What's New With Addison?

He's a handful, I'll tell you that much. He's learning to be a big helper by going to get things I ask for and sharing with Bryn and putting his dirty dishes in the sink. He also helps me to clean up his room every morning and did a passable job by himself this morning without even having me in the room! With all that maturity has come a good deal of orneriness too, mainly in the form of selective hearing. I feel like a broken record every day of my life.

He is a lot of fun, though. Here are a few things he's currently loving.

Movies, as always. Here he is caught up in the emotion of some favorite movie.

He'd watch tv 24/7 if we'd let him, which we don't. Usually at some point during the morning I mention what day it is and what we do on that day, such as, "Today's Monday. We have family night tonight." He's learned what we do on most of the days. Sunday we go to church, Wednesday we go to Young Women, Thursday we do laundry, Saturday Daddy stays home with us, but Friday is by far his favorite, because we watch a movie. It's actually a really fun little tradition we've got going. After jammie time we lay out all of his movies (all ten or so of them) and he deliberates for as long as we let him about which one to watch. Then he likes to pick a few of the cases to hold and look at. Then we put it in and he gets popcorn while he watches it. Not much makes him happier. Some current faves are Robin Hood, Franklin and the Green Knight, and Ninja Turtles (the original cartoons).

I really enjoy watching him learn how to play and pretend. He's into dressing up a little bit. He loves putting on Daddy's shoes and a tie and a hat and grabbing a bag of some sort so he can go to work. He also likes to "go to school" on his trike.

He is extremely attached to Daddy's bicycle helmet too. He is also very into swords. We have a croquet set in our shed, and he likes to take the ends off the mallets and use the sticks as swords. I think I'm the only casualty so far, with a knock to the noggin one fateful afternoon. He likes to pretend he's the Green Knight, from his Franklin movie, on a quest to find spring.

We recently had a failed three-week attempt at potty training. It's not the first time we've tried, and I was just sure he was ready, but I was wrong. Despite the most creative and ridiculous rewards I could come up with, we finally gave up for now. I think our laundry bill started to exceed our diaper bill. Here he is with one of his rewards. It sure was fun to reward him when he earned it.

He's getting to be pretty darn good at coloring, and he's also developing a sense of humor. I like that he cracks himself up. You all know the classic "The wise man built his house on the bagel" one, I'm sure. He still uses that one frequently. Another one of his personal favorites is when he and Bryn are bathing and I tell one of them to lay back. He replies "lay tummy." Ha! Clever little devil, isn't he? In this picture he finds it hilarious that he hung our ghost pictures upside-down on the fridge.


He loves games. Especially Candy Land and a little alphabet-truck-magnet-puzzle one that we have.

And as I mentioned in the last post, he has his own room up in the loft on a completely different level of the house (sniffle) from us! My baby's growing up! We moved him a month or two ago after he kept waking up Bryn from every nap. Now we've got a nice "quiet time" routine figured out so that even if he doesn't nap Mommy gets a little break.