Signing and playing in the mud

The last few weeks, the little man has been signing a lot. His daycare teaches the kids how to sign American Sign Language starting in the infant class, but he has just now started signing words himself. The words he now knows are: more, food (which, for him, sometimes means drink), milk, cracker, finished, please, bye-bye, and down. We also sign to him, water, and thank you. It has been amazing that he now lets us know when we wants to eat or drink something, and when he is finished eating. Now if I can only convince he should be eating more than crackers!

This weekend, we started working in the backyard a little bit. Actually it was D doing all of the hard work digging holes, and the little man and I picked up sticks and rocks so we can eventually mow. It had rained last night, so the ground was nice and wet, and very sticky. We don't usually go outside when it is wet, but, decided we needed to today. I think this was the first time for the little man to play in the mud. You can see from the shots below taken from my mobile phone, he got a bit muddy.


Look at those cute chubby and muddy legs!

He actually didn't know what to make of the mud. He kept wanting me to wipe it off of his hands. Not sure if we will have a neat freak on our hands.

He has lately been showing more acceptance to wearing hats. He used to hate it, but then there was hat day at school a few weeks ago, and the teachers said he actually wore his hat a little bit. Since then, he will wear a hat from time to time for a few minutes. Mostly, he loves to practice taking it off and then putting it back on.

If you have been following my tweets (that is, my posts on twitter.com/cmsadler), you already know that there was a school closure for swine flu here in Austin. And though this is not the little man's school, it is where we take him on the weekends to play. The school is a pre-kindergarten school, so their playground is very suitable for his abilities. We have taken him to the nearby park, but there are so many other bigger kids, we really have to make sure he doesn't get run over by them. Anyways, the news story that ran on our local station was that the Lucy Read School was closed for a probably case of swine flu, and they showed school district employees sanitizing the classrooms. Well, yesterday, we wondered if they were done cleaning the school, and decided to go over there to play. As we drove by, we saw a crew in the playground hosing off the equipment. So, hopefully next weekend, we will get over there and he can play.

One of the things that I have been enjoying lately is doing video chats with my parents. We have been doing weekly phone calls, usually Sunday evenings since, I don't know, since forever. Anyways, as we both now have MacBook Pro laptops, we have everything we need to do a video chat. My parents really enjoy seeing the little man. And he really enjoys it too. He loves to blow kisses and say "hi". But he doesn't stay in my lap for very long. I try to aim the camera so that my parents can see him running around. He loves to do show-and-tell for them. Usually I will say something like, where is your dinosaur?, and he will find it and show it to them. Here he is showing them his basketball.


I hope this post finds you all well.