Jen's Blog

random Elliot update

Some recent factoids about Elliot.

Elliot recently added two more words to his arsenal: baby and bubble. These, along with ball, more, milk, water, bear, and dog (or close approximations of the words), make up most of what we can understand. He does say dada and mama, but rarely to our faces. Most animals are dogs (including our cats Frito and Trixie), except his stuffies, which he calls bears (even though most of them are dogs).

Things Elliot can do when asked (at least some of the time):
-bring us items (like his cup of milk, or a ball or blanket)
-take off his socks and put them in the hamper
-clap
-dance (although typically there needs to be music on)
-look up (especially useful in the bathtub)
-point to various objects (and he knows a lot of them! Floor, ceiling, window, fan, lights, plants, cats, boxes, tables and chairs, etc. Interestingly, if I ask him to point to mama, he won't, but if Gary asks him, he points to me. Same when Gary asks him to point to daddy.)
-open and close drawers
-put items back into a drawer or box (although for putting legos away he prefers to fling them into the box, which makes a pretty loud noise. This means he shuts his eyes before the lego has left his hand, and, it seems, sometimes before he has really aimed properly.)

Back in September Elliot went through a fidgety phase, in which he was unable to sit on our laps and sit through an entire book. Usually after the first or second page he would slide off and find a toy to play with. Luckily this lasted less than a month, and now he will find books, bring them to us, and climb into our laps to be read to. He does still get bored sometimes with the selection, but usually he will go in search of another book. So far we are only reading board books, partly because of durability, and partly because they are a good length (usually ~16 pages).

I predict it will take a long time for Elliot to learn to talk on the phone at home. Not because he can't use the phone; on the contrary, he is proficient at locating every phone in the house, picking it up, and holding it to his ear. He is also really good at pressing buttons, and the model we have has a large silver button to pick up, and hang up, the phone. He is really good at pressing this button. Recently he's also learned some of the other buttons on the phone, but so far our phone bill hasn't seemed unusual, so I'm not worrying yet.

On the other hand, I predict he'll be able to kick my butt playing computer games in about 2 weeks. He knows how to hold a game controller, and has figured out that if he presses buttons on it, stuff happens on the screen. One of my programming tasks is to write a simple computer game for him.

And here are 2 recent photos from daycare:

Quatro master...almost

Elliot figured out how to fit two Quatro* pieces together this afternoon! He did it a couple of times, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fluke. But then after dinner he couldn't do it anymore...maybe he was just tired.

Let the building begin!

* For the uninitiated, Quatro blocks are a larger version of Duplo and Lego.

new carpet, part 2

Our main computers are still offline, so no pictures yet. The new floor looks great, though! I had been worried it looked too brown, but now that it's laid out I don't see that anymore.

Elliot had dinner in the kitchen, since Gary wasn't home yet and wanted to see the place before anyone messed it up. :) Unfortunately, after we got the tv and sofa moved into the living room, Frito walked in and threw up! At least we got a couple of hours of clean, untarnished carpet.

new carpet

Gary and I finally made the plunge to replace the carpet in the downstairs. We had wanted to do so when we first moved into the house (nearly 6 years ago!), but at the time we didn't have sufficient funds. And in the meantime we did put in hardwood floors in the dining room and living room, which was well worth it. We considered hardwood for the rest of the house, but decided for now we would just do carpet.

The carpet guys are here now, removing the old carpet and pad.

We also had our first sprinkle of rain for the season this morning, after they unloaded the new carpet and pad from their truck. Gary called me on his way to work to let me know that it was starting to rain, so I pulled my car out of the garage so they could put the new rolls in there.

The new carpet is tan with dark specks. I had liked the carpet sample we brought home from the store, but when they showed us the roll of carpet this morning I thought it looked too brown. So I'm not sure I like it. On the other hand, almost anything would look better than what we have now (well, what we had an hour ago), so I'm sure I'll get used to it.

I've got some before and during pictures, but they're still in my camera. Since our computers are packed away (I'm on my laptop with more limited capabilities), it'll be a day or so before I can post them.