After 19 months

Yesterday my big boy turned 19 months. Our last month has been busy but fantastic, with lots of luscious and helpful grandparent visitors. Let's see what I can remember about new Isaac achievements.

Every day brings new words, which are now being combined into phrases. Two of his favorite games with words are:
1) Introducing Dada and myself. This game is especially popular when in the car and we are both right there in front of him. "Dada," he says, pointing at Dada, "that's Mama," then pointing at me. You know, because we're strangers in the night.
2) Correcting himself. I do not intend to be one of those moms that sits by idly while my child calls a streetlight a moon, but instead find ways to gently correct him and also introduce new and exciting words, like streetlight!, into his new vocabulary. Apparently I do this so much that, now that he does know the right names to lots of things, he has whole conversations with himself where he does the correcting for me. "Is that the moon?" he says. "No, that's not the moon," he replies.

He has become quite an accomplished baby-jogger, such that I hesitate to let him loose anywhere near a street because he will take off, speeding away using his revved-up waddle. Because of this, we spend a lot of time walking around the dorms near our house. This in turn has led my Junior Ladies' Man to completely perfect his game with the coeds. Oh, to watch him work is so shameful. Whenever we are walking along and he and I come upon one or more attractive ladies walking towards us, he will alter his course such that he blatantly veers towards their oncoming legs and they are forced to either seriously change their trajectory to walk around him, or to stop momentarily and take him in. You can probably guess what happens every time, especially since he immediately starts in on his line: "Now that I have your attention, ladies," he says, "could I interest you in coming to look at the moon with me?" The most ridiculous part is that his shtick rarely emerges for dudes, or for ladies that Dada tells me are "not hotties." Luckily for Isaac, the campus appears to be a cornucopia of hotties who think he is "so CUTE!" One day the three of us were walking to Starbucks together and Isaac accosted two ladies. I dragged him back on course, but Dada was lingering behind and overheard the ladies' conversations as they walked away:

Hottie Co-ed 1: I love it when he walks around here. I see him all the time, and he's always so excited to see us!
Hottie Co-ed 2: ...or dogs!

This behavior pretty much encapsulates Isaac's emerging personality. My kid is the life of the party. Today he and I went to our first "toddler" storytime at the library, having been shackled into boring baby storytime for the last 2 months. The teacher starts out by singing a little song. All of the other toddlers are huddled into the safety of their mommies' laps. Where was my kid? He ran to the front of the room to a wide-open spot where everybody can see him, stopped, and then shook his butt like it's going out of style. When the teacher read a book, the same thing happened -- everybody else, sitting quietly and timidly or politely, but my kid planted his face right up in the book, probably obscuring someone's view, and asked "What's that? What's that? What's that?" until the teacher told him it's a giraffe. I love it and think he's hilarious, but I worry sometimes that I am letting him become "that kid," the one who can't sit down and be quiet when he's supposed to. But really, who ever got anywhere by sitting down and shutting up?

The biggest development in the last month has definitely been the toddler bed, which has revolutionized Isaac's life in many ways. Taking the behemoth crib out of his tiny-closet-of-a-room opened up so much space that now we actually have room to hang out there as a family. At several points throughout the day, Isaac takes one of us by the hand, says "room?" and literally drags us in his room to watch him play with his toys or bounce on his bed. He wants to crawl up in his bed and sit, or read, or even better, play peek-a-boo with his sheets. He climbs in his bed at odd hours of the day, lays down on his tummy, and says "I go sleep. Night-night!" Of course we are not so lucky when it actually IS time for night-night, and he requires quite a bit of coaxing and tummy-rubbing or bedside-sitting to get him to stay in bed when it's time and not go leaping away. But when he does relax and go to sleep, he SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT. 4 out of the last 5 nights, people. AND he is teething. Probably the best part, though, is what happens when he wakes up. Most mornings, there is no more crankiness. Instead of very loud get-me-the-h-out-of-bed crying, instead of the wake-up anger we thought he had inherited from his mama, you hear this from our bedroom at 6:30 in the morning:

...rustle rustle rustle...sliiiiiide...THUMP. Thump thump thump thump thump (out his bedroom door) thump thump thump thump thump thump thump (into the living room) thump thump. "WIGGLES!" (screaming excitedly at the blank TV)

There is no sleeping through this act by Mr. Herd of Elephants, trust me, but it is all right because we have already done so much sleeping we almost don't know what to do with ourselves. BRING IT!