This week has been a real double whammy of difficulty with the kid, because he’s sick and the neighborhood playground is closed for hornets. There are other parks to go to, but that one is nice when he’s sick because it’s not a well-known playground and nobody ever goes there, so I don’t feel too bad about him getting his germy little hands all over everything. I suspect he has gotten sick intentionally to try to ruin my upcoming 40th birthday, because while he’ll likely be feeling better by then, it’s very possible I’ll have gotten it. He did this for our wedding anniversary in May too.
We’ve been working on getting him to eat more independently. We did baby led weaning, meaning when he started solids we gave him foods he could pick up and eat himself rather than spoon foods we’d need to feed to him. It seems to have caused him some delay in eating with utensils (which we aren’t worried about, to be clear). Anyway, whenever he scoops a spoonful of something by himself I say “good scoop!” He has begun reciprocating. When I scoop a spoonful of my own food he congratulates me, exclaiming “good scoop!”
Boo only recently really began talking, and is really difficult to understand. This is made worse by his strangely robust vocabulary – we can assume, when we don’t know what he’s saying, that it could be literally anything in the English language. Sometimes it’s even something he’s heard in a song, like yesterday when he kept saying “put a ring on it.” When we can’t understand a whole phrase, we can’t even use context to try to figure it out. The other day, in the back yard, he was repeating the same refrain over and over as he climbed in and out of every chair in the yard, wanting to test each of them out. We finally figured out he was saying “sitting with poop.” He had a dirty diaper.
Speaking of diapers, he only ever gets diaper cream when he has a painful rash, and a while ago he started pointing to the cream on the shelf and saying “cream for butt hurt.” Occasionally he tries to tell us he needs cream for butt hurt, but he’s usually lying about it. I recently got a haircut and have switched from styling my hair with a scrunchie to styling my hair with an air-drying cream. He has started referring to the tube as “cream for hair hurt.”
He’s been really fixated lately, linguistically, on saying “another” of something when he sees another, and then following that up with “two” somethings. If he sees one truck and then another truck he’ll say “truck. Another truck. Two trucks.” Even if it’s the eighth truck he’ll still say “another truck. Two trucks.” Sunday night, after he went to bed, we drank a bottle of sparkling rosé while watching Mad Men. The next day he managed to get his hands on the cork, and whenever he finds a wine cork he stashes it wherever he’s currently keeping his treasures. Monday mid-morning he was looking through the items he was collecting in his backpack and said “Cork. Another cork. Two corks.” I felt extremely called out.
Boo has, inexplicably, become afraid of water. Not too long ago he thought he could transport himself to the pool simply by finding and handing me his swimsuit, but now if we so much as visit a park with a splash pad he cries. Maybe he knows his mother is disproportionately afraid of those brain amoebas. We’re giving him sponge baths until this phase passes.
Denise Resting 
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