Cam and T-rex

Cam has hit a development milestone of some sort as he's noticeably more aware of himself and his surroundings.  He has always been curious about his environment, but now he's interacting more with everything.  We ate out the other day and we let Cam run around an empty portion of the restaurant.  The restaurant had old hardwood floors and when Cam ran over a softer and bouncier part of the floor he stopped to look down at the floor and then slowly walked back and forth over that patch of floor.

He's pointing at things and making a "kay?" sound.  These querying sounds must be the precursor to the non-stop "what's this?" questions that toddlers go through.  And while he's not really using true words yet, he does understand some of what we say.  Sara says "go kiss T-rex" and Cam walks over to T-rex, picks it up by the head, leans in, and plants a big kiss on T-rex's snout.

He has also developed associations - when it's dinner time and he's hungry, he'll head over to his feeding chair and paw at it, trying to get in with urgent cries.  Once I sit him in it, he stops crying and waits patiently (and expectantly) for the tray of food to show up in front of him.  I would say he's become much easier to feed now, though Sara may have a differing opinion  :)  We used to have a constant parade of various toys for Cam to play with throughout a meal so we could feed him, but now we just put finger foods on his tray and he feeds himself as we feed him his main dish.  He only starts to fight the feeding if he wants something to drink (in which case he calms down as soon as we bring water or milk) or if he's no longer hungry.  He's also not a picky eater just like his Daddy, which is awesome.  He eats pretty much anything, though he does have preferences.  For example, he loves broccoli and cauliflower, choosing them over sweet potato when they're all laid out on his tray.  We also recently discovered that he likes okra.  Broccoli, cauliflower, OKRA??  We're not complaining, mind you, but that's just weird.

Another association he's developed is that upstairs equals bed and sleep.  When he's tired he'll start to climb up the stairs.  When he's just playing, he'll climb up the first couple steps and sit down to play with his, but when he's tired he'll climb all the way to the top while we follow him up.

Cam also recognizes the diaper change mat that we use downstairs.  As soon as he sees me with it, he starts to run away from me since he doesn't like lying on his back when he could be running around instead.  It's very funny and I don't mind chasing him around at all, especially when he starts to squeal and laugh.

It's not all laughter, though - Cam is getting brattier and brattier.  When he doesn't get his way -we take something out of his hands, or move him away from something he's trying to get at, or don't give him something he's reaching for- he'll do a slow-motion dramatic belly flop onto the ground, roll around a bit, and have a whiny cry.  The cry is very short, more of a complaint than a true cry, so the whole thing is actually more cute than annoying but definitely we can see the day when Cam amps up the cry and it's going to test our patience.

Climbing all over

The biggest change that Cam's gone through is physical.  Cam's turned into a climber.  He attempts to scale anything with a ledge or foothold that he can reach with his little legs.  We have small ottoman cubes and he spends a lot of time climbing onto them.  When he first got on top he was unsure what to do - he sort of crouched there and slooooooowly stood up before carefully crouching down and climbing down.  We've put those cubes near other furniture and he uses the cubes as stepping stones to get onto the bigger furniture.  He's now at the point where if a cube is too far from the chair, he'll try to move the cube closer to the chair so he can use it to get onto the chair.  He absolutely loves our big leather chair - he climbs up and then flops back onto the seat with a huge grin, all proud of himself, and he'll spend quite a lot of time on the chair, reaching for the nearby DVD rack, hanging over the side of the chair, and even trying to climb up the back of the chair.  He also tries to climb out of his crib, but luckily there's no ledge for him to use and the top of the rail is still too high for him to get his leg up onto.  Won't be too much longer before he's able to climb out, though.  We'll have to start thinking about the next bed setup for Cam.

Take a look at some photos Cam climbing all over the place, as well as some pics from our recent visits to the park.