Two-year old tid-bits

Jackson is at such a super fun age. I feel as if I've said that at about every stage he's gone through...but it's just so fun to watch him grow!

First, he is talking non-stop. My mother pretty much laughed in my face when I told her that I really just needed a break from him telling me story after story one day. So, I guess I had it coming. It is so fun to have real conversations with him! After spending time with grandparents, he'll tell me what they did together. Or he'll bring up a movie or a book he's recently read.

His vocabulary is growing rapidly. And I am reminded of how much he picks up on all of the things I say and do!    Like, when I hear him in the back seat going "dang-it" over and over again. Oops! Not all of it's bad. Whenever he coughs he says, "gracious" (as in goodness gracious) or he'll come up to me and say "icky cough!" He is currently in the stage of saying, "Aaawww!" at lots of things, actually, but mostly at clothing items and pictures of babies, however, he did say it while looking through the Hy-Vee grocery ad today. Not sure what that was about, but apparently, he's heard a lot of "ohhing" and "ahhing" over baby girl stuff!

Speaking of baby girl, he calls her "baby sister". He does know her name, however he has no interest in even trying to repeat it back to me ever... and in the few times that he does, it sounds nothing like her name. Feel free to ask him. Today he picked out one of the pink blankets I had out, and proceeded to "make her bed" on the ottoman (I'm super excited to post about how I transformed by coffee table into an ottoman!).

Jackson has been going down for bedtime really well for several weeks. And for the past couple days, nap time has been super easy too! Oh, it's such a relief! I purchased room-darkening curtains from Wal-mart (I don't recommend then, they are totally not-room darkening... but my windows are very short, so if I double them, they do the trick). Really, it made all the difference in the world having those curtains, so he's not distracted by the toys!

Jackson loves to give hugs and kisses when people leave, often multiple times. And yesterday when I dropped him off at the nursery at morning church, I totally thought he was going to have a melt-down with me leaving by the way he was acting, not letting me leave... but it turned out he just wanted to kiss the bulletin I was holding in my hand. At night church, it was my purse. Weird.

He is convinced that we have a cactus growing in our front yard... somewhere underneath the 7 inches of snow that is covering our yard.

His current sentence structure sounds a lot like, "Where James is?" when asking for a friend at church. He still says, "up you/hold you/help you"- whatever he wants at the moment. And it is very, very important that you repeat back to him what he says to you or else he gets extremely frustrated and will shout it over and over until you do actually repeat it.

Then at bath time tonight, he was unusually gassy. As if he didn't already giggle enough when he toots, he figured out that tooting underwater makes bubbles. And apparently, that's really very funny.