The Mind of a One-Year-Old

Isn't it amazing how kids learn something new everyday? However, there are some things I like more than others. Here's what my boy has been doing the last couple of weeks. I'll let you decide which ones I enjoy and which ones I'm ready for him to forget.

He puts his clothes in the hamper every night. When I undress him for his bath, he grabs all the clothes from me and runs across the hall to deposit them in his dirty clothes basket.

He's learned where the Dum-Dum Pops are and how to get one. This kid LOVES suckers! Several times a day he goes to the pantry and bangs on the door while yelling at it to open (We keep the suckers in there on the top shelf). He is just like a cat when you use the electric can opener. He can be on the other side of the house, hear the pantry doors open, and be there pointing at the suckers in 2 seconds flat.

He can follow directions. If I ask him to get his shoes or a diaper, he runs to his room to get them. This is one stage I hope he never grows out of.

He's discovered that French fries are better with ketchup. We drove thru McDonald's for dinner tonight and really enjoyed the fries. First, I try to hand him a fry. He looks at it, shakes his head, and won't take it from me. So I dip it in ketchup and he takes it with a big smile. A few seconds later he grunts and hands it back. He has sucked all the ketchup off without taking a single bite. He'd like it dipped again, please. My dad says he's just like my sister, "they can make a single fry last through a whole bottle of ketchup."

He puts himself to sleep. I didn't know if this would ever happen because he's always fallen to sleep within a few minutes of being rocked. Now I can just lay him in the crib and say goodnight. Yay!

He's conquored the stairs. Mike's been campaigning for the gate to come down for a few weeks, but I've just been too scared to really put it away. But it's been down for a while without an accident. I even put it in the storage room yesterday!

He helps me empty the dishwasher. I hand him all the sippy cups and he puts them in the drawer and closes it for me. Then he looks me in the eye and claps his hands until I tell him he did a good job.

He likes to turn off the lights. When I curl Ally's hair in the morning, he pushes the stool over to the light switch and turns it off. Then he laughs. But he doesn't know how to turn it on again. So there we are-- in the dark-- until I flip the switch back up. This brings peals of laughter from both my children because they know that the game has officially started. Yesterday he turned it off 17 times. I turned it back on 17 times. So I grabbed the tape and rigged the switch so it stayed on. Which brings me to his next trick:

He figured out how to take the tape off this morning.