Judah at two and a half

Judah at not quite 2.5- Thanksgiving 2013

I feel like it is time for a Judah update now that he is a Big Boy (his words and he will absolutely correct you if you call him a baby. He corrects me constantly. Trust.). He turned two and a half on December 21st. As a big boy there is definitely no need to record a play by play of his development each month, but half a year seems like a good check in time.

Judah now sings. All. The. Time. We are not a singing family. I take requests from him (ABCs, Old McDonald, and whatnot) but I don't just randomly burst into song. If you have ever heard my singing voice you would know that there is a good reason for this. However, Judah is all about it. We can certainly credit him going to school with the increased singing. He's pretty funny because sometimes he knows the general sounds but doesn't really get that they are words, or sometimes he just has just has one or two lines that he just repeats. He also will make up nonsense word songs or make up songs about his life. One of my personal favorites goes a little something like this:

Mommy, Daddy
Judah, Shoshi,
Ralphie, Gertie,
Kitties, fish
That's all of us

It's a pretty catchy little ditty. Sometimes he will insist I sing him a song and he will tell me either the title or a line from the song and I have no clue what he is referring to (what with his penchant for getting the words wrong). Then he will get so pissed that I can't sing it. At times I am able to get him to sing it enough that I can piece together what song it he wants. That is what happened with Wee Willie Winkie. I swear I had never heard that nursery rhyme before, but I got him to sing it enough times that I could fully understand enough words to google it and found out what it was.

His vocabulary has grown in leaps and bounds (again, I think school has a lot to do with this). However, his pronunciation has not kept pace, so there are lots of words that sound identical to others and for the life of me, I cannot figure out what he is saying. It was a lot easier when he was just with me all the time because I had more of a context for the words and they were words I tend to use, but now he comes home with all sorts of new words. Usually we are able to figure it out, but every once in a while he has us completely stumped. His current favorite exclamation is "shit box", which he learned from Willie. We both find it pretty hilarious. It also took us a bit to figure out what he was saying, we thought for sure he was telling us "sit in box". We were wrong.

Judah now refers to his left and right. Sometimes he even refers to them correctly! This also makes him quite the back seat driver.

I am sad to say that he no longer naps during the day. It took about a month of battling him on it and always losing (he napped 3 times that month: the first day of preschool and twice when sick). It just wasn't worth it to fight him on it everyday. He got mad. I got frustrated. No one was relaxing. He also learned the neat trick of pooping in his diaper as a way to get out of nap time. So awesome! With nap time getting the kibosh, we moved his bedtime up a bit earlier and called it good. He is usually in bed around 7 and sleeps until 7:30ish, so we really can't complain.

He is still in his crib at night. His crib is super deep and he has yet to be able to get out of it. We plan on keeping him his crib as long as we can. I'm not pumped on the idea of him having access to the house while we are still sleeping. I will definitely need to do some refining on my child proofing once we get to that point. He also still wears a diaper at night. Some mornings it is still dry and some mornings it is soaked. He hasn't quite gotten to the point where he can hold it that long or be awake enough during the night to ask to go. Besides, I don't really want to get up to help him go in the middle of the night as I am awake more than enough with Shosh as is thankyouverymuch.

Judah picks out his own outfits. Some days he just goes for whatever is on top in his drawers, but other times he specifically seeks out a shirt or pants. Of course, there are also days where he is not into wearing clothes at all and then it is up to Bill or I to pick out an outfit and wrangle him into it.

He is really into puzzles at the moment. I was surprised to find that he can do conventional style puzzles (as opposed to baby puzzles of putting a shape/number/letter into a pre-fit spot on a board). He is also very much into trains, cars, and mini plastic animals. He engages in imagination play with them and it is pretty adorable. He will play on his own and we will just kind of eavesdrop on him as he has animal families go on adventures or get ready for bed. It's so neat watching him make sense of the world around him through play.

It's Gert, the photo-bombing pug!

At two and a half Judah was going through a not so awesome stage of ripping up books. He had some paper backs in his collection. He now no longer has any paper back in his collection. He even tore up some board books. We have worked out system now where he is free to rip up his magazines once he is done with them, but books are not to be ripped!

Judah continues to be a big fan of Shosh. He is always hugging and kissing her. He tackles her and we are convinced she will cry, but instead she busts out laughing. She thinks he is just the funniest thing in the world. Of course, he also gets jealous of her and will rip toys out of her hands (which, again, she tends to think is hilarious).

He watches more TV than I would like to admit, but so it goes. Some days he won't watch any (and I feel like I win at being a mom!) and other days he watches hours of it in the morning and afternoon (these days are usually after I have been up ALL NIGHT with Shosh and just don't have the energy/patience to engage). I try not to beat myself up over the days he watches too much. I'm definitely thankful that he goes to school now so I can focus on Shosh during that time without him being parked in front of cartoons on OPB.

Judah counts up to 20 now, but I think he really only has one to one correspondence up to ten. The teens can get a bit garbled, but more often than not he gets them in the correct order. He is always practicing his letter sounds. He will see a letter and then repeats the letter sounds at us. It makes me wonder how old he will be when he starts reading cvc words. My guess is he will have some down by the time he is 3.

Oh, and somehow I forgot to put these photos in Shosh's 5 month post... so here they are now instead (photos taken on 12/13/13)