- At Jesse's 2-year appointment he weighed 31.2 pounds and was 35.5 inches tall, which were both 75th percentile. He is wearing 2T and 3T clothes and size 8/8.5 shoes.
- Jesse's favorite toys are duplo blocks, his duplo train set, puzzles, his stacking peg board, and matchbox cars. Several times a day he asks to get out the pegs to build parking decks for his cars.
- He also loves to play with play-doh, color, paint and use stickers. Sometimes he asks to "do artwork".
- He really loves books. Some of his favorites are The Giving Tree, Have you seen my dinosaur?, The Snowy Day, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Three Little Pigs.
- His talking is really taking off. He pretty much doesn't stop talking from the moment he wakes up until the moment he falls asleep (at least that's what it feels like to me). We get a running narrative of every move he makes. He is speaking in lots of sentences and uses prepositions and pronouns (though those are usually incorrect, like when he says "Mommy hold you"). He still refers to himself as Jesse. It is hilarious to hear him talk about/to himself. Lately he has been building duplo towers and we will catch him saying to himself as he builds them, "Ooooooh, that's really cool, Jesse" or "Oooooh, that's good, Jesse!" No lack of self-confidence at this point!
- He has begun asking lots of questions. "What's that?", "Where dis come from, Mommy?" (asked about anything he finds that is unrecognizable to him), "Where dat went?". I'm sure it won't be long before we're getting the infamous "why" question.
- He is still doing great with the transition to his big boy bed, even though he has now made the realization that he can get out of it. A couple times he has gotten out and we have heard him getting into toys in his room, but when we go back there and put him back in bed he doesn't try it again. He actually gets really upset and starts crying/making a pouty face...this puzzles me because he doesn't react this way any other time that he is told "no".
- He gets great joy out of getting out of bed "all by self" in the morning and after nap and is very distraught if one of us even comes near his bed to get him. He wants to get out of bed, turn on his light, and open the door "all by self".
- He also really wants to do things "all by self" when it is clean-up time or when we bring home groceries. He usually wants to clean up all the toys by himself (and we sometimes have to insist on helping him when we don't have much time, which doesn't always go over very well with him). He also wants to take all the groceries out of the sacks and place them on the table or in the refrigerator (he seems to know which things go where) and gets upset if I try to do too much, so I either have to sneak things out of bags or just sit down and relax while he does all the labor! Seriously, though, I am thankful for his desire to help out, and it is actually much appreciated after making a long trip to the store and lugging all the sacks up to our apartment.
- He is definitely transitioning into the stage of wanting things a particular way, namely HIS way. He wants a certain color cup to drink out of, he wants his food a certain way, he wants to use a certain elevator to go downstairs, he has to push all the buttons to open the doors to get out of our building, and the list goes on and on and on. He is having to learn that he does not always get everything just how he wants it, which is a tough lesson for a 2-year old.
I also have to share/document some funny quotes/stories from the past couple months.
- On election day, James asked Jesse that morning who he (James) should vote for. He told him the two options, and Jesse very promptly said "Romney". We don't really ever talk politics and I don't think we had ever discussed the election in front of him, so this was a purely random choice on Jesse's part. Well, later that morning when I took Jesse to the polls with me to vote (I did not say anything else to him about the candidates or mention who I was voting for) he begins yelling "Romney, Romney, Romney" within yards of the polling place. I was so embarrassed and so thankful that he stopped by the time we got inside. Seriously, you could get shot for something like this in Chicago (especially when President Obama's house is just blocks away!).
- When we went to church on Christmas Eve there was no childcare, so Jesse sat through the service with us. He did great (only because he got to sit on Grandmama's lap) and seemed to enjoy the music and candles, but half-way through the short (10 minute) sermon, Jesse started saying "say Amen!" and "all done!". He was so ready to go home!
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| Puzzled about his truck |
Reading books with Daddy by the Christmas tree on the day that we celebrated Christmas just the 3 of us before traveling to Arkansas.
Here he is sporting his new tool-belt raincoat that he got for his birthday.
He liked it so much that he requested to wear it when we took him out for ice cream on his birthday (good thing the temperatures were not in the single digits/teens like they are now, or he would not have gotten his wish!).
This boy loves some chocolate ice cream! We just got a new ice cream shop in Hyde Park, so of course we had to give it a try for the birthday boy.
The raincoat eventually had to come off because he was going to get chocolate all over it, and it made more sense to get chocolate all over his brown shirt instead.
Jesse with one of our parking deck creations.
And in case you need some more Jesse, here are a few recent videos. The first is Jesse's rendition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
And the second is Jesse talking about looking into the sky and seeing lightning and thunder. He and my Mom were doing this together over Christmas and last week out of the blue he started saying it again. He is trying to say "sometimes when you look up in the sky, you see lightning and you hear thunder go boom, boom, boom".
