Little Sponge

Lately I have been thinking about how much Ethan has been picking up and learning, sometimes without us specifically trying to teach him a new skill.

He just blew my socks off a couple of minutes ago. We recently bought the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and have sometimes been reading it to him before his nap/bedtime. At the very end there is the whole alphabet and I usually sing the ABCs to him while pointing to the letters. Today before his nap he sang along and clearly said "H, I, J" and "L, M, N, O, P"!

He has also recently learned to count to 10, it's so cute how proud he gets when he reaches 10! He's also beginning to learn his shapes and colors, he is starting to consistently identify star, circle, triangle, red, blue, and green. He is talking more and more every day and is using 2-3 word phrases. My favorites are "Thank you momma/daddy", "Daddy/mommy loves you", "Daddy/mommy do it", and "___ in there" (the blank is usually filled in by "water", "milk", "dark"). He's also commenting a lot more on what is going on around him. The other day we were at Babies R Us and he saw a newborn baby with her dad. Ethan said, "Baby, hold it", it was so cute! I, of course, told him that he would be able to hold a baby soon enough. =)

He also loves, well, insists really, on feeding himself. He's gotten to be a pretty proficient self-feeder, thanks to these expensive (but worth the money) Baby Bjorn spoons. Thankfully he's generalized the skill to less expensive spoons also. This skill has made mealtimes much more enjoyable because we can all eat at the same time.

His favorite thing lately is to "pour" and "dump it". So, we've been spending a lot of time outside where he can do this with his water table because it's not so fun (for me, anyway) when he does it with his toys inside the house. Although, he does say "everybody, clean up" when we clean up and sing the clean up song (oh, the teacher in me!).

They are such a little sponge at this age, it's so much fun!