Sunday, September 24, 2006

A limited adventure; pet sounds

From Carolyn:

Taking Pete out to CERA today didn't go as I'd hoped. He was scared of the forest and refused to walk on the mown path, wanting to be carried instead. He's heavy enough that there's no way I would be able to take a real walk carrying him, so we sat in the path for a while, and then went back to the car, where he played with the buttons and levers in the front seat for about an hour. I enjoyed standing outside the car, feeling the breeze, basking in the sun, trying to blot out the noise from I-80.

Pete started imitating the cats today. He's been saying "Ca[t]" for quite a while, but as with most other animals, he has chosen only one way to refer to them. (He only uses sign language to refer to birds, only uses a moooing sound to refer to cows.) But one of the cats meowed today, and Pete imitated it quite well. His cat noises are very accurate (no stereotyped "Meow"), and we've been getting a kick out of asking him to remind us what cats say. I only wish the cats were more vocal so we'd get more impressions.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Storytelling; eating like a big boy

I haven't provided any Pete updates in a while. Here are a few tidbits:

* Pete has started telling stories. He doesn't have the vocabulary to do this in English, so he does it in Pete, with all the cadences of sentences. We can usually tell what story he's telling because he punctuates each one with sound effects or reenactments of recent events. The first one we noticed involved talking about the time, a few minutes previously, when he had fallen off the chair. He started the story, then pointed to the chair, then made a little falling motion, then gave his analysis. He also likes to tell The Time I Saw a Volleyball Game and The Time We Went to the Scary Car Wash But It Was OK in the End.

* Pete now refuses to be strapped into a high chair or booster seat, and he doesn't like using baby plates and utencils. Most of the time, he's eating more or less like we do: he has Cheerios and milk in a glass bowl in the morning, drinks out of an uncovered cup, and so on. It is hard to believe that a year ago, he couldn't hold down the tiniest bit of a banana puff for babies. Now he sometimes eats more of the same food than I do at a meal.

* Pete's favorite activities suddenly include sitting in the driver's seat of the car with the keys--he knows how to put the correct key in the ignition, which is alarming--and going potty. We weren't thinking of potty training him yet, but a couple of weeks ago, he started insisting ("insisting" is now a hard verb to avoid) on sitting on the big toilet without a diaper, so we got him a training seat. Now he LOVES sitting on that and hates getting into a diaper. Usually, nothing, ah, emerges, but he has once peed right into the training seat. Good lad! Two or three times, he has peed near the training seat, which, it turns out, is less fun for us than his producing no pee at all.