how he spends his days

Lately Garrett has been...

Eating grapes. He eats them with (or for) breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, snack, snack, and dinner. They are his current favorite.

Taking care of his blanket. He likes to pretend that his silky blue blanket is an actual baby. He wads it up into a small bundle, then gives it bottles or spoon feeds it solid foods (using Caleb's dishes and bibs and his own stash of wooden food). He'll tuck it into bed and kiss it goodnight or give it toys to play with. It's really quite darling and has left me thinking that, male or not, maybe we should get him a doll.

Adjusting the refrigerator settings. Ever since he broke through the childproof lock on the fridge, he's not only been helping himself to snacks, but he's been fiddling with the temperature settings. I usually don't notice until the milk has either turned to ice or everything has warmed to room temperature and the freezer shuts down. In Garrett's perfect world, that particular knob should (and will, if he has anything to do with it) be set to either extreme.

Talking. In even just a short time, speech therapy has done wonders for Garrett. For the most part he is still pretty unintelligible to the untrained ear, but his vocabulary has exploded. Some of my favorite of his new phrases include, "Oh man!"; "There we go!"; "Let's go!"; "sit down" (which sounds like "stoon"); "that's cool," which sometimes sounds like "that's cute" (it's hard to tell the difference sometimes); "it's coming"; "play" (which sounds like "bay," and is now usually accompanied by a word describing what he wants to play with); "we're home"; "good idea" and "no idea"; and "all right," (which sounds like the toddler classic "ah-wight"). He also recently learned the words "whale" and "people" from Lina, his speech therapist, and now he can't stop talking about them.

Watching either The Incredibles or Ratatouille. Like grapes, they are his current favorites. In fact, he really loves watching them while eating grapes.

Coloring. With markers, with pencils, with crayons. He's addicted.

Giving me a thumbs up. Only he doesn't use his thumbs. He uses his pointer fingers, both of them, held close together. It's pretty funny.

Telling me the difference between hot, cold, and warm. He's known what hot and cold are for some time (the radiators in winter helped with that one), but now he understands that they are opposites. When I put a plate of food in front of him, he'll hover his hand over it and ask if it's hot. If it's not, I'll tell him no, to which he'll say, "Oh, it's cold." Sometimes, though, it's neither hot or cold, but, rather, warm. Warm is a concept he's had trouble with, but now he's starting to get it. So all of our meals now begin with a conversation establishing the temperature level of the food. But it's not just food that he assigns hot, cold, or warm characteristics to. It's everything. That toy over there? It's not hot, it's cold.