change.
We spent this past weekend in New York visiting family. Neither Jesse or Ian have been back yet, so it was exciting for me to have both of them back there. I have a lot of aunts and uncles that I wanted them to meet and they finally did. I don’t have any pictures at the moment (Nana and Grandma Smith were taking so many, I figured I would get them from them), but I do have some videos. So until I can get the pictures, you’ll have to suffice with some dancing. Although I should mention, Ian loved the dance floor. He couldn’t stay off of it and he was even out there shaking his little butt.
He is starting to talk a little. He has gotten bye and hi down, although he uses them interchangeably. He’ll even wave while he’s saying it, sometimes. He’s had mama and dada down for awhile, and while he can say it, he still hasn’t called us mama and dada. We’re hoping he do it soon since he knows who we are. We can tell Ian to “go show daddy” or “take that to mama” and he’ll do those things, but we’re still waiting to hear him say the words to us.
Now that it has been warmer out more often, we’ve been taking Ian out more and more. It’s gotten to the point that whenever one of us goes near the door, Ian is right there ready to go outside. He wants to be outside so badly that I’m kind of sad we don’t have a place where we can let him go out and play. The residents in our area haven’t been picking up after their pets, so we don’t want to let him play in the grass only to find someone else already has. We’ve been going up to the park when we can, but when it’s crowded, it’s a little harder for Ian to play. He’s so much smaller than the other kids, that I’m afraid he’s going to get stepped on. We should be hearing about the house soon and in another two months, we’ll be someplace with a yard, I hope.
And I leave with another video…
We rented the new Alvin and the Chipmunks tonight and Ian’s reaction was priceless. The movie just started and all of a sudden, we hear Ian erupting into giggles. It was great. We tried to recreate it, but…yeah, he turned a little camera shy.
Today was so gorgeous that we decided to have dinner at the park. The park we went to is so toddler friendly that Ian had a ball. He was all over the place and he loved every minute of it. Here are some pictures and A LOT of videos.
Grandma and Grandpa Morgan got a new puppy….
Sorry this took me so long to post, but between Adrian, Lori, and I, we took about 370 pictures while we were at the Cincinnati Zoo. So I had to go through them and try to weed out the blurry shots and the butt shots and whatnot. I managed to get the number down to about 170. Talk about being photo happy. :)
Anyway, over the weekend, Adrian, Ian and I went down to visit Lori in Dayton and we decided to check out the Cincinnati Zoo. It was a gorgeous day and was perfect for spending it outside. Ian wasn’t sure what to make of it at first, but he started to really enjoy watching all of the animals. He was really excited about the goats in the children section. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to spend a lot of time in the children section since we got there as they were closing the exhibits. But he was still able to pet the goats and we spent a good 15 minutes at that one exhibit. There was a few moments there that he tried getting in with the goats, but thankfully he couldn’t squeeze through the rails.
Ian spent most of the day in the stroller, but he was able to get out and walk a bit and never really got fussy. He did get a little tired, but he laid down in the stroller and took a good hour nap and then he was ready to go. He did get a little spoiled as he left the zoo with a stuffed elephant AND a stuffed leopard. He was dragging them all around the gift shop, so Lori and I couldn’t resist. It worked kind of well, the elephants were the first animals we saw at the zoo.
The Cincinnati Zoo was really nice. I was kind of disappointed that we didn’t get to the children’s section sooner than what we did, but we did get there right after Ian’s nap. I’m hoping to take Ian to the Detroit Zoo soon, but I heard a sad rumor that they don’t have a children’s section with a petting zoo. I guess we’ll see. Anyway, I mentioned the large amount of pictures, so here’s the gallery for them. I’ll include a few of the good shots.
