For a long time now, Ian’s favorite characters have always been the Muppets from the Muppet Show.  Over the last couple of months, Ian has started to acquire a few more characters that he simple loves.  He still goes nuts over the Muppets and he’s even calling Fozzie by name (it’s so cute!), but he likes to share his love.

The first character that was added was CARS.  He got to a point where he loved anything with wheels and for something new, I popped in Cars instead of the handy muppets.  He didn’t have the patience to sit through the entire movie, but he loved it.  Whenever we went downstairs, he immediately went for Cars.  At the same time that Ian discovered cars, he also decided to start potty training.  So we took advantage of this  and at Thanksgiving we started Ian’s Hot Wheels collection by giving him a new car every time he went to the potty.  At this point, Ian has not gone poopy once in his diaper since we started this, but we’re still working on getting a dry diaper.

Over Christmas, his second character was introduced, but this time it was the object and we gave him the character.  For Christmas, he received a train that laid down dominos and he LOVED it.  From that point, he wanted to play with his “whoo whoo” just as much as he wanted to play with his cars.  Since he was having a blast with trains, I decided to pick up a book and DVD of Thomas the Tank Engine.  Now, that’s all we read at night – Thomas the Tank Engine.  He loves watching the trains on the TV too and I love it because each segment is only about 5 minutes long.

The last two characters that he’s really getting into right now are not that surprising.  Not if you think about it.  Neither Jesse or I want Ian to get into the Elmo craze, so we’ve been picky about which Sesame Street he watches.  I started picking up various DVDs at the library and he’s loving the ones with Cookie Monsters and the Count in them.  That’s right, he’s lovin Cookie Monster and the Count.  He’ll say Elmo, but he’s using that to indicate Sesame Street (I know this because it doesn’t matter who shows up on the screen as long as it’s a muppet); however, if he starts yelling for Cookie Monster or the Count, then I had better have that up or he gets louder.

So those are Ian’s favorite characters right now.