More Things Barak Can Do

1. Give hugs. This is the best. He puts his arms around my neck, squeezes, and says, "Hug!" Definitely tops on the list of Imma's favorite things.

2. Dismember peanut butter sandwiches. He has, on occasion, eaten peanut butter sandwiches as the good Lord intended them to be eaten, but he is much more likely to open them up, scoop out the peanut butter, proffer the scraped bread to Imma and say, very sweetly, "More more?"

3. Put together two words and sometimes even three, as in "no more milk," "all gone cookie," "not stuck" etc. He's pretty solid on using no for negation, as in "no bath," "no potty," "no cheese." And sometimes he gives you a very decisive no by putting both hands out in a "stop" gesture while shaking his head very seriously. I definitely don't want cheese, thanks.

4. Tell me all the sounds the animals make in the immortal literary classic, "Moo, Baa, La la la." He can also point to all the right animals on the last page--cow, horse, duck, cat, dog, etc.

5. Correctly identify a moose. This is thanks to the honorary grandma who brought him a copy of Richard Scarry's Word Book when she visited last winter. Inside the front cover, there is a picture of a moose that covers both pages. Barak can now usually be trusted to read paper books without ripping out the pages (you need to keep an eye on him, though, because previously existing tears can be a little too tempting) so he spent much of yesterday sitting in the big glider rocker in the living room looking at this book, pointing at the moose, and pronouncing, "moose!"
For some weird reason, though, he keeps pointing at the walrus on the next page and calling it by the cat's name. Hmmm.

6. Sit still through multiple readings of multiple books. Tonight, we read "But Not the Hippopatamus" six times, "Moo Baa La La La" four times, and Dr. Seuss's ABC book three times. We got to the end, Barak said "again?" and Imma obligingly turned back to page one. It's not such a big deal when each book takes forty seconds to read.

7. Get in and out of his stroller by himself. He even understands that I have to get all the buckles undone first, or he'll get stuck ("guck!).

8. Show me where something hurts if I ask him where it hurts. This was really handy today in helping me figure out why he was crying--part of his diaper was turned in and it had given him a nasty chafe mark, which I would never have known about until the next diaper change if he hadn't been able to show me.

9. Identify most parts of his body, including eyes, ears, toes, belly button, etc. Whenever he is in the room while I'm getting dressed, he helpfully points at my middle and says, "tummy!" Yes, I know it's big, thanks. He also sometimes points to it and says "baby." Yesterday, he came up to me while I was sitting in the comfy chair in the kitchen, put his hands on my tummy, and said "tummy!" just as the baby gave a big old kick right where his hand was. Big open eyes, big open mouth. Now what was that?

10. Nap without a pacifier. This doesn't work at night, though. We're planning on working on that one after we come back from visiting my SIL and company this weekend. The idea is to banish the pluggie well before baby #2 turns up IY"H after Pesach--hoping Barak will have forgotten about it by then. Well, I can always hope, right?