Growing a Family {The Figueroas}: The Boy

Another month gone by already! Boy, I hope April takes its sweet time coming around... The pages of the calendar are turning much too quickly for my liking! As of today, our sweet boy is twenty-one months old. He's growing more and more each day, physically and verbally. My baby is seeming much too big these days!

- He now understands what it means to be "louder," particularly in the context of "Say 'bye' louder, AJ!" His response: "BYEEEE!"

- He is repeating words like crazy. It's time to be really careful about what we say around here! Some new regularly used words are undies, ice, oso (bear), bowl, eg-g, Josh, baby, and boo (boo boo). This list grows as the minutes go by!

- Speaking of baby, he finally likes his baby that we bought before we left for Italy. It only took about a month and a half to warm up to it, but now he hugs, kisses, cuddles, and gently lays Baby down in a nice, comfortable bed among the building blocks. As for babies in general, he's been getting so excited to see a baby in pictures, whether on the wall or on the yogurt container; and in person, pointing, smiling, and exclaiming (what else) "Baby!"

- He's been making these goofy faces at us out of nowhere, always unprovoked, looking for a laugh. He's such a silly kid.

- He's also been putting on little ukulele concerts for us, pausing every few notes to wait for our applause. How can we deny him? He also notices any kind of stringed instrument anywhere, which is sometimes amazing and always hilarious:

- Bedtime is tough. Most nights, it seems to take forever to get him to sleep. He just lays there, moves his feet and legs around, makes noise, talks to us, and generally tries to stay awake as long as possible. I know that this is just a phase, but I do hope it passes quickly. This mama is tired! Fortunately, he's been sleeping a bit better recently once he does drift off to dreamland. Maybe it will stick this time!

- We began potty training today after going through a diaper in less than thirty minutes yesterday - twice. We think that because he recognizes when he's going now, he makes an extra effort to get it out, and the diapers can't quite soak everything up that quickly. So, I wiped up various parts of the floor today more times than I can count, emptied out the little potty even more times than that, and tried to "keep calm and guide him on" (have you seen those posters?) this new adventure. May tomorrow be less eventful than today!

As always, I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting (like his recently acquired new tooth). I need to start keeping a daily journal or something lest I forget all of these wonderful, silly, frustrating, crazy moments that we are blessed to have with our sweet boy.

Here he is in all his silly, handsome glory while checking out the USS Parche memorial (the Parche was a submarine which sank 31,696 tons of enemy shipping during its six war patrols during WWII) on base today. Be still, my heart!