one and a half

Clark is 18 months old. Way! It’s true.

I can’t quite believe how this parenting thing just keeps getting better and better. He is the light of my life and I crave time with him like I crave sunshine. When I get home from work and I squat down, spread my arms wide, and he comes running full force, hurling his little body at me, the joy I feel is something indescribable.

He does so many hilarious and adorable things lately. It seems like every few days he has a new trick or a new word. Last night I said, do you want to go look out the window for a bus? (He loves to do this. Bus! he announces, then Bye Bus!) “Yeah”, he said. “Are you saying yeah, now?” I asked. “Yeah!” he answered.

I hope I can always remember how utterly delightful he is at this moment. To facilitate my increasingly seive-like memory, I shall list some of his current features.

He really likes to accentuate certain consonants. We found a mint patch in our new yard, and we’ve been making lots of mojitos. He loves to go help his Daddy pick mint, as in the photo above. MmmmmminT, he says. Long M, stong T. This cuteness is also present when greeting our friend MmmmmmaTT, or when you’re at the store, walking past the butcher, MmmmmeaT.

He loves Freya. She tolerates him.

He wants to be outside all the time. When forced to be indoors, he’s constantly pulling on you going, “Outside? OK?” with his little eyebrows raised so hard, you think he might break his forehead.

For months now, thanks to his Grandfather, he has been obsessed with pretending to drive our cars. That’s pretty much all he wants to do. Sometimes the first words out of his mouth in the morning are, “Vroom Vroom?” At first he was happy just to stand on the seat and push buttons, but now he says, “Keys? Keys?” He wants things to light up and for the radio to be on.

For some reason he loves to throw things down the stairs. We call it experimenting with gravity.

I know that writing this down will make it change, but for the last month or so, he’s been sleeping through the night most nights. (I guess that virgin I sacrificed did the trick!) It took 17 months, but I think this is about average in the grand scheme of things. I know people whose alien pod children reportedly slept through the night at 3 months or whatever, but I also know folks whose 3 year olds still aren’t. He’s going to bed around 8pm every night, but he still wakes up at inconsistent times, anywhere from 5am-7:30am. I still marvel when I wake up in the morning and realize I got to sleep the whole night.

His number one best feature has got to be the unsolicited love. He will out of the blue plant a big kiss on your cheek, and you just want to fall over and die from the cuteness of it all. The best case of this is when we’re riding my bike together. He has a super cool seat that sits on the handlebars like this. Sometimes we’ll just be riding along, pointing out kitties and arf arfs and trucks, and he’ll reach up and grab the strap of my helmet under my chin, pull my face down and lay one on me. Bwah!

I could go on all day, but I’ll leave you with some super cute pictures of his first haircut. Prepare yourself.

Before:

During: (That’s his Auntie M!)

And After: (OMG! He’s suddenly a Little Boy!)