BAD AIM!

I was beginning to regret our attempt to let Charlie go without diapers. It seemed to be giving him anxiety without much of a positive outcome. But we may have come up with an interim solution - not a very sustainable one, but at least he is getting over his anxiety. He stands up on the big toilet and pees. The bad news is that his aim leaves something to be desired! I also realized why diapers are so much easier when we took an outing to the building museum this weekend and Charlie demanded to go to the bathroom. It hadn't dawned on me that we'd have to do public peeing!! I hurried to find a bathroom (although he was wearing a diaper) and manuevered our way into a stall. There we were in the women's restroom in a museum and I was cheering him along. I'm sure our neighbors thought I was nuts. We washed our hands and 10 minutes later walked out the door. He took 3 steps and then turned to me and said "pee-pee." We went through the whole exercise again. We walked out and, clearly enjoying the novelty of the experience, he turned to me again and said "pee-pee." I told him to hold it and we went back to playing.

One of the most fun aspects of this stage is watching his comprehension of everything - words, concepts, images - expand. I am especially surprised by his visual memory - probably because his father and I have the worst memories around. He knows the US Capitol building and when he saw a truck pull up in front of our house with a sketch of the capitol on it he kept saying, "captol, captol." Then again he seems to call any building with similar architecture "captol." He also came up with his first string of three words last week - I can't really call it a sentence, but he said "dada otro mano" which meant: dad, give me your other hand. He hasn't done a repeat performance yet. Here is him saying 'basketball' and 'mas queso.'

Another concept that I can see him working through is the idea of what is/is not a sculpture. Sculpture was one of his first words - I have no idea why - and he loves to point out sculptures. Today we went to the art museum to look at sculptures and he loved the Alexander Calder mobiles, but his favorite sculpture turned out to be the light display on the walkway from the East to the West wing. Oh well - I guess I have a way to go until I have the next Rodin on my hands....

On the house front we finally had the marble installed on the kitchen island and I had to act as if Carlos was my contractor. He called me Ms Taft, but it was hard for me to take him seriously when there were pictures hanging up in on the wall behind him of us on our wedding day!

I'm heading to New Hampshire and Atlanta this week so Charlie and Carlos are on their own. The big question is whether everyone will notice my belly bulge! Yep at 15 weeks I am pretty darn large.

I'm having a hard time taking pictues of Charlie because eveytime he sees the camera he wants to see the pictures of himself. Here he is sayin 'baby, baby, baby...' when I tried filming him.