Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Twinkle, Twinkle...

Handsome's favorite channel is PBS Sprout. He pretty much loves everything about the channel - including the Verizon commercial where the phone is also a calculator ("Phone?"), and the potty dance commercial where he dances along with them. He picks up the oddest things.

He likes the Play With Me Sesame show. The main characters are Grover, Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster, and Prairie somethin-or-other. Occasionally Elmo makes an appearance, and I tell Handsome who Elmo is, but he didn't seem to pay attention. Then we went to Target the other day and I hear "ELMO!!" coming from my cart. He spotted Elmo and was SOO excited. I don't get it. He has Ernie and Cookie Monster at home, but they are apparently not on the same level as Elmo.

He also loves the Goodnight Show with Nina and Star. He gets so excited when he sees them. He even practices the sign language they teach and stretches when Nina is teaching yoga.

But the reason I mention Sprout, is they sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star every night. He LOVES it. I started singing it to him and he just wants me to sing it over and over and... well, you get the point. So last night before I put him to bed we knelt down and prayed, as always, and he says, "Amen. Amen." Then I sang Jesus Loves Me, as I sing every night to him. While I was singing Jesus Loves Me, I hear him singing "Tinka, Tinka, eh eh ah..." Apparently he's trying to hint to me to change my song. I put him to bed, and after I leave the room I hear on the monitor, "Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen...." And then after he has been in bed and quiet for lets say an hour, we hear on the monitor, "Tinka, Tinka, eh eh ah..." And then, after another hour or so of quiet, "Tinka, Tinka, eh eh ah..." Each time DH and I would crack up laughing which was loud enough for Handsome to hear so he would start laughing too.

I love that little boy. He makes me so happy.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Updates

Wow, my poor neglected blog. I've had zero time to update this blog lately. So much has happened and now I feel like I've missed documenting most of it because I haven't written anything here. I do have pictures of most of everything, so at least there is that.

Handsome's language is doing MUCH better. He's got around 70 words that we can think of and he is learning something new everyday. About 60 of those words that we've written down are English and I know he has more Dagaare that DH just isn't remembering. He is even starting to put a couple words together to make the beginnings of sentences.

He has also gotten rid of a lot of his shyness. He'll give random people "fives" and even hugs. He's even playing with other little kids more. We went to a little Soccer Tot meetup and he found this one little boy that he decided was going to be his best friend. He kept following the little boy around and putting his hand on the boys shoulder. He kept wanting to hug him, but the other boy - who was three months younger than Handsome - wasn't too sure about it all. He did give Handsome a hug or two at his mother's request, but he just didn't want to share so much of his personal space. The funny thing is, about five minutes before Handsome started chasing him around, the other boy was watching Handsome and doing everything Handsome did but with about a 3 second delay so that Handsome didn't see that he was copying him. Too funny!

DH's school is not going quite as planned. We've had to delay everything by about a year and that has been really stressful. We are working through it and I know in the end everything will work out, it is just hard right now.

Handsome turns two in a month. *sniff, sniff* My little boy is growing up so fast! We bought him a slide for his birthday which I know he'll love. He's all about the slide on the playground. I have invited friends over to our house to celebrate. We thought about reserving a park bench somewhere, but found out that would be about $100, which seems outrageous to me, so we are stuffing as many people as we can into our tiny house. So far we have about 10 of Handsome's little friends coming and hopefully he'll be excited about them coming and not freak out about the number of people in his normally quiet and calm house. Singing Happy Birthday to him could be traumatic having that many eyes on him, but we'll see how he does. I wish my family and DH's family could be here, but it's just not possible right now. Maybe next year we'll go to either Texas or Ghana for his birthday. (Just dreaming here, folks. There is no way we could afford Ghana and DH will only have one week between semesters in school) I just hope Handsome actually gets to know, and can be close to, more of his family than DH and I.

I'll try to update more often, but I'm not optimistic. Work keeps getting busier and DH hogs the computer. ;)