Animal Noises May 27, 2009

There comes a time in every kid’s life that animal noises become the funniest things!  That time for me is now, erm I mean Hayden.  For a while now we’ve been teaching him some different noises and he’s starting to get pretty good at them.  His favorite by a mile is lion…

When we were at Naples Zoo on holiday there was this very loud lion that you could roaring all across the zoo.  Hayden was pretty impressed and reacted with his own, just as ferocious, maybe a little quieter.  Since then every time we see anything resembling a lion Hayden gives our the funniest lion roar.

Lion is understandably his favorite but he also is very proficient at moo-ing, baa-ing (Wyn – that one is for you!!), oooh-ohhh-ing (for a Monkey), and this hilarious breathing through his nose thing for a pig!

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner

I know a lot of the recent blogs focus on Hayden’s speech, but we are at that point where his speech accelerated from 10 words a month ago to about 200 now so you can’t blame us!!  Well the word he seems to put the most passion into is “Outside” as Kara already referred to.  What she didn’t mention is that he says it with a rude boy West London accent!  It’s more like Outsiiiiiaid.  I’m very proud of my little boy!!

Another one of his favorite phrase is “another one” – apparently you actually say “Another one” a lot – when you have a children that repeats everything you say, in particular the phrases he knows well, you realize you say certain things 5/10 times a day.  Anyway to backup my earlier point – he says “another one” more like “nuvver one” – Perfect little cockney boy I’ve created it!! 😀

One extra point on this post – it shows I’ve been away too long and also all my brain cells have been fried by drinking too much or something – I spelt London, “Londen” for a moment!  That is really worrying.

Hands! May 26, 2009

Hayden has developed a funny trait recently…………….It started when we were on vacation.  He would get sand on his hands and just look at us with this look of horror and hold his hands out awkwardly.  Now it’s expanded to having anything on his hands.  Could be food, dirt, and most recently chalk.   He will pick up one chalk, get the tiniest bit of chalk on his hands and run to either Kara or I to wipe it off his hands!

I think the reason this is funny is because he is a really tough kid.  He constantly bumps his head, cuts his knees, whatever, and it rarely bothers him.  He will fall over, have blood pouring out of his knees, but all he is worried about is a little bit of dirt on his hands.  We have to brush it off, then he inspects makes sure we have done an appropriate job, and then carries on with his business!

Observant or just a genius.. May 17, 2009

We all think our children are geniuses of course.  Well in Hayden’s case it is actually true 🙂

We were playing around outside of a restaurant waiting for Kara, we were actually standing on some old railway tracks so Hayden was busy going “chooo chooo” (his explanation for a train obviously) and he’d just got off my shoulders after running around doing a Indiana Jones impression (“da da da da-da, da, da da da” etc – he is actually pretty good at it!).  Then a truck went past on the road, about 100 yards away or so.  He announces the truck as usual – “Truct”.. then a blue Prius goes by and he shouts out “Mummy!”.  Now I’ll explain why he’s so clever.  Kara has a silver Prius.  The Pruis is not that distinctive, from a distance it looks like any other silver car.   I’ve not seen him do this to any other car.  So somehow he recognized the exact car model of his mum’s car from a hundred yards, and the fact it was a different color didn’t perplex him.  Personally I was pretty impressed.

All good things must come to an end in “T” May 13, 2009

Above you will find a picture of one Mr. Chatterbox.  Mr. Chatterbox chatters from the time he wakes up until the time he finally rests those tired eyes.  He has so much to say!  He has so many words that I wouldn’t really know where to start if I were to try to catalog them here now.  Yes, he talks and talks and talks and talks… until there are other people (besides Mommy and Daddy) around.  He goes to daycare and he will have been talking all morning, jabbering away “reading” this book or that or talking as he plays with his cars or eats his breakfast, and as soon as we step into his classroom he goes silent.  I don’t know how much he comes out of his shell as the day goes on, but I know I can’t get him to say a word when I drop him off.  And we will have family or friends come over and we’ll tell them all the fun new words he has and will he demonstrate any of those words then?  No, he will then make a mouse look drunkenly obnoxious.

No matter the word, he will usually make it end in a very pronounced “T.”  Sheep is sheeT (our friend Helen cleverly pointed out that it’s much better he is saying sheep than ship in this instance), duck is duT, truck is tuT, nut is nuT (fancy that), milk is mooT (that one always makes me laugh)… the list goes on.  It’s really cute how he emphasizes the T at the end.

Whenever he says outside it always has an exclamation point at the end.  Outside!  He says this often.  Whenever I put a zip up sweatshirt on him he starts saying “outside!” even when I am just trying to make him warmer inside.

Color me happy

Hayden knows his colors now and can say some!  He says green and – of all things – purple.  Not blue or red, which I would think would be much easier to say than purple.  But I digress.  We talk about colors a lot while we play cars and blocks.  John has always been particularly good about that – “Hayden, here comes the RED car!”  Today I was having him hand me his legos by color and he was getting excited that he knew the colors I was asking for.

Letters update

Hayden is making great strides with his letters!  Now he reads these letters: A, B, C, D, E, G, H, I, M, N, O, R, V, W, Y.  I could probably stick F in there, too, because he was playing with his fridge magnets this morning and pretty much said F, but I think that was the only time I’ve heard that one.  He is so cute with those fridge magnets because when he puts the letters in the big thing that tells him the letter and sound it plays a little song (D says duh, D says duh, every letter makes a sound, D says duh) and he will do this little squatty dance when the song is playing.  He doesn’t dance often, but he gets excited enough with those letter songs to dance most of the time!  Also, when I start to sing the alphabet song he will always chime in with C after I say “A, B…”  M and N are cute because he says Mmuh and Nnuh.  I think I was over-pronouncing them so he could hear the difference between them more easily and I have inadvertently given him a speech impediment!

I had thought he could only read the capital letters because that is what we have been going over, so I was really surprised when he started saying the little letters the other day.  He was putting together a puzzle that spells his name that I got him in San Fran.  It has all small letters except for the H, and he shocked me a couple of days ago but picking up each one and saying the right letter.  Most of the little letters look completely different to the capital letters, so I am happy he seems to be making the connection easily.

Vacation! May 6, 2009

We had a lovely time on vacation, can’t believe we’ve already been back a couple of weeks!  We went to Naples, FL.  We were warned by many that there are a lot of retirees down there, which was true but suited our pace fine.  John said many times that he could definitely retire there – beautiful beaches, warm weather, plenty of golf (golf courses after golf courses – what a shame thing to do to the native land, I say!), and the place itself (restaurants and such) is very nice.

We went to a different beach every day, usually in the morning in order to get back in time for Hayden to have a nap.  We also went swimming in our condo complex’s pool, typically after nap and before dinner.  There seemed to be plenty of families in our condo with small children, but unfortunately the place didn’t entirely cater to families.  I agree with the theory John came up with, that because it is such a golf-focused area they don’t want to intentionally draw a lot of families in because it could turn off the people they really want to attract – golfers.  There wasn’t a play area and the no baby pool, but we made do by swimming with Hayden in the beautiful big pool and walking around the complex with him when he would get restless in the condo.  We took many walks around the complex, and it was funny because he started imitating the birds on his own.  He was going “Ah! Ah!” and it dawned on us that he kept doing it right after a bird would make a “caw”-ing sound.  So funny!

The photo above was the first beach we went to.  You can see that he really liked the waves.  What you can’t see in this picture is there were loads of sting rays that were patrolling the area right before the waves were breaking.  So most people were staying out of the water.  We only wanted Hayden to dip his toes in but as you can see he kept wanting to go further and further in, so that was a fun battle. 🙂  It was really crazy – the sting rays were not far from where he was.  Of course, they are swimming up and down the shoreline so most of the time they were not very near but then they would come back and we would have to pull him away.  We also saw a couple of dolphins on the last day, which was really neat.  John had taken Hayden into the water and he saw something a little ways away.  A couple of minutes later it came out of the water again and I was able to see it.

Apart from the beaches we went to the Naples Zoo.  That was a nice place.  They have these ‘primate islands’ and you have to wait for these boats to take you around to see the monkeys and apes, which was a cool idea.  We also went to a nature center that was near our condo, and that was cool too.  They had a butterfly garden which was really pretty.  There was also a mangrove where we could see all these jellyfish.

Letters

Hayden is seriously starting to read his letters and numbers!  Granddad got him a giraffe puzzle for Christmas that has a letter on one side of each piece and a number on the other side.  We were putting the puzzle together yesterday (one of his many fave activities), he picked up and M and said “mmm.”  He did it a couple of times, so it wasn’t just a coincidence!  He picked up and O and said “ohh.”  Later we were looking through a book with numbers and he looked at the 8 and said “eighTT” (he really pronounces the T at the end).  We have an alphabet toy on our refrigerator that sounds out the letters, and he has been saying “B” for a while now when he plays with that (and other times he sees a B).  This morning we were doing the giraffe puzzle again and he said M and O again and this time added N (“nnn”)!  He was also saying “one” a lot while we were on holiday, but he hasn’t been saying that for a while (apart from “that one” and “another one” which he says constantly 🙂 ).