Something he picked up quite a while ago is the word “Careful”.. 
When he’s being a boy (i.e. climbing on stuff he shouldn’t be and standing and delicately balancing on a rocking chair or something) we tell him to be really careful and obviously make sure he’s not going to hurt himself. Well the little monkey has interpreted this in his own way…….. It’s perfectly fine for him to do these things, as long as he repeats the words “careful, careful”. So we can turn our back, he’ll be climbing or jumping on something he shouldn’t – but everything is ok because he is telling us “careful”
Careful!! October 21, 2009
Walk, or not to Walk
Hayden is starting to become somewhat of a handful when we go with walks. It breaks down like this. If we take his stroller then he just wants to push it the whole way instead of riding in it. If we even touch it then he gets cranky at us and has a mini fit. Attempting to put him in the stroller without his written permission – parental suicide! 
Sometimes he’ll change his mind half way on the wall and start to climb in the stroller, and then he will either just want to play straps, or might let us push him the rest of the way depending on his mood.
Well I’ve started to have enough of this. While I’m pretty patient, if I’m on a walk I do actually want to walk a little bit rather than crawl along, and if we have the dogs they defiantly get very restless and will just start pulling so I want to shake his habit. So the other day we tried to go on a walk without his stroller. The first big mistake was to go out through the garage, so he immediately walked over to his “trailer” and started to push it and told me to open the garage. I tried to explain to him that today there was no stroller – it was clear that one of two things was going to happen. We were going on a walk with the stroller, or we were not going on a walk and Hayden was going to scream and roll around on the floor for twenty minutes.
OK so next time I wasn’t so dumb and I made him go through the front door. Genius I hear you say. Well this worked find except he just ran off towards the garage and complaining it wasn’t open so he couldn’t get his stroller out. I was determined to walk without it, so I pick him up and started to walk. He kicked screamed for at least two houses when I finally managed to distract him with a fountain in the pond near our house and then we had a nice walk from that point forward. Obviously no talk of the stroller from me. So now I know he’s good to walk you just have to break the connection…
We tried this again at the weekend, and this time the same sequence occurred. I was thinking it might have given it up, but nope – he still wants his stroller. So my latest plan was to leave the house carrying him so he can’t run to garge to get his stroller – genius! 😀 Well almost – he had a bit of a fit about “want down, want down” but i went with him the opposite way to the garage put him and down and asked him which way are we going – he pointed off the way i wanted and away we were with perhaps just one tear… I think we’re getting there 😀
He loved the walk by the way – he likes to grab the dogs leash and walk them – he thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world!!
Daddy’s Boy or Mummy’s Boy?
At times Hayden is like a yoyo. One day he is the biggest mummy’s boy ever. Hanging off her leg if she dares leaves him playing to go make dinner or something, pushing me away if I dare even sit at the same table as him eating because he wants mummy, “no daddy no daddy no daddy!!” etc. 
Another day, Daddy is the coolest thing since sliced bread. I’m the first thing he talks about in the morning, everything must be “Daddy sit right here”, “go Daddy’s car” and generally just wanting to hang out with me and play. Even to the point where we are playing his (my) favorite distraction game for when he’s getting restless when eating (where is the “xxxxx” fill the x with anything you can see – kind of like I spy for toddlers) and then if Kara tries to offer a suggestion he’ll go crazy “NO daddy do it, daddy it”. It’s a lottery – you never know what you’re going to get!! However if you keep candy in your pocket he’ll always come around!! Bribes are a toddlers best friend!! (erm I mean rewards, not bribes, how un-PC of me!)
Jokes October 1, 2009
Hayden has started telling his version of “jokes,” which absolutely cracks me up. It’s all around saying he wants to do something that he doesn’t really want to do. He will be playing and he’ll look up at me and smile and say “day care!” So I’ll tell him it’s not a day care day and Mommy gets to spend the day with Hayden today, and he doesn’t really want to go to day care, does he? And he’ll smile and say “day care!” again and laugh, and eventually I’ll say, “Okay! You can go to day care!” and he’ll say “No, home.” Then I ask him if he was teasing Mommy and he just laughs! When I brought him home from day care yesterday and I was about to get him out of his car seat he said “day care” and I said, “You want to go back to day care?” He said, “Yep,” so I said, “Okay! I’ll take you back!” He then said, “No, home, home,” and again laughed when I asked if he’d been teasing Mommy. You can also replace “nap” with “day care” and have the same scenario.
The first “joke” he told was when we were looking through a book of sheep and he pointed to one and said, “Mimi.” I started tickling him and said, “That’s not Mimi, that’s a sheep!” and he was laughing and laughing, and for a few days he would point to Mimi or Lucy and call them sheep or see a sheep in a book and call it Mimi or Lucy and laugh every time.
Girlfriend!
So apparently Hayden has a girlfriend at day care! When I picked him up a couple of weeks ago the teacher said that he and a little girl named Riti were holding hands at story time, and they were laughing and having a great time. Riti is the only Indian girl in his class so when I left the first person I texted was Reena because I knew she would love that! Unfortunately, after that she was on vacation for nearly two weeks; I felt badly that his friend was gone. He seemed to have moved on in that week though, because there is another little girl in the class called McKinnley, and I’ve heard a lot about her lately. When he talks about her it sounds exactly like “Jenny,” but we don’t know any Jenny’s and the closest I can come up with is McKinnley. He says “Jenny” and then gets the cutest little smile. There hasn’t been any hand holding, but there is a lot of talk about her (again, assuming that is who he means).
Fun day care report
Yesterday when I picked Hayden up from day care I had a very proud Mommy moment. The teacher asked me if we had this particular book that we don’t have. I said, “No, does he like it?” She showed me the book and told me in amazement about how there are all these shapes in the book and Hayden knew all of them! She said, “I mean, not even just circle and square, he knew diamond and rectangle and even oval. They never know oval!” Then she was going on about how many colors he knew, and how good he is with his numbers. I think I was just glowing as I walked out!
Hayden do it
Keeping up with the expectations of what a two year old is supposed to do, Hayden is becoming an independent little guy. One thing we hear often in this house is “Hayden do it.” If you start to do something he wants to do, he will get fiesty and say “Hayden do it!” He says it if you start to feed him and he wants to do it himself, if you start to sing something and he wants to sing it by himself, if you try to read to him but he wants to read, pretty much any scenario you can imagine. Alternatively, there is “Mommy do it” or “Daddy do it,” which is used when Hayden is feeding himself and he has decided he’s done doing that, and so on. The boy knows what he wants, there’s no doubt about that! Because of this, I now try to make a point of letting him make some decisions throughout the day. In the morning I hold up three choices of shirts and he chooses which one he wants to wear (this has magically resolved a problem we were sometimes having where he did not want to take off his pajamas), he chooses his plate at meal time, he usually chooses if we go in Mommy or Daddy’s car, etc. He loves making decisions!
Singing
Hayden LOVES to sing! He will first announce what he wants to sing (or less often, what he wants one of us to sing): “ABCD” (formerly “CDCD”), “Tinkle, Tinkle,” “Head Toes” (Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes), “Spider,” “Street” (Baa, baa black sheep). Last weekend he kept saying something about “street” and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was always when he was wanting to sing but I couldn’t think of anything we normally sing that fit. Finally after about the third different time he brought it up I was able to understand that he was saying “sheep,” so I asked if he wanted Baa, Baa Black Sheep and he smiled and said “yep.” So we sang that but I was perplexed because that is not something we sing ever. The next day I asked at daycare if they sang it and they said yes that was one of the kids’ favorites!
Another thing around music that he is doing now is bringing any toy that he finds that makes noise and naming a song that he wants to hear. That works about 5% of the time, but the other 95% he wants the toy to play a song that it doesn’t play. Of course, this upsets him and depending on his level of tiredness it can cause some tears when he can’t hear “Tinkle, Tinkle” or “ABCD.” And it actually seems to make things worse if John or I try to sing it for him (hmm, that’s possibly slightly offensive! 😉 ).
Nap update
I am thrilled to say that the non napping only lasted a couple of weeks, and Hayden is back in full nap mode. His habit now when I put him down is to talk and talk and talk for a while until I come upstairs to check his diaper (many times he has a dirty one that needs changing, but even when he doesn’t this is still the routine now). I check it and change if needed and put him back down and he goes pretty much straight to sleep! Whatever works! I definitely wasn’t ready for him to ditch the nap.
Hayden and Layla's Place 