A Voice Only a Mother Could Love?

lol, Aiden was loving singing karaoke with Daddy and Aunt Mandy the other day.

The kid LOVES to sing!

16 months old!

Aiden may finally be 20 pounds. Isaac still weighs him in at 19, but he sure seems heavy to me now!

He babbles some great sentences now; I wish I knew what he was saying. He says “banana” sometimes, and he has said balloon and a few other things once or twice, but nothing new that’s consistent. His favorites are definitely “Mom,” “ball,” and “doggie.”

He has been enormously cranky lately off and on; I have my fingers and toes all crossed that it is a new tooth or something that will pass quickly. When he is not crying, he is quite a lot of fun.

He likes to brush his teeth and hair, and he likes to hand our shoes to us when it’s time to leave. He is adamant about feeding himself a lot now, which makes meals messier, but it’s fun to see him practice. He sits better for books now than he has in the past, which makes me so excited, I might have picked up a few books lately… I’ll save that for another post. Suffice it to say that he especially likes big books and finding the ball in every book possible. For example, in his counting book, he finds the ball, points and says “ball.” In his doggie book, he flips to the page with the ball to point it out… and sometimes he finds something round that isn’t really a ball, but he lets us know what it looks like!

He is showing himself to be very compassionate lately. He looks very upset when he hears other kids crying. The other day, he walked over to a crying 3 year old, dropped the ball he was playing with, put his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, smiled, and said “Hi!” in as bright a voice as ever. He stroked the boy’s hair and stayed there until he stopped crying. It was pretty adorable.

He is definitely keeping us on our toes, climbing and running and staining everything… I can’t even count how many stains I have treated in the last month; it feels like nearly every day there’s at least one item. I have to say, I’m getting pretty good at it.

In spite of the challenges, sixteen months is tons of fun, and I can’t wait for summer school to be over in a week so I can stay home with him for a month.

Happy Fourth of July!

This morning we went to our ward breakfast at the park. Aiden was happy there were balls to play with.

Mom, Mandy and I had a girls’ trip to the Great Mall and went shopping. Mandy and I have definitely ended up with much the same fashion sense.

Aiden took a nap, Mandy and I painted our nails, Isaac got to come home early from work, and we had a family dinner.

We went to the home of a family in our ward to watch fireworks. Aiden was pretty enthralled… with the dogs, the tetherball, and also the firecrackers…

That’s Mandy… she wasn’t quite fast enough…

Legal in our city? No… but these big ones were fun to watch over the trees…

We’re sure grateful to live in America! Land of the free, home of the brave… can you believe he smiled like this for the tripod? lucky.