And so, another month has passed by and the little guy is now 17 months old. He’ll be a year and a half soon! Wheeee!
[[image:2013_0529_rafe15.jpg:Pleased as punch:center:0]]
* Mouse over the pictures for captions
Adik can now pretty easily climb the sofa. He doesn’t need help or a boost, he can do it all by himself. He has trouble and needs help if he’s carrying something in his hands while he does the climbing but if he has his hands free, boom, he’s on the sofa before you know it! He enjoys sitting on the sofa, playing with his gadgets or reading a book. The bad thing is, he still doesn’t quite understand that jumping face-first off the sofa might not be the greatest idea. So we have sit with him and monitor him and make sure he doesn’t accidentally hurt himself.
Adik is still quite obsessed with brushing his teeth. He brushes them multiple times a day and can even be persuaded to say “one more, please” to ask for more toothpaste. 🙂 It’s quite adorable. And hopefully he will have good dental health while we’re at it!
Books are still his friends. He loves to page through them, rip them up, read them, and especially, to pull each and every one of them off the bookshelves so he can sit in a pile of books and look through the ones he feels like reading. He loves to spell, and now that Yaya is quite the speller, Adik joins in with his own set of almost-letters (“dee eeee eeee eeee geeeee” for instance) every time we quiz Yaya. His old bedtime book Race you to Bed is now quite a torn up wreck with taped up pages. He’s starting to prefer different books at bedtime as well – the current favorite is Hop on Pop by Dr Seuss, which we used to read to Yaya for at least a year and a half or two years at bedtime! That book brings a smile to our faces and we can still pretty much recite it from memory.
Sleep status: no change from last month, other than the fact that bad nights are getting very few now. He does still end up in our bed in the wee hours of the morn, and he kind of expects it, but at this point we are ok with it. The nice thing is that I get to sleep better at night now that he’s sleeping better at night, and one day maybe I will sleep through the night again. We shall see!
Food status: Adik was kind of sketchy with what he was eating while we were on the road. He went off yogurt (!!!) and pretty much drank a lot of Pediasure. But he did start to eat peanut butter sandwiches (no jelly, he’s not into the jelly), and loved the New York style bagels in New Jersey. When we’re on the road, it’s a challenge to get him to eat yogurt or mangos – it’s understandable though that traveling and whatnot does disrupt his routine and makes him act differently. We could not even get him to eat much pizza, which is a food that he loves to eat when we’re at home. (Yaya of course ate circle toast with butter while we were traveling – at least it’s easy to get and easy to make). Adik did mooch Yaya’s circle toast too. But he does like to taste different things and eat just a tiny bit of this that and the other (how happy it made me when he ate pasembur from Penang with me! He loved their cucur udang and kuah pasembur. He ate a bunch of that, my little Malaysian boy).
Speech status: Adik seems to be trying to talk a lot now! Besides “Mama”, “Papa”, “Yaya”, “Kitkat” and “Bye” he now says “more”, “bubble” (baw-ball) and “please” (peeeshhhh). He can also be counted on (haha!) to yell out “TEN” when you count to nine. He’s definitely trying hard to communicate. I would totally attribute much of this to his desire to copy Yaya. He wants to do and say what Yaya is doing/saying. He wants to be in on the action and not left out. He wants to dance to his favorite music (and knows how to operate the stereo as well as the iPod/iPad to get it) and now he even sings along (or tries to) to music. He’s such a fun and funny little boy – we are constantly laughing at his little antics.
Let’s get to the pictures of how our cuddly hero spent his 17 month birthday! He woke up in a hotel room after his Mama had surreptitiously nursed him and escaped to go to work. Mama drove in to work at the crack o’ dawn and got lost a few times (but that is a whole other story). So he spent the day with Papa and Yaya at the hotel:
[[image:2013_0529_rafe01.jpg:Playing doctor with Mr Baseball Bear:center:0]]
After an outfit change:
[[image:2013_0529_rafe03.jpg:Property of the Chicago Cubs?:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe04.jpg:Beaning Yaya with Duchess (aka “How do you guard against hurled stuffed cats?”):center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe02.jpg:Pediasure break, filched a hankie from the suitcase:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe05.jpg:Hmm, what shall we do with this?:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe06.jpg:Let us daintily spread it out!:center:0]]
Note the daintily raised pinky action ;-).
[[image:2013_0529_rafe07.jpg:Playing with the iPod (aka Mama’s Black Phone):center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe08.jpg:Tromping around in Papa’s slippers:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe09.jpg:Papa, I want to play! Where are all my toys?:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe10.jpg:What? I am NOT playing with the door (as he closes the door to the bedroom):center:0]]
The nice thing was that we were in a suite where the bedroom is separate and so we had room to spread out. The bad thing was that Adik loooooved playing with the double-doors to the bedroom. Opening, closing, opening, closing.
He did like to be strapped into the stroller and asked to ride in it sometimes:
[[image:2013_0529_rafe11.jpg:Yaya on sofa with iPad, Adik in stroller with iPod:center:0]]
Adik started to look a little sleepy. I had driven myself to work that day so Vin was left at the hotel without the car (and the most reliable means of getting Adik to take his afternoon nap if he can’t sleep in my lap). Since we had had (accidental) success with getting him to nap in the stroller, Vin left him there to see what would happen.
[[image:2013_0529_rafe12.jpg:Parked in the bedroom with cartoons on TV and gadget in hand:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe13.jpg:And the baby has fallen asleep!:center:0]]
Adik managed to get a decent nap in the stroller. Yay! Poor little baby, sleeping without his Mama… When he wakes up, he is ready for action!
[[image:2013_0529_rafe14.jpg:Joking around with Papa:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe16.jpg:Papa, you crack me up!:center:0]]
And then, finally Mama gets home and joins in the fun!
[[image:2013_0529_rafe17.jpg:Sitting in the setting sun:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe20.jpg:I’m not going to jump off or do anything dangerous, really…:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe18.jpg:I’m just lying down on this armchair:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe19.jpg:Here’s the dangerous stuff! Vin is ready to catch the boy should he topple over:center:0]]
And then the kids had a little art session:
[[image:2013_0529_rafe21.jpg:Drawing together:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe22.jpg:Adik is intent on his masterpiece:center:0]]
And somehow he has escaped minus his shirt!
[[image:2013_0529_rafe25.jpg:What? I don’t know what happened to my shirt:center:0]]
[[image:2013_0529_rafe23.jpg:I have the room key!:center:0]]
Vin, Adik and Yaya made it through the long day without a car and without me, and everybody was still happy when I got there. Yay! And then it was bath and bedtime for little boys (and girls). It was a full day and Adik and Yaya coped very well even though they were in a hotel and not running around on their home turf. On the plus side, this hotel did put out a lovely breakfast spread (omelets made to order!), and Vin did get some lovely sushi for dinner. Wheee!
Happy 17 month birthday, baby boy! We love you!! See you all next month!
[[image:2013_0529_rafe24.jpg:His GQ pose?:center:0]]
