"No problem!"

It's been busy since my summer class started, and we're now halfway through. It's been hard to be away from Carter so much, though I really love teaching in the summer. The first week of classes was hard on Carter. He just wasn't used to me leaving every day, and he would pretty much wrap himself around me and cry. Michelle would have to pry him off me, and he would scream and sob while I drove away. But after a week, it's much better. Now he walks me to the car, and though he's sad to see me go, he talks about where I'm going ("Mommy go to teach her students"), and knows that I'll be coming back soon.

He also knows where Doug goes ("Daddy go to work in the office building" or "Daddy fly to New York in the airplane up in the clouds"), and always makes a point of noticing which car he drove to work. It's interesting that he's now old enough to understand things like that. We can tell him something that's going to happen tomorrow, and the next day he'll start to expect it to happen. His concept of time doesn't seem to extend beyond tomorrow, though we talk about things happening next week and such.

His language is always growing, but something that seems new lately is that he is able to reason through lots of fairly complex situations. He can remember things that happened several weeks or even months ago, and will talk about them at length. He'll talk in long run-on sentences that encompass several topics, and you can almost see the wheels turning in his head. He will now answer direct questions with verbal responses, which he didn't really do before. He will also hedge his answers with things like "No problem" when the answer is actually yes but he wants it to be no. For example, if he has a poopy diaper or if it's bathtime and he's not quite ready, he'll say "no problem!" instead of refusing outright. It's interesting that he's already learned that it's impolite to say "no" when it's clear that the other person really wants you to do something.

As I'm writing this, he's alternately singing songs and reciting dialogue from his favorite TV shows. It's especially interesting that when he says words in Spanish, his accent is perfect! We're going to South America in August, and it will be interesting to see if he picks up any more Spanish then. I'll also be interested to see his reaction to seeing me speak Spanish! I don't think he's ever heard me speak Spanish, other than the occasional counting.

He has no real interest in the potty yet, so we're waiting. People keep telling me that when they're ready to do it, it's easy, and I am far too lazy to push it before he's ready. We don't have any outside reasons to push potty training, so we're still in diapers. Since we use cloth, it's not like we have the extra expense of buying them, so it's not a big deal. :-)

Here are some pictures from the last week or so. This one was posted on Facebook last week, so some of you have seen it. I heard this little voice saying, "Mommy, I'm stuuuck!" and when I came around the corner I saw Carter with the potty seat around his neck!



It was hard to get off, too. Here is the obligatory messy face picture. I never got why these pictures would be cute until I had a child of my own! He likes my Bucatini, which makes me very happy.



He's still very interested in construction, lawn, and farm equipment. Home Depot provides lots of free entertainment along these lines:







We recently got him a bubble mower, and he LOVES it! The first day we got it, he wanted to sleep with it. He even wanted me to nurse it! He loves this thing.



He loves machinery and will spend as much time as he can studying it and messing with it. This sometimes has unexpected results, as I found yesterday morning. I'm not sure when he managed to pull the keys off of this laptop, but he did a good job:



I love that he's so curious about things! It was kind of fun to figure out how to put it all back together, actually.

I'll finish up with some pictures from the 4th of July. We went to a party where there were lots of kids around Carter's age, and he seemed to have a good time playing.





Happy July!