yum, yum, yum.

Something I have noticed about parenting: there are some phases that make you want to rip your head off and then take a two-week-long nap, and some phases where everything is so amazing and you are so obsessed with your child and he is just cuter than anything ever and you just want to EAT HIM UP all day long because he is so cute and smart and delicious-looking.

We are currently in one of the good phases. Dane has been SO cute and SO funny and SO smart lately, everything he does makes me fall over with all the adorableness. I KNOW I AM BIASED but this is how I feel. Tommy agrees with me, so it must be the truth, right?

Some awesome things Dane does:

-He has been napping around two hours a day. THIS IS A MIRACLE! (After his first year of life being a pretty noncommittal napper, I am soooo thrilled by every nap that is a decent length.)

-He is OBSESSED with Tommy and ME! This is a new thing--finally Mama is just as great as Daddy. He not only says "Mama" and "Dada" when he wants us, but he'll just walk around talking about us to himself. "Mama... Dada... Mama... Dada..." Like we are just the best things he can think about all day long. 

-He loves, loves, loves giving kisses and hugs. He gives Indie hugs about 12 times a day. He gives me hugs about 40 times a day. He just runs up and says "HUG" and then leans his head onto you and snuggles you.

-He gets very sad and hurt any time you say "no" to him. His eyes well up with tears and he starts sobbing and then--just wait!--he runs to you to have you give him a hug! So every time he gets in trouble it leads to more hugging and loving. It's impossible to be mad with a child who wants you to comfort him after he gets in trouble FROM YOU. 

-He is talking up a storm (for him). He learns new words every day, like "squirrel" and "plane" and "truck" and "chicken"--it is the BEST to see him learn a new word and point at something and say it. He is so pleased with himself whenever he figures another one out. 

I am not kidding--the last two months have been so happy and awesome. I am just living it up because I know there will be harder months to come (like when we're living in Texas in 110-degree heat all summer!).

And of course, a few pictures from my phone.and some more stories to go along with them.

Another adorable thing: he insists on running around naked after his bath for about an hour before we put on his jammies. He gets very offended at jammie time now. And he loves it when Tommy gives him a cape made out of his blankets--he'll run around wearing this cape for as long as it'll stay on. 

He is obsessed with balloons, of course. For Valentine's Day, we went to the grocery store and got a new balloon because he COULD NOT RESIST the balloon display at our store. I snapped it onto his jacket and he was absolutely thrilled to run around with it.

This is the background on my phone right now--the snow day!

One day a week or so ago, I put him in the Bumbo with a few cheerios to entertain him while I started dinner. Then a few days later, around dinnertime, he climbed into the Bumbo, grabbed the tray and tried to put it on, and then pointed at the cheerios and yelled for me to give them to him. HOW COULD I RESIST?

He used to be really into me and Tommy reading him books. NO LONGER! He insists on reading to HIMSELF now, 90% of the time. He gets super mad when I try to sit on the chair with him, but he will happily sit in his chair, choose a book from his book pile, make me give him THE EXACT RIGHT ONE (batting away any other books I try to offer him), and then turn through the pages by himself. He will even say the words that he remembers to himself. This book below is called "Peekaboo!" and he flips through the pages saying "Peeboo... peeboo" over and over again. 

I told him to read the book to his baby, and he did.

Dane has never been that interested in TV, but I turned on the Lion King the other day when it was freezing and snowing outside and we had no chances of going anywhere else. And he absolutely loved it. He sat and stared at all the animals and made the noises when they came on the screen--he was roaring at the lions for about 5 minutes straight. His attention only lasted about 20 minutes, but it just killed me to see him so happy about it. And then the next day, he started doing his elephant noise and walked over to the TV and pointed at it, and looked up at me so expectantly and hopefully. He was just totally asking to watch Lion King again. It just killed me, it was so cute.