(camping at Gooseberry Falls over labor day)
It's been a while since I've talked about Truman, so here is a review of this summer's achievements.
Around 15 months he started becoming very interested in "saying" things, but was having a hard time with many of the words he wanted to say because the compilations of sounds were too difficult. So we started practicing animal sounds, which he started picking up right away. The first was "meew," which he picked up rather organically from playing with cats and stated before even being prompted.
Dog (arf), monkey (oo, oo, oo, ah, ah), chicken (boc, boc, boc), cow (moo), tiger, lion, bear (all raaaawr), snake (ssssss, which is also the sound for pee) and a few others followed.
Then, a few weeks later word after word tumbled out of his mouth. Words like pizza (pzzapzza) cheese (cheee) and ball (ba) flow frrely these days. Other favorites include blueberries (bweebewy), water (formerly a tongue-wiggling sound water makes when you poor it and now wa'er), bye-bye, hi, and, of course, mama and dad.
If we tell him a word now, he usually will try to say it.
And it became clear he understood so much more, too. He stared being able to follow directions more (if he was willing=).
On this front he has started to come to the bathroom following my prompting and will even initiate this by telling us he has to go about once or twice a day (usually by patting himself or saying "pee" or "potty.") At 7 p.m. yesterday he was still using the same dry diaper he went to bed in the previous night with no pees having occurred outside of the potty. Today we've had a few outside of the potty, but mostly due to parental misunderstandings, not for lack of initiative on his part.
It will probably be a little while longer before he can reliably be out of diapers full time, but these are huge steps that have resulted from an elimination communication process that began when he was 6 months.
Truman continues to have huge feet (size 8, as of now) but is making up time on the teeth-front, popping molar after molar this month. He now has eight front teeth (4 on top and 4 on bottom) and three molars (one on top and two on bottom) that are coming in.
For the first time he is starting to outgrow the length of pants before the waist.
He loves to be outside and asks to go outside (mostly by whining and grasping madly for the door handle) every time he comes near our front or garage doors. He loved our camping trip and even did his share of hiking.
I am now planning lots of physical activity into our days. And this fall we are taking an art class for 1- & 2-year-olds from ECFE.
