Bring on the schmoop

Cute things my kid is doing lately:

Sometime around Christmas Day, Nico brought me the goat from his Little People barn and said "Baaaa. Baaaa." I've been telling him that the sheep says "baa" and the goat says "maa" for weeks, so I said "Close enough!" Then a day or two after Christmas, he started saying pig. I was cleaning while he played inside his baby fence and suddenly he started yelling "Pih! Pih!" while waving the Little People pig above his head. The look on his face was awesome. I could see him thinking I figured it out! YES! Ever since, all the animals in the barn are Pig and they all say "baa."

He received a talking helicopter toy in the family kids-only Christmas name draw, and MB showed him how to pop the balls through the top so that it plays a song. He'll put one in and then bob up and down, dancing to the music. He also dances to the songs from the LeapFrog Scout dog my sister gave him, and once he danced to the iPad commercial with the piano music.

Speaking of Scout, Nico really seems to like it. He's figured out that squeezing the paws makes it talk, so he presses them over and over. If he sees Scout through the bars of his crib, he'll go over and point until I retrieve it for him.

He also got a really great board book in the name draw. When he (okay, I) unwrapped it, his face lit up. He grabbed it and started paging through it right away and my nerd heart sang.

MB and I gave him a Little People Noah's Ark for Christmas with a bunch of extra sets of animals (I found the whole shebang on Craigslist for cheap). We have all the animals in a basket since it's hard even for me to fit them all into the ark at once, and Nico likes to get the basket and start chucking the animals around the room. Sometimes, though, he'll bring one over to me while I putter around on my laptop. When he hands them to me, I try to make up a song about them. ("I'm a giraffe / I'm the color of a banana / I like to roam / on the African savanna!" "I am a leopard / I have lots of spots / I live in the jungle / where it's very hot!" "I'm an alligator / and I like to romp / down in Florida / deep in the swamp!") So far he hasn't complained about my lyrics or my singing.

I usually put Nico in his high chair and let him snack on rice puffs while I fix his cereal plus baby food. When I bring the bowl to the table, he will request his bib by pointing to it and saying "Bih! Bih!" Once I fasten the bib around his neck he pats it and says "Bih!" and then signs "more" for the food. Unfortunately he's also started swatting the spoon when he gets tired of eating.

If there's any humidity or if he's napped on someone's lap and gotten a bit sweaty, the back of his hair turns into a patch of lovely curls. I need to get a good photo of it in case it stops doing that.

Every night before bed, the last story we read is Bear Snores On. When we turn to the last page, Nico waves bye-bye to the book.


He's going to turn one in twelve days, you guys. ONE! In TWELVE DAYS! I'm not sure how this happened so quickly.