Martha's Vineyard

We returned home yesterday from a Taft family reunion in Martha's Vineyard. It was our first trip to Martha's Vineyard and all 25+ family members stayed in a compound with cabins, a barnhouse and a cook. Charlie had a great time playing with his cousins and learned the names of almost everyone. He hasn't figured out the word "who" so instead he would ask "What's this?" when he wasn't sure of some one's name.

It was also especially nice to having wide open space so I didn't have to worry about him getting into much trouble. His all time favorite thing was the 'tractor' (lawn mower), his 2nd favorite was the ping pong table followed closely by the playroom which featured lots of crayons and a ladder to a loft. Despite being in a new place he quickly learned which was our cabin and would take off across the field past 'the casa de cousin wallis' towards ours.

It was a great location as we could easily walk to a nice beach but as I suspected having Charlie along didn't make for much of a vacation. He was up around 5am everyday! There was also a heat wave and no A/C to be found so by the end of the week I was exhausted and felt like I was hard boiling this poor baby. On Friday I was so crampy that I thought I might be giving birth on the island! Luckily we made it back with only one baby on our laps for the flight home.

Charlie definitely warmed up to the beach and the water though we didn't do a lot of actual swimming. He loved throwing rocks in the water and making uncle seth get him buckets of water for his sand castle (more like sand castles I would make and he would destroy).

It seems like his comprehension of language is really exploding. He is using more complete sentences, answering and asking questions and listening to what we ask him to do. Of course his favorite answer is "no" and usually he doesn't obey us! But I can tell that he is processing the requests at least. This evening I asked if he wanted to go pee before I put a diaper on him for sleeping and as I got his pajamas out he went into the bathroom and peed in his little toilet without me. On the other hand he is more demanding - he uses "I want" a lot and last week he started using "I need!" "I need the phone mom", "I need the banana"....! Unfortunately I am noticing that he seems to be speaking more english than spanish. He uses spanish words, but the majority of the sentence is english.