More evidence of growing up

Well, I guess we know what his first chore will be...
Originally uploaded by samiratou

Helping with chores. In this case, vacuuming.

Giraffe!

Giraffe!
Originally uploaded by samiratou

First ride on a carousel. He wasn't a fan. Maybe we'll have better luck with a larger, less rickety one. But the little carnival at West St. Paul days wasn't quite cutting it.

18 months

All clean
Originally uploaded by samiratou

Where, oh where, has the time gone? Nicolai is 18 months old now. He's tall. He's very mobile. He's into everything. He's talking now, finally. We didn't hear much clear verbal communication until a couple weeks ago, and it appears that's because Nicolai has decided to skip words and go straight to phrases. Most prominently: "I want..." I want that, I want down, I want up, I want bubbles, etc. We've also got "go buh-bye" when he wants to go outside and others we've yet to figure out. This makes interpretation quite a bit more difficult, as it turns out, but we are encouraged by the increase in communication. His favorite toys currently are balls and bubbles, and he'd live outside if he could. This wouldn't be so bad if he didn't still need constant supervision, but as it is running around after him and keeping him from killing himself is darn tiring.

He's pretty good at following directions, at least when it comes to throwing things away (except when he throws things away that don't belong in the trash, of course) and fetching things. He'll bring us something or throw something away and then clap for himself. It's very cute. We're working on how to get him to not start doing something we don't want him to do and then being proud of himself when he stops when we tell him to stop. Main example now is grabbing onto the curtain and walking away with it, threatening to pull the curtain down. He can play peekaboo behind the curtain, but can't pull on it, but he'll grab it, pull on it, wait for us to tell him to let go, and then he'll smile and clap for himself. *sigh*

He's still working on climbing, which is okay with us--I have no desire to go into the kitchen to fetch milk or something and come back to find him on top of the hutch.

Happy Belated Birthday, Nicolai!

DSCF1063
Originally uploaded by samiratou

So, I've been worse than usual about writing lately, but it has been an eventful few months.

To begin: Nicolai turned 1 on Nov. 14, 2009. I didn't write about it at the time as things were rather hectic. He came down with pneumonia and an ear infection a couple weeks before his birthday and was a pretty sick kid for awhile. Then he broke out in pretty bad hives (he tends to get rashy when he gets particularly sick, but this was by far the worse reaction we'd seen. Possibly due to antibiotics. Possibly just due to everything. Probably not an actual allergy.), so his birthday started off with a doctor visit. He was mostly okay until it got to late afternoon and he needed a nap and the hives started itching. He did have fun opening presents, though, and a good time was had by all. He was kind of done by the time we got to the cake, and isn't really a food-smearing type of kid, anyway, so there's no obligatory child-covered-in-chocolate pictures, but he has enjoyed all of his presents.