Stories!

Guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren. First off, pictures/tales from our visit to PA last week are coming, but I've got about 6 gigs of pictures to sort first, so it's gonna take a while. For now, please enjoy these tales of Jim from the past couple of days.

"HOUSE!"
Or, to be more accurate, "houf!" Jim has fallen completely in love with his Megablocks set. He's progressed from building tall towers of single bricks to massive structures using every block in the set. When finished, he stands up and announces, "Uh oh! Houf!" and demands that I come over and "see houf!" He's started taking it a step farther, too. In addition to simply pointing out the beauty of his houf, he will now point out the precise locations of the 'do' and 'webbow' (door and window, you see). Last night he even went so far as to "knock knock knock" on the door, but he restrained himself to just saying and miming it, so as not to knock down the whole magnificent structure.

"SAR!"
We went back to the speech pathologist yesterday, and according to her, Jim is "AMAZING." His speech progress is huge in the last couple of weeks (as you may be able to tell by all the words in quotes here), but what really impressed her was his vast knowledge of geometry. At one point, he pulled a star-shaped something out of the toy box, announced unprompted that it was a "sar," and then proceeded to place it on top of a star-shaped hole in a different toy. I wasn't aware that this was weird, but it flabbergasted the poor lady. Apparently being able to point to shapes when asked is good for this age, being able to say the name unprompted is VERY good, and being able to match it up with the same shape in a different context is positively astounding. No offense to the grandparents who have been saying this all along, but hearing that your kid is a genius from a stranger with a lot of degrees is totally more impressive.

"BOOTS!"
In Jim-speak, "boots" means "broken," and that's what he declared his bed to be after Noah turned it from a crib into a toddler bed last night. Fortunately, he got over his disapproval pretty fast and went to bed in it without a fuss, despite the missing side. All was going well (maternal sniffling at his big-boy-bed notwithstanding) until we heard a huge THUMP! several hours later. So we raced upstairs, heads filled with thoughts of concussions or broken limbs or at the very least some mental trauma, but what did we find upon opening the door? Jim, of course, lying on the floor beside his bed snoring like the world's noisiest weed-eater. We just tucked his blanket around him and backed out of the room. As of this morning, no harm seems to be done. He even let me sleep in an extra hours while he wandered around his room doing whatever it is toddlers do.