Max uses dinner utensils for the first time

This morning Max used a fork to eat food for the first time ever.  He was eating pancakes with blueberries and whipped cream for breakfast.  (The mess was epic.)  He was given a fork with his meal today as an experiment in early childhood development.

Max used his fork as follows.  He picked up a piece of pancake in one hand, set it on top of the fork in his other hand, then immediately picked the piece of pancake off his fork with his hand and fed himself.  The fork served as an intermediate rest stop between his table and mouth.  The whole spectacle was greeted with thunderous applause from both mommy and daddy.

Sadly, we got no pictures of the event.  Perhaps we'll catch it on film sometime in the future.

Max the bear

Max has decided that all cool babies know what the bear says.... in fact, all cool things say what the bear says.  He flips through his books looking for anything that remotely resembles a bear and then loudly proclaims RAWR!!!  Thus, the grizzly bear, the polar bear, the panda bear, the kola bear and the teddy bear all say RAWR!!!

Trivia:  Based on this article, what does Max think the bird says?
(Note: You cannot use his mouth as a clue as he is actually
saying bird in this picture.)

Grandpa Gutoski is largely to blame for all of this.  He started the bear obsession.  Max loved to have him read an animal book and name all the animals.  When he got to the page with the bear grandpa would say "The big bear RAWR!!!" in a gruff voice that Max loved.  Max was so delighted that grandpa proceeded to attach RAWR to every animal in the book ("And the dolphin says...RAWR!).  Now the bunny rawrs, the lizard rawrs and the duck rawrs.  To Max's delight, the dump truck also rawrs and you can kind of make the dog rawr.

Fortunately, I am his mother and thus he has learned a certain amount of respect for the chimpanzee. It says "Whoo whoo whoo ah ah ah".

Disclaimer:  I do not really believe in accuracy getting in the way of a good story, but since this blog to act as a sort of baby book for Max, I feel compelled to report that he also correctly knows the sounds of the fish, sheep, cow, owl (although he thinks owl is representative of all birds) and cat.

Gardening and yard work with Max

Before I begin, please notice and admire the fancy new look of this blog, which features a cute picture of Max taken last fall as its banner.  Here's the original source photo.

Today Greta and I finally got started on our gardening.  Max and the dogs helped us all the while.

Max helped with these lettuce transplants.  Shaky chewed his ball.

Max and mom admiring their handiwork on the transplants.

Max can now do two things at once: climb stairs and play with a trowel.

We decided to abandon an old bed of herbs we established outside our yard on city property.  The bed was getting too overrun with grass.  I transplanted any herbs I could salvage from the defunct bed into another bed inside our yard.  Greta had to point out to me which plants were weeds and which were herbs.

To honour Greta's sister Wendy, I will now provide a Wendy-style list of the stuff we transplanted today:

• oregano
• celantro
• chives
• some other herb who's name I've forgotten
• yet another herb
• rhubarb
• lettuce

Greta transplanting herbs (mostly).  In this picture you can clearly see the rhubarb and chives.

These are our raspberry bushes, now into their second year.  We are VERY excited about the amount of raspberries we expect to pick this summer.  We did absolutely no work on these bushes today -- I only include the picture because I like raspberries.

And finally, I spent some time today chipping away a little more of our retaining walls.  (See image below.)  We've undertaken a very ambitious project to replace our rotting railroad-tie walls with concrete blocks that we obtained for free off craigslist.  We were pleased at getting such great bricks for free.  But the pleasure quickly turned to anxiety when we realized exactly how much work it is to build a retaining wall.  (GULP!)

These rotting railroad ties need to be painstakingly pried up.  For rotting wood, they're extremely stubborn!

"Hot" means ....? (More progress on the word "No")

In an earlier post I detailed our struggle with teaching Max the word "no".  I am pleased to announce that we have made some progress in this regard.  Mostly, we have been attempting to teach Max that the stove is no, because he has developed an interest in hanging from the oven door, which causes it to crash open.  Although this is relatively harmless when the oven is off, it has obvious negative consequences when the oven is on.  I'm all about letting Max learn natural consequences, but these seem a little harsh.

So the oven was no.  We explained to Max that it could be hot and he went on time out if he touched it.  At first this seemed to work very well.  He would run up to the oven and declare "HOT!" and then run off again.  He even generalized the concept to Grandma and Grandpa's oven and to the barbecue.  We were thrilled.   Not only did our son know to leave the oven alone, but he had also mastered a new word!

But our original assessment of Max's understanding may have been misguided.  As you rock him to bed at night he quietly repeats "hot, hot, hot".  When you give him a bite of your ice cream, he informs you that it is "hot".  And when he is happy to see you he dashes across the room with a big grin, open arms, and a barrage of "hots"

Max's understanding of the off limits oven seems to be headed in a similar direction.  Despite our early progress, Gus turned around yesterday to find that Max had not only touched the oven, but he had climbed into the oven drawer!  On second thought, it may not have been an example of exemplary parenting to delay time out while we took some pictures.....

Max's first words

Max awoke over an hour ago coughing and crying and unable to sleep.  I just put him back to bed now.  (It's 4:15am.)  He spent the last hour with me in the darkness of our living room talking up a storm, running through his repertoire of words over and over and over.  To date he can say the following words:

• mama
• dada
• Anne (Max's cousin, Sue & Jeff's new baby)
• hot
• no
• bottle
• birdie
• done
• nana (banana, also means "can I have some food?")
• up
• down

Tonight, sitting with me in the dark, he combined two words together for the first time.  I gave him a sip of water from his sippy-cup to soothe his cough.  He asked for his bottle, which always has soy milk.  (Apparently he wanted milk instead of water.)  I told him that his bottle's done and he repeated:

• bottle done

"That's right!" I cheered.  "All done," which he also repeated:

• all done

Of course, his pronunciation leaves much to be desired.  It's often difficult to tell what he's saying, though tonight his pronunciation of "done" was especially clear.

He has not yet said a word that contains "s", such as "sleep" or "soother".  I suspect this is no coincidence -- "s" is probably a harder sound to make at a young age.

He's also fond of making several sounds, such as:

• roar!  (like a lion or bear)
• meow!  (cat, in case it's not obvious)
• whooo!  (like an owl)
• blether-blether-blether (a fun sound made by sticking out the tongue)

It's too bad Greta and I are not equipped to teach Max any other languages.

Hailey the miraculous flying wonder dog

This morning our dog Hailey took a terrifying 5-meter plunge from the second story of a parking garage.  All I heard was a quick yelp.  I dashed to the ledge from which she leaped with my heart pounding.  By the time I got to look down over the ledge she was already milling around on the grass below, looking up at me and wondering what was taking me so long to take her on a walk.  She's totally fine.  I still can't believe it.  I forced Greta to wait while I took some pictures of the scene.

Haily took a Peter-Pan from the second floor.  As you can see, it's a good fifteen feet above the ground. 

The view from the ledge.  This is what Hailey saw as she plunged to the earth below.

The view from inside the parking garage.  I stood there watching dumbly while my dog ran full speed up to this ledge, leaped up on top and dove off without a care in the world.

New homemade sleeper from gramma G

Jean painstakingly sewed Max a brand new sleeper made out of fleece, complete with zipper and foot pads.  It's very well made and very warm.  Jean was afraid it wouldn't fit, but as you can see Max has room yet to fill.