Liam Skills

Liam is doing new things on a nearly daily basis right now.  His language, his motor skills, everything, are just increasing at a crazy rate.  He’s learning things that I don’t even know how he’s learning.  I can’t count the number of times I have looked at Andy and said, “Did you know he can do that?”  Here are few off the top of my head:

-He can climb anything.  Stairs are no trouble.  Chairs, stools, counters.  He’ll climb them all.  He really likes to try to go across the three stools at the island…the three stools that are about 8 inches apart from each other.  Yeah.  Not happening.  Yesterday he climbed onto the island to try to get a toy that his grandma had put in the light fixture (I don’t know why…that was never going to end well).

-He can repeat a crazy number of animal sounds.  Quack is his favorite.  His stuffed dog Scout that he sleeps with does a whole, “Can you guess what I am?” then makes an animal sound, then says the animal name and asks him to do said sound with him.  He repeats Scout every time.  I can hear him playing with that and repeating sounds when he’s going down for a nap.  He also has a Baby Einstein book that has animal sounds, and he repeats those and does a hand motion for several.  His dolphin is hysterical.  I’ll try to get it on video.  Yesterday he picked up his monkey finger puppet and started making monkey noises, then tried to feed the monkey his banana.  And when I asked him if he was eating dog food (he was…he was supposed to give it to Ollie, took off and hid to eat it himself) he responded, “Woof.”

-He is starting to learn the alphabet.  I’m sure this sounds crazy.  But he really can recognize like five letters of the alphabet.  He has this Leap Frog Letter Factory toy, and you put each of the letters in the slot one at a time and it sings a song about them.  He will pick up letters, say the name of them, then put them in the toy.  He can do a, I, o, y, e, and sometimes p.  He pointed out the D on Andy’s parent’s vintage Coke machine the other day (it says ICE COLD on the bottom).  And today on Sesame Street they did the alphabet slowly, and he repeated most of the letters as they said them.  And sometimes on Word World and SuperWhy he shouts out the letters when they come on screen.

-He is saying a lot more.  Most of it is incomprehensible, and a lot of times he uses one word for opposites (off means off and on, hot means hot and cold), but he’s picking up new words.  He answered the telephone the other day (we didn’t know it….) and the lady who called said he said “Mom, telephone.”  I didn’t know he could say telephone…but Andy’s mom heard him say t-fa or something like it before that happened. 

-He is learning how to manipulate.  This one is crazy to me.  I can tell when he wants something from me because he will give me a kiss or a hug, or snuggle up sweetly, then go and try get/do what he’s not supposed to do.  Yesterday I told him he couldn’t have popsicles (Andy’s parents eat sugar free popsicles and a part of me dies inside every time they give Liam one….please, give my kid artificial food coloring and sugar free chemicals, awesome)(oh, and he won’t eat the homemade fruit popsicles I make for him because he’s developed a taste for the fake ones, more awesome), and he started to throw a temper tantrum.  Then he stopped, walked over to me, wrapped his arms around my knees to give me a hug, and smiled.  When I said, “Thank you for responding so nicely.” he then walked back to the freezer and tried to pull it open to get his popsicle.  So.  I only got a hug because he thought he’d get something for it.  Nice try.  Didn’t work.

And I’m sure there is more…but he’s waking up right now, so it’s time to go.