The Last Days of Summer

We’re a bit behind on our updates. The kitchen remodel has taken up a lot of time, led to a lot of take-out meals, and generally thrown the whole household out of balance.
The good news is that our countertops will be installed this week, and after that I can hook up the sink, dishwasher, and oven. We still have to figure out the tile plan for our backsplash, but we can actually start to use the kitchen soon. In fact, the new fridge and microwave are in, so things are slowly coming into order.

In the meantime, I’m going to throw in random Oliver updates from the past few weeks. In general, he’s stringing words together into full sentences and expanding the songs he likes to sing beyond the ABC and Elmo songs and also doing “Old McDonald” and a version of “Camptown Races” (“doo-da, doo-da!”).

The often seen (but seldom blogged) unhappy face. It gets much worse than this :-)

As for his sentences, they take some practice to comprehend and rely heavily on context and understanding of his mispronunciation. Its all classic toddler stuff: milk is “milch” and guitar is “tar.” The funniest thing is just how he yells at us all the time to get our attention and show us something: “MOMMY! DADDY! MOMMYDADDY!” (he says that even when there’s just one of us.)

Oliver’s current obsessions include choo-choos, Bob the Builder, and Ernie on Sesame Street.

Today he had a breakthrough; he announced to us that he was going to put on his boots, and then he actually got them out and put them on correctly all by himself! That was his first successful self-dressing of any kind, so during a break in the rain, we went out to splash in puddles and throw a golf ball up the sidewalk.


This is from a couple weeks ago, when Jenny took him to the zoo to try to see the new baby elephant. That little guy is huge celebrity! I think they put it off for a time when it was less crowded (see that line behind Oliver?)