Great words

We try not to reinforce improper pronunciations with Quinn's expanding vocabulary, but some of them are pretty priceless. Now and then when he falls or drops something, he'll come out with "Oops day see" (oopsy-daisy). His word for "front loader" is "fyonto yodo" which took some fine detective work by Bec to figure out. "Tractor" comes out as "cock-so" clear as a bell, which is a little hard to fathom, and further complicated by the fact that he uses the same word for "cracker". A firetruck is a "wee-ahh", after the siren sound it makes. A train is a "tugga-tugga" (chugga chugga). "Buhh dozz" (bulldozer) was one of his first real words. "Fahdown" (fall down) is a heavily used expression by our little gravity-checker.

Even better - he's started into the hushed self-monologues as he plays. If you listen closely you hear him say things like "fyonto yodo fahdown go boom oop day see" and then the front loader crashes onto the floor. All the words he's learned to understand these last few months are now just pouring out of him. A chatterbox, he now is.

Big Hugs

Quinn's been sick recently. Just regular sick, which is a relief in these H1N1 times (a couple nervous days were had...). He's had a very runny nose, and we constantly had to wipe his nose to keep puddles from forming on the floor. His nose and upper lip got quite sore and Bec would put cream on it to try to make it better. Well Quinn didn't think much of that idea. "Owwie Nose!" he'd shriek and flail left and right. But mommy always achieved her mission, as mommies always do.

But then Quinn came up with a very clever defence. "Big Hug" he'd wail and throw his arms around his mommy's neck. Well of course this would melt mommies heart and they'd hug for a moment. "Big hug" he'd plead and hang on for dear life. After awhile it became clear that this was as much evasive as emoting. I said "I think somebody's a sneaky hugger" and honest to god he got a twinkle in his eye!

In spite of his boxer's clinch, mommy still always achieved her mission, as mommies always do, but the defensive tactics are already evolving lickity-split. We're going to have to work at it to stay ahead of this kid I think.

Quinn and his gang

For months we tried to get Quinn attached to a stuffed animal that might get him through the night without the aid of mommy or daddy. For months we tried in vain. The teddy bear his great uncle Dave bought him through an exception in the "no stuffed animals - we've got too many already" rule; the fox that gramma bought him through another exception in the "no stuffed animals - we've got too many already" rule;any one of the 45 stuffed animals that led to the "no stuffed animals - we've got too many already" rule. To no avail.

Suddenly Quinn developed an attachment to four of them at once. Foxy, Owl, Hippo and Puppydog are all required attendees at bedtime now. He'll call them by name and stack them around or underneath himself causing seemingly uncomfortable contortions. Sometimes he'll lose track of one and while lying on his back, he'll hold up a hand and say "Ow ull" until you retrieve the fugitive furriness.

Whatever gets him through the night. Sleep's going much better these days.

Hocquet

Bec bought a second small replica hockey stick today. However we can't find the old one we had. So grampa and Quinn played hockey with a whack-a-toy mallet, the hockey stick and a blue rubber ball. Seemingly a combination of hockey and croquet, we dubbed it "hocquet" (or croqhey).

I got to play some hocquet with Quinn when I got home. Now, it's always fun to do things with Quinn, but this didn't require any pretending - it was truly fun!

Dokker Semi

Quinn's got another ear infection, which combined with a full body rash last week warranted a couple visits to our family doctor, Dr. Assemi. The maladies have turned out to be nothing serious, but Quinn won over the entire audience by saying "Dokker Semi" several times.

He also has a doctor kit at home with several play doctor instruments in it. He now gets it out and we play "Dokker Semi".

WXYZ

One morning recently, right out of the blue, Quinn looked at a group of things in a book and said "One....", (I noted it), "Two....", (I thought 'very good, counting to two is impressive'), "Three....", ('wow, he's really going!), "Four!" (Holy cow how far is he going to go??). Then he stopped, but I was completely flabbergasted. He had counted one a lot, two on rare occasion when aided, and here he went right to four all by himself! With some aid he got right up to eight! I'm not sure it would have all been identifiable out of context but I was impressed nonetheless.

Today Bec sang the alphabet song and stopped at 'P'. He sang 'koo arr esss, tee ooo vee, dub eck wyyye zee, now no ayy cee sing see". He did it again for me at suppertime. We made a big thing out of it, as you can imagine, and he looked so proud.

It's truly amazing how fast kids learn things at this age. I have no idea how Quinn's progress compares to norms, and I'm trying very hard but not quite successfully to dwell on it at all, but I personally am truly impressed at how well he's doing. I am most happy about how he gets a kick out of it. I so hope we can keep that alive.

Solo Daddy

Bec went to Montreal with her mom and sister this weekend. It used to be a tradition BC, but she missed last year because Quinn was too young for her to be away. Flash forward one year, and well, we weren't entirely sure Quinn wasn't still to young for her to be away. We'd talked grand designs of prepping Quinn and Daddy for a solo flight, but too much work and a general lack of round tuits and here we were holding our collective breaths as Bec left for the train.

We'd discussed that probably having Quinn watch her board the train without him would be too much. However I fear we went a little far in the other direction. Bec's parents picked her up at home, and she said goodbye to Quinn, but then she just left, with us being hesitant to make a big deal out of her departure for fear of meltdown. I briefly considered waving with him from the window, but we were reading at the time and he gets in a reading zone, so we just kept reading. In the short term this seemed quite effective. He asked for mommy a couple times over the next few hours and I explained that she was away until tomorrow. He considered that for a moment and carried on.

Later, just before nap he was going up the stairs and he stopped. He turned around and looked at the door and waved and said "bye bye". It was said in a tone loaded with meaning, and it is one I will remember forever in the "emotion sears memories" sort of way. It was soft; it was vulnerable but confident; it wasn't sad; it was a bit resigned, but also content; and matter-of-fact - all at the same time. Then he turned and continued up the stairs. He went down great and had a great nap.

I didn't immediately identify it with mommy leaving, and in fact it's still not totally sure in my head. Just prior to that he'd been pointing to the light and smoke alarm on the front hall ceiling and said something that seemed to indicate he thought someone was out there. I briefly wondered whether it was one of those "I see dead people" moments from the movies with or without the macabre part, which freaked me out in a number of ways but I was able to quickly banish those thoughts. So when he waved bye bye I wasn't sure whether it was The Imaginary People or not. Only later did I piece together that he was probably waving to mommy, and perhaps even imagining mommy there. Whatever the case, I now wish we'd let him say goodbye more. Who knows, maybe he *would* have melted down; maybe there isn't a black and white answer.

In any event, he and I have done just fine together, and I am so glad he feels that comfortable with me. I think I'm much more boring than mommy, but I think I have managed the care and feeding of our son effectively over the weekend. I even recovered a couple minor meltdowns. My biggest fear was that he would lose it and want his mommy and be completely unrecoverable, but that didn't come to pass. In the end, after much anticipatory gnashing of teeth, I think it has been good for us all, and we'll all be excited to see one another in a couple hours' time.

ERP II

Last night Quinn picked out the "Dr Suess's ABC" book and brought it over to the couch for us to read. As he walked he said "dok soos E-R-P".

Today Bec spelled out "p-i-e" in conversation with me at suppertime, to avoid Quinn fixating on the idea in lieu of dinner. Quinn looked at her and said "E-R-P".

Whatever this ERP thing is, he certainly has caught on to the letters and spelling idea.

The Great Communicator

Quinn is learning to communicate quite clearly. Developmental books we read talk about toddlers getting frustrated when their ability to communicate can't keep up with their understanding and desire to do so. With a combination of Quinn's inventive ways and some solid parsing by Bec, this doesn't seem to be the case for Quinn.

Example: Monday night we were all returning from a dinner out and Quinn was walking (actually running top speed for a lot of it). To keep him moving along, we focused on the fire hydrants along the way, and specifically the ones up ahead. He steamed around the corner of one building, and then looked around quizzically, and said "ennn see" and shook his head. "Ennn" has long been his word for "again" or "another"; 'see' was quite clearly spoken and is a word he recently learned so it seemed a reasonably surefire assumption; the head shaking was plain as day. After Bec and I looked blankly at one another for a second, feverishly trying to crack this word puzzle, Bec blurted out "'again', 'see', 'no'...we were looking for fire hydrants and he can't find the next one". We pointed out the hydrant, which was behind a telephone pole, and he checked it out briefly before we sprinted to the next one.

You still need a large helping of Quinn-to-English dictionary, but he can definitely get his point across. This is a real-life word game that's so much fun to play.

ERP

Quinn has really had an explosion of language learning lately. A new toy he has is a magnetic easel with letters and numbers. In conjunction with the easel, we dug out the Dr Suess's ABC book, which he now pays attention to with renewed zeal with the extra added context. We've started to teach him some letters. He can repeat them after us, but the only one he consistently gets right unaided is 'x' (which he says as "eck"). Still though, I'm impressed at how well he's doing.

For some reason, when he sees letters on something, he points at them, and says clear as day "E-R-P". We're not quite sure why he has glommed onto that particular sequence, but it certainly appears he's referring to letters when he does. Maybe he got into a Swedish keyboard or something. We'll have to write our own alphabet song I guess.