One major success is that Daniel is very gentle with the cats now and likes to "peh" (pet) them. I have to say having neighbors and a grandparent with dogs has given Daniel great practice with petting. Our cat, Jack, has always been the more tolerant of the two cats to Daniel's antics, so Daniel gets lots of petting practice with Jack. I turned around the other day to see Daniel quietly climbing onto the sofa (a rare occasion) and quietly (who is this kid?) petting Jack- snapped that picture quick! Zoey is still very skittish and needs my reassuring presence for Daniel to even go near her- mostly she just runs away before he even comes close to her. She'll come around some day, when Daniel is even more calm and quieter (that will happen right?!). Anyway, we're thrilled that this day has come! (Oh- and he pets his stuffed animals, too!)
As with nail clipping, toothbrushing is not an easy task to achieve with my little guy. Our doctor reassured us that we could put just a *touch* of toothpaste on Daniel's toothbrush, so we tried that (a while back actually) and it's worked wonders! Daniel LOVES "pay" (paste) on his toothbrush and now willingly brushes his teeth. At first I did mine at the same time, too, so he gets the motion and the idea, but now he does pretty well all on his own. Yes, he walks around while he brushes and he does kinda chew on the brush a lot too, but hey, at least he's kinda sort of brushing his teeth. No more battles there!
I brought out the blocks Daniel got for Christmas again recently (they had been hiding, since I like to rotate our toys so they're *new* again) and was amazed to see how much Daniel has grown into these blocks now. When he first got them, the blocks were just frustrating and he had no idea really what to do with them, hence the hiding. Fast forward a few months and wow! Daniel loves to put them together and just last week has even started pretending with them and will actually make sound effects, too! So cute! Ben made the blocks into a spaceship, Daniel added his own touch to it as you can see him doing in the picture below. And then, all we said was that Daddy made a spaceship and Daniel started doing this whooosh sound while flying it around- he must have put that together from his spaceship book, which has different sounds for different spaceships. Smart guy. In the last picture you can't really tell, but Daniel is driving it around and making it go vvvv. I just think it's so cool that he's really grown into this toy and can actually put the blocks together and sort of play with them too. This is where the fun begins!
Other recent major successes have to do with Daniel's talking. He's finally starting to add ending sounds to more of his words- dump, tip, vroom, moom (moon), and so on. And we still can't keep up with Daniel's new words- there are truly several a day sometimes and often we're thinking- he remembers that word? He sure is attending to what we're saying and has a good memory. I'm also excited that Daniel is starting to say "moa" (more), while making the sign for more- this is great. And even better- we've had a few instances where Daniel says "please" with no prompting from us! This is so cool and I love that he's applying the word please in appropriate instances on his own. Learning manners already- I'm liking it.
One last sign of growing up we've come across lately- Daniel's newest, rather emphatic word- bet you can guess- NO! We knew the day would come and consider ourselves lucky that it didn't come until he was almost 19 1/2 months old. Alas, the word NO has become a favorite of Daniel's. It's not really a problem- yet- so we're doing fine; Daniel just likes to assert his independence and choices like all toddlers. Our little boy is growing up quickly!
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