I don't know how it's possible, but at some meals Ryder eats as much as I do! He's a skinny little kid, so I don't know where it goes! He is all about feeding himself now. He has no major issues feeding himself yogurt or cereal with a spoon. He loves spearing everything with a fork. He has been going through phases, loving one food, then refusing it for a week and liking it again after. One thing he consistently loves is bananas. When he sees or we mention a food that he likes, he happily exclaims "Mmmm!" He also likes to help make his food- mostly he watches now and sprinkles in spices.
His vocabulary has been increasing, he probably has twice as many words this month. His new favorite word/thing is "Bus." He get extremely excited when we see the buses in the morning on the way to school. In fact every time we get in the car, he starts looking for buses. Seeing buses and trucks in his books and on the TV also gets him excited. This month he has also added "Duck" and "Yuck," plus "Lion," "Rock" and my personal favorite "Budgy." Budgy can mean both buggy and bunny. When he sees a bunny in a book, he says "Budgy," when he sees a bug flying around, it's "Budgy." Ryder also seems to think that all lint and crumbs are actually bugs too, which is so cute. He is learning to understand/recognize a lot of new words. He knows the names of many new things and can point out five times as many things in his books as he could before.
Ryder is still extremely active. He runs around as much as possible- he runs circles around people, circles around the house, and of course loves to run around outside. Some days he picks a couple of toys to play with, usually his cars or his bouncy balls, and other days he dumps out every single toy in the house and plays with/throws all of them. He doesn't do it every time, but he will put things back where they belong on occasion.
He does lots of hugs and kisses now, mostly when we are around strangers or he is tired. On the rare night when he has trouble sleeping, I will rock him until he can fall back to sleep. Now he holds on tightly. His affection has been recently expressed by hits, kicks, jumps and hair pulling, but it seems like he is learning to be "Gentle!" We've always taught him to be gentle with the cat, so it seems semi-easy to get him to be gentle with us. He has started having mild temper tantrums, but you can usually distract him, luckily.
I asked him to sit, I was thinking on the couch!
Fooling around
He loves his cars
He's always smiling when he's not having a temper tantrum
Chilling out on the couch
Running to Daddy
