Peeky-Boo!

Carson has been in such a good mood this week. I know that's probably weird to say, but it seems like all of a sudden he is kind of starting to mellow out emotionally and doesn't fly off the handle all the time. He has been calling everything a "big boy ____" even though I don't think he really knows why he's saying it. Somehow in the last couple weeks he also totally decided he loves to sleep. That is a lot to say for this child who fought me for over a year straight on it! He doesn't want me to rock him at all after we read and just points to the crib saying "nappy-do". He lays right down, tells me night-night or love you and goes right to sleep. 

He started giving me kisses on my cheeks out of nowhere now. He makes a big kissy noise before and during the actual kiss, but doesn't do that with a kiss on the lips.

He's getting so good at putting new sentences together. He loves saying "my name is Tarson!" (he pronounces it like that). When I ask him what my name is he says, "your name is Rachael!". For my mom he says, "your name is Grandma Rachael!" Today when I picked him up from daycare he told me he 'drew a green monster mommy daddy'....not sure about that one.

 He is growing up so dang fast. 

Last week I was doing some work and he was running around. I heard him getting keys out of Carl's ("baby-proofed") drawer, but I didn't think much of it. A minute later I go in and find him sitting in front of the cupboard that has an actual lock on it, it's wide open and the keys are on the floor with him. This one key is part of a group of keys and I figured it was a fluke. I locked it all back up and went to get the camera. I gave them back and after he fiddled with it for a minute, not only did he find the right key all on his own, but he opened it right back up. You can hear him say, "see, open!".

He's also been playing in the set of cupboards we don't have locked a lot lately. We don't keep anything in them so he can play with them, but he has been trying to climb in. He's too big so I took the shelf out of one and this has been a ton of fun for him for a few days. And it's just a fun excuse for me to take adorable photos of my little boy. :)  He gets in, swings open the door and yells "peeky-boo!".

 Although, we are "baby-proofed", I will use that term loosely. He can get his little arms down in the drawers even though they are locked because he's tall enough now. This means he is always grabbing spoons and running. The other day he grabbed some and the next thing I know I hear the strangest sound. I realize he has dropped them down inside an air return vent in the living room. I have no idea how or why he figured out that this was an option, but he did. I wasn't just going to unscrew it and pop it off because it doesn't actually come off anymore. It's been caulked and painted to the wall. Well, he did a few more times so Carl decided to tackle it last night. 

He started to take it off and the paint was all choppy so he had to use a razor blade for the rest.

 

Carson was a BIG help. haha

But then.......not only did we pull a PILE of spoons out, but we also found my pick in there! This is a big deal to me because I have had that pick since I was in junior high and last year it just totally went missing. I knew one day I had it downstairs and I have literally been looking for it ever since. That means he's been doing this for a really long time. What a stinkin' brat!!! Hopefully he doesn't continue this trend in the near future.

Other than those silly things, he has been playing with his basketball and hoop that Daddy came home with last week. He has a few balls that are too big so those are of course the ones he puts in the basket so he can hit them out from underneath. Carl has been telling him all about what they will do this summer in the mountains so Carson talks about mountains and the Jeeps a lot too. 

Oh, and I got a call to have Carson participate at the University of Denver in a research study on 2 year-olds. They needed kids within two weeks of their second birthday for a study about relative memory. I have always been so fascinated with this sort of thing so I jumped on the chance to be the "subject", especially now that I work in the research field. It was a little challenging because for part of it they needed him to sit still and watch a picture for 45 seconds at a time without moving (literally, they had infrared beams to monitor his eyes), but he did surprisingly really well. He was so excited that they gave him a bouncy ball at the end. It has Scooby Doo all over it so he loves with his 'Scooby Ball' now.