Fishy outside!

Knowing so many kids of around the same age, it’s really easy to watch common developmental phenomena as they come and go. One thing that seems to be a favorite talent to two-year-olds is the ability to give two word commands in the form of “<person>, <action>!”, where action is something that the person is supposed to do with said two-year-old. If the action is not soon performed, the two-year-old follows up by a grabbing of the adult’s hand and dragging them toward desired action.

Verl’s desired action is definitely “sit”, as in “Mommy, sit!” and “Daddy, sit!”, which means, “I am playing with this toy, and you should sit down and play with the toy with me.

It’s interesting that they have learned to clearly desire the participation of others in their activities, and to request it.

Flynn’s favorite action is “outside”. When we were over there a couple of weeks ago to babysit, he kept saying “Fishy outside! Fishy outside!”, more and more insistently, and then grabbing my hand to drag me outside, since it was dusk, and the adults were hanging out inside for a while before mom and dad took off for their date. As I’ve mentioned, Flynn loves anything to do with water, including fish, so I figured there must be some kind of a toy fish or something outside that he wanted to play with. I was saying, “You have a fish out there, Flynn?” Finally, Owen chimed in, “No, I think that’s you.” Of course, the standard formulation! “Mommy, outside!”, “Colin, outside!”, and “Fishy, outside!”

So, yeah, I’m “Fishy” :). And very flattered to be so, given Flynn’s love of fish.

 

Flynn the botanist

Last Saturday, we got to babysit our nephew Flynn, an exciting event for us.

After playing ball in the yard for a while and never convincing Flynn to throw the ball toward us instead of down the hill and into the street, we put some clothes and shoes on him and headed for his neighborhood park. The steps to the park are really big for Flynn right now, but he can manage it as long as each of his hands is stretched way up to one of each of our downstretched hands.

We showed Flynn a bunch of plants while we were out. I put a flower that Flynn had picked into his little shirt pocket, and for the rest of the trip, Flynn picked leaf after leaf from plants we passed, and wanted them all to fit in his tiny pocket. When we got home, he had quite the collection.

Colin pointed one plant in particular out to Flynn. The plant (called a Cleaver) sticks like velcro to your clothes when you brush against it. Colin picked off a piece of the plant and stuck it to Flynn’s shirt, which thrilled him. Colin told him “sticky plant”. After a great time had by all of sticking plants to shirts, we asked Flynn “Do you see any more sticky plants?” Of all the little plants around us, Flynn immediately picked exactly the right plant, and was rewarded by seeing it stick, as expected. After that, he spotted sticky plants over and over again on our trail. It’s amazing that two-year-old Flynn can learn a pretty non-obvious plant after only one sighting, while I have a terrible time learning a plant after learning them over and over again!

Flynn is now at a stage where he will make some attempt to repeat almost any word you want him to. We even got him to say both of our names! So we told him that he was Flynn the botanist, and he responded “botnist” :).

 

Dad’s stocking stuffers put to good use

My dad’s stocking stuffers made a lot more sense to me once I got back home to Seattle, where I realized that they were really an unconscious manifestation of his soon-to-be-fulled desire for grandkids.

Here’s 19-month-old nephew Flynn Ulysses putting the chicken that lays a shell-less egg to good use.

 

Flynn Ulysses is 1!

(I had a similar annoying experience with this post that David had earlier with WordPress a couple of months ago: it looked on my site like it was published, and I just now discovered that it never showed up for the rest of the world! I have to say that this is quite frustrating.)

On June 17, Flynn turned 1, and we turned a year old as aunts :)! This was very exciting for all of us. Here’s a picture and a movie from his birthday party.

As a side note, for Flynn’s birthday, we opened a college savings (529) plan in his name. If any of you have youngsters or youngsters belonging to others that you care about, I suggest looking into this plan! It’s very flexible, tax-deferred, and seems like a great way to start saving for college early.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/529_plan