Sweet 16. Months that is.

This month Garrett went from a little baby to a little boy. I can’t really pinpoint when it happened, but one day I woke up to discover Dennis the Menace in his crib. He’s climbing all over the furniture, into EVERYTHING, and is making my life much more exciting. It really gets your blood pumping to hear the terrible thud of skull on something solid, the minute of silence and sucking wind, and then the loud bellowing wail that follows.

Since we’ve been bad and put off his 15 month pediatrician appointment, I have no idea how much he weighs or how tall he is. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say about 33″ tall and about 29 or 30 lbs. He’s outgrowing his size 6W Diego light up tennis shoes that I bought for him less than 3 months ago. Good thing I only paid $10 for them on Amazon.

He’s grown so tall that he keeps face planting right into table corners and nearly knocking himself out. Yesterday he literally smacked his head THREE TIMES in the same spot. Three times he just wasn’t paying attention and BLAM! Right in the kisser. I nearly cried with him each time because he was screaming and crying so hard. Poor little guy just has no sense of where his big noggin is traveling in relation to the walls and furniture around it. It’s not unlike me when I was nine months pregnant and discovered that my belly could somehow turn on two of the stove burners all by itself. It got so big so fast that I just couldn’t seem to judge distance with it anymore. I hope he learns quickly how to avoid scenarios like that, because he’s nearly blacked his eyes a few times with his falls. I don’t want people to think we are abusing our child. I guess anyone who’s ever had a 16 month old rough and tumble little boy would probably understand, though.

His vocabulary is picking up just a little bit. He’s learned to say “Mama” FINALLY! Trouble is he gets it confused with “Nana” so sometimes he calls me “Manana” which is pronounced just like the name Monica uses on the episode of Friends where she gets her identity stolen. It’s been a long road to get to hear the sweet words, and even now at sixteen months old I’m not guaranteed to hear them on demand.

For example…

And another example…

And so forth…

And so on….

Until finally….

SUCCESS!!

You’ll notice I started this endeavor in the car as we were arriving home from work one day and didn’t reach my goal until 5:00 pm THE NEXT DAY when I was leaving my office. Nearly 24 hours of my incessant and very annoying repeating of “Say Mama!” until he finally said it on demand. That was also the day I let him wear his pajamas to work, so maybe he was confused into thinking he was supposed to be lazy all day.

Is that normal for sixteen months to not be able to repeat “mama” on command? I don’t really know.

I do know that I’m so tired of hearing the whining and “Uh Uh Uh” when he wants something, so I’m trying to be mean and not give him what he wants unless he asks for it. I’m not picky about pronunciation. I’ll take anything that remotely sounds like the word I’m repeating, but getting him to say even a consonant of it is nearly impossible at times. He did pick up a few sign language moves from Christy aka The Best Nanny in the Whole World. She taught him to say “more” and “monkey” and is working on “apple” and a few others. I had already taught him to say “all done”. Well, sort of. I couldn’t remember the exact sign for it, so I decided to use the Clear-the-Table-Hand-Clap motion that a Blackjack dealer makes at the casino when he’s done counting out your money. G doesn’t know the difference.

He is eating fruits and veggies like a mad man these days, and I’m trying to squeeze in as many as possible until he gets into the really picky preschooler phase. The other day we put him in his stroller while we walked around Durbin Farms in Clanton. While I was picking out some fruit he pointed to a peach so we gave him one to hold while we shopped. Five minutes later we looked down and he had devoured the whole peach all the way down to the pit. His entire shirt was soaked in peachy slobber and he was happily sucking away on the last juicy bits of it. Today he grabbed a big strawberry from the bowl on the table so I let him eat it as I was locking up the office and heading out. I intended to take the leaves and stem off when he got close to being finished with it. Before I even realized it, he had eaten the whole thing, green and all.

What can I say? Kid loves fruit.

He is now obsessed with cars and trucks, so those two became an easy addition to his vocabulary. Every time he sees a truck now he points and says “Kuck! Kuck!” J bought him a cool book at Costco that has all these different vehicle sounds. Besides eating it’s his new favorite indoor activity, but he’d rather be outside pushing a dump truck around the sand box.

Since we have gotten the back porch all cozy we are out there every single day and night. The renegade mosquitoes that sneak in through the cracks have bitten him so today he has big red welts all over his body. Add to that the blue goose egg on his forehead from running into things and the scratches he’s gotten from playing with the dogs, and he looks like a regular old Ultimate Fighting Champion.

He loves, love, loves being outside so much. Gus and Woodrow are his FAVORITE toys. He feeds them Milkbones and Beggin’ Strips by the handful, so I’m sure the feeling is mutual. He knows where their treat box is, so he is constantly pulling out bones and saying “Sit!”. When I’m not looking he hides the bones all over the back porch. I’ve found them in my tennis shoes, my watering can, and buried in his sand box. The other day I was outside planting flowers and heard Gus coughing and choking. He had found the buried treasure bone, but inhaled a load of sand in the process.

I think Garrett wouldn’t mind moving his crib out on the back deck and set up shop with the dogs as his side kicks. If I ever want him to stop doing something bad like flushing wads of Charmin down the toilet or tossing all of my shoes in the trash can, I simply stop, look at him and say “You wanna go see Gus and Woodrow??!?” and he says “WOOF! Sit!” and off he runs to the back door.

And this is what follows….

And then there is some of this…

Woodrow is like his own personal minihorse. J and I are going to have to change our names to Rob and Big.

Some days I wonder if Garrett thinks he is a dog, because he hangs out with them so much. And then there is the time I found him trying to eat a handful of dog food right out of the bin.

And then there was this episode caught on tape at Nana and Papa’s house the other day…

Man’s best friend has never been cuter.